MARA STAHL’S "OUT OF THE ASHES" She earns a living and shapes a life, working with story. Now Mara Stahl takes you back stage, after the performance, and tells her own story. This is something new, neither a recorded performance nor a book on tape. Her warm voice invites you to hear the story behind the stories. SAMPLES OF WHAT OTHERS WRITE ABOUT MARA’S WORK: “Mara Stahl’s work re-unites the earliest forms of poetry and drama. She returns us to a view of the universe in which we see ourselves not as detached and 'superior’ humans, but as an integral part of a majestic whole which includes the mythological, the transcendent, and the utterly real.” Sam Hamill, poet and translator “Mara Stahl is a theater artist whose tools are masks and myth. Whether at the Portland Art Museum or in an Eskimo village, her widely traveled performances emphasize the universal qualities in experience which transcend time and culture. She is a complete theater artist, collecting stories from world mythologies, reshaping them into her voice. She brings thirty years of theater experience, including two seasons with the Oregon Shakespearean Festival, to her performances in storytelling. One quickly gets the impression that she has found her niche, that the entire long process that precedes each deceptively easy-going performance is a labor without which she would be lost. Her radiance on stage and in person says as much as does her sense of humor. She brings to all cultures those elements which are universal, elemental, and the very atoms of our existence.” Charles Deemer, playwright and critic, Northwest Magazine “She tells tales grown in the stillness of night, on the endless rocking of the sea, out of the dance of fire in faraway lands.” Ken Gerner, poet “To say that Mara Stahl knows how to tell a story is to say that George Gershwin knew how to write songs.” Katie Bergin, Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum “Mara Stahl takes care of story as other people take care of the earth. Her masks and language evoke the relationships that exist between living things, and induce wonder. To be near her stories is to know a state of health, to feel cleansed.” Barry Lopez, writer "The voice she finds can be startlingly, musically poetic. What Stahl does with words is wondrously energetic, stretching syllables like taffy, rotating rhythms like a jazz drummer, hammering the ends of words with ringing “B’s” or “D’s”. Her voice is like a trombone, or a foghorn sounding muffled out of the unknown.” Bob Hicks, The Oregonian The elegant and unadorned recording is by Jeremy Bowker. The narration is written and spoken by Mara Stahl. The listening is by you, audience.