Storytelling

Storytelling

Transcript for Storytelling (full episode)

From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

There's something to their surprise, a little creepy about those chairs.

Something says to them, some voice, it says, don't put your kid's name on any of these chairs.

Welcome to State of the Human.

This is the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

For watching.

We're looking at the experience of storytelling itself.

And to start off, we're going to tell a story about a story.

So, my mom and I had been talking a lot about kids and grandkids because I was working at Bing Nursery School last year.

This is Nina Foushee.

She's a producer with us.

And my mom's super excited to be a grandmother.

And so we were having a lot of these conversations, and she just kind of out of the blue one day, said, hey, Nina, I have this friend who lost her family in the Holocaust and kind of doesn't want to lose her legacy.

And so she really wants her daughter to have kids.

But this woman's daughter, she doesn't want to have kids.

Why not?

I don't know, that's irrelevant.

Anyway, this story her mom tells, it gets to Nina.

And I remember kind of being moved by this story of her friend and how her friend is going through sort of this later in life crisis of not feeling like she has a legacy or an identity that's being passed on.

And so I think my mom just sort of let that story sink in with me a little bit.

And then she called and left a message for me.

Hey, Nina, you always wanted to be a rabbi when you were younger.

You always wanted to see how you could tell stories to make people feel compelled toward big choices that would affect their lives in various ways.

Nina, will you come up with a story that I can tell this woman to tell her daughter, to convince this daughter to have kids?

Did you know this woman's daughter at all?

Yeah, I feel like I'd met her maybe once.

But yeah, nope.

Nina's mom is asking for a story to give her friend to tell her daughter.

To get her to have a baby.

Yeah, I don't think a story can do that.

I remember deciding, wow, I can't do this.

Because I'm concerned about the implications of trying to manipulate someone in that way.

That means she thought it would work?

She thought she could come up with some story and get this woman she's met once to have a baby?

Yeah, she wasn't gonna mess with the power of story.

I thought she wanted to be a rabbi though.

So she doesn't actually want to use stories to help people change their lives?

Not quite.

There's an epilogue here.

It's not about Nina's mom's friend or her daughter, but a friend of Nina's, and this time she did tell the story.

I have this friend whose parents are getting divorced right now, and he's really, really broken up about it, and they're in kind of a terrible place.

And I told him about this poem that I really like called Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It's the same when love comes to an end or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake.

And the poem ends with this idea that Icarus wasn't failing as he fell, but just reaching the end of his triumph.

And so I sent him this poem, and I said, consider sending this to your parents.

I think that it's a really important idea, and it's helped me in my life a lot.

So I sent it to him about a week ago, and he just texted me recently and was like, my parents told me that it was exactly what they needed to hear.

But can we really change someone's story?

Can you just do that?

Can you say that someone falling into the ocean and dying is a triumph and it's all of a sudden a triumph?

Does it work that way?

I'm saying that if he was thinking, I'm coming to the end of my triumph as he was falling, then that's enough.

Having that recognition at some point in your story, that's enough.

So, Jack Gilbert imposing this story on Icarus, I feel like is me giving the poem to someone else because by having Jack Gilbert say, I believe Icarus wasn't failing as he fell, I'm also telling this friend and his parents, I don't believe that you're failing as you fall.

What does it feel like to know that you were able to find the perfect words to help a family reframe a really difficult experience?

I think if anything, it makes me feel connected to something which is like my own story, which is I've kind of been taught by my family that the words or the story that you need is always there.

You just have to look for it.

Is that true?

Is the right story out there waiting for us?

How can we know which stories are useful, and which ones are holding us back?

That's what our show is about.

When are we in control of our story?

When does our story control us?

Our first story is about a myth.

It's a myth that tells us the world is a certain way, and it would be pretty cool if the world is that way.

But it's probably actually the opposite.

After that, what do you do when your own story is interrupted and you have to find a new one?

In our last story, we hear stories from children, and ask what happens when we choose to see the tales all around us.

Stay with us.

Nina's saying her family believes, and she believes, that the right story is always out there waiting for us.

And once we find it, we can see the world in a totally different way.

We can see falling as reaching the end of our triumph.

I think that'd be nice if we could go through life just picking up stories like flowers, putting them in a bouquet.

But I think stories are more like those sticky seed balls that get in my socks when I go hiking.

My friend pulled one of those out of her belly button once.

Out of her belly button?

Yeah.

Yeah, they suck.

Super suck.

They are impossible to get out of your clothing, pretty much.

You have to pull them out.

Our next story is like that.

It's got these features, these pointy ends that stick to us.

Oh, they're called foxtails.

This is actually a cowboy tail.

Brilliant transition.

No, I love it.

I love it.

It's told by a Stanford student named Jess Peterson, who's been thinking about cowboys a lot lately, specifically the story of the cowboy, the all-American rebel, guy who does what he wants.

But once Jess started investigating, he actually found a very different cowboy.

Until a few months ago, I thought I had a good idea of who cowboys really were.

When I was growing up, cowboys were these mythic figures that I read about in books and saw in movies.

But I'm starting my own herd.

Is that right, Dustin?

Are you leaving?

I am.

You can't do that.

You signed on.

You agreed?

I signed nothing.

If I had, I'd stay.

Like John Wayne in that movie you just heard, the 1948 film Red River.

Totally independent, totally free.

Sometimes my friends and I would pretend to be cowboys and explore the wild frontiers of our local park.

It felt like the normal rules didn't apply to us.

But in all this time, I never really thought about where cowboys came from.

