Storytelling: Nature and Nurture

Note: In honor of the storytellers in my family, I am dedicating Saturdays for storytelling.  The stories will sometimes be fictional but most will chronicle some piece of my own personal history.

Growing up, my mom would always tell or read a story at bedtime.  Sometimes it would be a Hans Christian Anderson or a Brothers Grimm.  Sometimes the stories would be from a series such as “Little House on the Prairie,” or “Nancy Drew,” but most often she would tell us true stories of my great grandmother Elinore Pruitt Stewart.  Some of the stories were passed down to her by her own mom and some of the stories she got from my great grandmother’s book “Letters of a Woman Homesteader.”

My mom claims that storytelling is an inherited trait (genetic if you will).  As an adult, I finally read my great grandmother’s book.  Turning the pages, I recognized the stories from my childhood and I heard the voices of my grandmother and mother.  My great grandmother had flair for taking what could be considered a mundane occurrence and bringing it to life; this is something I have seen in both my grandmother and my mother.  I can only hope that I too have inherited the “gene” for storytelling.

Elinore cannot be called a historian because much of her writing was opinion and she seemed to exaggerate in order to entertain the reader.  She could describe a sunsets so that you could feel the dying heat of the day on your own shoulder; the chill of the plains pervade your own bones.  The sorrow over the lost babies and cattle feel as real as if the reader were a friend of Elinore’s. 

Often, the debate rages about whether a writer ought to tell how it is, or whether it is permissible to use some literary license.  Because my great grandmother wrote the way she did, with such honesty, the exaggeration somehow does not seem gross.  Were it not for the embellishments, she might not have been able to keep the readers’ attention and we would not know of all the people she chronicled.

My mother has claimed that with modern technology, the art of storytelling, specifically letter writing, is a dying art.  She has said that the personal moments of putting a pen to paper and reflecting on each nuance, cannot be duplicated by striking the keys of a computer.  

I tend to believe that storytelling is an inherited trait outweighing any adverse effects of technology but maybe I’ll never know until I try it myself.  I believe that blogging is a modern form of letter writing in the sense that it chronicles the “everyday” that we often take for granted but look back on, years later, with such sentiment.  Blogs just reach out to a larger audience than a letter would.

I found a wonderful blog called FoxLily A Little Notebook.  The author “Foxlily” writes on a variety of subjects that interest her (travel, books, pets, etc.).  In one posting she wrote of Elinore Pruitt Stewart, “If Elinore Pruitt Stewart had had a computer, she could have been a champion blogger.”  I think I will take up where great granny left off.

Elinore Pruitt Stewart in her garden