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Everything Is a Story: Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives
Stories are alive--and they shape our personal and collective identities, for better and worse
Discover how the stories we tell--and the ones we inherit--hold extraordinary power to heal, harm, and reshape our reality.
In Everything Is a Story, award-winning Indigenous author Kaitlin B. Curtice reveals how narratives function like living seeds, taking root in our consciousness and growing from acorns into mature oak trees that define who we are. This book will help you
● learn to identify toxic narratives that perpetuate division and replace them with stories of compassion and wholeness;
● discover how Indigenous storytelling wisdom can transform modern approaches to healing and community building;
● develop skills for examining family stories, religious beliefs, and cultural myths with discernment; and
● explore how to pass meaningful stories to future generations.
Through this compelling journey, Curtice examines how stories shape our personal identity, family dynamics, spiritual beliefs, and cultural understanding. She guides us through the crucial process of discerning which inherited narratives serve our growth and which ones limit our potential for healing and connection.
This isn't just another book about storytelling--it's a framework for reclaiming agency over the stories that control your life. Whether you're struggling with family trauma, seeking spiritual growth, or working to build bridges across cultural divides, Curtice offers gentle wisdom that transcends religious and cultural boundaries.
Featuring a foreword by Simran Jeet Singh and woven with contemplative poetry, Everything Is a Story offers hope-filled guidance for anyone ready to rewrite their narrative and embrace stories that foster genuine healing, connection, and transformation.
Discover how the stories we tell--and the ones we inherit--hold extraordinary power to heal, harm, and reshape our reality.
In Everything Is a Story, award-winning Indigenous author Kaitlin B. Curtice reveals how narratives function like living seeds, taking root in our consciousness and growing from acorns into mature oak trees that define who we are. This book will help you
● learn to identify toxic narratives that perpetuate division and replace them with stories of compassion and wholeness;
● discover how Indigenous storytelling wisdom can transform modern approaches to healing and community building;
● develop skills for examining family stories, religious beliefs, and cultural myths with discernment; and
● explore how to pass meaningful stories to future generations.
Through this compelling journey, Curtice examines how stories shape our personal identity, family dynamics, spiritual beliefs, and cultural understanding. She guides us through the crucial process of discerning which inherited narratives serve our growth and which ones limit our potential for healing and connection.
This isn't just another book about storytelling--it's a framework for reclaiming agency over the stories that control your life. Whether you're struggling with family trauma, seeking spiritual growth, or working to build bridges across cultural divides, Curtice offers gentle wisdom that transcends religious and cultural boundaries.
Featuring a foreword by Simran Jeet Singh and woven with contemplative poetry, Everything Is a Story offers hope-filled guidance for anyone ready to rewrite their narrative and embrace stories that foster genuine healing, connection, and transformation.
208 pages, Hardcover
Published October 7, 2025
15 people are currently reading
354 people want to read
About the author
Kaitlin B. Curtice
18 books261 followersKaitlin Curtice is a Native American Christian author, speaker and worship leader. As an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Citizen Band and someone who has grown up in the Christian faith, Kaitlin writes on the intersection of Native American spirituality, mystic faith in everyday life, and the church. She is an author with Paraclete Press and her recently released book is Glory Happening: Finding the Divine in Everyday Places. She is a contributor to Sojourners, and you can also find her work on Patheos Progressive Christian.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 29, 2025
To say that I've become fond of the writing of Kaitlin B. Curtice might be an understatement. More than her writing, which is a transcendent tapestry of vulnerability, wisdom, insight, and revelation, I've become fond of the Kaitlin B. Curtice who has claimed the power of her story and who has, it would seem, learned how to amplify the narratives that serve her best.
It seems almost inevitable that Curtice would author a book such as "Everything Is a Story: Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives."
In "Everything Is a Story," Curtice positions herself as a sort of story revealing sage guiding us toward realizing that our stories are more than just our stories - they're alive internally and externally shaping who we are, how we live, how we commune with one another and the world in which we live, and they have both the power to heal and to harm.
