The mystery and drama of the everyday extraordinary

Narrative helps us have eyes to see each other.

I love how author Alix Ohlin, in this post about her collection of short stories Signs and Wonders, explains how poignant and fitting a short story can be as a means of exploring our everyday lives and connecting to people.

In the stories I write, the people tend to be flawed, to make or have made mistakes -- because I think that's true of most of us. Nobody's perfect all the time, after all, and if they were, we'd have no need to tell stories about them. Real people struggle to connect with the people around them, even those they love the most.

And that's my main theme as a writer: the necessity and difficulty of the connections between people, how they sometimes break, how they can be sustained. I'm fascinated by the problems we have relating to other people -- their agendas, their emotional histories, their inner lives -- even as we crave intimacy with them.

There's something about a short story that is perfectly suited to exploring the mystery and drama of what we call, misleadingly I think, "ordinary life." (Because nobody's life is ordinary when you look at it closely.) In a short story, you don't usually cover a massive span of time or multiple generations of a family, say, the way a novel does. You can, however, do justice to the small moments that somehow become turning points in people's lives.

Our creative geniuses are looking for stories to come out of the fabric of our church. I hope this sets a few minds humming. We can use story, our stories, our creative stories, to connect to the real, raw, everyday extraordinary, to tell the greater Story.