Storyteller travels worldwide to create books, libraries

WINONA — When Anne Pellowski, 78, sets her bags down after several weeks spent in a distant land, she does not expect them to stay put for long.

Even though Pellowski, an expert storyteller, author and international literacy activist, moved to Winona in 1997 to retire, she still spends a sizable portion of her year out in the world, working, teaching and learning.

Pellowski travels to communities around the world where books are scarce and libraries even scarcer. 

There, she holds workshops that teach the local people how to create books and foster libraries. The books are made out of cloth for durability’s sake and have as their subject-matter local folklore, stories, riddles, or simple concepts like alphabets or numbers. They are illustrated using decorative fabric donated to Pellowski.

Once the cloth books are finished, they're tried out on children, who select what they think are the best ones.

"I try to see if they can get a few published locally in paper... for distribution to preschool institutions and people who have no access to any books,” she says.

Cultural treasures

Many of the communities Pellowski visits lack books in the native language of the residents, so the cloth books produced in her workshops are cultural treasures that help the communities feel pride in their native language. This, Pellowski says, is imperative to the community’s self-esteem.

“I really feel that they often feel inferior because of the inferior position that their language is given, either in their own country or in the world situation,” she explains, “They think, ‘My language has less value than one of the international languages.’ This is just wrong. They should feel that their language has as much value as any.”

The list of countries in which she's conducted workshops reads like the index of an atlas: Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, Ghana, Senegal, Togo, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Zambia, South Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, India, and the Philippines.

“I’ve been to other countries,” she clarifies, “but not doing workshops.”

A storyteller's life

Pellowski has taught at several universities, authored several books, and worked for the New York CIty Library and UNICEF. She is best known in the United States for her work as a storyteller — she appeared on "Mr. Rogers" and won him over with one of her favorite stories, "A Guest for Talil," an old Turkish story.

Nancy O’Reilly, of Winona, plays bridge with Pellowski once a week when she is in town and reaps the benefits of Pellowski’s storytelling talents.

“It’s always fun when she comes home to hear about her travels,” said O’Reilly, “like when she went to Mongolia and had to ride these crazy animals around.”

Storytelling has also saved Pellowski from a tight spot in at least one instance. Years ago, while on the border of Afghanistan and China, Pellowski was investigating a very gifted child.

“Suddenly,” she recalls, “the driver, the local person who translated for me, and myself were in a tea house, and we were surrounded by men pointing guns at us. I mean, truly surrounded. Fierce looking tribesmen with long guns. The driver quietly said, ‘Just start telling me a story quietly,’ and the translator began translating and suddenly the men just put down their guns and were listening.”

A dream kept alive

She knew early on in life that she wanted an international lifestyle.

“I had a teacher, it was a nun, in my little school in Pine Creek, Wis., who had been a missionary… she had the most wonderful stories that she would tell from the countries she had visited,” says Pellowski.

An avid reader, books transported her mind to other countries.

"I made up my mind, I would say it was at age 9 or 10, that I was going to visit every one of those countries that I had read about," she said. "I kept that dream alive and it happened because I kept it alive and kept talking about it — and various people listened.”

Bryan Lund is a freelance writer in Rochester.