Loralee Cooley
Loralee Coleman Cooley, a "War Baby" born the year pennies were not made from copper, has worked as a professional storyteller since 1977. For her storytelling, she coined the professional name "StorySpinning" to describe her work. Growing up in Charleston Illinois, she attended the Lab School connected to what is now Eastern Illinois University for all eight grades, then Charleston High School, returning to Eastern for her B.A. in piano performance in 1965. After two other forays into graduate study--one in church music at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville Kentucky (where she won the title of Miss Louisville 1966), and another in music theatre and composition at Arizona State University in Tempe--she finally earned an M.A. with an emphasis in storytelling at Antioch College in Yellow Springs Ohio in 1994.
Following the death of her husband, Ed, in Cordell Oklahoma in 2014--where he had been serving as pastor of two small Presbyterian congregations--she moved herself and her studio to Yukon Oklahoma, living at the Spanish Cove Retirement Village until 2018. At that time, she chose to move to Albuquerque New Mexico. She describes this region as being "a thin place," as the Celts would describe it: a place where Earth and the "Other" [almost] touch.
Earlier, she was listed on the state artist rosters of South Carolina and Texas, for her work as a storyteller. While in Texas, she completed an extensive residency through Texas Tech University, covering some 20 school districts in the Texas panhandle and south plains. Prior to that, during their time in the Atlanta Georgia area, she had instituted storytelling classes at the prestigious Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, which led to the creation in 1982 of the regional arts organization, Southern Order of Storytellers or S.O.S. It presents an annual winter storytelling festival, for years called the "Olde Christmas Storytelling Festival," since it was held on or near "Old Christmas" or Epiphany or Twelfth Night--January 6.
When they moved to Ed's native Texas panhandle, she discovered the challenging connection between Woody Guthrie and that region. Guthrie, born in Oklahoma, had wandered into Pampa in the late 1920s as a teenager to work with his disabled father, and it was here he began his musical journey, resulting in such musical contributions as the ubiquitous "This Land is Your Land." She took the concept of "land" one step further, with a Reader's Theatre presentation for the Gray County Centennial (Pampa is the county seat) opening April 14, 2002 entitled "This Land." The performance, using some eighteen area performers, presented songs by Guthrie as well as popular gospel songs of the day, poetry, folk tales and selections from newspaper accounts of the great Black Sunday dust storm on Palm Sunday, April 14, 1935, and a one-act play, "Dust," a long-lost script written for the Pampa High School's state drama competition by Ben Guill, a Pampa teacher and later Congressman.
Loralee's first published effort also was a commemoration of that Centennial event; a collection of essays by Gray County residents or former residents, entitled "A Word Fitly Spoken."
The next writing venture was by the invitation of David Holt and Bill Mooney, to contribute to a collection of folk tales, "More Ready-to-Tell Tales." Her selection was an Iraqi folk tale, "The Kiss of Evil," listed in the book as a cautionary tale, dealing with greed.
Most recently, she completed a children's biography (but for any age, really), telling the story of Barack Obama's childhood through his 10th year. It's entitled "Island Child," and it deals with his growing up in Hawai`i and Indonesia, from his birth in 1961 when Hawai`i was a few days short of its second anniversary as a state, through his days in Jakarta with his mother and step-father, to his return to Honolulu when he was not quite ten to live with his mother's parents and attend Punahou School...,experiencing the culture shock of a child who knows chess and soccer but can't balance on a skateboard or throw a football.
The illustrator for "Island Child" is Jillian Gilliland, a professional artist in Kingston Ontario who for years created the weekly artwork for folktales retold by Amy Friedman for the syndicated newspaper column "Tell Me a Story." Jillian's own story is one of immigration, being a child in South Africa, then moving as a young woman to Ireland, and finally settling in Ontario with her family.
Loralee and Ed claimed an unusual family; no children of their own, but they hosted several foster and international young people over the years, now ranging in age from their 40s to early 60s. Although everyone lives in the United States, there are many international connections, ranging from Bulgaria to Brazil, as well as the USA. The Cooleys have also been "dog" people, and Loralee currently shares her home with their fifth Standard Poodle, Rosie. whom they found on the PetFinder.com website in 2013, shortly before Ed's diagnosis with terminal cancer.
Living in New Mexico and establishing her studio yet again, her biggest challenge now is emptying every box they've kept through multitudinous moves, and discovering something "new" in every box! Trying to find new homes for much of her discoveries is a challenge, and she's often said that "at my funeral, folks can participate in a raffle of all the left-over boxes, and take home a souvenir of unknown contents...a sort of grab-bag of our 'stuff' as a remembrance."
