Tell Me Tauranga/Kōrerohia Mai, is an organisation devoted to the craft of storytelling. It’s real people telling true stories, live and without notes. And they’re on the hunt for new speakers for their latest event, themed “Legacy” and dedicated to the group’s late founder, Dawn Picken.
When Kenneth Setiu stood in front of a packed house to tell an eight-minute true story about his life, he was barefoot and held no notes or props.
Instead, he spoke from the heart.
He told a story about his late great-grandmother Te Arani Ngāwaka, and her cooking of the dish called kowhaki, and how that kai became food for his puku and food for his soul and created a legacy of whānau tradition, spawned from times of scarcity.
While initially apprehensive about participating in the live storytelling event Tell Me Tauranga/Kōrerohia Mai, the te reo Māori teacher says he called upon the Māori proverb: “Tama tū tama ora; tama noho tama mate” for inspiration, which can be translated as “get involved and thrive, or remain aloof and diminish”.
And he’d like to encourage others to step up and tell their own story.
Founded by the late Bay of Plenty author Dawn Picken, the next Tell Me Tauranga/Kōrerohia Mai event will be held on November 2 at 16th Avenue Theatre, Tauranga.
The venue will come alive with true stories told by the people who lived and experienced them.
This year’s event will be held in Picken’s honour, after the former American TV reporter, Bay of Plenty Times and Rotorua Daily Post columnist and business tutor died in December, just three months after the second Tell Me Tauranga/Kōrerohia Mai was held to a sell-out audience.
Tell Me Tauranga event lead and former Tauranga Business Chamber chief executive Stan Gregec says the theme, Legacy, will “give us a chance to acknowledge Dawn’s remarkable legacy”.
“[It’s also] a stage for others to talk about the impact of legacy in their lives,” Gregec says.
Nominations for speakers are open, and Gregec says the theme is open to the broadest interpretations.
“The important thing is that it’s about a legacy that’s felt deeply and a story that is crying out to be told.”
True stories from everyday lives
When Picken first convened a network of people in 2021 to describe her vision for Tell Me Tauranga/Kōrerohia Mai, she pulled her inspiration from the storytelling phenomenon, The Moth, in the United States.
When The Moth began in 1997, most of its speakers had only ever told their stories around the dinner table.
Back then, The Moth was an informal community of people who gathered in New York City’s parks and apartment buildings to share true stories from their everyday lives.
It’s come a long way in the 26 years since, inspiring spin-off events in countries around the world, including Picken’s event in Tauranga, the first two which had the themes New Beginnings and Soul Food.
The best stories are, as Gregec puts it, “heart stories”, and they get to be told in a safe environment that fosters empathy. They inspire a deeper recognition of the power of our everyday lives.
Of previous speakers, Picken had been quoted as saying: “They shared a time when their perspective or their whole life changed. They had chosen or were forced, to start again.
“In the end, each of them told a personal tale that was at times funny and sad. Certainly, it was memorable.”
While some self-confidence is required, they’re not TEDx Talks, Gregec says, and the aim is that they last no longer than eight minutes, and speakers are offered free mentoring in the lead-up to help develop and shape their stories. Mentoring will be from volunteer coaches, some of whom will be previous participants.
“They’re less about informing people about things that they may not already know and [more about] telling your story and connecting with the audience in a very visceral way.”
“We want a diversity of storytellers and a diversity of stories.”
Gregec says Picken, who died from a rare liver disease, did not know about the legacy event before her death.
One speaking spot will be reserved for a friend of Picken’s yet to be determined; then seven others will talk about legacy from their own experiences.
Picken’s best friend Becky Aud-Jennison became Picken’s voice in the media when Picken became too unwell to update readers on her condition. She would have liked to have spoken at the legacy event, but in a cruel twist, has since become unwell herself.
Immediately after Picken’s death she began to feel sick and put it down to a bug or her 14-year battle with Crohn’s disease.
However, she has since been diagnosed with a rare kidney disease and is in stage three kidney failure.
Like Picken’s illness, it is a pre-existing condition. However, unlike Picken, Aud-Jennison had not been aware of hers.
“The horribleness of it is there’s nothing they can do until you are ready for transplant or dialysis, so you’re just treating symptoms,” she says.
“It is freaky happening just after Dawn. Doing this ride with her. You don’t know how many times I’ve wanted to pick up the phone, like, ‘Girl, how did you feel when this was going on?’ I’m in the midst of that.
“I’m trying to take one day at a time, live in the moment. Enjoy what I can enjoy. I’m living off [Dawn’s positivity]. I feel like Dawn is ahead of me with the Olympic torch, looking back, saying, ‘Remember this, or do this’.
“She was an absolute force,” Aud-Jennison says.
The clinical therapist had been friends with Picken for 11 years, meeting as expats from the United States. And Dawn was one of Aud-Jennison’s first guests on her podcast, The Death Dialogues Project, an international storytelling network that normalises conversations around dying and grief.
“We learn more from the connection of people and hearing real stories than listening to experts, and that’s the premise of Dawn’s storytelling [event] as well,” she says.
In October 2022, Picken wrote in a Substack blog post that Tell Me Tauranga/Kōrerohia Mai had been a “pipe dream” until 2021 when she secured a small grant from Creative Tauranga.
“I devour episodes of The Moth podcast,” she wrote. “Along with Family Secrets; This American Life; The Death Dialogues Project; Terrible; Thanks for Asking and many others.
“Tell me a story, I think as I press play. Suddenly, I’m transported — to the ocean where a lobster fisherman got swallowed by a whale; to the heartland of America, where a mother of seven survived an abusive marriage and went on to earn millions of dollars selling houses; to Mariupol, Ukraine, where a 12-year-old boy navigates streets with land mines to attend school. So many stories. So little time.”
Feeling ‘empowered’ and not alone
For Tauranga artist Angela Maritz, the opportunity to tell her story at Tell Me Tauranga/Kōrerohia Mai last year made her feel “empowered”.
Originally from South Africa, Maritz’s story about how art fed her soul was a tale that had been “a long time coming”.
It was her way of unravelling why she paints and an emotional reflection on the importance of self-belief.
The event had a positive impact on her and, she hopes, the wider community: “It’s creating a connection between people from all walks of life.”
Seizing the moment is something Setiu says summed up Picken, who “fiercely lived every second that she was given”.
He has since become an unofficial te ao Māori adviser for the event organising committee and was invited to speak at their last gathering, which he called a positive experience.
There is value in not only telling our stories but in listening to other people share theirs, too.
”In the backdrop of Chatbot AI and technology that can mimic us, they can’t be us,” Setiu says.
“They will not come up with our ideas, our hearts, and our lived experiences that have become an essential part of our identity and part of our purpose in life.
“When I’m telling my story, I stand by it and it’s beautiful. This space brings us back to that longing that our inner child has to tell a story or be told a story.
“You aren’t critiquing or analysing it, you’re just involved with the journey.”
Have a story to tell?
Potential Tell Me Tauranga/Kōrerohia Mai speakers will have the chance to share their ideas with organisers on Pitch night, which will be held at Basestation on Durham St, Tauranga, starting at 6pm on August 30. Or you can email stan.gregec@gmail.com before or after the event.
Anyone who would like to be part of Tell Me Tauranga, whether as a storyteller, organiser or audience member, can visit the Tell Me Tauranga Facebook page for more information. Videos of previous storytellers are also available on the page to watch.
Carly Gibbs is a weekend magazine writer for the Bay of Plenty Times and Rotorua Daily Post and has been a journalist for two decades. She is a former news and feature writer, for which she’s been both an award finalist and winner.