If you're expecting a lighthearted, warm and fuzzy literary experience, then I'm guessing you've never read a Kaitlin B. Curtice book. While that may sound like a negative, it's one of many things I appreciate about Curtice's writing. Curtice is more than a storytelling cheerleader here. Curtice dives deeply into the very soul of the narratives that guide our lives to help us identify the toxic narratives hindering our lives and to replace them with narratives grounded in compassion, wholeness, and so much more.
As always, Curtis leans into her Indigenous narratives and brings forth narratives applicable across the spectrum of life. She teaches us how to begin examining our family stories, religion-influenced beliefs, and cultural myths in a way that allows us to sort of, to borrow a term, deconstruct them.
Curtis challenges us to alter our narratives and to ensure the stories that we pass down to future generations are meaningful, healthy, and breaking of negative cycles.
I didn't always "like" "Everything Is a Story." I can't help but think that's the point. If we're truly examining our stories, we're destined to find both the glorious and the godawful. While I've broken many unhealthy cycles in my life, I wouldn't even be close to truthful if I didn't acknowledge that "Everything Is a Story" challenged me, ticked me off a bit, made me squirm, and made me shift. It's that transformative shifting that is so common in Curtice's writing, shifting grounded in coming to recognize those places where we need to grow. Like that wise sage (I'll confess I originally put "wise old sage," but then it dawned on me Curtice might think I'm calling her old. Ha.), Curtice teaches, facilitates, holds space, and then seems to put forth a gentle literary smile by book's end.
"Everything Is a Story" has a meaningful forward from Simran Jeet Singh. Curtice also does something here I did in my own book (Yes, she does it better) - she weaves together contemplative poetry that amplifies her lessons and adds resonance to how these stories unfold.
For fans of Curtice and those struggling with the stories that can so often perpetuate negative cycles and personal harm, "Everything Is a Story" is a call forth to claim our stories and to reclaim the truth of who we are.
It seems almost inevitable that Curtice would author a book such as "Everything Is a Story: Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives."
In "Everything Is a Story," Curtice positions herself as a sort of story revealing sage guiding us toward realizing that our stories are more than just our stories - they're alive internally and externally shaping who we are, how we live, how we commune with one another and the world in which we live, and they have both the power to heal and to harm.
If you're expecting a lighthearted, warm and fuzzy literary experience, then I'm guessing you've never read a Kaitlin B. Curtice book. While that may sound like a negative, it's one of many things I appreciate about Curtice's writing. Curtice is more than a storytelling cheerleader here. Curtice dives deeply into the very soul of the narratives that guide our lives to help us identify the toxic narratives hindering our lives and to replace them with narratives grounded in compassion, wholeness, and so much more.
As always, Curtis leans into her Indigenous narratives and brings forth narratives applicable across the spectrum of life. She teaches us how to begin examining our family stories, religion-influenced beliefs, and cultural myths in a way that allows us to sort of, to borrow a term, deconstruct them.
Curtis challenges us to alter our narratives and to ensure the stories that we pass down to future generations are meaningful, healthy, and breaking of negative cycles.
I didn't always "like" "Everything Is a Story." I can't help but think that's the point. If we're truly examining our stories, we're destined to find both the glorious and the godawful. While I've broken many unhealthy cycles in my life, I wouldn't even be close to truthful if I didn't acknowledge that "Everything Is a Story" challenged me, ticked me off a bit, made me squirm, and made me shift. It's that transformative shifting that is so common in Curtice's writing, shifting grounded in coming to recognize those places where we need to grow. Like that wise sage (I'll confess I originally put "wise old sage," but then it dawned on me Curtice might think I'm calling her old. Ha.), Curtice teaches, facilitates, holds space, and then seems to put forth a gentle literary smile by book's end.
