Long before the emergence of the printed word, human beings gathered to hear stories. These tales, carried in the head of the storyteller, ensured that a community remembered its history and its beliefs.Now our stories come from a range of sources, but there is still something magical about the spoken word. In this collection of stories and thoughts, Dan Yashinsky shares gems from his treasure trove of material. We travel from the neonatal ICU at SickKids' hospital to the realm of the Blue Djinn, from a mythical forest path to a British Columbia beach, but everywhere we go we are accompanied by Yashinsky's gentle, quizzical, sometimes bawdy, and always entertaining voice.

Dan Yashinsky has been a working storyteller for more than thirty years. He is the recipient of a Toronto Book Award for Tales for an Unknown City, and the author of The Storyteller at Fault. He founded the Toronto Festival of Storytelling, was one of the founders of the Storytellers School of Toronto and began the 1001 Friday Nights of Storytelling in 1978, a weekly institution in Toronto that continues to this day. In 1999 he was the recipient of the Jane Jacobs Prize for making a valued contribution to Toronto’s cultural life, and in 2007 won the Anne Izard Storytellers' Choice Award.

Dan Yashinsky's profile page