And I didn't think about it for a long time.

Which is strange, because the cowboy is all around us.

Classic Hollywood characters like Han Solo from Star Wars or Agents J and K from Men in Black, they're basically cowboys.

And that's exactly what I liked about them.

It all felt so different from my own life.

The cowboy idea is powerful in politics too.

When presidents like George W.

Bush and Ronald Reagan would dress up in cowboy hats and leather boots, when they rode horses in cleared brush, they were drawing on the power of the cowboy, on notions like independence, self-reliance and freedom.

But it turns out, the cowboy represents something very different about America.

I started to realize this a few months ago after I read a book called Railroaded for an American history class.

According to the book, everything I thought I knew about cowboys was pretty much wrong.

To get the full story, I went to talk to the author of the book I read.

I'm Richard White.

I'm the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University and author of the book Railroaded.

To understand why our cowboy myth is so wrong, first we need to understand where cowboys even came from.

They didn't just pop into existence with lassoes in their hands.

Deep economic forces summoned them into being.

That's the cowboy origin story Richard White tells.

It starts in the late 19th century.

After the Civil War, most of the sources people relied on for beef had been exhausted by the war.

Think about it, in the South, the Union Army is going on through the South.

And both them and Confederate soldiers are in need of food and they will kill any cattle they meet.

I mean, think of Sherman's Army marching through Georgia.

In the North, they're not doing that, but on the other hand, there's huge demands for stock brother troops.

So there was a lot of demand for cattle, mainly for beef, and very little supply.

Enter the Texas Rancher.

Texas cattle hadn't been affected by the war.

In 1870, Texas was home to 3 million Texas longhorn cattle and that number went up to 5 million by 1880.

There were a ton of cows in Texas.

So Texas ranchers saw an opportunity.

If they could send their cows on the railroad to the slaughterhouses back east, where there was a huge demand, they could sell them and make a bunch of money.

But there was a problem.

Most Texas longhorns carried a tick, and this tick infected cows with a disease called Texas Fever.

The Texas cattle had grown immune to it, but the tick would kill any other cows it contacted.

The ranchers didn't even know that the tick existed, so to them, it would seem like the Texas longhorns carried some sort of mysterious plague.

Nobody knows the cause of Texas Fever.

All they know is if you put a Texas longhorn in contact with domestic stock, those cattle will begin to die.

Because the Texas ranchers would drive or herd their cattle to the nearest railroad station, they would almost always come into contact with other cows.

And they put two and two together.

Whatever is killing them has to do with Texas cattle, so if you have a cattle drive heading into a place like Missouri, there will be armed farmers, and they will just stop it.

They will not let the cattle proceed.

Now the Texas ranchers were stuck.

No one wanted their diseased cattle, so they came up with a new plan.

So what you have to do is drive Texas cattle into a place where there are no other cattle, which means you have to drive them west, which means you have to drive them to the railroads.

But even that would be a problem.

You put these cattle on the train, and these are 19th century railroads.

They're train wrecks, cattle escape, you put them into stockyards, they come into contact with other cattle.

These initial experiments didn't work, but they did lead Texas ranchers to a solution.

If you drive these Texas cattle north, and you overwinter them, or even if you keep them for one frost, Texas fever disappears.

Reasons disappearing is the tick's dying, it can't stand the frost.

All they know is that if we drive these cattle up there, hold them for a while, into the fall, we can ship them safely to market.

Mysteriously, the other cattle stop dying.

Stop dying, yeah.

And that was the breakthrough.

Drive the cattle north, into the plains, the winter kills off the tick, and suddenly, these cows are safe to ship.

The ranchers could sell them.

So somebody has a bright idea.

Why don't we take these Texas cattle, which are really scrawny, I mean, as they're described as 200 pounds of hamburger on 1,000 pounds of bone and horn, and drive them further north in the plains.

Fatten them up for a year or two, where they're much more valuable, and then ship them to market.

And then what you begin to get is the long drive.

And who drove those cattle?

Cowboys.

It was an all-American enterprise.

Except for one thing.

Cowboys herded cattle for Texas ranchers.

But those ranchers?

Largely funded by British capital.

It's a completely weird origin story.

Cowboys exist because of the Civil War, a disease-carrying tick, and foreign investors.

I was starting to feel like these mythical figures of independence had little grounding in reality.

But then I had a thought.

Even if cowboys existed for these surprising reasons, their actual lives might still be how I imagined.

Lives of freedom, self-reliance.

Basically opting out of society?

Well, it turns out I was pretty wrong about that too.

Cowboys are poorly paid laborers.

Many of them are going to be freedmen or ex-slaves out of Texas.

Others are going to be Southern whites who are trying to make some kind of money after the Civil War in an impoverished Texas economy.

What was their day-to-day life like?

Their day-to-day life is if you were on a long drive, let's say, not just driving the cattle north, you are up very early in the morning.

You will eat a breakfast and you will get on horseback.

You will then start moving the cattle.

You move the cattle slowly, because the whole idea is you don't want them to lose weight.

So you keep them moving slowly.

You are at the back of the herd.

I mean, let's say there is a thousand cattle and you are rising behind them.

You are just eating dirt.

You are behind all of the dust that is being raised by these animals.

It's loud, it's dusty, it's hot.

You are miserable, you are thirsty.

And that's what a day's labor is going to be.

And at night, when the cowboys would rest at their campsite, things could get pretty scary.

The most nerve-racking part is if something spooks the cattle and a stampede starts.

At that point, things get very, very dangerous because both you have no idea where the cattle are going to run.

