Once upon a long, long time ago, after day was done, the sun gone down, people squatted around their home entertainment system to hear someone tell a story. In the flames they saw the story unfold — an ancestor who was brave, a child who didn’t listen, a frog who fell in love, a god who wreaked revenge.

The stories were illustrated with no more than trembles of voice, the emulation of a sob, gestures and shadows in orange flame light, maybe a song, maybe the prop of a stone or a spear.

The stories did more than entertain. They transplanted memory and preserved a kind of history. They turned legend into a kind of truth. They passed on values. They knitted complexity into cultures and cinched communities closer.

People told stories for a hundred millennia before anyone wrote or read a story.

And despite books, television, movies, and the internet, we still tell stories. They come in genres known as gossip, ghost stories, bar talk, speeches, radio dramas, public relations, political spin, sales pitches, smooth-talk, desperate excuses, and job interviews.

Back when I was a camp counselor, I used to thrill my little campers with stories around a campfire, just as in Paleolithic times. I was good at it. Too good.

I could set up a horror story so real that, at a climactic moment, kids would scream as they lurched toward the fire. Some wet their pants. Some ran off to find their mothers. Some did both.

One kid’s hair caught on fire, and he fled into the woods, where he was caught by the double-headed Hemlock Hurdler. The next day, all we found were some bloody bones in the bushes and tuft of scorched hair on a raspberry thorn.

I was so good at telling stories that I was told to stop. But sometimes stories just happen.

A lot of stories still happen thanks to the Connecticut Storytelling Center. It was founded 40 years ago by Barbara Reed, a professor at Connecticut College. For the last 20 years it’s been under director Ann Shapiro, with an office at the college.

And then one day Little Mr. Coronavirus came to town.

Now the Center is uncentered. Everybody works from home. But the storytelling goes on — or at least it’s trying to. A big part of storytelling has always been the proximity of the storyteller and the audience.

The audience needs to hear the voice, see the gestures, and sense each others’ presence. The storyteller needs to read the audience and their eyes.

For the last 39 years, the Center has held an annual storytelling festival. It was mostly for teachers, librarians, and storytellers, an opportunity to do more than hear tales.

They learned about the benefits of oral stories and how to use them to teach children. The Center also sent a couple dozen storytellers to schools across the state, and not just for entertainment. Storytelling is more pedagogical than the kids ever suspect.

Listening to a story involves several skills. Kids need to follow logic, chronology, and cause-and-effect. They need to remember. They need to visualize. They need to cooperate, to respect, to shut up and pay attention.

The typical classroom story isn’t just a few minutes of narrative. It involves audience participation — the storyteller eliciting responses, calling for suggestions, checking on comprehension, holding attention by the scruff of its neck.

Every year some 10,000 Connecticut kids get to hear local storytellers at school. But now the kids are distanced. Everybody’s wearing a mask. And nobody needs an outsider coming in to spew fairy tales and germs.

So how’s storytelling supposed to work?

Good question. So far, no good answer.

The obvious but not-so-good answer: an internet conference. Kids in one place, the storyteller in a land far, far away. Participation is awkward. Eye contact is impossible.

The rare opportunity for in-person communication is back on a screen like just about everything else these days.

Gathering around a computer screen just isn’t the same as gathering around a lady dressed up like Mother Goose. It’s uncomfortably like watching TV. Still, Ann Shapiro says it seems to be working — not perfectly. It’s better than TV but not nearly as much fun as a small fire on the classroom floor.

Glenn Alan Cheney is a writer, translator and managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@nllibrarium.com.