Stories of Ourselves http://sarahayars.com Stories are everywhere. We consume them, we create them. This is an exploration of their impact. Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:25:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Stories of Ourselves http://sarahayars.com/stories-of-ourselves/ http://sarahayars.com/stories-of-ourselves/#comments Sun, 29 Jan 2012 13:11:20 +0000 @sarahayars http://sarahayars.com/?p=21 Stories have been important to me since I was small and though I don’t always acknowledge the role that they play in my life, it is without a doubt that they are crucially important in my life and I’m sure I’m not the only one.  The stories I loved as a child gave way to [...]]]> Stories have been important to me since I was small and though I don’t always acknowledge the role that they play in my life, it is without a doubt that they are crucially important in my life and I’m sure I’m not the only one.  The stories I loved as a child gave way to a different kind of story in young adulthood and beyond, though many that I loved when young have continued to be favourites and I love to reread them.  Sometimes I need to reread them because I know they’ll cheer me up or help me find resolve or distract me from things I cannot change.  The consumption of stories has played an imporant part in my life and this is perhaps best evidenced by the stories I like to tell about myself in relation to them.

I am proud of being able to tear through novels at what seems to some a startling pace, as a teenager finishing Gone with the Wind in four days at the beach despite being made to participate in family activites throughout or being the first in the family to read the last Harry Potter book because I would be fastest and finishing it in a single day before handing it over to my stepmother and others to read.  My dad joked for years that I didn’t read books, I inhaled them.  I started reading books from places besides the YA section because in those days it was rare for YA novels to be even 300 pages and I could read 30 or 50 by the time we got home from the bookstore.  It was around the same time that my father stopped paying for books for me as a general rule seeing as it was no longer necessary to encourage me to read and instead I had to earn the money by babysitting or mowing the lawn or washing the car.  I like these stories about myself as a reader, though if I’m honest I don’t read as much as an adult as I did as a young adult, and they feed in to the stories I tell about myself as a writer, and how I somehow manage to think about myself as a writer even when I’m not writing as much as I want to be.

As much as I love stories, there’s little doubt in my mind that it isn’t really possible to love stories for their own sake.  I love them because of what they say to me and about me, of what I take from them about myself and about the human condition and what I think they can communicate that can otherwise be difficult to express or comprehend.  It is not an accident that parables and illustrative, teaching stories are used in many, if not all, religions and that myths themselves are made up of this kind of story.

In this blog I hope to explore the stories I read in terms of what they mean to me or might mean to others as well as the stories we tell ourselves and how they impact out lives.

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