Storyteller I: Stories

Copyright 2007-All Rights Reserved

When I was a little girl, I fell in love with two things: The movies and fairy tales. In other words…stories. My fascination with stories led me to make up my own in my head. I had a sixth grade teacher who would let me tell my stories to our sixth grade class sometimes when he had to leave the room for some reason or another. Later, in junior high, I wrote stories down and somehow convinced my friends, Judy, Charlene, and Bea, to act them out with me. In high school, I recognized the kick I got out of writing, so I went to college with the intention of becoming a journalist—trying to kill two birds with one stone: Write and make a living at it. But that didn’t work out because I hated the core/prerequisite journalism class at Indiana University.

What was happening, at the same time that I was getting turned off by journalism, was that I had fallen hard for my literature classes where I'd been introduced to all those the Greek myths, The Odyssey, in particular, the short stories like “The Lottery,” Chaucer’s tales, the unforgettable character, Lady Macbeth, and all that just knocked me over. The story thing, again. So since I hated journalism and loved literature, I decided to change my major to English which really meant literature. And I did a double minor in Creative Writing and Comparative Literature.

Stories. What good are they, you ask?

Well, among other things, they tell us and others about our history (our past), our sociology (our connections with the group), our geography (our physical points of origin), our cultural anthropology (our art, clothing, music, dance, food, rituals, and literature), our philosophy/cosmology/religion (our view of life, ourselves, the earth, and that which is greater than us), our psychology (that which drives us/motivates us).

Stories tell us who we are, where we came from, what we desire, where we’re going, and what we think of ourselves. In our stories, we reveal our identity. We find our identity. We confirm our identity. We confirm our common humanity.

In stories, we connect to each other. At a very basic level. No matter what the race, nation, era, culture, or geographic location that they hail from, stories bring us together around the campfire. Stories are a life line. A link. A bridge to the past, present, and future. Stories give us hope. Give us courage. Bring us through the bad. Help us celebrate the good.

The kind of stories we tell ourselves tell us and others how much we love ourselves, hate ourselves, or are indifferent to ourselves and all living things that inhabit this earth (the peoples of the air, the peoples of the water, the peoples of the earth as some Native Americans put it). Stories teach, reinforce, pass down, to each generation, what we love and prize. What we value.
They are our truest and finest legacy… the most important things we give each other, the most precious things we pass on to succeeding generations.

I love stories. I love to tell them, watch them, listen to them, see them acted out. And write them.

Are you a storyteller? I am.