In most people’s minds, the worst kind of lawyer is the out-and-out storyteller variety. Regardless of the facts, they will concoct whatever sort of fiction they feel is necessary to obtain victory, sometimes spinning nothing but utter fabrication in order to sway their audience, the jury, to their side.
For former prosecutor and neighborhood resident Tim Couch, however, telling falsehoods has become a noble calling.
In 1973, the United States saw its first National Story Telling Festival in Jonesboro, Tenn., kick-starting what’s called the modern storytelling revival. The success of the festival led to the founding of a National Storytelling Association and the creation of splinter groups around the country, dedicated to keeping the oral tradition alive.
For nearly a decade, Couch has served as a lynchpin member of two such splinter groups — the Dallas Storytelling Guild and the Tejas Storytelling Association — acting as president of both in recent years. The organizations’ dozens of members appear at non-profit fundraisers, hospitals, festivals, schools and elsewhere, performing everything from traditional folk tales and tall tales to stories of fantasy and otherworldly adventures. The audiences differ, but most fit on the lower end of the age spectrum — a group Couch has been serving the majority of his adult life.
Until about a decade ago, Couch was an employee of the Dallas district attorney’s office specializing in child abuse cases. He’d entered the job with noble aspirations, and said he did a “fair amount” of good while grinding away at it, but after working the job 14 years, he said, he was too burned out to continue.
After a short search, Couch found a new vocation at the Episcopal Middle School of Dallas, where he was tapped to teach religion. The year he was hired the school was between chaplains, and Couch was asked to start leading chapel meetings until the school could find one, due to the public speaking experience from his jury-addressing days. But between his new classes and these chapel appearances, Couch says, he learned a crucial difference between juries and middle schoolers.
“Middle school students are absolutely merciless,” Couch says. “Even if you’re boring, a jury will sit there and listen to you. But middle schoolers, you have to keep them entertained or they’ll eat you alive.”
This stark realization led Couch to local storytelling guilds, the members of which, he had been told, possessed the near-supernatural ability to make middle school students sit still and listen. Couch attended a meeting and has been an advocate ever since, serving as president of the Dallas guild for years and later forming a popular storytelling club at his school.
Couch says the club is a big point of pride right now, pointing specifically to ninth-grader Britani Bullock, a five-year member of the club, who has been selected as Texas representative to the National Youth Storytelling Showcase. Because like stories, he says, the skill of yarn spinning is best when it’s passed on.
