Remembering Together: A Shared Tradition of Storytelling

By Michael Dean

Of the thing I identify as, I would certainly place “storyteller” on that list, but not nearly as high as most people would assume. If, for whatever reason, somebody came up to me on the street and said “Hey you! Since you are a writer, would you consider yourself the storyteller in your family?” In response I would say, “Thanks for this convenient inciting incident to set up this blog’s theme. To answer your question though: no, I would not consider myself as the storyteller in my family.” Instead, in this scenario, I would respond that this title belongs to my dad.

My dad was, and still is the chief storyteller of my family. Whenever we would gather together at the holidays, or for our patented spring-summer birthday parties, my dad would inevitably swing into the position of storyteller and entertainer, telling stories about when he competed in karate tournaments as a teenager, or worked at McDonalds in high school. Recently, I was scrolling through family photos on Facebook, and I saw picture taken from our last family get-together, December 2019, that perfectly emphasizes the larger-than-life role he would take during our get-togethers. In the photo he is its prominent centerpiece: gesticulating with both arms, no doubt to emphasize an important story detail.

As most folks do as they enter adulthood, I am reflecting on the role my family played in shaping me into who I am now. When I reflect on my family’s storytelling tradition, I am not sure that I would identify my father as the source of my own propensity for storytelling. Quite the opposite, I would say that, if anything, listening to (and often tuning out from) the stories that he would inevitably tell and retell, turned me off from the idea of storytelling, lest I too begin to recount how I once had to walk to and from school, uphill in both directions during a snowstorm. This exaggeration aside, while my childhood rebellion from listening to these stories was understandable and probably the source of some arm-chair criticism about the attention span of Gen Z, I think it has unintentionally shaped the ways that I do and do not recall my past and my own family’s history.

I self-identify (somewhat contradictorily) as someone that is not good at remembering my past. I am often jealous of those that can recall events from their life with incredible specificity, let alone those that are able to retell those details in a compelling way. I think this frustration comes up most often when I turn to my own life experiences for writing. I am very good at remembering how a scene looks: the weather, the colors, the time of day. But, when it comes to recalling the traditional specificities of a scene: the people who were there, what they said or even how they talked, my mind tends to draw a rather uncomfortable blank.

(For those of you who don’t know, these are very important qualities of compelling storytelling!)

I think this a problem for which I have yet to find a satisfying solution, or water-tight resolution to offer you in this blogpost. I do often lean on detail-rich exposition as means to bringing my own storytelling to life and leave the finer points of my stories to float off into memory’s ephemerality. For those details that I can’t let escape me, I instead turn to the memory of those who may have been around me in those moments.

A recent joy of mine that I plan on continuing in the future, is asking my friends to recount experiences that we have shared. Hearing about our own shared history from their perspective has been an illuminating process, as I have had a chance to see myself from the outside (which is sometimes hard to do if you have not tried it) and sometimes learn something about their life that I was not aware of in the moment.

I think these collaborative instances of story-sharing have the potential to lessen the burden of carrying my own history with me. If we both take on the role of storyteller and story-listener, we have to chance to understand our own past more holistically. And I think I really like that.