Storytelling

The Moth is one of my favorite programs on NPR, featuring storytellers from all over. Their website and podcasts contain all their past episodes, short personal stories that are great road trip company.  

As a narrative lover all my life, I can get lost in a story.  But I can also find myself in them.  

Finding ourselves in a story is one of the reasons we read. 

From the epic tales of myths to the personal anecdotes we tell each other, great storytellers have a way of honing in on the details that make a story so real that, years later, we think it actually happened to us.  We remember it as if it did. 

I actually remember being on the back of a horse with my daddy when I was about two years old.  Suddenly the horse started running for his life, leaving little tiny petrified me holding on to my dad's back with all my strength as we raced across a field.

I remember us finally coming to a halt, dismounting, and discovering that what had set off that old horse was an accidental burn from the tip of my dad's cigar!  

Turns out, a few details had transported themselves from my dad's memories to my mind: the sudden run-away of the horse (though it wasn't a horse, it was a mule); the accidental burn that set it all off; my daddy pulling on the reins with all his might to stop the wild animal. 

But when all that happened, I (the girl on the back) was not even born!

He told me this after years of my believing I was there: "No, Sugar, that was back before you were born." 

I've been thinking a lot lately about stories and why certain ones have staying power, why some are buried so deep in us that they only come to the surface when we need them.  About a certain story that I heard in college that impacted me for years to come. 

I've been wondering why certain stories capture the imaginations of generations of people, why others are maybe just as good but soon forgotten.   Thinking about the ways we literally hold our breaths a minute waiting to find out how a story turns out. 

Maybe that's what I'm going to write about for a few posts coming up.