Photos provided by Sarah Loehmer
Anderson University hosted the tenth annual Quoth the Raven Tuesday night at 7 p.m. in the Alley, located beside Mocha Joes. Quoth the Raven is an event that is hosted each year to highlight the students and their storytelling from taking the Art of Storytelling course, offered here at Anderson University. This course is designed so that anyone here can take it. It teaches valuable skills in storytelling craftsmanship and extreme vulnerability. The students are able to learn from Lugar, who has professional film credits. They are able to learn how to expel language through verbal and nonverbal cues and create action through their stories to keep audiences engaged. This year’s theme for Quoth the Raven was “A Night of True Stories”.
There were a lot of students in attendance and it was a packed house. The people who presented their stories ranged from cinema and media arts majors to education, and even basketball players. Jack Lugar, the host and professor of cinema and media arts, said at the start of the event, “In this experience, it will be nice to have an audience available and supporting friends and hearing their true stories.”
The audience was not prepared for some of the stories that were about to take place. One may not think of a story about super smash bros ultimate and an elementary kid, but that was exactly what Cohen Miller told the audience. Intrigued, they were at the edge of their seats wondering exactly how he achieved losing to a child for so many years playing a video game. Deacon, the elementary student, was a tough competitor as Cohen recalls, “The look of sadness that he had on his face that his competition was leaving {graduating high school}was sad, but his expression made it even sadder.” He has vivid memories of this event and the moral of the story was to have the people in attendance remember that your “greatest enemy” was never your enemy or arch nemesis at all.
This story was just the beginning, as the audience was intrigued to hear what the next storyteller had in store. It was Kenny Troutman. Someone who everyone knows is a phenomenal basketball player on the court. Nobody expected that the phrase “everybody knows when you need to take a number 2 there’s 2 farts” would ever exit Kenny’s mouth. But it did, and not only did the audience laugh hysterically at that moment, but also the moral of that story was to “never ignore the number 2 fart” which after that story is something that will definitely be remembered for a while.
As the night was beginning to come to an end, we heard some more stories about relating imaginary friends to the VeggieTales cartoon from Jedidiah McCallister, Uriel Peters probably chasing a butterfly and Gabby Hosier telling a story about how sometimes when you keep talking and “no one is listening” that is a blessing in disguise. There was something for everyone, and all will certainly remember the time when friends told true stories that will be remembered forever, even if you learned way more about them than you’ve ever known before.