Michael Gerard Parent

Time Magazine, describing Michael Parent’s 1981 performance at the Opera House in Rockport, Maine

Internationally known storyteller Michael Parent died of complications of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP) on May 5, 2023. Born in Lewiston, ME on April 27, 1946, he grew up steeped in the folklore and expressive arts of his French-Canadian ancestry.

In an interview, Michael said of his family:

I come from a very verbal French-Canadian culture…Since they were workers, they were not too educated, in a literary sense. My father left school after the 5th grade and my mother was considered quite educated, because she stayed at school ’til the 8th grade...

She worked in nursing homes for nearly thirty years. I’d learned to play guitar; of course, we had a lot of singing, in our house. I never worried whether or not I was a good singer; I just liked to sing. Every once in a while, I would go to one of the nursing homes where she was working and I would sing songs, in both French and English, I’d tell a few jokes and some stories. I just loved it, because I had such wonderful connections with the old folks.

Michael also had a lifelong love affair with sports, especially hockey. He was goalie for the St. Dominic Academy hockey team when they became 1964 New England Champions in a shut-out game at Boston Garden, and he played with the Greater Portland Oldtimers Hockey League into his seventies. He called his last solo show, A Beautiful Game (DVD, 2008), "the mostly true story of my longtime passion for hockey."

In 1969 he graduated from Providence College, joined the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, and taught high school English in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire. He described his path from teaching to storytelling:

I was naturally one of those people who use stories to make points so I did that more and more with my High School pupils. I actually invented a couple of characters that had an ongoing life in the classroom; they were composite characters – Harry Jabone and Abigail de Magere. Whenever something happened to me or my friends or even for things I just made up, I would convert the stories into the characters Harry Jabone and Abigail de Magere – around the kids’ own ages. I used the Harry and Abigail stories all the time when I was teaching...

By 1977, Michael had left the classroom and the Brotherhood "before they kicked me out," he quipped, saying:

I needed to move back to Maine for health reasons in 1977, so I decided to invent a new job for myself. At that time there were very few people storytelling professionally… I came across Brother Blue – a well-known US storyteller. I went to see him and, while I was teaching, had him come to my classes. That was the seed. At that point I decided I would do some things I really loved, such as, telling stories, juggling and singing songs. I just began to do it everywhere.

In August of 1981, Michael appeared at the First Annual North Atlantic Festival of Storytelling. The festival took place at the Rockport Opera House in Maine. Melvin Maddocks reported on the festival for Time Magazine and gave Michael’s performance pride of place in an article titled “In Maine: Storytellers Cast Their Ancient Spell.”

Michael was first featured at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN, that fall, and returned multiple times. Besides performing throughout the US he appeared at venues in Canada, Poland, Austria, and Italy. In addition, he was featured at the International Storytelling Colloquium in Paris, the Glistening Waters Festival in New Zealand, and the Cape Clear International Storytelling Festival in Ireland.

During this period, he lived in Tenants Harbor, Maine, where he bought land, built a house, fell through the ice, and worked on the ferry that operated between Port Clyde and Monhegan Island. On that ferry, he met Jeanne van Gemert. He followed her back to Charlottesville, VA where they married in 1982. Though they divorced in 1990, they stayed in touch till his death.

In Charlottesville, he co-founded the Fall Festival of Tales in 1982 and, with Larry Goldstein, Fran Smith and others, the Live Arts Theater in 1989. According to his partner in such Live Arts performances as The Illuminati, he was "king of the knuckleheads" – a title that Michael prized. An indefatigable sense of the absurd fueled his creation of one-man shows like One More Thing and The Goofy Show. He also performed an evening of stories about his Franco-American family called Grandpa’s Birthday.

Michael released four audio recordings in the eighties. Three were self-produced: Michael Parent Live at the Prism Coffeehouse; the award-winning Sundays at Grandma’s (Dimanche’s Chez Memere), and Michael Parent Stories and Songs. The fourth, Tails and Childhood, was produced by Weston Woods Storytelling Circle and won an ALA Notable Award. August House published his book Of Fools and Kings – Stories of the French Tradition in North America co-written with Julien Olivier in 1996.

Michael moved back to Maine for the final time in 1998. The following year he received the ORACLE Circle of Excellence Award from the National Storytelling Network. This “storytelling Oscar” recognized his contributions to the field.

He was committed to encouraging his fellow performers, and gave a memorable keynote to that effect at Sharing the Fire, the New England Storytelling Conference, in 2005. In celebration of the impact of his inclusive nature as a teller and teacher, one of his colleagues called him “the beating heart of the festival-based American storytelling revival.” His final audio recording, Chantons – Let’s Sing, a bilingual collection of traditional French songs with Maine fiddler Greg Boardman, was released as a CD in 2008.

He prized his friendships near and far – some going back to childhood and his hockey playing days, some from his early days in the Brotherhood, some in the storytelling community, some in the neighborhood. He belonged to the Maine Order of Storytelling Enthusiasts (MOOSE).

For fifteen years, he met regularly as part of a trio of Maine tellers called “The Chums,” who worked on their material in two-to-three-day intensive sessions. And for thirty years, he was part of “The Blue Mountain Lakers,” a weeklong storytelling retreat group of nationally known tellers, meeting annually up and down the East Coast.

Until recent years, he lived in an apartment complex for seniors, getting up early in the morning after snowstorms to clear the snow off every car in the parking lot. After a number of falls led Michael to a diagnosis of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), his friends and admirers from coast to coast raised monies to support his move into assisted living in 2021. The following year, his condition worsened, necessitating his move to a skilled nursing facility. In anticipation of his death, Michael wrote about how he wanted to be remembered: "He did the best he could. He loved people and enjoyed being alive."

He is survived by his longtime companion, Katy Rydell; his brother, Norman Parent and extended family; his ex-wife Jeanne van Gemert; his stepchildren Michael Lucy and Cybele Maness and grandchildren Jolie and Zadie Maness; cousins; his childhood friend buddy Phil Cloutier plus many, many friends and fans from every strand of his life.

The memory of his laughter, his incisive wit, his kindness, his generosity, his joie de vivre, and his famed knuckle-headedness remains. May it inspire us to do the best we can.

Advantage Funeral Home in Portland handled his cremation. An in-person memorial is scheduled for 1:30 pm on Sunday, July 16 at the 150-seat Community Hall of the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, 1342 Congress Street, Portland, ME. Through the kind help and tech skill of Simon Brooks, the gathering will be live-streamed and recorded via the Northeast Storytelling YouTube channel for those who cannot be in attendance.

To access the channel for the July 16th live-stream event, paste this link into your browser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPeRfwh5hgw .

Another in-person memorial at Live Arts Theater in Charlottesville is scheduled for September 16, 2023 at 4:30 pm.