storytelling: a moodboard

Readers — kids and adults — ask me about the message of one story or another. I want to say to them, “Your question isn’t in the right language.”

As a fiction writer, I don’t speak message. I speak story. Sure, my story means something, but if you want to know what it means, you have to ask the question in terms appropriate to storytelling. Terms... See more

The strange thing about Moth stories is that none of the tricks we use to make ourselves loved or respected by others work in the ways you would imagine they ought to. The tales of how clever we were, how wise, how we won, they mostly fail. The practiced jokes and the witty one-liners all crash and burn up on a Moth stage.

Honesty matters.

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In real life, the success or failure of each individual performance often plays out in the form of concrete, physical action—you get invited over for dinner, or you lose the friendship, or you get the job. Online, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and eyeballs,

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Stories are entrusted to storytellers by the elders. But these storytellers are not meant to repeat the narrative verbatim; they are expected to understand these stories and, through them, reflect on what the community needs to hear at any given moment. This temporal gathering, both in and around a story, acknowledges the personal subjectivities... See more

As a storyteller, do you ever think that means we’ve run out of things to say?

No. Families get together and they tell stories. How many times have you talked about that summer where dad drove the car into the lake, or whatever? There’s something reassuring to revisiting stories, the kind of ancient storytelling tradition of the campfire: “Tell me... See more