They can run right into the camp and wreck the whole thing and trample people.

And they can sweep up horsemen along with them.

By the time they're 30, 35, most of these guys are physical wrecks.

One thing I started to realize in all this was that when these cowboys were around, the American West wasn't actually that wild.

In fact, cowboys weren't all that different from factory workers in the East.

They were paid wages and were responsible to their bosses, just like a factory worker.

Their work was stressful and usually pretty boring, just like a factory worker.

And the ranchers they worked for, they were funded by investors in New York and London.

The cowboy's whole existence in the West was due to the reach of global capitalism.

I started to feel like our whole idea of the Wild West was just a myth.

But if that was the case, then where did this myth come from?

How did cowboys become these iconic figures?

The answer, it turns out, is pretty simple.

A man named Buffalo Bill.

Born with the name Bill Cody, Buffalo Bill was one of the great figures of the late 1800s.

He once engaged in hand-to-hand combat with an American Indian while wearing what one historian called a black velvet mariachi style suit.

This guy was a showman, and he had a pretty colorful background.

Buffalo Bill is a person who pretty much turns his own life into a commodity.

Buffalo Bill had been a buffalo hunter, hence his name, Buffalo Bill.

He'd also been a guerrilla in the Civil War.

He'd also been briefly a pony express rider.

He had been a scout, an Indian scout, and had fought Indians.

He'd done all those things, but what he does is turn them into a character.

In the 1800s, he started this thing called Buffalo Bill's Wild West.

It was a sort of Western-themed circus with dramatic reenactments of life in the Wild West.

It took three trains and more than 700 people to move the show from city to city, and they went everywhere.

For about 20 years, Buffalo Bill traveled all over the US and even brought his show to places like New York, London, Paris and Russia.

In all these places, his audiences were mostly working people, people adjusting to things like working in factories, for wages and having a boss.

These all seem so normal to us now, but they were new to these audiences.

And Buffalo Bill offered them a different version of reality, with the cowboy as the main character.

They will stage all of the skills of cowboy life.

They will rope steers.

They will chase cattle around the arena.

Cowboys become the symbol of wild, heroic, masculine individualism.

But here's the thing.

What Buffalo's Bill Wild West would do is do all the interesting things a cowboy did over the space of a year, and they'll do it in an hour.

What they don't explain is what the cowboys do the rest of the time.

All the boring stuff, all the hard work, all that labor is just left out.

So what you have is as if cowboy life was one giant rodeo.

Not only were they entertaining, Richard White says that Buffalo Bill's shows were sort of selling the meaning of America.

The meaning of the United States is selling.

Americans are individualists.

Americans are self-reliant.

Americans are men who protect families and women from danger, and you will see this when you see the life of the cowboy.

What's so striking about Buffalo Bill is not that he created an alternate reality, it's that he made his audiences believe that alternate reality represented America.

Of course, it wasn't just Buffalo Bill.

It was hundreds of movies and TV shows and books after him, all selling the same myth.

Once upon a time, Americans were free and independent and worked for themselves.

Except it's just not true, at least not for the cowboy.

And yet, we so want it to be.

Just like Buffalo Bill's factory worker audiences, we modern Americans living in a highly organized world, we like to think of ourselves as independent and self-reliant, not just cogs in a machine.

We're seduced by the myth of the cowboy.

In reality, though, cowboys are part of a huge project, a project with investors, the Civil War, and mysterious disease as the Central Forces.

And this might seem weird, but knowing this actually comforts me.

I used to feel like my life should be a little more like John Wayne's and Red River, or any of those other movies.

I wanted to be self-reliant, live on my own, that sort of thing.

I felt like it was the way we were supposed to live.

But knowing that even the cowboy, the emblem of all this, never really lived like that, it makes me think maybe true independence isn't what being an American is about.

We're hopelessly interconnected, and we have been for a long time.

But telling ourselves that we're independent, telling ourselves that we're free, it doesn't get more American than that.

Oh, the old cowboy story was a lot more fun.

Yeah, it's kind of a drag to make believe you're an underpaid laborer.

It's way better to imagine you're the Lone Ranger with the six shooter and your stallion roaming the prairie.

No master, no horse, just you and the open.

My point is, that's why the cowboy story is so sticky.

It's comforting, and it tells us something we'd like to think is true.

So we keep retelling it.

In fact, I predict 50 years in the future, we'll still have the cowboy story.

I think good stories are like these armored capsules, they're like time capsules.

They're impregnable.

But stories are so fragile.

They're more like soap bubbles.

As soon as they hit some resistance, they pop.

That's what happened to a woman I met named Terri Wingham.

She was in one story and then it popped.

We all have a story in our heads of who we are.

Sometimes it's a story we choose.

Sometimes forces outside of our control put us in a story.

But what do we do when it's not the story we want?

I was asking myself these questions when I met Terri Wingham.

I graduated with a business degree majoring in entrepreneurship, of all things.

And at the time, I didn't see myself at all as an entrepreneur.

Let's go back to 2009.

Terri is 30 years old.

She's a successful recruiter for a large technology company in Vancouver.

She's making six figures and climbing the corporate ladder.

And that's her story.

Terri the headhunter.

But her story is about to change.

She's just found a lump in her breast.

A lump, a little four-letter word that can change everything.

Terri thinks she's too young to have breast cancer.

It concerned me, but I didn't actually think it was cancer.

But she gets the biopsy anyway.

Afterwards, she does what corporate people usually do.

She grabs lunch.

So I'm having lunch with my friend, and she asked me the question.

And she said, Terri, if you could do anything, what would you do?

And I said, I'm doing it.

You know, I love my job.

I love my work.

She said, no, like, if you could do anything, what would you do?

And I still didn't have an answer.

I said, no, I really love my job.

And she said, Terri, it's a game.

And then I got diagnosed with cancer five days later.

Terri's doctor said she couldn't work during or for six months after her treatment.

And I really wrestled with that because I had this sense of identity that was very tied to the fact that I was a successful professional.

Losing the ability to work meant losing her story.

Instead of grabbing lunch at fancy restaurants, she ate meals at home, delivered by friends.

She became Terri, the patient.

My first surgery was in 2009.

In the fall of 2009, chemo was in early 2010.

Thankfully, Terri's cancer responded well to chemotherapy.

After four rounds of chemo, Terri got the green light for surgery.

It's not as simple as the breast cancer, pink ribbon kind of culture makes it out to be.

You know, you go to a plastic surgeon, they say, well, we're going to do a double mastectomy, reconstruction, but you know, you're going to look better afterwards.

Well, that doesn't address the issues of dating after radical surgery, of pain, of the fact that you are never going to feel like you actually have your own breasts again.

It didn't even cross my mind that I would be depressed when I finished.

I really thought, wow, what is wrong with me?

I'm so ungrateful.

Why can't I snap out of it?

And I was really angry at myself for feeling that way.

And so I'm not going to Google it if I don't think it's a thing.

You know, like depressed after treatment.

No, because I don't want to admit that I'm depressed and I don't think it's a thing.

I think it's just a me issue.

And remember that job Terri had loved so much?

As she got farther away from the experience of being a recruiter, she realized something.

She didn't really want to go back.

My old story, my old identity doesn't fit me anymore.

But if that's true, then what the heck am I going to do in my new life?

Now she had a problem and it wasn't just cancer.

It was what happens after cancer?

What's her story now?

Terri took the next completely natural step.

She wrote a letter to Oprah Winfrey.

She thought that if she could tell her story on Oprah's show, she might meet people who could help her navigate this new chapter of her life.

Two months passed.

Oprah never responded.

So Terri decided, why wait for Oprah?

And she started a blog.

She wrote about the challenges of finding a new story.

And it helped.

She was literally starting a new chapter.

And so I was getting further and further away from my identity as a recruiter and trying to try on this identity as maybe I'll be a writer.

But then came another turning point.

New Year's Eve, 2010.

Terri decided to put on her fake it till you make it makeup.

She left the apartment she'd been holed up in for an entire year and went to a New Year's Eve party with her friends.

It was the time of year for new beginnings, and Terri was trying.

But it wasn't all glitter and party horns.

She got into a fight with a close friend.

She just said, I feel like I don't know you anymore.

I feel like cancer has become your only story, and I miss the person that you used to be.

Now, this was one of the most terrible things someone could have said to Terri, because Terri, though she was blogging and writing, Terri was still a patient.

Terri was only a few weeks away from her final surgery, breast reconstruction.

Of course cancer was still her story.

Her body was about to be reshaped by a surgeon.

Her sense of identity manipulated again.

But she didn't want it to be her only story.

So she went for a walk along the seawall near her house, and she was looking at the families and thinking depressed thoughts like, why don't I have that life?

Why am I not married?

Why don't I have kids?

Why do I have to have cancer?

And that's when I started thinking about that Martha Beck article.

Isn't it funny that in our darkest moments, sometimes it's the smallest thing that can change our life?

For Terri, it was a piece of advice from a writer named Martha Beck on New Year's resolutions.

The advice was to pick resolutions based on how you want to feel, instead of making a checklist of things to do.

And I thought, I don't want to feel this way.

I don't want to feel angry.

I don't want to feel bitter anymore.

I want to feel inspired.

I wanted to do something that was out of my comfort zone, but that scared me, but I was in control of that fear.

Because with cancer, I was scared a lot, but I didn't get to control it.

But I also wanted to do something that I felt like would inspire me and give me a new story.

And so I'm not even joking.

Out of nowhere, I thought, I want to go to Africa.

And the only thing I can attribute it to is that I had met some people from Africa in my life that had touched me, and it was just became this spark of an idea.

And it was the first time since I got sick that I felt excited.

The first time that I thought, I can look into a future.

Because for such a long time, I didn't want to look into a future because I just saw more tests and more chemo and more surgeries.

And so it was in that moment that everything changed.

And it was in the lead up to my final surgery and I would be lying awake at night and normally I'd be stressing about my surgery and I'm Googling volunteering in Africa.

And so it just became this new adventure and this new idea that something new could define me.

It just felt right.

But Terri still had one last surgery, one last chapter in her cancer story.

Her surgery finished and treatment over.

Terri gets on an airplane and she does it.

She goes to Africa.

She volunteers in a daycare.

And it happened to be on the anniversary of Terri's painful double mastectomy surgery that something unusual happened.

I was feeling really, really emotional.

It was lunchtime.

Terri was spooning rice and beans into a little girl's mouth when she looked out over the courtyard.

And I saw one of my favorite little guys and he had just gone to the potty, but his pants were around his ankles.

And I looked at him and I motioned for him to pull his pants up.

And he just looked at me with such pain in his eyes.

So I put down the food and I walked over to him and I realized that he'd had a huge accident in his pants.

And he was a mess.

A woman directed Terri to a dilapidated house and showed her the bathtub.

And realized there was only cold water.

And he was probably three, but really, really small.

And he looked at me like I was the devil because I'm trying to clean him off with this cold water.

And his teeth started to chatter.

And so I cleaned him up as best as I could.

There's no towel that I could dry him off.

So I put him against my chest and I walked out into the courtyard.

And luckily it was a sunny day.

So he sat on my lap until he dried off.

And it was nap time.

So I took him into the trailer and they were sleeping on these gym mats with really threadbare blankets.

So I put him on the gym mat and I put a blanket over top of him.

And he looked up at me with such gratitude in his eyes.

And I realized in that moment that the way he looked at me was the way that I looked at the nurse who took care of me when I was on the operating table the year before, because I was crying and I was scared and I couldn't see her face.

I just saw her eyes.

And she held my hand, and she asked me about my family, and she asked me all these questions.

And so it was that moment that I knew I wanted other survivors to have that kind of experience, because I can't even put into words what that did for me.

Terri had entered a new story, not the story of a victim or a cancer patient, the story of a helper.

And that was a powerful story.

She was determined to help other survivors find what she found.

Terri decided to travel, checking out volunteer organizations in six different countries, figuring out what worked and what didn't.

I really would not do this if I felt like there was no benefit on the developing world side.

She began dedicating herself full-time to building a foundation that would help other survivors by stepping outside of their cancer stories and becoming helpers.

In the first round, she invited cancer survivors to apply for her foundation.

She chose 12, and in February 2013, she took them to India.

So I don't think it's necessarily a light switch, and you can just say, great, this is my new story, and that's over, and everything's easy.

Because I don't think you can start writing the new chapter in your story until you grieve.

And so what I hope to do with the program is to encourage people to feel that loss and give them space and opportunity to grieve it in a way that you can't if you're caught up in the day-to-day routine of your life, but to also instill a sense of possibility in them.

If I can go to India, if I can go to Africa, what else is possible for me?

When a disease like cancer unexpectedly enters your life, you lose creative control.

You're no longer the author.

These stories can trap us, but if you're lucky, you can choose to be the author of the next chapter.

And the story you choose, that story can set you free.

Terri visited Stanford this September to give a talk at the Medicine X Conference about this issue of survivorship.

She's currently working on a pilot program in LA for people who think Africa or India is too scary, or their health doesn't permit them to travel internationally.

If you're interested, you can apply for an upcoming program or check out her blog at afreshchapter.com.

Welcome back to State of the Human.

It's the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Charlie Mintz.

I'm Christy Hartman.

Today's show is about storytelling.

We've heard the origins of a story America likes to tell about itself, a story that's false, but will probably never change.

And we've seen what happens when a person needs to change her story to heal.

But we haven't heard yet from some of the most natural storytellers around, children.

Anthropologists have found that storytelling is universal, and everywhere, kids start doing it by the time they're about two years old.

Child psychologists have been studying this phenomenon for a while.

There are studies where researchers ask kids to just tell them stories, and kids tell stories like...

The monkeys, they went up sky, they fell down.

Choo-choo train in the sky.

I fell down in the sky in the water.

I got on my boat and my legs hurt.

Daddy fell down from the sky.

Or this one told by a five-year-old.

The boxing world, in the middle of the morning.

Everybody gets up, puts on boxing gloves and fights.

One of the guys gets socked in the face and he starts bleeding.

A duck comes along and says, give up.

I found these in a book called The Storytelling Animal by a guy named Jonathan Gottschall.

It's about why we tell stories.

And there's a lot of answers for play, to help work out problems, to connect with other people.

And this all starts so young.

We wanted to hear some of these stories too.

So we recruited State of the Human producer, Jackson Roach.

Hi, Jackson.

Hello.

And tell us where you went.

I went to the Bing Nursery School here at Stanford.

So the Bing Nursery School is a school for kids about two to five.

It's also a lab school.

So psychologists who work here at Stanford can actually go and watch kids play through a one way mirror, which sounds a little creepy, but they can really learn some really useful stuff.

So I'll just play you some of the stories I found and then we'll talk about something interesting I heard from a woman who works there.

There was a birthday party and a wolf came into a birthday party and it was a friendly wolf and it ate some cake with the people.

Oh, I should say that's Beth Wise.

She's Assistant Director of the school and she helped out with the storytelling.

We'll hear more from her later.

They danced to disco music, by the way.

So there's that.

And I heard this story about a piggy bank.

What if we made up a story once upon a time a fox came to your house and knocked on the door and got your piggy bank.

Then what would happen?

And then he'd bring it to his home.

Okay, and then what happened?

And then he puts money in there.

And then he looks for more money outside.

It's like the big bad wolf went to business school.

And then he's by a crane.

Can we hear one more?

You want to hear one about an airplane?

Heck yeah.

An airplane was flying in the sky and it was a biplane and it was going as fast as it could and it got too slow, it stalled and fell into the water.

A lot of developmental psychologists will say these stories are a way of working out what's scary in the world for kids, which makes a lot of sense.

But I wondered if they were doing that intentionally.

I would always ask my own children to dictate something.

If they had a story in their mind, I'd say, well, tell me about that.

And I would write it down.

And then what happened?

And then I would write it down, and I would read it back to them.

And we do that all the time at Bing.

And it's amazing they'll stop you, and they'll say no.

That's not what I said.

I didn't say that word.

I said this.

Or no, that's not exactly what happened.

Which shows you that they deeply know that story.

And it has meaning for them.

And they've constructed it with a lot of thought.

But not all kids are at that stage.

In fact, the younger they are, the more likely they are to just kind of be in the story.

It's not something they have control over.

And it's almost like they're telling the story and they're there.

That only lasts a couple of years, though.

By about five, a kid can say, I'm telling you this story, but that's outside.

And it pretty much stays that way.

For better or worse, we get control of stories.

We start telling them.

We can wield them.

It's like we get a magic power.

And we have to be careful about how we use it.

Thanks, Jackson.

Sure.

That was my last story I could tell because I just used up all my stories in my mind.

So we're born authors, commanders of our own little universes.

Commanders and prisoners, I guess, too.

Prisoners of story.

I don't know if prisoners is right.

I like prisoners.

Because we have to understand the world through stories.

No matter what, we're in a story, I think.

That's a kind of power, though.

We can choose what story to tell.

Stanford professor and author Tom Kealey says it's an important choice.

I mean, if we don't have contact, and we don't have those storytelling opportunities, we will literally go insane after a while.

It's not even that we want to escape through stories.

It's we want to connect through stories.

To finish the show, Tom Kealey is going to tell a story about two teenagers who tell each other stories about strangers.

Nobody.

Nights at the store, the brother and sister bagged the groceries that tumble down the conveyors, rarely looking up, a simple nod of the head at a thanks from a customer.

The girl, Meryl, was 15 and quite tall for her age.

The brother, Nate, was 16 and trying to grow a mustache.

He often wore a green knit hat.

They didn't talk much with the cashiers or the manager, a yes sir, no ma'am here and there.

When the store was slow, they brought in the carts, held contests between each other.

Who could bring in the most?

Other times, one of them would take the push broom and move down the aisles, collecting the candy wrappers, spilled sugar, the vegetable leaves in the produce corner, while the other rotated stock made the shelves look full.

They had a rubber ball the size of a tennis ball, but bright red that they played a game with, sometimes down an empty aisle and sometimes in the parking lot.

There were rules involved in the game.

It was clear to the manager the times he watched them.

The number of bounces, the left or right hand that they sometimes grabbed with, sometimes slapped back.

Often enough, they simply rolled the ball to each other, set it to strange spins, and after, they would hold up fingers.

Between two and five, he could never predict.

When he asked the girl about the rules, she simply blushed and looked at the floor like she'd been caught stealing something.

It was late summer, almost autumn, and after work, they'd play other games in the parking lot, and the manager would watch them out there while counting his receipts, marking up the inventory for the next day.

They'd ride a shopping cart down the hill, one inside the cage, other times the both of them hanging off the back.

For all their games, they rarely smiled, and something about the way they held themselves reminded the manager of his brother, who had died as a child.

He'd been younger by many years than these two.

They would often bounce the red ball over top the manager's car.

One of the few left in the lot at that hour, and he considered each time to go out and chase them off.

But he was afraid they might take it harder than he'd intended, like his brother had taken things.

And other than the games, they gave him no trouble, which was rare for his workers.

Marilyn and Nate were not aware that they were watched.

The windows of the office were dark, and they could see only the dull-lit aisles in the store, the stillness inside.

Often they'd watch the heat lightning in the sky, the red blip of the radio tower beyond the treeline.

A small and slow airplane headed miles toward the county runway.

This night, a small bat skipped around the glow of the street lamps, searching for the night bugs that were also drawn there.

Nate found the smallest of pebbles and began tossing them up at the lights, and the bat would swoop and dive at what the boy threw, catching the small stone for a moment, then dropping it again.

Marilyn watched them both.

You try it, Nate said to her.

Why, said Marilyn, because a rock is like a big bug to him, Nate said, but not when he catches it, said Marilyn.

This response annoyed him.

So, he said, so would you tease a blind person, said Marilyn.

He frowned.

Don't be a dolt.

You're the dolt, said Marilyn.

Oh, that's clever, he said.

He tossed a few more, and eventually the bat figured out the game.

They collected the rest of the carts, though their shift was over, set them in a line near the front door.

After, they could hear the deep whistle of a train from beyond the back of the store through the narrow woods, the bells of the crossing signals, the rumble of boxcars along the tracks.

They picked up their aprons and boxcutters from the sidewalk and headed that way.

He put Nate in mind of a story he'd once heard, a deaf girl picking flowers too close to the tracks.

He named her Clara in his mind, as he and his sister picked their way through the woods toward the train.

His mother had told him that story as a warning, though she'd left the name out.

He thought about the engineer and the locomotive and what he must have been thinking, looking down the tracks at the girl.

The man must have pulled and pulled at the horn, and the boy tried to figure if the man understood her as deaf after a time or just without sense.

Hadn't the girl felt the vibrations of the tracks?

There was no answer, but the boy liked to think of these things.

At what point the man had punched the brakes?

The boy thought of the man thinking, the number of cars behind him in the distance ahead to the girl.

They waited, watched the dark boxcars and the rounded petroleum tankers pass, felt the rumble beneath their feet and the breeze, which smelled of coal and grease at their faces.

As the last car passed, they watched the cloud of dust and grit that settled behind it, the moon ahead low.

It seemed that the train might be headed there.

Across the tracks and into the next line of trees, they found the creek that they could jump and the ditch that they couldn't.

Their feet slipped in the dirt and mud, and they picked mosquitoes and thorns from their necks and arms.

The cemetery was beyond the other side of the woods, and in the starlight, it often looked like a miniature city to them.

Buildings and roads, shadows that somebody could hide in.

They hopped the gate, watched the sculptures as they passed, an angel here like a child, an eagle and an owl sitting together there.

The first time, they thought the owl real.

They stopped at the largest angel, the one not like a child, just before the lane of unmarked graves.

The angel was tall and dark and skeletal, and it held a large sword above its head.

In the moonlight, they could see the jagged teeth and the empty eye sockets.

The mouth looked like it was ready to scream bloody murder or commit it, and they didn't consider it much like anything they'd like to meet in heaven.

They stood watching it for a while, as they always did, nudging each other with a finger or an elbow, trying to work up a scare.

Meryl tried to make a scary voice.

She moaned, bring me back my eyes.

Nate set his hands in his pockets.

He watched the clouds behind the statue, kept an eye on the length of the sword, the broken tip at the end.

Did you see it move?

said Meryl.

There was hope in her voice.

If it'll make you happy, I'll say that I did, he said.

But honestly, it always seemed to move a little.

So they walked on, nudged each other some more as they made their way past the gravestones.

Meryl stopped and straightened a cluster of dead flowers that had been knocked over.

When they came to the unmarked graves, they both thought of the ghost stories.

One of the cashiers had told them this.

When the ghosts were alive generations ago, they'd worked in a textile mill south of the town, and then they were burned up in a fire.

The mill was made of bricks and there were no windows, and the foreman, examining the remains, couldn't tell one worker from the other.

Immigrants, they were believed to be, and no one came to claim the bodies.

So they got buried here, in a long line, with just the date of their deaths.

If you walked close enough, they'd reach up and grab you, and they'd steal your name.

This is how the story went, and after that, you were just nobody.

Nate kept his distance, but Merrill walked close enough, felt that they could have her name if it would do some good, but neither ever walked over them.

They hopped the far gate after that and headed east.

They were miles from the sound and from home, but they were getting closer.

The smell of saltwater was in the air.

At a familiar neighborhood, Merrill and Nate bounced on the curb as they walked, made their way around garbage cans and mailboxes, took three steps each in the driveways.

A few dogs barked from backyards, and they could see their shadows at the fence lines.

They passed all sorts of things in yards.

Cars with hoods up, no engines inside, lawn chairs here and there, a mower in a yard with no grass, and once a pyramid of beer bottles set on wooden boards.

In one driveway, they passed a pair of boots, empty, but pointed out at the road like they were waiting for the owner to return.

They listened to the static of radios here and there, somebody running an electric saw in a garage.

It put Merrill in mind of their previous home years ago when they lived with their mother, where Merrill and Nate would often enough sit at the kitchen table alone, listening to the rattle of the old refrigerator.

Lights were on in houses, though often curtains were drawn, and from the curb Merrill and Nate began to imagine what might be happening inside each house.

This was a game they often played.

It was almost all guesses.

They couldn't see much.

Somebody's in love, said Nate, pointing at the first chosen house.

Somebody's coming out of it, said Merrill, toward the second.

Some woman playing checkers by herself, said Nate.

A pair of men watching baseball naked, said Merrill.

That's good, said Nate.

I like that one.

He waited for the next house, tried to think up something to top it.

Somebody hiding a body.

A human body, said Merrill.

Yes, a human body, said Nate.

You've done that one before, said Merrill.

All right, he said.

Somebody chopping one up then, feet first.

Blech, said Merrill.

They rounded a corner and went up another street.

She waited as they walked.

It was important not to get too far ahead.

Some child escaping a bath, she said, but he's not going to be able to escape it for forever.

Nate looked at the next house.

It was small and there were no lights on.

The windows were all shut, but the front door was open.

There's some parent waiting up there, he said, trying to keep their kid alive.

They listened to the dogs, as Merrill considered.

Above them, the moths and the night bugs hovered around the street lamps.

The next house was all lit up, and they could see people inside, about a half dozen, more in other rooms.

They're all waiting for some woman to make them a sandwich, said Merrill.

They watched the people as they passed the house.

It seemed as if there might be some somber occasion happening inside.

What kind of sandwich, said Nate?

Different kind, she said.

There's not enough turkey to go around, so she's using some leftover breakfast sausage.

She's cutting it up into thin slices.

There's also an avocado, and there's a visitor to the house who's never had an avocado.

He likes it.

He tries to grow avocados when he gets back home, but he's not successful.

He takes it as a defect in his character.

He sounds like a loser, said Nate.

Merrill shrugs.

I like him, she says.

Why is it the woman making the sandwiches, says Nate?

Why can't the men make their own sandwiches?

Merrill almost crosses her arms, but she keeps them at her sides.

She rolls her eyes.

We're three houses behind, she says.

Nate stops.

He closes his eyes.

He stands military straight.

He's got bad posture and is over-accounting for it.

He looks like someone about to do a back flip.

Three houses back there are three people watching television, he says.

It's a show about making little chairs, little kid chairs.

The daughter, a teenager, thinks, that's what I'd like to do when I grow up, make little kid chairs.

The other two people, they could be her parents, but maybe not.

They don't take her very seriously, but she is serious.

She meets a carpenter.

She meets a lot of carpenters.

They teach her what they know.

She's not very good at first, but she gets better as she goes along.

In a few years, she starts making these little kid chairs.

She puts an ad in the newspaper.

She'll make your kid a little chair, and she'll even paint the kid's name on the chair.

But the problem is when parents start to arrive, there's something about the chairs that they don't like.

There's something to their surprise, a little creepy about those chairs.

Something says to them, some voice, it says, don't put your kid's name on any of these chairs.

The voice seems to indicate that something really bad will happen if they do.

Meryl breathes in deep.

You are so weird, she says.

I'm not done, Nate says.

His eyes are still closed.

So she's stuck with all these creepy little chairs in her house, he says.

Even she thinks they're creepy.

Her boyfriend, he has a hairy back, and one day he'll be her husband.

He likes the chairs and he likes her.

But she wants to be done with those chairs.

She takes them out to the curb one day to get rid of them all.

Merrill interjects, but even the garbage men don't like the chairs, she says.

Absolutely, says Nate.

Those garbage men are scared too.

They want to leave those chairs there.

But they pick them up and crush them in the compactor.

They smash them until those chairs can't hurt anybody anymore.

That's a great story, says Merrill.

I'm not done yet, says Nate.

We're going to be here all night, says Merrill.

I know for a fact that you have nothing better to do, he says.

Don't be so sure, says Merrill, but go on.

Nate opens his eyes.

So she gives up chair making.

She makes hats.

It's a lot less work and less creepy, too.

She eventually starts her own business through mail order.

It's called Tippie's Hats.

Though that's not her name, Tippie.

It's just what she calls the business.

It's a hit.

Merrill waits.

She watches him.

Nate shrugs.

That's all, he says.

She sometimes thinks her brother is crazy, and this greatly endears him to her.

She knows that she's crazy.

He's her only true friend in the world.

There's a man who owns four birds in the next house, she says.

All day long, he talks to his birds, hoping they'll talk back to him.

But they're not the kind of birds who can talk.

They never say a word ever.

They're finches and canaries.

They just sort of look at him.

He lives a life of great disappointment.

Nate nods at the next house.

The woman there is in love with the bird man, he says.

She thinks it's great how he talks to his birds, but he hardly notices her, even though she brings him tomatoes.

Most weeks of every summer, she brings him a half dozen tomatoes.

To him, though, she's just the tomato lady.

They walk on.

This is suddenly depressing, says Meryl.

It's your turn, says Nate.

Lift us up.

She thinks about that.

She hops over the lid of a garbage can.

The husband of an astronaut lives there, she says.

His wife is in outer space, but there's a problem with the spaceship.

We're all worried about her, the people on Earth, us.

We're all worried about her and four others in the spaceship.

There's some door on the spaceship that won't close, and they can't come back to Earth if that door won't close.

No one wants to say it, but they're going to run out of oxygen.

The husband, Merrill continues, he has a lover.

It's a man.

It's a man he knew when they were both in high school, and in the last year they've reconnected.

The husband is surprised about all this, but when he's with his lover, he's not surprised at all.

On the fourth day of the crisis in space, he understands a clear truth.

His wife is going to die by the end of the week.

She's dying right now as he's thinking this.

He's overcome with guilt.

He loves her very much, and at the same time, and he's not proud of this, he's happy, because he can be who he is now.

In fact, he already is who he is.

Meryl looks over at her brother.

He's stepped off the curb and walks beside her now.

This is the last story of the night.

Go ahead, Nate says, I want to hear the finish.

Meryl keeps walking but steps down off the curb, too.

The next evening, the door closes.

The door in the spaceship in outer space closes.

One of the astronauts had a good idea.

All five of them now, they're going to make it back just fine.

The husband, he lies in bed on Earth with his lover.

The two people that he loves most in the world are alive.

This makes him feel alive.

He feels like his heart is going to come out of his chest and burn the house to the ground.

Bad times are ahead, but he's happy for the first time in his life.

When his lover starts to snore, it doesn't bother the husband as much as it used to.

He doesn't notice the noise so much.

He notices his lover's breath moving in and out.

Nate kicks a soda can.

He puts his hands back in his pockets.

Marilla's worked on that story all week.

She has tried to get it just right.

Having told it now, she feels like the second half started to fall apart.

She should have left out the snoring part.

She looks at her watch.

It's almost midnight.

Nate looks ahead.

There are a few more houses, though their father's trailer is still a mile past the neighborhood.

Nate spits.

This is a habit he has taken up recently.

It annoys Merrill to no end.

She suddenly shivers.

It's cold out.

The stories, especially the creepy chair story for some reason, had kept her warm.

She feels as if a thin ghost has passed very quickly and uncomfortably through her.

When she remembers this walk years later, she'll remember Nate as the one with the shivers.

Do you think they're watching us?

She says.

Who?

Nate says.

She points up at the houses, the people in there.

Nate shrugs.

Why would they bother?

It might be interesting for them, Merrill says.

She considers the light in the windows.

We seem as if we're just outside, but we're actually far, far away.

Tom Kealey is a lecturer in Stanford's Creative Writing Department.

His most recent book is a collection of short stories called Thieves I've Known.

Thanks to everyone who shared their stories today.

And a special thanks to the Bing Nursery School, Jennifer Winters, Jiawei Ye, and Beth Wise.

Today's program was produced by me, Charlie Mintz.

And me, Christy Hartman.

With help from Jonah Willingans, Natasha Ruck, Jackson Roach, Rachel Hamburg, Nina Foushee, Miles Siever, Victoria Hurst, Josh Hoyt, and Will Rogers.

Thanks to all the amazing musicians who made music and shared it with a Creative Commons license so we could use it to make our stories sound awesome.

You can find a complete list of the music on our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

With our generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity in the Arts, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and Bruce Braden.

Remember that you can find this and every episode of State of the Human on iTunes.

You can also download them and find out more about the Storytelling Project's live events, grants, and workshops at our website.

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Charlie Mintz.

And I'm Christy Hartman.

She is Christy Hartman.