Kati Davis Philosophy of Storytelling

“The creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos… We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there is more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation.” – Hayao Miyazaki

Why do we tell stories, you ask? We tell stories as a means of finding meaning in the meaningless and hope in the hopeless. We tell stories to splash color into a grayscale world, to illuminate parts of ourselves that would have otherwise remained in shadow. We tell stories to transport ourselves to places with people who are like our own children – paper and ink replacing flesh and blood – people who possess the brightest and the darkest aspects of ourselves. We tell stories to awaken the child that has begun to drift asleep within us, the one who fills our dreams with dragons and waterfalls and wings and magic. We tell stories to build worlds of our own with the pieces we have been given, constructing a clumsy jigsaw puzzle of memories and mayhem, composed of that stranger in the corner of the cafe and that sign we glanced at on the way to get groceries and that conversation we overhead in the back of the bus and that piece of the dream that clung to our consciousness. We tell stories because they are the straw through which we breathe the air that keeps us from sinking into seas of despair, the rope we cling to when the quicksand is pulling us deeper and deeper into the earth. We tell stories because they are an inherent part of us: embedded in our bones, coursing through our veins, flowing in and out of our lungs with each breath we take.

We tell stories because we are stories.