i come from a long line of storytellers

 i come from a long line of storytellers. our history has been passed down through family tales, accounts recalled from a relative, with a frequent aside added, like meat to the skeleton, to explain what the original may have lost. Frequently, little was lost because of the necessity to store it mentally. When one is repressed by a foreign occupier, that foreign censor, who sees his own culture as superior, may attempt to obliterate any hint of color, of personality, to the subject's speech, including an ancient language predating their own.

This is what happened to my people. Written histories were destroyed, burned. Oral histories, along with their accompanying stories, survived. And thrived. And those stories passed down one to another, relative to relative, until this day. 

In the company of a great uncle, a seanchaí, I drank in the stories, made them a picture memory, a word memory, and a written memory. His body lies buried in a cemetery now...but the storyteller's tales, those remains linger in my mind. 

it is why my own tales tend to echo an oral storyteller, and i may actually reject what fifth grade grammar asserts is kosher. I cannot make a sacrifice on the altar of that drivel, because storytelling cannot be reduced to what may have been grammatically pure to the elementary student, or his...or her...teacher.

if the story cannot be read aloud in a way that, combined with a good imagination, paints a picture within the reader's mind, then it cannot be called a story in the sense of one told by a storyteller. While the written word- that product from our time- may vary greatly in form- there is still a connection worldwide to the basic storyteller's story, and I intend to continue to use this style to take the reader to another place, another story.