I think the more personal movies and television shows are, the more universal they become. I feel like if you can be really specific with your life, you think "oh, nobody's going to relate to that," they do. There's an emotional context to those things that sort of make it blow up and become bigger than you could even dream.

-- Ryan Murphy, "Ryan Murphy's Journey with Eat Pray Love"

Stories are the thread of our lives, but they're hard to write.

-- Stephen Elliott, The Daily Rumpus Email, 2013 March 24

And when it tells a story, it gets sidetracked and tells instead a story about the telling of the promised story.

-- Smaro Kamboureli, On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem

Monday Morning Required Listening. Today I bring you not something to read, but something to listen to. I've already told you of my love for spoken word poetry, so it should come as no surprise that I'm posting about it yet again. I don't know if it's normal to develop a celebrity crush on a spoken word poet, but I definitely have a crush on Phil Kaye. I think he is kind of adorable, and I admire his work deeply. If you are anything like me, when you hear him perform, you'll laugh, you'll be moved, and then you will get sucked into the vortex of YouTube listening to everything can find by him. Here's an entry point into that delightful vortex: Phil Kaye's "Beginning, Middle & End."

The biggest question I get anywhere I go, and this is five-year-olds and seventy-five-year-olds, is "how can I start?"...And there's this underlying question to that of "what book do I need to read?" "what certain life experience do I need to have?" "what's the right school I need to graduate from to start?" And my best, most simple advice is to completely throw that out, that that's not what it's about. People haven't been telling stories for thousands of years to all get published in Harper's. Let go of this idea of perfection. Because that's not what it's about. It is to connect, I think, it is to make sense of what it is to be human.

-- Phil Kaye, in this TEDx talk

Story lets us carve our initials into the wet cement of this moment.

-- Phil Kaye, in this TEDx talk

We tell stories to feel alive.

-- Phil Kaye, from this TEDx talk

There are stories behind so many little things. For instance, there has to be a story behind why someone just wandered into the coffee shop barefoot.

Monday Morning Required Reading. There are periods of time when it feel like my life gets in the way of my creativity. I get wrapped up in day-to-day things. My to-do list grows, constantly expanding with mundane things: laundry, vacuuming, dishes, grocery shopping, insurance calls, bank trips. And with all of this on my plate I wind up feeling sapped and empty, unable to even imagine writing anything. It's a strange mental space of exhaustion and blankness. When I hit these slumps, the best thing I can do is return to the comfort-food equivalent of reading for me: The Vinyl Cafe. Although, I must admit that these stories are perhaps best enjoyed by listening to Stuart read them himself. And so that is exactly what I am going to recommend you do. GO HERE and download the podcast in whatever form works best for you. Hopefully it works some of its magic on you as well.

And storytelling has a life of its own. The ego dissolves. And when the ego dissolves, people can listen. Story allows us to enter through the back door. We don't even know what we're saying in a story. I really believe that. It just helps us think and begin to talk to others.

-- Terry Tempest Williams, in an interview published in What's Nature Worth?: Narrative Expressions of Environmental Values