Visitors to the Mystic and Noank Library, including children at Happy Time Nursery School next door, were treated to a visit from Mother Goose on Nov. 6. Mary Jo Maichack of Holyoke, Mass., used music, puppets, and of course, a plush goose to tell nursery rhymes with the children.

One of her puppets, a cow, was very shy, so before she began “Hey Diddle Diddle,” she quietly had to coax the cow to speak.

“Quack!”

The children roared with laughter.

“Are you being tricky again?” Maichack asked the cow. “Alright, you’re going to do it now straight, right?”

The cow nodded.

“Promise?”

The cow nodded, and after another quack, meows, and a bark, it finally mooed to lead into the rest of the sketch.

Despite the silliness of a cow that quacks, in Connecticut, storytelling is serious business.

The General Assembly created the official position of “State Troubadour” to promote cultural literacy in the state through song. And the New London-based Connecticut Storytelling Center launched Tellabration, an international storytelling event held throughout the month of November.

When the late J. G. “Paw Paw” Pinkerton started the Tellabration event in Stamford in 1988, he created it to be a way for friends and people in the community to get together and tell stories. That year, the Connecticut Storytelling Center held a Tellabration in six communities throughout the state, and the event has since expanded to every continent except Antarctica.

This year, 31 communities in the state are participating in the event. Ann Shapiro, executive director of the Connecticut Storytelling Center, said many towns hold Tellabration events every year, and new ones are started by people who want to bring the event to their own town.

Roberta Donahue, children’s librarian at the Mystic and Noank Library, said the library hosted Tellabration events in the past and was approached by the center to sponsor one this year. Previous events were designed for older children or adults, but Maichack’s visit this year was the first Tellabration event at the library for preschool children.

Traditionally, Tellabration is the Saturday before Thanksgiving, but events are held throughout the month for a variety of age groups.

This year, the event in New London was held at the Garde Arts Center on Nov. 12, and Norwich resident Tom Callinan, a Tellabration mainstay who served as Connecticut’s first State Troubadour in 1991, was the host. Rather than starring in the show, however, he performed his songs and stories about New London and the Connecticut shoreline and moderated stories from members of the community.

Callinan has also hosted the annual Connecticut Storytelling Center Festival and Conference, which is held in April at Connecticut College. He said the events help the main organization to give back to the community through their programs at local schools and libraries, which he has also done.

“It gets us in touch with humanity, our roots,” he said. Before modern media, storytelling was the way people disseminated information and created connections with each other, and as a former English teacher, he has always been involved with some form of storytelling.

The programs are largely aimed at elementary school students to enrich the language arts programs, said Shapiro, the center’s director. Through repeat visits to the schools and libraries, children listen to stories like “El Conejito,” a story about a rabbit who tries to convince larger animals not to eat him. As they learn the stories, they are able to join along, retell them, and write about them in their classes.

“My love is working with the kids,” she said. She enjoys performing for children because they get into the stories and will believe anything the storyteller says.

The Connecticut Storytelling Center also hosts workshops to train teachers on how to adapt stories to the classroom.

Upcoming family-themed Tellabrations include Saturday at 2 p.m. at Groton Public Library, 52 Newtown Road; Sunday at 4 p.m. at the Dragon's Egg on Shewville Road in Ledyard; and on Nov. 27 at 11:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. at the Florence Griswold Museum, 96 Lyme Street in Old Lyme. For more information, visit the Connecticut Storytelling Center's website at www.connstorycenter.org.

a.hutchinson@theday.com

Twitter: @ahutch411