BC author explores the past, present, and future of stories and storytelling in new book
Posted March 26, 2023 10:16 am.
Last Updated April 25, 2023 12:45 pm.
J. Edward Chamberlin is fascinated by stories and storytellers. That fascination has taken him around the world – from the Indigenous peoples of North America to the hunters of the Kalahari and the herders of Mongolia. His latest book, Story Lines: How Words Shape Our World, is a celebration of stories and the people who tell them. Born in Vancouver, Chamberlin now lives in Halfmoon Bay, B.C.
“Stories shape our lives. It’s as simple as that,” he explained. “We learn about things through stories, we tell you about things that have happened to us in stories.”
Story Lines is not only about the enduring power of stories, but how much Chamberlin feels he still needs to learn about them.
“I’ve been working with stories for 40 years,” he said. “I taught literature at the University of Toronto, those are stories and songs; I also worked very closely with Indigenous people on land claims, and those are stories and songs. And I realized all too recently that I didn’t really know a lot about how stories work, what makes them work, what gives them the extraordinary power they have over us and with us, and what they do to help us. So, that’s where the book emerged from.”
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One of the things Chamberlin finds fascinating about stories and songs is their inherent contradictions, “like how sad songs can make us happy, how beautiful music can make us cry.” Or how the world can be both round and flat at the same time.
As technology continues to evolve, Chamberlin says storytelling will evolve with it. It always has – from the printing press to film, radio and television, and now artificial intelligence.
“It will evolve the same way storytelling evolved when books came in,” he said. “One of the stories I tell [in the book] is years ago, I went to the 650th anniversary of Charles University in Prague. It was founded way back [in 1348] and within, certainly, 50 to 75 years, it had 25,000 students who would go to Prague to sit with the teachers and listen to them. About two centuries later, the number dropped from 25,000 to 5,000. Why did it drop? Because of books. And I think that kind of change is coming to us in all sorts of quite wonderful ways that we’re just getting used to, the same way people took a while to get used to books and used to surrendering themselves to a story in a book the way they would surrender themselves to a storyteller.”
“So, I think we’re on an exciting path and I certainly don’t know how that’s going to play out. But I think, at the heart of it, will be what stories can do and what they do, and I think they’re doing that, for many of us, with the new technology. Witness you and I talking right now [over Zoom.]”
