For the Love of Story

My parents have a reel-to-reel audio tape recording made when I was three years old. On it you can hear my mother ask me what I had done that day. There follows fifteen minutes of non-stop, rapid-fire, description of my meeting Timothy the Turtle and the riveting adventure, replete with suspense, pathos, and humor that ensued. Despite the childish patois and the squeaky little girl voice, my vocabulary was disturbingly advanced for my age. Even without visuals, you can hear as the drama unfolds that I had to be waving my arms around as I spoke and making the exaggerated facial expressions appropriate to the drama. When I finally came to a halt, all my mother said into the recorder was, “As you can hear, she’s quite the little storyteller.”

My sweetest childhood memories involve my mother sitting beside me on the living room couch and reading aloud to me. She had joined the Dr. Seuss Book Club and twice a month a beginning reader would arrive in the mail. I have deep, instinctive reactions to phrases like “green eggs and ham” or “go, dog, go” or “a person’s a person no matter how small.” I loved that letters made words, and words told stories. By the time I was five I was reading the Dr. Seuss book collection aloud to my mother while she made dinner.

My kindergarten teacher was pretty harried the day it was her turn to introduce her class to the school library. Most of the children just wanted to run around the book cases. I sat in a corner, pulling down one book after another, marveling that there were so many I had never seen before. When the teacher told the class to line up for our return to class I began to cry. The librarian came up and asked me why I was upset and I said it was because I had not had the chance to read all the books yet. She told me that I could check out several of them, take them home, and read them when I had the time – just so long as I brought them back next week. Then I could check out more. My face lit up and I cried with joy, “You mean I can read as many of these books as I WANT?” The librarian got all misty-eyed and the whole class had to wait restlessly while I procured my first library card and checked out my first armload of picture books. Here was a world of stories to explore.

My fourth grade teacher showed us a short movie about black bears and then asked us to imagine we were a bear cub and write down a short story. Twenty minutes later I was on page five, scribbling furiously in my loopy, illegible handwriting and the teacher said, “It’s time to go to recess.” “Don’t want to play outside,” I said, “I have to finish the story.” At the next parent-teacher conference she suggested that I be steered towards a career in writing. Every scholastic choice I made after that was aimed at my becoming a professional storyteller. I wound up a communications major in college with a minor in film studies because I couldn’t decide which medium to tell stories with: film, radio, or print.

When I was twenty-four I joined a Bible Study Fellowship class and discovered the one true story that makes all other stories worthwhile. At twenty-eight I started sharing that “greatest story ever told” to two-year-olds and knew I had found my true calling. At thirty-seven I was asked to start teaching the Bible to adult women. I was sent to Bible Study Fellowship International’s headquarters for training and in a “getting to know you” session we were each supposed to share something special about ourselves. Some candidates were active in sports, others in the arts, others had rare hobbies and when it came my turn I said, “I’m a storyteller.” To which, the executive director sternly said, “We teach the Bible, we don’t tell stories.” I figured they’d put me on the next plane home but I survived the week’s barrage of tests and returned home to teach the Bible – by telling stories.

In the story of my life I am now fifty years told. To commemorate that half-century mark I have begun a blog, DeVera Words, in which I present words De Vera (of truth) in a manner as if “I took de verra words right outta me mouth.” These are true stories that have been a part of my life and I have reached a limit to my storage capacity so that they must come spilling out. In college I would be writing page after page of single-spaced typewritten description in letter form to my parents. My roommate would say, “What could you possibly be writing about since nothing happened to us this week?” Then I would read aloud to her the adventures of her past week. She'd say “Everything’s a story to you, isn’t it?”

Read the blog and see.