Ten years old, playing alone in our backyard, in the midst of a ferocious sword fight as both Sir Lancelot and his archenemy.

Mama called me in.

We sat at our kitchen table, bright yellow Formica with metal trim. A film of summer sweat covered me.

“Your daddy just doesn’t like you all that much,” she said. “Just avoid being around him.”

I looked down at the table and nodded. My finger ran along the crack between the two halves of the tabletop, full of the grime and filth accumulated over years of family meals, waiting in vain to be cleaned.

Seven years passed of strained avoidance. Alone in my bedroom, I picked up my latest copy of The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine I subscribed to because Emerson, Stowe, Twain published in its pages.

I read “Shaving,” a story by Leslie Norris, about a boy my age whose father is dying of cancer. The story is set in the UK and my paternal grandparents were English, my dad Canadian, but I considered him English. The boy tenderly cradles his father’s head while he shaves his face. “It was as if he had never known what his father really looked like. He was discovering under his hands the clear bones of the face and head, they became sharp and recognizable under his fingers.”

As soon as I finished reading the story, I read it again.

And again.

My father was not dying, thank God, but we were strangers living in the same house, separated by more than walls. I couldn’t wait for him to be on his deathbed to learn the contours of his face for the first time.

Another seven years passed of trying to know my father. We lived hundreds of miles apart, but I came for visits whenever I could. I’d been writing letters and calling my parents almost every week for years, taking care to close with telling them I loved them. My mother replied in kind; my father, in silence.

Until this one time.

“It’s been great to talk with you, Dad. I love you.”

Pause.

“Me too,” he said. “But in reverse.”

We hung up. I smiled. I couldn't remember ever hearing him say the word “love” before. Not in talking about the weather, the country, the family, me. “But in reverse.” I knew this was as close as he would get in his own voice. Could get.

Just eleven years later, my father passed. Countless phone calls, letters, and visits throughout those years. I kept that phrase in my heart like a cherished line from a treasured story.

“He leaned his head tiredly against the boy’s shoulder. He was without strength, his face was cold and smooth. He had let go all his authority, handed it over. He lay back on his pillow, knowing his weakness and his mortality, and looked at his son with wonder, with a curious humble pride.

“‘I won’t worry then,’ he said. ‘About anything.’”

Over a random phone call this morning, my father disclosed to me that he hated reading as a kid. Never once in my 20 years of life have I ever seen him pick up a book. Not even a magazine. So, this wasn’t exactly surprising. But, anyway, the phone call today went a little like this:

“Oh, that old book? Yeah, I had to read One Hundred Years of Solitude when I was in high school. I would fall asleep. I absolutely hated it and I never even read a sentence,” he said.

“Really, why not? I mean, how can you hate something you never even tried?”

“Well, you know I’ve never been the most cultured person. Once a teacher asked the class about important things in Italy and I didn’t participate because I didn’t know shit about Italy. Meanwhile, these fuckers were naming the Vatican and other places right off the top of their head.”

“Everyone knows the Vatican and—”

“Not everyone. Not the poorer children on the block who didn’t have A/C at home. Definitely not me who didn’t even have shoes for school. I mean when the fuck were we supposed to learn about Italy? In between shifts at the local textile business? Not everyone has had your education and parents to fund it. You don’t get to value shit like the Vatican and One Hundred Years of Solitude as a kid growing up in the poorest neighborhood of Venezuela.”

The silence was loud. And I mean that literally. You could only hear the static and faint breathing in the background.

“Well, it’s good you’re reading again. I know recently you’ve been lazy and sleeping—”

“Not lazy. Depressed. There’s a difference,” I corrected him.

“Right, well, it seems like you’re enjoying the book. You’ll have to lend it to me when you’re done. I have to get back to work. I’ll call later.”

I didn’t even process what he said until much later. He wanted me to lend him the book. Lend it to him. The same man who didn’t know what the Vatican was. The same man who doesn’t believe depression is real. All in an effort to understand his depressed daughter and educate himself?

It was odd, to say the least.

My dad has always stressed the importance of education since I was very young. As a kid, I would read almost a book a day. I saw it as a means of escape from a friendless childhood. A way of traveling and seeing new things. But today, One Hundred Years of Solitude taught me that it was also a way of reaching people. A way to get through to them. A way of learning basic empathy.

