Were you one of those people who loved English in school? If so, here is an excerpt you might like. It’s from “In Praise of a Teacher” by Nikki Giovanni, from Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. © Harper Perennial, 2002.
…I always loved English because
whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories
that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a
history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we
think we are; English is much more a story of who we really are.
It was, after all, Miss Delaney who introduced the class to My
candle burns at both ends; /It will not last the night; /But, ah, my
foes, and, oh, my friends, /It gives a lovely light. And I thought
YES. Poetry is the main line. English is the train.
I love this poem. Is there an English teacher out there that you’d like to thank? If so, please comment and give a shout out to your favorite English teacher. Nikki Giovanni would probably like that.
P.S. Little known fact: Nikki Giovanni and I are both from Knoxville, Tennessee.
P.P.S. I’m an ex-shrink who writes award-winning novels. Check out my books here.
I think we are definitely natural storytellers. I’ve got two kids, ages 4 and 5, and they spend most of their free play making up stories for their toys to enact. We never told them to engage in this sort of play. They just do it.
For this particular day, what I can do to honor myself as a storyteller is not go crazy. Nothing bad is happening (quite the opposite) but distraction has many forms, does it not?
Kids are so brilliant that way, aren’t they? My daughters were like that, too. Uninhibited, natural storytellers. I wonder when we start to lose that. When our stories begin to be graded??
I know what you mean about distractions, too. Today, I’m distracted because we have an elderly cat that’s not doing well and we didn’t get much sleep. It’s nearly impossible for me to be creative when I’m tired.
As always, Sonja, I appreciate your comments. 🙂
Humans may be natural storytellers, but so are dolphins. There are accounts of them repeating the exact same series of clicks and whistles months and hemispheres apart.
The earliest cave paintings were stories–stories of the hunt, of spearing animals, etc.
Interesting to note that the first use of language was for telling stories, the first use of mathematics was for accounting and keeping track of land. From the beginning one discipline was left-brained, the other right! My wife is an accountant, but will read a story and only say something like “It’s nice,” or “I didn’t like the main character.” I am a right-brained person and I will look at a table of figures and see….figures. About as exciting as watching paint dry. Very different, we are.
Hi John,
It never occurred to me that dolphins were storytellers. I love that. There’s a remote spot off the coast of South Carolina, near where I used to live, where walking along the beach I would always come upon a family of dolphins. I would watch them for hours. Perhaps they were telling me stories and I didn’t even realize it!
And in a spot off the South Carolina coast there is a family of dolphins telling each other how they used to watch this human walking on the beach for hours…