"Everything Is a Story" has a meaningful forward from Simran Jeet Singh. Curtice also does something here I did in my own book (Yes, she does it better) - she weaves together contemplative poetry that amplifies her lessons and adds resonance to how these stories unfold.
For fans of Curtice and those struggling with the stories that can so often perpetuate negative cycles and personal harm, "Everything Is a Story" is a call forth to claim our stories and to reclaim the truth of who we are.
Want to read
September 29, 2025KathMay
January 11, 2026
If you aren't a fan of the use of language and imagery in this book, which relies a lot on the working allegory of a tree in order to flesh out this idea of everything (all of life and all of reality) as a story, chances are you might struggle to get on its wave length. For this to work the allegory needs to have the power to carry it, and I did feel at points that it was being stretched a bit thin.
I did however find myself doing a lot of highlighting along the way, with certainly told me that I was very much i nterested in getting on its wave length.
The book starts with both a statement and a question. Curtice states that it does not matter where they begin, the fact is that somewhere a story is born. It is always born. This is how reality works, from the cosmic level to the particular shape of the stories contained within. Curtice then moves to ask, who first told you the story of yourself? Which is really where the two central interests of this book comes together. A story is born, beginning with capital R Reality. We are born into this world as part of a story already being told. Somewhere along the way we become aware of the story that we are, by nature of being born into Reality, already a part of well and which is well underway.
There is a tension that emerges in these same thoughts as well, the tension between that which tells us our story and the agency we have to revisit and reshape them. This is what sets all things in conversation, in relationship. This is also how we as humans make sense of the world- through story.
Stories take both a cyclical shape and a linear shape. One thought that I found intriguing on this front is that the central shape of the story of everything is cyclical, the linear matters in terms of the question "what cycles do I want to break." The cycles can be the space where we find transformation, or they can be the space where we find enslavement. To isolate forms of lined trajectory within that often emerges from intention.
The author also makes the observation that stories first get labels with the family system. This is where they are given shape, capturing what we might call the birth story. In terms of the analogy of the oak tree, this is where Caitlyn follows the life of this tree as a way of understanding the life of a person (or really, any story). Stories themselves "grow up." Our connection broadens. We become a part of a larger forest. We have greater measures for which to see and understand the cycles and seasons. And most importantly, as are awareness expands beyond the boundaries of the family we begin to be confronted with the question of how it is that we then have the power to shape the stories around us. This becomes our responsibility.
It also becomes the point of crisis. Because we become confronted with deep rooted questions, such as "why does it hurt so much to be human. Why do we destroy each other? And how does this reconcile with the idea that our stories reveal that which we destroy to be likewise sacred and to reveal the sacred?
How we tell the stories around us is captured in what we might call myth. Curtice wonders about the ways in which myth, by their design, disguise the sacred within our telling. They are always responsive and reflective of that which is true about reality, about the world, about ourselves, and yet they also carry with them our "making sense of the sacred." They are poperly contextualizing the mysteries of the Divine in our language, in our shared and collective experience. And always anchoring that in a cosmic view. At the same time, how we tell stories moves from the micro to the macro as well. It is shaping us from the top down, and we are shaping it from the bottom up. And it is the liminal spaces the reveal this as a sacred dance.
If all of this sounds like it needs to be rooted in something a bit more substantive, that might be right. I think there is important truth here to be sure, and I absolutely agree that narrative or story is behind how it is we know and participate in this world. That's part of what drew me to pick this one up, was a desire to really flesh that out and explore it with more intention and depth. This just felt a bit surface level to me, and even a bit too caught up with the sentimentality of its central image (for me that is). I wouldn't be surprised however if this really works for some others.
I did however find myself doing a lot of highlighting along the way, with certainly told me that I was very much i nterested in getting on its wave length.
