About
As a child growing up in a large working-class family in in the English Midlands, Jennifer fell in love with the spoken word. Every Sunday, a cast of rogues, ne’er-do-wells, raconteurs, and heroes gathered around the family’s old wooden table to tell stories, share secrets, and gossip. Their tales are the inspiration for Jennifer’s extensive repertoire of stories. Poignant, funny, and profoundly moving, they are carefully crafted narratives that resonate with the frailty and courage of the human spirit. However, what really sets Jennifer’s stories apart is the precision of her language and vividly dawn images. Greg Weiss, storyteller, educator, and actor said her stories are “. . . filled with bulls, bicycles, buckets of fish and other wonder tokens of childhood and growing up. Jennifer Munro takes [us] to that place, just beyond the watchful, if not winking, eye of authority and introduces an assortment of characters, some endearing, some dangerous, all captivating . . . Her language transports us to locales and circumstances that would be familiar to Dickens, Twain, and even J.K. Rowling.”
In 2016, Parkhurst Brothers published a collection of her short stories, called Aunty Lily and Other Delightfully Perverse Stories, which can be purchased directly from the publisher or from Amazon.
A Circle of Excellence Award winner, she has received numerous awards both for her contributions to storytelling, her CDs, and collection of short stories. She has performed at festivals internationally and across the nation and regularly presents workshops on the art and practice of storytelling.
Jennifer has said, “In looking back over my life, the family stories we traded as oral currency leap vividly to life in my mind; I remember them all in exacting detail, and it is from a combination of these real and retold events that my stories spring. Weaving them together so that they form a satisfying narrative arc means that the facts may have been compressed or reordered, but my intent has always been and continues to be to retain the authenticity of my experience. The truths of which my stories speak are not earth shattering but are straightforward insights, which I hope confirm what it means simply to be human.”
With her partner Denise Keyes Page, she has co-produced a series of shows called Women Tell: Our Stories Through the Decades. Women are invited to tell stories that have been shaped by the economic, social, or political conditions of selected decades. The result has been an amazing collection of true stories about issues women have faced and continue to face.
Stacy Parish, Full Spirals Podcast, sat down with Jen shortly after she returned from a residency at the International Storytelling Center in Jonesboro, TN to talk about the creative process, trusting in the Universe, and the gift that is story. Here's a link to that conversation - https://www.buzzsprout.com/2146889/14685033
If you want to book an event or communicate directly with Jennifer, please email her at jennifer@jennifermunrostoryteller.com