I come from generations of folktale tellers, scoundrels, and liars. It’s almost like I couldn’t help writing.
The stories we love, though, are not the stories that contain 100% fact or can be seen with the naked eye. I come from Pioneers who traveled halfway across the American Continent to settle on land they couldn’t imagine living on, but we still own. I can visit and point to gravesites of people long dead, but who I feel like I’ve had conversations with.
As a fourth-generation English teacher, I’ve learned the stories we tell contain supernatural events, but we tell them in normal, average ways. The strange, the far-out, the grotesque, and the otherworldly shape who I am as a storyteller because these are the stories I’ve heard.
Not just from my family, but from Scripture. The Bible shapes who I am as a storyteller, but it also shapes who I am as a person. In a real way, the mixture of my family and my faith requires me to see the world as it is. A world full of things I can and cannot see. A world full of things I can and cannot explain. A fallen world in need of redemption.
So the world I have lived, and the world I see is enchanted. It’s not enchanted by some cheap magic trick, either. I live in a world brought alive through words, even as the Word is brought to life.
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