The book starts with both a statement and a question. Curtice states that it does not matter where they begin, the fact is that somewhere a story is born. It is always born. This is how reality works, from the cosmic level to the particular shape of the stories contained within. Curtice then moves to ask, who first told you the story of yourself? Which is really where the two central interests of this book comes together. A story is born, beginning with capital R Reality. We are born into this world as part of a story already being told. Somewhere along the way we become aware of the story that we are, by nature of being born into Reality, already a part of well and which is well underway.
There is a tension that emerges in these same thoughts as well, the tension between that which tells us our story and the agency we have to revisit and reshape them. This is what sets all things in conversation, in relationship. This is also how we as humans make sense of the world- through story.
Stories take both a cyclical shape and a linear shape. One thought that I found intriguing on this front is that the central shape of the story of everything is cyclical, the linear matters in terms of the question "what cycles do I want to break." The cycles can be the space where we find transformation, or they can be the space where we find enslavement. To isolate forms of lined trajectory within that often emerges from intention.
The author also makes the observation that stories first get labels with the family system. This is where they are given shape, capturing what we might call the birth story. In terms of the analogy of the oak tree, this is where Caitlyn follows the life of this tree as a way of understanding the life of a person (or really, any story). Stories themselves "grow up." Our connection broadens. We become a part of a larger forest. We have greater measures for which to see and understand the cycles and seasons. And most importantly, as are awareness expands beyond the boundaries of the family we begin to be confronted with the question of how it is that we then have the power to shape the stories around us. This becomes our responsibility.
It also becomes the point of crisis. Because we become confronted with deep rooted questions, such as "why does it hurt so much to be human. Why do we destroy each other? And how does this reconcile with the idea that our stories reveal that which we destroy to be likewise sacred and to reveal the sacred?
How we tell the stories around us is captured in what we might call myth. Curtice wonders about the ways in which myth, by their design, disguise the sacred within our telling. They are always responsive and reflective of that which is true about reality, about the world, about ourselves, and yet they also carry with them our "making sense of the sacred." They are poperly contextualizing the mysteries of the Divine in our language, in our shared and collective experience. And always anchoring that in a cosmic view. At the same time, how we tell stories moves from the micro to the macro as well. It is shaping us from the top down, and we are shaping it from the bottom up. And it is the liminal spaces the reveal this as a sacred dance.
If all of this sounds like it needs to be rooted in something a bit more substantive, that might be right. I think there is important truth here to be sure, and I absolutely agree that narrative or story is behind how it is we know and participate in this world. That's part of what drew me to pick this one up, was a desire to really flesh that out and explore it with more intention and depth. This just felt a bit surface level to me, and even a bit too caught up with the sentimentality of its central image (for me that is). I wouldn't be surprised however if this really works for some others.
December 31, 2025
In EVERYTHING IS A STORY, Kaitlin Curtice uses an oak tree to help readers better understand storytelling: “seed (birth of a story), sprout (adolescence of a story), sapling (adulthood of a story), and last, mature tree (elderhood of a story). I conclude with a dropping seeds section (asking what the future of storytelling means for us).”
Ever one to enjoy hearing artists explore creativity, I appreciated Curtice’s perspective, informed by her faith and her Potawatomi culture. On a personal note, I was happily surprised to come across a reference to Holy Wisdom Monastery, which holds a special place in my heart for where I took a personal retreat in 2022, my first time alone for any stretch of time in months and months, as we collectively took steps towards a new normal after a worldwide pandemic.
Through these pages, Curtice explores the role storytelling can have in the world, and also how our experiences shape how we approach stories: “This is always our dilemma as storytellers–we are both experiencing the world and crafting words to describe it at the same time, because it’s how we process and understand the shape of a story.”
Far more than a book on storytelling, EVERYTHING IS A STORY also offers advice on navigating this world we are in, with its need for balance and accountability, and encouragement to continue striving, even in the face of injustice.
(Thank you to Brazos Press for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.)
Ever one to enjoy hearing artists explore creativity, I appreciated Curtice’s perspective, informed by her faith and her Potawatomi culture. On a personal note, I was happily surprised to come across a reference to Holy Wisdom Monastery, which holds a special place in my heart for where I took a personal retreat in 2022, my first time alone for any stretch of time in months and months, as we collectively took steps towards a new normal after a worldwide pandemic.
