Once Upon a Time : The Power of Stories

We all have one book that we claimed as ours as a kid, right? The book that defined our reading habits and built us into the lover of stories that we are with the ideas that define us. Don’t we? I have a friend who claimed Danny, Champion of the World. Another lived and died by Redwall. Mine was The Phantom Tollbooth. I must have read that dozens of times, following Milo into Lands Beyond, jumping to Conclusions, mining for numbers*.

The lasting effect was two fold. One: I am 1000% a sucker for a novel with a map, especially if they are lands beyond. The second is that I continue to turn to stories to take me away, and to live a new life, even if it’s in the 20 minutes before bed time.

What it is about stories that allows us to be spirited away? How can literature, worming its way through space and time, continue to enchant, enthrall, and repulse us? (I’m looking at you Of Human Bondage.) The other night after reading well beyond her sanctioned bedtime, my daughter sneaked into my room and whispered to me, “Mommy. Colin walked. In the garden.” And who I was I to complain?

In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Mary, a seven year old girl, is sent from India to her uncle’s house on the English moor, where the house is large and strange and the people cold and unwelcoming. She happens upon her cousin Colin, who is bed-ridden and fearful that he will not live to see the age of 10. They find and tend to Colin’s deceased mother’s hidden garden, which had been long-neglected, and, in bringing the garden back to life, Colin comes back to life too.

My daughter is a perfectly able-bodied young person. She lives in a household that loves and wants her, and she (hopefully) will never know cholera in her lifetime, or the fear and loneliness of being sent to a home where no one wants you. And yet she feels the power of the secret garden, feels the warmth of the sun and joins in the laughter of friends who help you all the while. She hears the robins chirping. She hopes that her friend will get better.

This is the power of stories. And these stories are ones that are made up, or that were made up because they were needed. Stories ground us into who we are, and who we could be, whether they come in book format, visual, or audio. Fiction is amazing, but a true story, told honestly and sincerely, can be mind-blowing. This American Life and StoryCorps are two of the most prominent podcasts that tell real stories, of real people, and that manage to elicit empathy and wonder from the listener. As a society, we are hungry to see and be seen, and to see and to understand. Imaginary barriers are all around us, and we want them to come down, if only we can figure out a way to dissolve them. And there are lessons to be learned from stories, too: The diner is alive and well. Don’t sneak. Your dad might be famous, but not how you expect.

Libraries are our repositories of stories and knowledge. People are knowledge, libraries are starting to demonstrate that, with both Human Libraries as well as their literary collections. Libraries are collectors of stories and recommenders of stories. And libraries know, too, that “Everyone has a story to tell” (Eberhart, 2018), and that “Everyone their book” (Ranganathan, 1931). If “the public library serves as a public forum and a place for the exchange of ideas” (Wentz, 2013), then the library is perfectly positioned to offer connection and nodes of empathy. Eliciting, recording, and guarding those stories is how we can keep communal memory and community memories. As Storm Reyes says of herself, the bookmobile allowed her “to know there was a world outside [her home], and I believed I could find a place in it. I had read about people like me and not like me. I had seen how huge the world was, and it gave me the courage to leave. And I did” (quoted in Popova, 2016).

*I will admit that pressing The Phantom Tollbooth on my friends got nowhere, it was perhaps the most unpopular of books my friends and I passed around. As one of them said recently, “It’s weird. It’s not rooted in a place. It is the most meta of children’s books.” Tell me how you really feel!

Resources

Eberhart, G. M. (2018, February 10). Sharing people’s stories: StoryCorps partners with public libraries. American Libraries. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/sharing-peoples-stories/

Popova, M. (2016, October 10). How libraries save lives. The Marginalian. https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/10/06/libraries-storycorps-bookmobile/

Ranganathan, S. R. (1931). The five laws of library science. Madras Library Association.

Wentz, E. (2013, April 26). The human library: Sharing the community with itself. Public Libraries Online. https://publiclibrariesonline.org/2013/04/human_librar/