Reading has taught me how to love. I don’t mean that it’s taught me my own capacity for adoration or relish, though it has. But that’s another kind of love. That love is simpler, more akin to passion, and there’s less teaching involved. It has an object, and it flirts with passivity, feeding into and from the idea that the lover has no choice in the loving. It’s nice. It’s a love I hope to find again, but that’s the thing: it’s a found love, sticking a toe out looking for quicksand.

I’m talking about a different kind of love. Reading has taught me how to love actively, without object. This isn’t general goodwill, or being nice, or even being selfless. It’s a generosity of spirit and a grace, a radiance that is notable not simply for the light it throws off but also, more importantly, for the glow everything else adopts in its presence. It’s a love learned from This Boy’s Life.

Actually, it’s a love learned from one line before This Boy’s Life. In the dedication, Tobias Wolff writes, “Also my mother thinks that a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome.” It might be the most blunt and tender sentence around. There’s no doubt the dog was ugly – Wolff tells us in three tenses: the dog “was” (past), it's implicit the book following this dedication will say so (future), and Wolff says “I describe [To this day! Still!] as ugly [Ugly!]” (present). But, without bargaining or budging, Wolff gives his mother the floor. While this is palpable love for her, it's also a kind of homage to a was-not-was-to squabble, something that, dog or no dog, we’ve all had before.

Just like that, Wolff takes a dedication (usually eye-glazingly exclusive, personal to the few people on or behind the page and impersonal to the reader) to a memoir (the most potentially exclusive literary form) and makes it inclusive. With one sentence, Wolff invites his mother in, invites the reader in, and even invites handsomer, improved versions of the dog in. There’s love for his mother and love for the reader and love for the dog as others might see it. It’s love grounded but not dependent on any one thing. It’s love without an object. This love isn’t blind – it sees, but acts anyway.

One of the joys of reading is living vicariously through others, being someone else for a bit. But reading This Boy’s Life is different. Somehow, you don’t live through Wolff, you live with him. You remain yourself, but something happens: you get better. Because, just as there are other versions of the dog, there are other versions of the reader. The reader can choose which one to be, and, when reading Wolff, it will probably be the handsomest. Rather than give readers the chance to be someone else, Wolff gives them a chance to fill the corners of their best selves. And every dog is better for it.

Near the end of the story “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin’s narrator is watching his enigmatic brother on stage in a Harlem jazz club when it all clicks. For the first time, he sees the beauty in what Sonny can do from a piano bench. And in a stunning culmination of the story’s tension and pain, Baldwin both describes and demonstrates the connective power of art, and its capability as a conduit for empathy.

But there’s no sentimentality to pad the sharp edges--the story’s empathy is reluctant and brutal, but caring. The Harlem Baldwin describes is unforgiving, ravenous. The teacher-narrator wonders if his students are using heroin in the school bathroom because “maybe it did more for them than algebra could.” He says, “their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities.” They remind him of Sonny. But then, through derisive laughter outside, he hears a whistling cut through it all, light and free.

Music is transformative throughout the story, whether it’s Sonny’s obsessive pounding on a piano he sees as his only way out of Harlem, the pain and ecstasy of street-corner gospel singers, or a barmaid who can’t help but dance to the jukebox as the music turns her “battered face” into that of an innocent child. And of course the story culminates in that visceral and vulnerable jazz performance in which “Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life.”

While it could be mistaken for a story about music or memory or Harlem or family or addiction or time itself, it’s more than that. Yes, Baldwin makes savvy structural and narrative choices, and the imagery and syntax are individually stunning, like the precisely tuned instruments of an orchestra. But it’s only when composed and employed in cooperation that they create harmony and resonance. That’s how the story makes empathy unavoidable, makes wisdom accessible, makes truly seeing (and hearing) possible.

Watching Sonny, the narrator is overwhelmed, as if hearing music for the first time. He realizes that “while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard.” And as he listens, he sees the faces of those he’s lost: his parents, a daughter, an uncle he never knew. It’s all there. Everything.

