Meet the Folklorists

Turkish Delight: A Visit with Warren and Barbara Walker

Twice in 2001 I took the opportunity to make the all-day drive from south Texas, where I work at the University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio, to Lubbock in the Texas panhandle to interview Barbara K. Walker and Warren S. Walker, Ph.D., scholars, authors and collector-anthologists of Turkish folktales. Although I had consulted with my fellow aficionados on STORYTELL, a listserver for storytellers, about what to ask them I needn’t have worried at all. I simply turned on the tape recorder, and three or four tapes full of adventures later (not counting a few hot chocolate breaks), I turned it off. In between, the Walkers shared with me and future visitors to our oral history archive their adventures and misadventures collecting folktales in Turkey and creating the Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative at Texas Tech University.

• Resources from the Walkers
• A hoça story from Barbara
• Some Turkish folktale resources from the Walkers’ extensive publications
• Visit the Uysal-Walker Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative Online

Interview with Arabian folktale collector Inea Bushnaq

Bushnaq considers herself "an interpreter of my past, to the present." The same folktales that were such a "wonderful treat of my childhood... seem to be the ideal instrument to open doors for people who might not be predisposed to listen to anything about the Middle East." Thus, during the 1991 Gulf War, Bushnaq was invited to tell Arab folktales to children in New York City schools, and children in her Greenwich Village neighborhood still remember her as "the one who told us those stories!" Enjoy Piney Kesting’s this inspiring interview with her for Saudi Aramco World magazine.
http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/199205/recalling.the.tales.htm

Back to Tales and Legends