Through these pages, Curtice explores the role storytelling can have in the world, and also how our experiences shape how we approach stories: “This is always our dilemma as storytellers–we are both experiencing the world and crafting words to describe it at the same time, because it’s how we process and understand the shape of a story.”
Far more than a book on storytelling, EVERYTHING IS A STORY also offers advice on navigating this world we are in, with its need for balance and accountability, and encouragement to continue striving, even in the face of injustice.
(Thank you to Brazos Press for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.)
November 1, 2025
I appreciated Curtice's use of the constant image of oak trees to untangle and illustrate the cycles of stories. Her insights from her Native heritage as well as her experiences in evangelical spaces helped to commend her point that all great stories have similar traits and much overlap. Stories are everything, and in everything, and form all things that make us human. As our stories and our ways of seeing our our stories grow, we are both more expansive and more rooted. I loved her weaving together of several metaphors of story and then describing how each facet of a story and a storied life empowers us to keep going in healthy, more whole ways.
“Stories are the mirror; they are the portal. They teach us to be honest about what we notice around and within us. As we journey deeper, as we watch stories grow like sprouting acorns, tend to them, ask which stories are healing and which are harming, we are doing the incredibly sacred work of being human.” (28)
“Stories are the mirror; they are the portal. They teach us to be honest about what we notice around and within us. As we journey deeper, as we watch stories grow like sprouting acorns, tend to them, ask which stories are healing and which are harming, we are doing the incredibly sacred work of being human.” (28)
December 9, 2025
I appreciate Kaitlin Curtice so much and have read all of her books, have subscribed to her newsletter, listened to her on a variety of podcasts… but this newest book lost the thread for me.
When I was caught reading this by a friend, she commented that she didn’t really enjoy Kaitlin Curtice books because she mainly seems to spend a lot of time quoting others. And I felt this big time in “Everything is a Story.” The thoughts were jumbled and interspersed way too frequently with cultural references or quotes. I really struggled to connect with what I was reading or even follow the thread. It felt like a series of short blog posts clunkily pieced together.
I mostly enjoyed the poetry and still think Kaitlin Curtice is an essential voice for our time. I loved her book “Native” and would still recommend that in a heartbeat. I just don’t really get what this book was meant to be.
When I was caught reading this by a friend, she commented that she didn’t really enjoy Kaitlin Curtice books because she mainly seems to spend a lot of time quoting others. And I felt this big time in “Everything is a Story.” The thoughts were jumbled and interspersed way too frequently with cultural references or quotes. I really struggled to connect with what I was reading or even follow the thread. It felt like a series of short blog posts clunkily pieced together.
I mostly enjoyed the poetry and still think Kaitlin Curtice is an essential voice for our time. I loved her book “Native” and would still recommend that in a heartbeat. I just don’t really get what this book was meant to be.
November 6, 2025
What a book to savor and linger a bit with. Curtice weaves a beautiful, lyrical non-fiction here. Infused with story, poetry, and rituals all aimed to help the reader understand story and embody their good story. Sometimes it’s wholly gentle and other times the firm call to action that’s needed. One I’ll recommend far and wide to all folks.
January 14, 2026
Everything is a Story and this story is everything.
Between the author’s lived experiences, the simple, yet stunning tree metaphor, and some truly beautiful sacred imagination, Curtice is a prophet in the wilderness, crying “Repent! But, like, also pick up a pen.”
“They who have ears, let them hear.”
Between the author’s lived experiences, the simple, yet stunning tree metaphor, and some truly beautiful sacred imagination, Curtice is a prophet in the wilderness, crying “Repent! But, like, also pick up a pen.”
“They who have ears, let them hear.”
December 29, 2025
I love Kaitlin Curtice and her writing style. This book was no exception.
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