Baldwin presents wholeness in each moment, integrity in each character. And with moments and people alike, seeing the whole in the individual allows us to see the individual in the whole. Baldwin shows us we can glimpse this wholeness in music and stories, in memories and pain. He reminds us that our moments aren’t ours at all, and like our stories, they are a part of a much bigger whole. The story isn’t didactic by any means, but it has taught me invaluable lessons about reading, writing, and the way I see the world. I cannot write as effectively as James Baldwin, but I can try to see the way his prose sees and hear the way his prose hears.

The best story I read as a kid was and remains unpublished. The total number of people who have read the manuscript is probably five, my nuclear family. It was written by my mother, it was called Mud & Pearls, and when I finished the last page, I cried to the point of hyperventilating. I could not believe something so beautiful had been created within the walls of my house. To sum it up – the story was about a young girl stuck for three months on an oceanographic ship and therefore missing her middle school play back on land; she would have been Dorothy.

Mud & Pearls taught me three things that basically charted/wrecked the rest of my life: 1) the stories are writable; 2) some of the best art never makes it above water; and 3) perhaps most detrimentally, it cemented my already desperate love of theatre.

Though my mother has published a slew of I Can Reads and picture books, she never published that story. She will not publish it. It will die in a cardboard box in our basement in Ohio. I can tell you it involved an oceanographer, redeemable father, who came to understand, over the course of his research trip, that his daughter’s misery was in great part due to his disinterest and negligence, and so yes he does attend her production of The Wizard of Oz, staged in the galley with the industrious help of the ship’s Cook.

Other works shocked and awed me too, not just the ones made in-house. Sarah, Plain and Tall said that sometimes life is as beautiful as the colors of the sea. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, confirmed that, ayup, you can wake up one day with your monstrosity on full display, and then an apple is lodged in your back and rots there, and then you die; life is 100% terrifying, and no, an explanation will not be provided. The most meta of all the awes was encountering The Outsiders. My god. The story is the essay is the story is the essay. Ponyboy was writing this all along. Wait. What?! My god.

Reading taught me to believe in the idea of living a life, even if narrative has little relation to actual life as we actually live it. Characters taught me facets of companionship beyond the anxious realms of human interaction. Books (published & unpublished) taught me that stories are writable, if you dare, if you are lucky enough to have any goddamn talent for it, if you are brave enough to write under water, possibly forever, possibly without your stories ever once reaching above the surface and into the light.

Reading stories makes it undeniably clear that if the world is in fact organized by an all-knowing, all-powerful solipist, it isn’t me.

Phew! Thank goodness. It’s not my fault.

There were a few months in college where I dreaded that posssibility, hoping that if there is one being who imagines the world, it be that girl with the scooter who we called Scooter Liz or the guy with the bag pipes, anyone but me. I practied opening the door to my room every few minutes one night half expecting a black void where the kitchenette and the floral couch should be. Maybe I’d catch God being lazy. It was so tiring obsessively checking that reality still played outisde of myself like a new parent listening for heartbeat. Thank whomever-may-be-God that we have stories to succesfully surprise and move us with insights and juxtapositions we cannot credit to ourselves. Reading makes the world bigger and pushes back the proximity of that void. That “why didn’t I think of that” jealous pinch when reading something new adds a layer of optimistic wonder on my walk to work. Passersby deserve their own focus. Minor characters have siblings and phobias and might be writing songs in their heads. We all are authors and knowning that makes me desperate to listen and watch the characters who otherwise appear in the periphery.

“The Thing in the Forest” by A.S. Byatt was just one story that reminds me. Byatt tries to describe the impact of human emotions--pain, war, loss, maybe even childhood, age, death and the rest of it--as a monster, or an object, well, a thing at least, humping its way through the woods. Like a spongey, expansive blob vacumming all it touches, the thing is a combined experience that grows even larger and disorderd as it moves forward. I love that stories sprout questions not answers. What if the combined weariness of millions of people was alive? What would it look and smell and sound like? What if it was a real thing that could touch you, that had a face? What if two little girls came upon it? What would they say to each other? How would they remember this as adults? Would they be able to say anything aloud?

I was sixteen when I made it to the state Future Business Leaders conference and it was my first chance to watch swaths of people. I’d been to NASCAR races with thousands more before this point, but my focus then was on the smell of burnt rubber and fear of not finding a safe place to pee. As a teenager watching over four thousand students my age flow past, mushrooming from the bottleneck of a doorway in the Hershey hotel, I was mesmerized. It was a parade of potential. Everyone had faces! They all wore tights and blazers. Their march was continuous, moving on and on and on and I thought, “Wow. They’re all alive like me.”

