Telling Tales for the Love of Reading

Evelyn Kibrick is not a grandmother, but there are a few places where she can be Granny Annie.

One is in front of the Nancy Drew collection, between the House and Home and Religion sections of a Northridge bookstore. Kibrick, a Northridge resident, is a storyteller, striving to create for children happy memories and a love of reading.

“She’s imaginative,” said Juan Velasquez of Northridge, who brings his 4-year-old, Estevan, to listen to Kibrick at a Barnes & Noble where she volunteers. “She makes up things as she goes along, and the kids really like that.”

For most of the last year, Kibrick has donned the white wig, glasses and wraparound shawl that define Granny Annie. She volunteers her services in schools and bookstores, and she works for hire at area malls. With finger puppets, stuffed toys and a book straddled across her lap, she relates tales of gingerbread creatures, teddy bears and ancient kings.

“The library was my entertainment center,” said Kibrick, who grew up during the days of radio in the Brighton Beach section of New York. When she was a girl, her local librarian used to tell stories and give cookies and hot cocoa. “It was a magical time. I lived for that.”

Kibrick has a small but devoted following. About 12 young children gathered at her feet at the beginning of one recent storytelling session.

“Hi, Granny Annie,” one girl said. “I remember you when you came to our preschool.”

Behind the group stood parents and grandparents, watching as the children sometimes jumped to their feet, excited by the storytelling.

“I look forward to seeing her each month,” said Idele Kaplan of Northridge, a real grandmother who brings her 5-year-old granddaughter, Alexandria, to Kibrick’s storytelling sessions. “She has more patience than I, as a grandmother, could ever have.”

Kibrick--who gave her age as “over 60”--had been a New York City schoolteacher before marrying her husband, Edward, and moving to California in the 1950s. After her husband died of cancer in 1995, she created the character as a way of staying involved and open to new experiences.

Kibrick became active in Friends of the Porter Ranch Library, and she volunteered with the Grandparents and Books Volunteers program in the Los Angeles city public library system. Eventually, drawing on her experience in marketing, she developed Granny Annie, using the name of her own grandmother.

But as important as books and children are to her, Kibrick is hard-pressed to pick her favorite children’s books. She draws on stories from as far away as Asia and India, and she is not a big fan of Dr. Seuss.

“I think a child should be exposed to as many good books as possible and let them decide what they like,” Kibrick said.

To keep the children from becoming bored, she asks questions and takes breaks for sing-alongs, arts and crafts and cookies. The key to being a good children’s storyteller, she said, “is almost the same things in a good story, to be creative and give them something they can identify with.”

To be a storyteller requires delving into the mind of a 5-year-old. “It’s unspoiled,” she said. “It’s innocent. They just tell you the way it is.”

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