Storytelling Sunday: Speaking My Life

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“My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.”

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Johnathan Saffran Foer

Orson Scott Card, author of the Ender series, presented a concept which appeals to me.  That is the concept of a “Speaker for the Dead.”  He tells us in the introduction to this book:

This concept arose from experiences with death and funerals.  I grew dissatisfied with the way we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their actual life that, in effect, we kill them all over again….erase them, edit them, make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived. 

I rejected that idea…more appropriate funeral would be to say, honestly, what the person was and what that person did.  Honesty does not mean saying all the unpleasant things instead of only the nice ones; does not mean averaging them out….To understand who a person really was, what his/her life really meant, the Speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story—what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in.  That’s the story we never can know and yet it is the only story worth telling.

Therefore, I’ve decided to speak my life to you so that you can hear the self story.  I’ve decided to share all of those things in an order that makes the most sense to me.  I decided it had to be organized in a specific way.  In one of the books I most enjoyed reading, Tipperary by Frank Delaney, one of the characters arranges a series of letters into chronological order.  When teased about her aversion to disorder she replies:

It is not so much about disorder….it is the fact of the disorder preventing an interesting and instructive human experience from being recorded.

While it may be presumptuous of me to assume my self-story is, interesting and instructive I believe that if you are reading this you must in some fashion think it is worth knowing.

Finally, as a storyteller I am acutely aware that a story is the result of the teller, or writer in this case, and the listener, or reader working together to make the story truly worthwhile.  Therefore, come with me on a journey that I hope will be of use to both of us.  I recently found the concept of "Storytelling Sunday" that I thought would be a great way to motivate myself to write the stories I've been wanting to share.  What a great idea!  

See you next Sunday!