Growing up in a family with storytelling as the coin of the realm was wonderful but perplexing. I just assumed it held sway in every other family too, so the first few times I sat through dinner at a friend's house with only a few niceties being traded I was stunned. My friends were even more stunned when they joined my family since by the time the meal started, a handful of stories were already taking shape & vying for center stage.

To my knowledge, no one in my family ever wrote down anything other than personal letters before I showed up, but oh, could they swap stories. That's one thing I came to especially appreciate—the swapping part. Sure, some tried valiantly to control the narrative for longer than the story had punch, but they nearly always experienced epic failure since it was well understood in my family that anybody could start their own story off to the side at any time & drift back & forth between versions at will. In some ways, we were like jazz musicians improvising & playing off each other, constantly innovating & embellishing.

To a modern ear, those stories might seem rustic, mundane, pedestrian at best. But to my young ears, they were pure magic.

I still remember being teleported into the hold of a transatlantic ship when Gram told stories of her father nearly dying as a kid, into the midst of the Battle of Iwo Jima when my aunt described the horror through the eyes of her twenty-year-old grandfather, onto the Oregon Trail while listening to my uncle's rendering of an ancestor's letter about surviving a harrowing trip to the Willamette Valley, as well as countless others.

So it wasn't at all surprising to me when a first-person narrator took center stage in Pearl Fields and the Oregon Meltdown as an homage to those wonderful storytellers from my past.

Till next time,

Drew
Drew Faraday
Pearl Fields and the Oregon Meltdown