Stories All Around Us, Stories Inside

[The StoryCorps project takes as its mission simply to record people’s personal stories, via interviews, and make them available to anyone who wants to listen to them. The organization has won numerous awards for its work — one of those “simple” ideas (like the similar one behind the Humans of New York photo project) which it’s great to see rewarded with praise.]

From whiskey river:

In summer, waiting for night, we’d pose against the afterglow on corners, watching traffic cruise through the neighborhood. Sometimes, a car would go by without its headlights on and we’d all yell, “Lights!”

“Lights!” we’d keep on yelling until the beams flashed on. It was usually immediate—the driver honking back thanks, or flinching embarrassed behind the steering wheel, or gunning past, and we’d see his red taillights blink on.

But there were times—who knows why?—when drunk or high, stubborn, or simply lost in that glide to somewhere else, the driver just kept driving in the dark, and all down the block we’d hear yelling from doorways and storefronts, front steps, and other corners, voices winking on like fireflies: “Lights! Your lights! Hey, lights!”

(Stuart Dybek [source])

…and:

The End of Science Fiction

This is not fantasy, this is our life.
We are the characters
who have invaded the moon,
who cannot stop their computers.
We are the gods who can unmake
the world in seven days.

Both hands are stopped at noon.
We are beginning to live forever,
in lightweight, aluminum bodies
with numbers stamped on our backs.
We dial our words like Muzak.
We hear each other through water.

The genre is dead. Invent something new.
Invent a man and a woman
naked in a garden,
invent a child that will save the world,
a man who carries his father
out of a burning city.
Invent a spool of thread
that leads a hero to safety,
invent an island on which he abandons
the woman who saved his life
with no loss of sleep over his betrayal.

Invent us as we were
before our bodies glittered
and we stopped bleeding:
invent a shepherd who kills a giant,
a girl who grows into a tree,
a woman who refuses to turn
her back on the past and is changed to salt,
a boy who steals his brother’s birthright
and becomes the head of a nation.
Invent real tears, hard love,
slow-spoken, ancient words,
difficult as a child’s
first steps across a room.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

Not from whiskey river:

A Story

Some will call the suicide bomber
a coward but seeing him

you think only, Hungry,
stumbling as he is toward you,

to the tent where pilgrims
stop to eat and drink.

Behind you a woman in a black robe
scoops rice with her fingers.

Beside her a girl, restless, runs out
onto the dusty two-lane road

that the bomber now crosses.
This is happening

at the end
of forty days of mourning,

the anniversary a martyrdom.
The girl returns breathless

and the mother gives her
a glass of clean water.

You watch the ripple down
her throat, and out of sunlight

the man approaches—
his eyes, like yours, are brown.

Now you hear someone say, Sit, sit.
It is the mother talking to the daughter.

And now someone is shouting,
and now there is the terrible noise.

Every person is a story.
You are the man who walked out

as he walked in, the bomb went off,
and you lived to tell.

(Hayan Charara [source])

…and:

In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.

(Gabriel Marcia Marquez [source])

…and:

I Could Not Tell

I could not tell I had jumped off that bus,
that bus in motion, with my child in my arms,
because I did not know it. I believed my own story:
I had fallen, or the bus had started up
when I had one foot in the air.

I would not remember the tightening of my jaw,
the irk that I’d missed my stop, the step out
into the air, the clear child
gazing about her in the air as I plunged
to one knee on the street, scraped it, twisted it,
the bus skidding to a stop, the driver
jumping out, my daughter laughing
Do it again.

I have never done it
again, I have been very careful.
I have kept an eye on that nice young mother
who lightly leapt
off the moving vehicle
onto the stopped street, her life
in her hands, her life’s life in her hands.

(Sharon Olds [source])

…and:

Write what you know. Are you an expert in the Norse weather-and-fertility gods? Or in elementary-school crossing guards? I am, and I hope you’ll consider for representation “Larry and Freyr: A Novel in Letters.” In it, Larry Patowski, a genial crossing guard at John F. Kennedy Elementary who’s known for his quick, albeit repetitive, wit, commences an epistolary friendship with the Norse god Freyr. In the course of their letters, e-mails, text messages, and Gchats, we learn more about this seemingly mismatched duo—one a fifty-six-year-old bratwurst-loving mortal from a Chicago suburb, the other a supernatural deity out of Scandinavian paganism—who are more alike than they think. By the novel’s powerful conclusion, when Freyr has become a beer-guzzling Cubs fan and Larry, with the help of a stolen iPhone, intervenes in mythological history to destroy the frost giant Surtr during the great battle of Ragnarøkkr, these two unforgettable characters will have carved a place into your heart as surely as Freyr rides the boar Gullinbursti to Baldr’s funeral!

(Teddy Wayne [source])

…and:

For writers of fiction, notoriously, utter satisfaction with their work always slips away from the present to hide in some imagined future draft. They hang a painting on the living-room wall where one didn’t exist before, and they later move the painting to the master bedroom; drench the garden outside with rainwater, snow, or sunshine, then decide there’s no garden at all; lure their characters into dark places and disastrous relationships, rename them, only afterwards installing a convenient lantern on the cave wall and completely swapping in a different character whom the love suits better. Why? They do it because — as writers will tell you quite happily, sometimes murking up the explanation with baroque language like denouement and dialogue and character arc — because it makes a better story.

The rest of us do this, too, all the time; we differ only in laboring for an audience of one: ourselves. And we do it for the same reason: it makes a better story.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)