The book came to me as a gift when I asked myself only one question. Why me?

The seed of that question began in basement library with the daylight window at Dallastown Elementary. If it was still intact I could walk today across the linoleum floors to the exact shelf where I discovered Harold and The Purple Crayon. The only book I checked out my entire first grade year. The librarian smiled, stamped the due date card with my name repeated line after line. Ka-thunk. Back in class, Mrs. Kessler’s frown made the cat part of her cat eyeglasses more pronounced as she instructed, again, that I practice my letters right handed, even though my left hand already knew the alphabet. My mimeographed sheets wreaked of blue ink and futile efforts.

At home, the moon and its gravity lifted toward my favor. My mother had ceased being sad. And she once again delivered crust-less, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the red bucket lowered from the middle branches of our backyard’s lone Sugar Maple. On those limbs I became Neil Armstrong, or Jeannie, of I Dream Of…magic. “Hey, Mom. Now that you’re not catatonic, maybe you could convince Mrs. Kessler to let me use my left hand,” I never said. But something ceased Mrs. Kessler’s right insistence that hopeful spring. Fifty years after the southpaw stand-off, my mother’s best friend will tell me that what had stopped the tears (that time) was electroconvulsive therapy.

Harold arrived in my life and brought me to a place of possibilities when I had few. I am grateful. But it is not the one book (can there ever be?), and the maple is not the one tree. Books, humans, trees, thrive in community. Harold found his way home to rest by the light of his moon, out his window. But what to do when home is on fire and smoke obscures the sky? We are all we have here. The moon moves a fingernail width away from Earth every year and the vastness expands.

The fictional shepherd, in The Man Who Planted Trees, Elezéard Bouffier knew what to do after he lost his only son and then his wife. His question was not why me, but instead…how can I help? His answer was to plant one hundred trees a day in a barren valley…for thirty years. He planted through two world wars, a pandemic, and a bumbling government forest agency. The meaning of the book, its seeds lied dormant in me for a long time. I no longer believe in a purple crayons’ ability to navigate life. Some days I can barely traverse my mind and heart.

I bring my life to stories in hopes those stories bring me beyond my life.

Fire may burn Elzéards trees, may burn the pages that gave him life, but he did what he could to make the days more gentle, less lonely for all beings in his time and his place.

My Grandmother died yesterday. This is the first thing I’ve written since and I’m wondering to myself, are there stories better than the ones she told? Last time- that is the last time I saw her (which was ages ago now)- we huddled around her bed and cooed over the pictures on her night table. One was of her at the age of three: black and white, dusty Alabama road. She stood next to another little girl, pigtails on the both of them and a wooden horse between.

“What a lovely picture,” my partner said, somewhat obseqiuously. Dottie rolled her eyes.

“You see her?” she asked, pointing to the second child. We nodded, tilting our heads and grinning like aww isn’t that sweet a little friend how cute.

“She’s STILL a bitch!” Dottie shouted. Woman could hold a grudge.

Maybe my worldview was most affected by reading the kinetic freshness of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth in college, or maybe when I read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and felt language like a marrow-tap, like...really deep. I mean, it could have been Sylvia Plath’s poem Daddy, but I’d rather not dive into that here. Sometimes it feels like I’m swimming in all of these texts. I found myself, just now, looking at my bookshelf and asking, “Where are they? The stories? The ones that made me this?”

I mean, it’s all cumulative, right? Probably sometimes I’m sitting anxiously waiting in a busy emergency room and think of an Elena Ferrante character stuffing her meatballs with shards of glass. Or maybe I’m out on a cold day in winter, the wind burning my ears, and imagine being on the run and falling in love across the tundra, like in Left Hand of Darkness. Visions of the future and the past and the present; they all get blended up in my memories of reading. I’ll say that just now, my Grandmother’s stories cut sharply through the rest. Maybe because she loved me and probably because she died. But anyway: All of it’s me. And memory. And grief and love.

‘Rugadh marbh an lao’ – the calf was stillborn. Thus opens a four-page story by Aran-islander, Irish language writer, Liam O’Flaherty in his short story collection Dúil – Desire.

