On Storytelling
“Books read us back to ourselves.”- Jeanette Winterson
In moments of despair, trauma, abuse, overwhelm— we reach for the things closest to us to help us escape. Maybe even to feel invincible. To help us feel good. Higher than life and untouchable. Pure. For some, escaping means turning to drugs or relationships that feel good at the moment but result in our downfall. I use these examples purposefully. As a former foster care youth, I know first hand and through others that things that are closest to us, aren’t always the safest.
I was lucky.
The only things I had close to me to help take my mind elsewhere— quickly and for free— were books.
They lit me on fire.
As I held a book in my hand and flipped through feathery, sometimes stale pages, my mind went a million different ways. I felt emotions I didn’t know I was capable of, for people who weren’t real, and yet they felt like they were sitting right beside me. I traveled the world in a matter of seconds. I formed ideas about class, gender, sexuality, identity, love, death, and so much more. Through the power of storytelling, I was able to conceive of a world beyond my own.
Poetry taught me how beautiful the English language is if you are patient enough to sit and receive. Novels showed me discipline— how if I stay with a character or a plot long enough, I will be rewarded with an ending, a lesson, a shift in perspective. Plays expanded my imagination— challenging my mind to dream up sets and voices and characters. Short stories taught me how to pay attention to detail and how a little can really go a long way.
It started with the Baby-Sitters Club book series. And now, one of my undergraduate degrees will be in English Literature. I can’t imagine a world in which I didn’t read.
When I was younger reading was grounded in my need to feel safe. When I wasn’t thinking about survival, I gave my free time to storytelling. Something about reading different experiences and different identities that rooted my own life into understanding that our world is made colorful because of the stories we listen to and the stories we tell.
Literature has taught me that there is nothing about the human experience that is new. Ironically, the saying goes, ‘we read about history, to learn about the present’ (and sometimes the future). Honestly, I feel as though literature teaches us the most. There is nothing about growing up, forming your identity, or exploring the physics of a relationship that hasn’t already been documented. We think of Sociology and Anthropology as disciplines that teach us about each other and our behavior, and the decisions we make, but Literature has been exploring these concepts long before those other disciplines existed.
In a BrainPickings blog post, Maria Popova shares Jeanette Winterson’s take on why we read and how storytelling transforms us:
“Reading is an adventure. Adventures are about the unknown. When I started to read seriously I was excited and comforted all at the same time. Literature is a mix of unfamiliarity and recognition. The situation can take us anywhere — across time and space, the globe, through the lives of people who can never be like us — into the heart of anguish we have never felt — crimes we could not commit.
Yet as we travel deeper into the strange world of the story, the feeling we get is of being understood — which is odd when you think about it, because at school learning is based on whether or not we understand what we are reading. In fact it is the story (or the poem) that is understanding us.
Books read us back to ourselves.
One of the things the story teaches us is this: Read yourself as a fiction as well as a fact.
When I was growing up poor in a poor place with a pair of Pentecostal parents who were waiting for Jesus to return and roll up time and space like a scroll, I never thought my life was narrow or my chances bleak. I thought I was Heathcliff, Huck Finn, Hotspur, Aladdin, the Big Bad Wolf. The Fish with a Golden Ring.
And later, when I had left home at sixteen and was living in a Mini, I had my favourite books stashed in the boot and whenever I could be in the library, I was there. This wasn’t a fantasy world or escapism — though it was an escape; it was the hidden door in the blank wall. Open it.
I opened the book and went through.
The escape into another story reminds us that we too are another story. Not caught, not confined, not predestined, not only one gender or passion. Learning to read yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is liberating — it is the difference between energy and mass. Mass is the beloved object — the world we can touch and feel — but mass is also the dead weight in ourselves and others.
Shifting the dead weight takes energy but at its atomic core the dead weight is energy. Transforming mass into energy, energy into mass is what creative work is about. An idea becomes embodied. A tragedy is released.”
We read and learn about others as well as ourselves. We read and we change our own lives and our own ways of thinking and being.
Now, as I get older and think about the career I hope to have in public policy, I can’t help but think about the power of storytelling as a way to move ideas forward.
We often rely on data to help us make decisions and implement policy choices, but data doesn’t move us. Seeing a statistic isn’t enough. We can’t empathize with numbers alone. We need to know who these numbers are supposed to represent. We need to hear from voices who are constantly marginalized and silenced. We need to know who's being impacted by the decisions we make and ensure that people are included in the decision-making process.
I think we are so used to feeling like people in power or people with power have to make choices on behalf of communities, that we forget that those communities should be a part of those choices from beginning to end.
Story becomes a verb. It becomes action. Story becomes a way to save lives. Story becomes a way to affirm people’s dignity.
What stories have you read or shared or told recently?
Books I’ve Read Recently
Every book in bold is a must-read!!!!
Children of Blood and Bone by Toni Adeyemi
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Minds by Resmaa Menakem
We Were 8 Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Wayward Lives and Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman
In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
There There by Tommy Orange
The Moors Account by Laila Lalami
Just As I Am by Cicely Tyson
Know My Name by Chanel Miller
Even As We Breathe by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle
Disability Visibility Edited by Alice Wong
Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennet
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson