Storytelling

Storytelling

Transcript for Storytelling (Full Transcript)

Christy Hartman: [00:00:00] Ah, sorry. 

Welcome to State of the Human. This is the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm Christy Hartman. 

Charlie Mintz: I'm Charlie Mintz. 

Christy Hartman: Normally we bring you stories that deepen our understanding of a common human experience. 

Charlie Mintz: Yeah, like singing or lying. 

Christy Hartman: This week though, we're looking at the experience of storytelling itself. And to start off, we're going to tell a story about a story. 

Nina Foushee: So my mom and I had been talking a lot about kids and grandkids because I was working at Bing nursery school last year.

Christy Hartman: This is Nina Foushee. She's a producer with us.

Nina Foushee: 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 wanna lose her legacy. And so she really wants her daughter to have kids.

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

Charlie Mintz: Why not? 

Christy Hartman: I don't know. That's irrelevant. Anyway, this story, her mom tells, it gets to Nina.

Nina Foushee: 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, 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?[00:02:00] 

Christy Hartman: Did you know this woman's daughter at all? 

Nina Foushee: Yeah. I feel like I'd, I'd met her maybe once. But yeah. Nope.

Charlie Mintz: Nina's mom is asking for a story to give her friend, to tell her daughter 

Christy Hartman: to get her to have a baby. 

Charlie Mintz: Yeah. I don't think a story can do that. 

Christy Hartman: No?

Nina Foushee: I remember deciding, wow, I can't, I can't do this. Because, because I'm concerned about the implications of trying to manipulate someone in that way.

Charlie Mintz: That means she thought it, it would work. She thought she could come up with some story and get this, this woman, she's met once to have a baby. 

Christy Hartman: Yeah. She wasn't gonna mess with the power of story. 

Charlie Mintz: I thought she wanted to be a rabbi though. So she doesn't actually wanna use stories to help people change their lives?

Christy Hartman: Mm, 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. 

Nina Foushee: 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 [00:04:00] 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.

Charlie Mintz: 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, does it work that way? 

Nina Foushee: 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 Aris, I feel like is me giving the poem to someone else because by having Jack Gilbert say, I believe Acar 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.

Christy Hartman: 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? 

Nina Foushee: 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, or the story that you need is always there.

You just have to look for it.

Charlie Mintz: 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? 

Christy Hartman: That's what our show's about. When are we in control of our story? When does our story control us? Us, us, us. 

Charlie Mintz: Nina's saying her family believes, and she believes, that the right story is always out there waiting for [00:06:00] 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 'em in a bouquet. But I think, stories are more like those sticky seed balls that get in my socks when I go hiking.

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

Charlie Mintz: Out of her belly button?

Christy Hartman: Yeah. Yeah. They suck. Super suck. They like are impossible to get out of your clothing pretty much. You have to pull 'em out.

Charlie Mintz: Our next story is like that. It, it's got these features, these, these pointy ends that stick to us.

Christy Hartman: Oh, they're called foxtails.

Charlie Mintz: This is actually a cowboy tale. Oh, sorry. Brilliant transition.

Christy Hartman: No, I love it. I love it.

Charlie Mintz: 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, you know, the all American rebel guy who does what he wants. But once Jess started investigating, he actually found a very different cowboy.

Jess Peterson: 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 movies.

Movie Reel: But I'm starting my own heart. Is that right? Justin? Are you leaving? I am. You can't do that. You signed on. You agreed. I signed nothing. If I had, I'd stay.

Jess Peterson: 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 cowboys all around us. Classic Hollywood characters like Han Solo from Star Wars, or agents, J [00:08:00] 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 other boots, when they rode horses and 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.

Richard White: I'm Richard White. I'm the Margaret Byrne, professor of American History at Stanford University, and author of the book, Railroaded.

Jess Peterson: 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 lasso in their hands. Deep economic forces summon 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.

Richard White: Think about it, in the south you of Union Army is going all 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 by troops.

Jess Peterson: 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 is 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 [00:10:00] 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.

Richard White: Nobody knows the cause of Texas fever. Um, all they know is if you put a Texas Longhorn in contact with domestic stock, those cattle will begin to die.

Jess Peterson: 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.

Richard White: And they put two and two together: whatever's 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.

Jess Peterson: Now, the Texas Rangers were stuck. No one wanted their diseased cattle. So they came up with a new plan.

Richard White: 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.

Jess Peterson: But even that would be a problem.

Richard White: You put these cattle on the train and these are, you know, these are 19th century railroads. They train wrecks, cattle escape. You put 'em into stockyards, they come into contact with other cattle.

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

Richard White: If you drive these Texas cattle north and you overwinter 'em, or even if you keep them for one frost, Texas fever disappears. Reasons disappearing is the tick 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 into Florida.

Jess Peterson: Mysteriously the other cattle stop dying.

Richard White: Stop dying, yeah.

Jess Peterson: And that was the breakthrough. [00:12:00] 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.

Richard White: So somebody has the bright idea. Why don't we take these Texas cattle, which are really scrawny, I mean, as they're described as 200 pounds of, um, hamburger on a, on a thousand pounds of bone and, and, um, 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 'em to market. And then what you begin to get is the long drive.

Movie Reel: Yeehaw!

Jess Peterson: 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...

Richard White: largely funded by British capital.

Jess Peterson: 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.

Richard White: Cowboys are poorly paid laborers. Many of them are going to be freedmen or ex-slaves out of Texas. Others are going to be, um, southern whites who are trying to make some kind of money after the Civil War in an impoverished Texas economy.

Jess Peterson: What was their day-to-day life like?

Richard White: Their day-to-day life is if you were on a long drive, let's say not your, this is driving the cattle north. Um, you are up very early in the morning. You will eat a breakfast and you'll get on horseback. You'll then start moving the cattle. You move the cattle slowly. 'cause the whole idea is you don't want 'em to lose weight, so you keep them [00:14:00] moving slowly. You're at the back of the herd. I mean, let's say there's a thousand cattle and you're rising behind them, you're just eating dirt.

Um, you're behind all of the, the dust that's being raised by these animals. It's loud, it's dusty, it's hot, you're miserable, you're thirsty. Um, and that's what a day's labor is going to be.

Jess Peterson: And at night, when the cowboys would rest to their campsite. Things could get pretty scary.

Richard White: The most nerve wracking 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 gonna 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.

Jess Peterson: 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 [00:16:00] name Bill Cody Buffalo. Bill was one of the great figures of the late 18 hundreds. 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.

Richard White: Buffalo Bill is a person who pretty much, um, turns his own life into a commodity. Buffalo Bill had been a Buffalo Hunter, hence, his name, Buffalo Bill. He'd also been a gorilla in the Civil War. Um, he'd also been briefly pony express rider. He, um, had been a scout, an Indian scout, and had fought Indian. He'd done all those things, but what he does is turn them into a character.

Jess Peterson: 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 Build traveled all over the U.S. And he 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.

Richard White: 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.

Jess Peterson: But here's the thing.

Richard White: What Buffalos Bill Wild West would do is do all the interesting things that Cowboy did over the space of a year, and they'll do it in an hour. Um, what they don't explain is what the Cowboys do the rest of the [00:18:00] 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 with one giant rodeo.

Jess Peterson: Not only were they entertaining, Richard White says that Buffalo Bills shows were sort of selling the meaning of America.

Richard White: It's the meaning of the United States, he's selling cause Americans are individualists, Americans are self-reliant. Americans are men who protect, um, families and women from danger. And you will see this when you see the life of the cowboy.

Jess Peterson: 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 [00:20:00] 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. 

Christy Hartman: 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. 

Terri Wingham: I'd 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.

Christy Hartman: 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. 

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

Christy Hartman: But she gets a biopsy [00:22:00] anyway afterwards. She does what corporate people usually do.

She grabs lunch. 

Terri Wingham: And so I'm having lunch with my friend and she asked me the question. She said, Terri, if you could do anything, what would you do? 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. 

Christy Hartman: Terri's doctor said she couldn't work during or for six months after her treat. 

Terri Wingham: 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. 

Christy Hartman: 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.

Terri Wingham: My first surgery was in 2009 in the fall of 2009. Chemo was in early 2010. 

Christy Hartman: Thankfully, Terri's cancer responded well to chemotherapy after four rounds of chemo. Terri got the green light for surgery. 

Terri Wingham: 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 gonna do a double mastectomy and reconstruction, but you know, you're gonna look better afterwards.

Well, that doesn't address the issues of dating after radical surgery of pain, of the fact that you, you are never gonna 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 [00:24:00] for feeling that way. And so I'm not gonna Google it if I don't think it's a thing. I'm, you know, like depressed after treatment. No, because I don't wanna admit that I'm depressed and I don't think it's a thing.

I think it's just a me issue. 

Christy Hartman: 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. 

Terri Wingham: My old story, my old identity doesn't fit me anymore, but if that's true, then what the heck am I gonna do in my new life?

Christy Hartman: 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. 

Terri Wingham: 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.

Christy Hartman: 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 closed friend. 

Terri Wingham: She just said, I feel like I don't know you anymore. I feel like cancer has become your only story and I [00:26:00] miss the person that you used to be. 

Christy Hartman: 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 sea wall near her house, and she was looking at the families and thinking, depressed thoughts, like: 

Terri Wingham: 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. 

Christy Hartman: 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.

Terri Wingham: And I thought, I don't wanna feel this way. I don't wanna feel angry, I don't wanna 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 wanna 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.[00:28:00] 

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 wanna 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, this new, this new adventure that maybe some in this new idea that something new could define me. It just, it just felt right.

Christy Hartman: 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. 

Terri Wingham: I was feeling really, really emotional. 

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

Terri Wingham: And I saw one of my favorite little guys, and he had just gone to the potty, but his, his pants were around his ankles. And I looked at him and I, 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, he was a mess. 

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

Terri Wingham: And realized there was only cold water and he was probably three, but [00:30:00] really, really small. And, um, he looked at me like I was the devil because I'm trying to clean him off with his 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, you know, really thread bear 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. 

Christy Hartman: 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.

Terri Wingham: I really would not do this if I felt like there was no benefit on, on the developing world side, 

Christy Hartman: 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. 

Terri Wingham: So I [00:32:00] 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?

Christy Hartman: When a disease like cancer unexpectedly enters your life, you lose creative control. You are 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@afreshchapter.com. 

Charlie Mintz: Welcome back to State of the Human. It's the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm [00:34:00] Charlie Mintz.

Christy Hartman: I'm Christi Hartman. 

Charlie Mintz: 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. 

Christy Hartman: And we've seen what happens when a person needs to change her story to heal, 

Charlie Mintz: 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: 

Christy Hartman: the monkeys, they went up sky, they fall 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. 

Charlie Mintz: Or this one told by a 5-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 Gotchu. 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.

Jackson Roach: Hello.

Charlie Mintz: And tell us where you went.

Jackson Roach: I went to the Bing Nursery school here at Stanford. 

Charlie Mintz: Cool. Tell us a little bit about, 

Jackson Roach: 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, um, watch kids play through a one way mirror, which sounds a little creepy, but, uh, 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. 

Child 1: There was a [00:36:00] birthday party and a wolf came into a birthday party and, and it was a friendly wolf and it ate some cake with the people and,

Beth Wise: okay. 

Charlie Mintz: 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. 

Child 1: And then she said, um, let's go to the ball. 

Charlie Mintz: And then they danced. They danced to disco music, by the way. So there's that. And I heard this story about a piggy bank. 

Beth Wise: What if we made up a story, Once upon a time a fox came to your house and knocked on the door uhhuh and got your piggy bank?

Mm-hmm. Then what will happen?

Child 2: And then he bring it to his home.

Beth Wise: Okay. And then what happened?

Child 2: And then he puts monies in there.

Beth Wise: Okay.

Child 2: And then he looks for more money outside.

Charlie Mintz: It's like a big, bad wolf went to business school and 

Child 1: then he buy a lot a coin. 

Charlie Mintz: Can we hear one more?

Jackson Roach: You wanna hear one about an airplane?

Charlie Mintz: Heck yeah. 

Child 1: An airplane was flying in the sky and it. And it was a bi. Mm-hmm. And it was going as fast as it could and it got too slow. It stalled and fell into the water.

Jackson Roach: 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. 

Beth Wise: I would always ask my own children to dictate something. If they were 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 [00:38:00] 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, 

Jackson Roach: 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, 

Beth Wise: and it's almost like they're telling the story and they're there.

Jackson Roach: That only lasts a couple of years though. By about five, A kid can say, 

Beth Wise: I'm telling you this story, but that's outside, outside, outside, 

Jackson Roach: 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.

Charlie Mintz: Thanks, Jackson.

Jackson Roach: Sure.

Child 2: All right. That was my last. Story I could tell because I excused off all my stories in my mind. 

Christy Hartman: So we're born authors, commanders of our own little universes? 

Charlie Mintz: Commanders and prisoners I guess too. Prisoners of storied, I dunno if prisoners is right.

Christy Hartman: I like prisoners. 

Charlie Mintz: Because we, we have to understand the world through stories. No, no matter what we're, we're in a story, I think. 

Christy Hartman: That's the kind of power though.

We can choose what story to tell Stanford professor and author Tom Kealey says it's an important choice. 

Tom Kealey: I mean, if, if we don't have contact and we don't have those storytelling, uh, opportunities, I mean we, we literally go insane after a while. It's not even that we wanna escape [00:40:00] through stories, it's we want to connect through stories. 

Christy Hartman: To finish the show, Tom Keeley is going to tell a story about two teenagers who tell each other's stories about strangers.

Tom Kealey: 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 hang 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. In [00:42:00] 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.

Merril 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 tree line, 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. Meryl watched them both. You try it. Nate said to her, why said Meryl? Because a rock is like a big bug to him.

Nate said, but not when he catches it said Meryl. This response annoyed him. So he said, so would you tease a blind person? Said Meryl. He frowned. Don't be adult. You're the adult. Said Meryl. 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 box cars along the tracks. They picked up their aprons and box cutters from the sidewalk and headed that way.

It 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 [00:44:00] 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 and the distance ahead to the girl. They waited, watched the dark box cars and the rounded petroleum tankers pass felt a 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. 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. Watch the sculptures as they passed an angel here, like a child, an eagle in 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 skelet. 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, [00:46:00] bring me back my eyes. Nate said 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 are just nobody. Nate kept his distance, but Meryl 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 salt water was in the air. At a familiar neighborhood, Meryl and 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 of 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 [00:48:00] owner to return.

They listened to the static of radios here and there. Somebody running an electric saw in a garage. It put Meryl in mind of their previous home years ago when they'd lived with their mother, where Meryl and 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, Meryl 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 Meryl toward the second. Some woman playing checkers by herself said, Nate, a pair of men watching baseball naked said Meryl. 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, Meryl.

Yes, a human body said, Nate, you've done that one before, said Meryl. All right. He said somebody chopping one up then feet first. Bleh, said Meryl. 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 gonna 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 Meryl considered above them, the moss 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 Meryl. They watched the people as they pass the [00:50:00] 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, says Nate, Meryl 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? Meryl 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. Yeah, 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 [00:52:00] 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 close. So she 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. Meryl interjects, but even the garbage men don't like the chairs, she says.

Absolutely says, Nate. Those garbage men are scared too. They wanna 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 Meryl. I'm not done yet, says Nate. We're gonna be here all night, says Meryl.

I know for a fact that you have nothing better to do. He says. Don't be so sure says Meryl, 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 Tippy's Hats, but that's not her name, tippy. It's just what she calls the business. It's a hit. Meryl 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. [00:54:00] She thinks it's great how he talks to his birds, but he hardly notices her even though she brings them tomatoes most weeks of every summer. She brings them 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, Meryl 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 is 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 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 gonna make it back just fine. The husband, he lies in bed on earth [00:56:00] 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. Meryl has 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's taken up recently. It annoys Meryl 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. Meryl says she considers the light in the windows. We seem as if we're just outside, but we're actually far, far away.

Charlie Mintz: Tom Keeley is a lecturer in Stanford's Creative Writing department. His most recent book is a collection of short stories called Thieves I've known.