To Be A Storyteller

I've always had trouble telling stories. This frustrates me. I was raised by incredible storytellers: my mom and dad, my grandmothers and my grandfathers, aunts and uncles.

Not only that, but I fell in love with reading stories early on. I craved books. I craved movies. I craved opportunities to be immersed in other lives.

I was an English major in college, for God's sake, and am now an English teacher! So, yeah, it's frustrating when I find myself without stories to tell.

Growing up, my dad used to tell me and my brother a bedtime story. It was an episodic, ongoing tale about a kid named Billy Poobah and his gang of misfit friends. Billy falls into his father's underwear drawer and each installment focuses on his effort to get back home. 

Over the years he told the story, my dad maintained that he got the story from a custodial worker when he was a student at Bradley University. He and this guy would sit on a bench, and this guy would tell it. I believed this origin story for probably too long. Ultimately, I discovered that he was just making it up as he went along. Now I can see some of the influences: The Wizard of Oz and Gulliver's Travels, among others. 

When I had my own kids, I thought about doing this kind of storytelling. But it wasn't in me. I read books instead. I couldn't quite grasp how to weave together characters and plots and dialogue. I wanted to, though. Badly.  

In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien says this about stories: "you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head." Exactly. 

Storytelling is both individual and communal. It's an act of self-preservation. But it also binds people together. It awakens a sense of self and invites others to share in your experience.

Man, I want to be a storyteller.

Quote from Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried