The symbol of a circle holds a variety of meanings throughout the world, including ideas of wholeness, inclusivity, and life itself—moving between sacred ritual and “mundane” everyday applications (Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2004; Simpson 2011). In this paper, I examine the halqa, a circular performance configuration used throughout North Africa and the Middle East for a variety of different performance genres, both in the past and present (Amine 2010; Goodman 2018). The most famous halqa is that of the storyteller, both that of the men storytellers in public venues and the household grandmother storytellers. While conducting fieldwork in Morocco, a research collaborator claimed that the original halqa of the public sphere storyteller was the site for the creation of all we see in the famous Jemaa el Fna Square in Marrakech, noting: “the circle gave birth to other baby circles, including the characters from the stories that the storytellers told: the snake charmer, the musician, the dancer, the wizard or the witch, or the henna lady, or the food stall, the tea maker, or the coffee maker…” (interview; 6/2/2018). However, when I asked my collaborators about their first experiences with storytelling, all of them recounted memories of their grandmothers sharing tales with them and other neighborhood children as they circled around her, just outside their homes. Cattell and Climo claim “from the simplest everyday tasks to the most complicated, we all rely on memories to give meaning to our lives” (2002: 1). The previously mentioned narratives, speaking to the multiplicity of memories surrounding the practice of storytelling, demonstrate the significance of the halqa for the construction of supportive, participatory space. Not only is the halqa a space of emergence and creation, as described by my collaborator above, but it represents the circling of a life narrative through the grandmother. Built upon discussions and fieldwork from 2016-2018 in Marrakech, Morocco, this paper examines how the circular configuration of the halqa in contemporary storytelling contributes to the historical memory of public and household storytelling. I will explore the halqa and the meaning and resonance of this circular configuration for spectators, as well as considerations in the importance of the circling back in history. Not only are listeners forming a halqa around storytellers, but the spectators themselves are brought full circle, from the present to the past and back to the present, as narratives and historical memories attach to the Moroccan halqa.