DAVID GUTHRIE 40A Devore St St Helliers Auckland New Zealand Email      david@guthrie.net.nz    Phone     09 5754699 Fax         09 5754799 Web Page   http://www.genesis.net.nz/creative/snails About myself: I am a retired Anglican priest who in my retirement now find myself working 7 days a week! The principal focus of my work is recording the scriptures of which project I have completed the New Testament (in the New Jerusalem Bible version for which I have world-wide recording rights.) The digital version of this recording has just been released by Naxos through their spoken word Library and for download via www.classicsonline.com and will shortly be available in iTunes and all digital download sites (Naxos handle all of that). Now I am recording the Old Testament. In doing this, I see myself primarily as a story-teller and my approach to the recording (and the live readings I am now doing) is to present them as if “Mark” or “Paul” or “Jeremiah”, etc, were present and simply talking, while the “Story” elements I tell as a story-teller (which comes across very differently from handling these texts as ‘sacred scripture’. However, in addition to this religious enterprise, I am also engaged in telling stories for children and, in fact, the entire recording process began with the recording of stories for children. In 2003 I was diagnosed with what was expected to be terminal cancer. Looking at what little time I thought I had left, I identified a small handful of targeted achievements I wished to accomplish, one of them being leaving a taonga for my five grandchildren. One of the very special things between us was my telling of ‘snail stories’. These are stories created spontaneously in the telling and lending themselves to literally endless variation. They have a begging and ending formula and, armed with this formula, not only could I weave limitless stories but the children quickly cottoned on and our story-telling sessions at bedtime passed from one child and myself to another, each one weaving their own imaginative story. I have since taken these stories into the grandchildren’s school classrooms with extraordinary response. At the end of a single session  children would get up and tell a coherent story that they were making up on the spot. Now I have been invited by Kings School in Auckland to become involved in recording stories for their pupils and probably to do classroom work and I would like to extend this if possible into all kinds of new situations. Hence my decision to join the Association. I am attaching a file of one of my stories (which you are free to put on the website if that is appropriate). As I described above, this story does not exist in any written of set form. While it is one of the ‘favourites’ that I am asked for many times, it is never the same two tellings in a row. I have made a CD of some of these stories though I haven’t yet gone commercial with it. .