I was a bored thirteen-year-old, the story, a prescribed text. Irish language classes were a penance; I hid English novels below the lip of my desk and read, all the while keeping an ear cocked so I wouldn’t be caught.

But then I heard the nun who taught us Irish read ‘Rugadh marbh an lao’ and I sat up. Each sentence slowly followed its predecessor: ‘The woman rubbed the cow’s matted forehead and there was a tear in her eye, for she was a mother too.’ The story continued, now with my undivided attention, as the men dragged the calf’s body across the field and tossed it over the edge of the cliff. It lay in ‘a pulped mass on the rocks.’

Then they returned home, the woman crying over the dead calf while apologising to God for her sorrow, for it was, as she declared, the will of God.

The cow’s owner remained in the field awaiting the afterbirth which he buried beneath a cairn of stones. With soil, he made the muddy sign of the cross on the cow’s flank. Then he too left.

The cow went mad with grief.

Here was a story, set in a wet field, on an island, with pain etched in every line. The story stayed with me, and with it, the quite thud of recognition that I am of this place and this language, no more, no less, than the cow, bereft in her handkerchief-sized field or the woman who understands the cow’s pain. And, though I could not articulate it at the time, there grew in me a quiet recognition that stories such as these were no less worthy than my usual diet of novels set in manor houses or in English boarding schools.

Re-reading Bás na Bó – The Cow’s Death, I recognise the skill with which Liam O’Flaherty delivers each sentence, carefully building our understanding of the cow’s anguish, for example, in her disregard of a wound near her udder, self-inflicted as she breaks through the drystone wall of the field in the wake of her calf, following its trail to the cliff edge.

And then beyond.

Back then all I felt was empathy with the beast in the field; it resulted in a lifetime’s vegetarianism. I now realise that this was accompanied by a fledgling pride in my homeland, its language, and its storytellers – though I, like so many Irish people before me, was still to emigrate and leave it all behind.

Bás na Bó made me hungry for stories of who we are, we who inhabit this island. Over the years I have read my way through them all: Frank O’Connor, Brian Moore, Edna O’Brien, Maeve Brennan, William Trevor…

Now, recently returned to live in Ireland, I take my pen and write.

“It seemed to her that between herself and all the other people in the world, a wall had been built up and that she was living just on the edge of some warm inner circle of life that must be quite open and understandable to others” (Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio).

From the time I was a child, reading helped me better understand the world around me and those within it. As a stage IV cancer survivor, active in a community of other survivors, I’ve also seen the power of a story shared. The moment you read words placed together in such a way as to explain your own feelings, fears, confusion, or hope – you begin to feel less isolated. Those imagined walls that kept us from that “warm inner circle of life” are revealed to be just that – imagined. I find reading to be an act of hope.

Our individual stories are woven together in a “single garment of destiny” as Martin Luther King, Jr. aptly describes in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. We are both individually and collectively a human story. Reading has helped me to see past the edges of my own seams and the squares of fabric sewn nearest my sides -- to exhaust the metaphor; it has reminded me that there is so much I have yet to understand. A novel can open our minds to the experiences of strangers and draw out of us empathy and human solidarity.

No better story comes to mind to describe how I view our world than Winesburg, Ohio. Here is a novel told through individual stories sewn together with a single tenuous thread. Each chapter revealing a character desperate to be seen and heard – to break through the separateness of life, isolation and loneliness. I believe there is truth revealed through the stories of others, and that they need to be both told and heard.

Our stories create the framework for how we view the world and live in it. Winesburg, Ohio captures stories of alienation, loneliness, unmet potential, love and obsession. Anderson was criticized for his telling of these fictional, unromanticized stories of the people of a small rural town in America. But they are very human stories. And it is the recognition of our own feelings of alienation, loneliness, unmet protentional, love and obsession that we see in our stories that can allow us to correctively alter the framework. Our suffering, that we once might have desired to hide, is repurposed in its exposure. The experiences and emotions that can create our walls are the same tools that we use to break them down and find community, connection and love. To find hope.

Henri Nouwen writes in his book, The Wounded Healer, “it's an illusion to think that a person can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.” I believe we find healing through our stories, which create connections beyond our time and our space and ourselves.