Willy Claflin, a singer, songwriter and storyteller, uses Maynard Moose and other puppets to entertain audiences of all ages. But the most important thing to him is to encourage children to keep their imaginations alive.

By Chris Samson

There's a moose on the loose when storyteller Willy Claflin takes the stage to perform or sits down to work with children in schools.

Maynard Moose is the most prominent member of Claflin's eccentric menagerie of puppets he uses in his appearances at schools and festivals around the country.

Claflin, who moved to Petaluma a year ago, was a folksinger and a teacher before evolving into one of the most accomplished and distinctive storytellers in America. With the assistance of his puppets, he uses humor and imagination to spin tales to audiences of children and adults.

Claflin's repertoire includes a cappella ballads, accounts of his childhood misadventures, New England tall tales, traditional folk stories from around the world and, of course, moose tales. He has produced six recordings of storytelling and music, some of which have received awards.

Maynard Moose is the main storyteller in Claflin's puppet collection. The others include Gorf the Frog, Boring Beaver, Bunny (The World's Smartest Rabbit), Bill Buffalo and Dr. Albert Alligator.

Many of Maynard's stories are moose versions of familiar tales ("Little Red, White and Blue Riding Hood," "Handsome and Gristle," "Sleeping Beastly" and "Rumbleshirtskin").

The seeds of Claflin's rich collection of stories, songs and characters were planted as a youngster growing up in rural New Hampshire, where he spent his time wandering through the woods, listening to his father tell stories and worrying about the imaginary wolf under his bed.

He learned to play guitar and banjo while in high school and developed a large repertoire of Scottish and American folk songs. He entered Harvard University in 1961, and soon became a regular on the Boston-Cambridge folk music scene. He spent a year in Paris, then a post-graduate year in Scotland, where he joined the Edinburgh Folk Song Society and collected a cappella ballads.

But by the late 1960s the folk music scene as a commercial art form had died. "All the clubs had shut down and most folk musicians were out of work because they couldn't get record contracts," Claflin recalled. "That's when I realized I was going to have to get a job."

He turned to teaching and curriculum development and during a teaching career spanning 1969 to 1981, created the first puppet characters he would use in his storytelling programs.

"Maynard Moose was the first puppet I developed. I used him in the early days to teach reading, because he mispronounced everything. And I discovered the kids would very enthusiastically correct him. They learned to read faster by having this moose puppet read things incorrectly."

He returned to performing in 1981, with a new collection of stories, puppets and monologues added to his repertoire of traditional and original songs. Since then, Claflin has continued to write and collect stories as he has traveled across the country as a storytelling performer and teacher.

He moved to San Francisco in 1984, the year his first two recordings came out, "Stones Along the Shore" (music) and "Maynard Moose Tales" (stories). He later released "Willy Claflin & Friends" and "Bones of Love," the latter an album of folk-rock that was featured as a recommended release in Billboard Magazine.

Two of Claflin's CDs, "Maynard Moose: Sleeping Beastly & Other Tales" and "The Wolf Under the Bed," were honored by the American Library Association as Notable Children's Recordings. His new CD, "The Uglified Duckling," was released last month.

Last month Claflin was one of 20 featured storytellers at the 29th annual National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn. A member of the Storytelling Association of Alta California, he was a featured storyteller at the 2000 Bay Area Storytelling Festival. Last spring, he was storyteller-in-residence at the Jakarta International School, Indonesia. In addition to his performing, he regularly does artist-in-residence programs in schools.

Last November, Claflin and his wife Jacqueline moved to Petaluma and settled into a restored westside Heritage Home. He's hoping to do less traveling, teach storytelling at area schools and connect with the community.

Before he left teaching to perform full time, Claflin was known as a children's entertainer. "I loved doing stuff for kids, but I missed doing things for adults," he said. "It's been a very welcome addition the last couple of years going to storytelling festivals. I discovered that this huge national network exists. It's very exciting. I've heard all of these other wonderful storytellers and met all these other people in their 50s and 60s doing what I'm doing." The resurgence of interest in storytelling, he believes, is a reaction to people missing the oral tradition and the element of shared experience.

"The feeling of live storytelling is something I really can't communicate. It's different from going to the movies. With a live storyteller you're reacting with the performer at the same time the performer is reacting. The story is happening to everybody, including the performer, at the same time."

The use of puppets in his storytelling is the most distinguishing feature of what Claflin does. And each puppet has its own distinctive voice and personality. "They don't think the same way at all," he says. "After all these years when I put Maynard on my hand, I really have no idea what he's going to say. It's almost like channeling. It's like an actor getting immersed in a character in a play. You are not the same person. It's the same thing when I put the puppet on my hand."

Claflin's shows are eclectic and never the same. When he does shows geared for children, he uses more of his puppets. When his audience is adults, he will tend to rely more on Maynard the Moose.

The important thing for Claflin is getting children to use their imagination. "Imagination is a muscle," he says. "We do so much to strengthen kids physically, intellectually and emotionally, but in terms of strengthening kids' imaginations I don't see much curriculum. It's disturbing to me. Twenty-five years ago, if I asked kids to close their eyes and imagine, I'd get all these amazing scenarios and they'd all be concoctions of the children. Now, I still get a variety of responses, but they're all either PokŽmon characters or TV characters -- characters or images taken from mass media instead of generated internally. This is scary to me. I think imagination for its own sake is a wonderful thing. Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. People's imaginations should be alive.

"It's not that I think TV and video games and computers are bad. It's just that so much information is flooding in all the time. It's nice to have that peaceful space to generate something from within."

When he's an artist in residence at a school, Claflin uses what he calls his Daydreaming in the Schools Program. "I do exercises with third and fourth graders about what it's like to imagine something. I'm trying to wean them away from characters they've been exposed to on television or video games. I'll say, "Imagine you're in a forest where there are characters you've never seen before until just now.' That's usually a good way of getting rid of all the TV images."

As an only child in a home with no TV set and a town with no movie theater, Claflin said, "I was either bored or had to make up stuff. Being bored is an excellent thing, because if you're bored, then in your attempts to get un-bored you're bound to come up with something remarkably interesting."

Claflin wants to settle in Petaluma, perform at national storytelling festivals on weekends and work more intensively in Sonoma County schools, teaching and doing concerts. He is already scheduled to do two shows at Penngrove School on Dec. 5, and he has been contacted to do some assembly programs at other local schools. He will present a public performance at the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station on Jan. 5 at 3 p.m.

For more information about Claflin's performances or to order CDs, visit his Web site, www.willyclaflin.com, e-mail claflin@sirius.com or call (800) 500-0252.