PENINSULA WOMAN: Storyteller weaves worlds with her words

She shines on stage as a storyteller, is a whiz at organizing storytelling festivals and teaches classes on the subject, but don’t expect Cherie Trebon to liven up the office Christmas party.

“I’m a complete dud at cocktail parties,” she said with a laugh, explaining that until she began telling stories more than 20 years ago, she was deathly afraid of public speaking and still considers herself an introvert.

“I gather more energy from being alone than with people,” she said. “It never entered my mind that I’d be a performer of any kind.”

Trebon is on the board of the Story People of Clallam County and coordinates the group’s annual Forest Storytelling Festival, and is the storytelling stage coordinator for the Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle.

She also tells stories professionally and has performed in venues in the U.S. and Canada.

For Trebon, 64, storytelling was a return to a childhood love.

She grew up in Seattle listening to stories told by her father and on the radio. She was 10 years old before the family got its first TV.

She recalled that one summer she decided to read as many books as possible during the summer reading program at her local library.

“I was an avid reader,” she said. “That summer I read over 150 books, mostly folk and fairy tales.”

A career in banking and raising two children as a divorced, single mother kept Trebon busy while her children were young, until a neighborhood book discussion group changed the course of her life.

With only a story

The group was supposed to bring something to share to the Christmas meeting, but Trebon came empty-handed.

“I just recalled reading this story in a magazine about a homeless woman so I told that story,” she said.

Their enthusiastic response opened her eyes to the power of storytelling.

Then in 1987 at a family summer camp, one of the speakers was a professional storyteller.

“I sat there mesmerized,” she said.

And she was hooked.

But while the spirit was willing, the introvert was weak.

That fall she enrolled in a storytelling class offered by the University of Washington, taught by Cathryn Wellner in her home.

“I gathered up all my courage, paid my money and registered,” Trebon said. “I went to her house — and sat in my car for 20 minutes, paralyzed by fear.”

Once she made it into the house, Wellner led the group in a simple name game, meant to break the ice.

“It was excruciating,” Trebon said.

For her class project, Trebon again told her homeless-woman story, impressing her teacher.

“Cathryn said I needed to continue storytelling. She became a mentor, coach and dear friend.”

The instructor supplied a review that Trebon has printed in her brochure:

“When Cherie Trebon begins to speak, the audience falls hushed, expectant. In a voice measured and sure, she tells stories of rare depth and beauty.

“Listening to her, we sigh and laugh and leave, for the space of her performance, the worries of our everyday lives.”

About a year after her storytelling class, Trebon had the chance to join an anti-apartheid group going to South Africa.

Expanded repertoire

To help her fund the trip, friends hosted a storytelling event, with Trebon the featured performer.

“That forced me to expand my repertoire from four stories,” she said.

A stipulation of the trip was that participants must spend the following year telling others what they saw there.

“The best way I could do that was to tell a story,” Trebon said. “Many of my stories came from that experience.”

She joined the Seattle Storytellers Guild and began telling stories to groups, gaining confidence from their positive response.

She also told stories at Roosevelt High School, where her children, son Darren and daughter Melissa, were students ­– although they preferred she didn’t present to their classes, she said.

Darren Hughes is now 37 and lives in Edmonds, while Melissa Hughes-Wilson is 39 with three sons and lives in Snoqualmie.

Trebon found her current home on the beach west of Port Angeles by chance, during a visit in 2002 with friends in the Story People group.

As an officer in community development with KeyBank, she was able to transfer her job to the Port Angeles branch, with an eye toward retirement.

Her children were young adults by then and on their own.

“I knew I wanted to retire to a small town,” she said, and growing up her family had often visited the Olympic Peninsula.

With friends in the local storytelling community and a satisfying job, Trebon quickly adapted to her new home.

She took early retirement five years ago, enabling her to devote more time to her storytelling, as well as visiting with her family in Seattle.

Her three grandchildren, ages 3 to 10, love hearing “Grammy Boo” stories, she said.

Trebon began her storytelling career by telling her own adaptations of familiar folk and fairy tales but now tells a wide variety of stories.

She offers 10 different programs, from multicultural stories and creation myths to stories celebrating the strength of women and ones that speak to the resiliency of the human spirit.

“I tell the gamut,” she said.

The former wallflower has also blossomed into a teacher, leading storytelling workshops for a wide variety of clients, including instructing public defenders on how to use storytelling techniques in the courtroom.

While Trebon has been paid for her talents since turning pro in 1990, she never planned on earning a living from telling tales.

“I decided early on I was not going to make a living as a storyteller, but I was going to make a life as a storyteller. It doesn’t earn a living, but it has made me rich,” she said.

Trebon said she develops her stories by reading a half dozen or more versions of a story, then rewriting it in her own words and style.

“It’s not just getting a book and memorizing it,” she said. “Then it’s not my story.”

She frequently sprinkles her stories with poems, and has recently added songs to the mix.

“That stretches me as a performer. I like that challenge,” she said.

Trebon is a firm believer in the transformative, healing powers of storytelling.

“A story well-told allows you to connect with people you might not be able to in any other way,” she said.

She recalled telling her homeless-woman story to a group of freshmen at Roosevelt High School and months later receiving a note from the teacher that one girl in the class, who had never been interested in learning, had suddenly opened up after hearing that story.

She was now participating in class and said she wanted to learn.

“That one story changed my life, and it changed hers,” Trebon said. “That’s the beauty of sharing stories — you don’t know who you are going to touch.”

Since moving to the North Olympic Peninsula, Trebon has continued to confront her fears, including appearing in several stage productions with the Port Angeles Community Players.

“Theater to me is much scarier than storytelling,” she said, with memorizing lines and the actors depending on each other.

“But actors say the same thing about storytelling.”

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