I’m currently in a course on Catholic storytelling. We were assigned to reflect on the question, Why do we write? It’s a worthwhile question, and so I’m sharing my response here with you in the hopes that perhaps you’ll spend some time this week wondering about why you share your own stories, written or otherwise.
We gathered around the table in the dining room where the good plates were kept and the wallpaper never changed. Not ever, even after all those years. It was Thanksgiving or it was Easter or it was my birthday or it was your birthday or it was Sunday at noon. All the same, there were brownies. And we sat there, leaning back in our chairs, cradling our empty glasses and our bulging stomachs and we told stories. Stories of discounted produce at the shop down the street and stories of friends and strangers who had inevitably died. Stories of school and work and play—if there was time—and the casino, how much had been won and how much had been inevitably lost. Stories that made big points—she’ll have to go into a nursing home—and stories that made little sense—and that’s why my Spanish teacher always sent me to the post office—and stories that made past present, for a time’s lonely glimmer.
And what was the point of any of it? Stories passed across the table like gravy and green beans and mashed potatoes and never the salad. Stories grounded in a people and a place. But the cast is new—some have bowed out and others have stumbled in—and the setting has changed—moved, exchanged hands, redecorated, and who can still speak to the wallpaper?—and the stories seem more fragile now with newer, fewer voices. They hang there on the walls, those stories, by a threadbare wire and a rusted nail.
Still, I sit and wonder about that sequence of scenes, my own upbringing in stories that meant very little but pointed in their littleness to everything: beyond the table and the old plates and the wallpaper. So, I wonder and write: scenes of that same littleness and meaninglessness and confusion and pain. And I write because in those scenes, in those moments, in those unexamined details, just there off screen is the hope and the connection and the trampoline that, with a little jump, can lift your gaze up and out and on to that which is bigger.
And in the lifting, in the gazing, maybe I right those fallen pieces of scenery, dust them off, turn them over, see if the light can hit them just so. And I write and I right and turn those details over and over and over again until they show us something new, until some secret is unlocked, the light finally streaming through the keyhole.
The secret, I think, is only a secret because of its frightening simplicity: Stories are what we have to pass the time until the brownies are finally gone and the wallpaper is finally curled and that rusted nail finally breaks free of the wall and the frame crashes to the floor and shatters.