Read Elsewhere: Story

"The artistic sensibility in the nation became wholly self-referential - the story of my life is what matters, not the well-crafted and distilled art of memoir, nor the carefully compiled story (and analysis) of the lives (and problems ) of others - but the story of what I am feeling, right now, right this minute.  And so, I became part of the problem, I suppose . . . We have always loved stories, I think, it's just that we, as a nation and perhaps as a human race, recently stopped loving stories about the other; we began to love stories only about ourselves.  We love stories in which we are the protagonists in search of truth.  I do not want to judge this.  But my feeling is that we can cope with the increasing smallness, rapidness, and indifference of our changing, violent world only by seeing ourselves as noble characters caught in the struggle.  We are all, as Turgenev so presciently said over a century ago, either Hamlet or Quixotes, and we must be these kinds of people if we are to endure.

We see ourselves in a struggle of epic, or at least interesting, magnitude, and so we go about documenting it ourselves, not waiting for some future historian, anthropologist, or novelist to find our tale and tell it for us. YouTube, MySpace, blogs - all of these things are ways for us to make ourselves protagonists on a very crowded, violent, and unjust stage." - Dean Bakopoulos, My American Unhappiness


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"The story my kids will tell someday depends on me.  I am writing their book, and I want their childhood chapters full of traditions and stories and memories of the comforts of home." - Kelle Hampton

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"When our story is told, and it will be told in song and fable and interpretive dance and puppet show, people will weep with joy and, through sobs, say, "Today we have witnessed love.  How can our lives not be bettered by this?" - quote in a friend's back entry.