“But this too is true: Stories can save us.” (~ Tim O’Brien, In the Things They Carried)
I want to tell you about my dream a few nights ago.
I want to tell you a story.
I will recount my dream as I remember it.
In that telling, I have already given the recounting an armature; parameters; rhythm; an arc; deleting and enjoining, recognizing the fantastic, disjointed sequence as perhaps metaphors. Recounting my dream, I bring it into my life and my listener’s. What was ragged and muddled starts to even out and a pattern emerges. A structure is created. I find meaning.
I have become a storyteller.
Storytelling is humanity’s oldest invention for defeating its own disappearance. The source of all our origin stories.
Humans aren’t the only species that communicate with each other. Whales sing across oceans. Bees dance signaling directions toward nectar. Wolves howl to locate one another in darkness. Scientists have found that many animals transmit information, warn of dangers, and even pass along ways of living—songs, hunting techniques, and social customs—from elders to the young. For example, some bird species learn local songs or calls from older birds, creating regional “dialects.” And, humpback whales’ songs can spread through whale populations, with new patterns being adopted and transmitted over time.
But there is no evidence that I know of that non-human species gather to narrate the past, imagine the future, or invent lives that never happened.
Humans do.
The difference may lie not in language alone but in time. A story allows us to inhabit two tenses at once. We can revisit and reflect on what is gone and we can reevaluate what is present.
Oral storytelling emerged from this necessity. Before archives, before libraries, memory lived in the body. The story was not merely entertainment; it was a vessel. It carried ancestry, law, geography, grief, desire, and warning. To tell a story was a human desire to preserve a world against extinction.
Even now, when every phone is an archive and every cloud stores our photographs, the deepest stories remain oral. We tell them across dinner tables. We repeat them in hospital rooms. We memorialize them at memorial services. How our parents met, why my grandmother taught sewing, what happened in the summers of ’68 & 69.
Primo Levi, a chemist and writer, a survivor of Auschwitz, said in 1986, a year before he killed himself:
“While I was in the camp the need to tell the story was so strong that I began to describe my experiences there, on the spot, in that German laboratory laden with freezing cold, the war, and vigilant eyes; and yet I knew that I would not be able under any circumstances to hold onto those haphazardly scribbled notes. As soon as I returned to Italy, I felt compelled to write, and within a few months I wrote Survival in Auschwitz. Some 15 years later, I wrote The Reawakening, which is the natural continuation of its older brother.” (From February 17, 1986, The New Republic. Translated from Italian into English by Ruth Feldman)
There are three types of storytelling that thrust me to write this essay. First, Harriet Clark’s debut novel The Hill. The story follows a girl, Suzanna, growing up in the shadow of a mother imprisoned for a political crime. (The author’s own mother, Judith Clark, a member of the Weather Underground, was the driver of the getaway car at the Brink’s robbery in 1981. She wasn’t armed and neither did she kill anyone, but she waited as the heist went eerily awry and a guard and two policemen were killed. Clark was sentenced to three consecutive 25-to-life terms. Her sentence was commuted after 38 years).
Suzanna inherits fragments, silences, rumors, explanations offered by others. She spends her childhood trying to understand a story that began before she was born. Prison becomes not only a physical institution but also a repository of untold narratives. Clark herself grew up visiting her incarcerated mother, and the novel explores how children construct meaning from partial histories and interrupted family stories.
The question beneath The Hill is one every child eventually confronts: What happened before I arrived? Why is my family the way it is? We inherit not only genes but unfinished stories. Sometimes we spend our entire lives trying to fill in the gaps.
A similar narrative propels Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, a memoir by Zayd Ayers Dohrn. Born to the founding members of the SDS and the Weather Underground, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayres, while they were fugitives, Zayd Dohrn grew up inside a family whose official narrative concealed painful truths. The memoir becomes an act of excavation. Drawing on interviews, letters, and declassified files, he revisits the stories he was told as a child and discovers how much remained unsaid. The book asks how a person survives when family mythology collides with historical reality.
Both narratives are, in their separate ways, investigations into inheritance. Neither author is primarily concerned with the political events themselves, though Dohrn’s memoir is possibly the most thorough written history of not only the Weather Underground and Black Liberation movement but of the radical left movement of the sixties into the early eighties in the United States. Both writers excavate what stories parents tell children. What stories do they withhold? How do children make sense of silences?
We know ourselves through the stories we can tell about our lives. When those stories are broken, hidden, or contradictory, we experience confusion not merely about events but about selfhood.
This is why humans alone practice storytelling in its richest form. We are the species that knows it will die. We are a species that remember ancestors we never met. We are the species that imagine descendants we will never see. Storytelling bridges those impossible distances.
And storytelling heals. Anyone who has heard stories from people in recovery at group meetings will tell you that.
We are taking fragments of experience and arranging them into meaning. We are pushing back against oblivion.
And the third type of storytelling. In the region I live in New England, I came across an unlikely duo, a GIS specialist and a mechanical engineer, part of the Indian, and specifically Bengali, diaspora started a Moth–like storytelling group a decade or so ago. Off-Kendrik “has the central goal of writing and performing experimental theater which arguably is non-mainstream or…. off-center,” says Chandreyee Lahiri, one of the main curators and voice coaches , who has assisted the founder, Sankha Bhowmick, host a storytelling event (among many other productions) called “Voices”.
At a recent event, seven storytellers from a variety of non-performance backgrounds, representing a swath of the South Asian diaspora told finely tuned stories, narratives with pitch-perfect arches, pauses, self-deprecations, and the gut-punching denouement of individual experiences from their immigrant lives. For myself, each story struck familiar registers of long-ago, yet deeply familiar, cultural resonances. And some, beyond anything I’d ever imagined, tore through my being. To hear a family medicine doctor come face-to-face with a survivor of a genocide as she asks routine questions, but probingly persistent, in a wellness check mandated by the survivor’s employer.
The voices I heard reminded me where I’d come from, who we belong to, and what the world means. The story is the bridge.
At the end of the storytelling, Bhowmick invited three guests, two men and a woman, to join him on stage for a Q&A. The panelists were long-time immigrants from Iran. One was a colleague of Bhowmick’s from the university where he is a professor and a chair of his department. They spoke, in response to prompts, about their personal responses to the conflict called “Operation Epic Fury,” the U.S. war against Iran. They simply told their stories, about their families in Iran, about memories of their birthplaces, about their own, daily nightmares, and one story about an Iranian relative who was visiting the U.S. when war was declared. Trapped, without a legal way to return to Iran, her family here got her to Turkey and then overland back to Iran.
The simple act of telling their stories connected all of us to the moment, to our lives, to the uncertainties and the bonds of belonging at a time when division and hate are pulling us threadbare.
With it, we become part of a human conversation.
“I spent a very long time reading about radicals in the thirties, forties and fifties, the sixties and seventies, but then, to all of a sudden have that profound experience of that’s me, inside books that describe totally different conditions—it frees you from thinking that your own history, your identity, constricts you. Those writers brought me into the human fold. They revealed me to myself. They made this call, and then it took twenty years for me to write my response.” (Harriet Clark, author, The Hill. Interview in The Paris Review, May 27, 2026)
An amazingly well-written and thought-provoking piece.
Thank you, Kurt!