Stories
How many stories does one life contain?
A story is a chunk of life we break off to see more clearly. What are my stories? I have wandered, built buildings, taught young to read and old to design. I have been a teacher, builder/ architect, elected official, Quaker, printmaker, father, grandfather, husband, and son. and now I edit and carve. Each of those roles has stories of joy, loss, and challenge. My memories, self-awareness, and relationships all shape the stories I have chosen to define my life. Now I am trying to help others see the stories that created the order of their lives.
We Choose Them.
The key is that we get to choose our stories. It can be a good story or a bad story; but we choose them. One Christmas, our home burned down - bad story; but we rebuilt a much nicer home - good story. Which do I prefer? The loss? Or the loss that led to a huge gain? That is a no-brainer, but how often do we let the bad story dominate? How often does the one failure cancel all of the non-failures? This is why we like resilience. It nudges us in the right direction.
The Stories Balance the Crazies
Right now the world seems crazy. The pandemic, political, and environmental threats have stirred that “crazy”. When the stress exceeds our ability to cope, it can change us permanently. The stories we choose to navigate through this “crazy” can help us find the resilience we need to get through.
The people at Regent Street Press know that resilience beats the “Crazy”. (“Crazy is shorthand for trauma, violence and stress.) Let us introduce you to good stories and encourage you to write your own.
From Regent Street Press
Our first book, The Rage, is an adventure tale decrying the limitations and impacts of violence, but it is also a careful description of different stages of trauma. Young Trib has been training all of her life to fight, and she is effective and ruthless in her first combat. But she recognizes that fighting rarely resolves anything. Also the traumatic costs of fighting are huge. She struggles to resolve her fighting instincts with her new found feelings.
There are other books coming Including Cody Seltzer and the Creeping Shadows which is a Middle Grade urban mystery and Broader Standards which is a compilation of short essays following a feminist perspective as it evolved through 58 years of “normal” living.
There are also shorter stories available written by our readers. At some point the writer must write the story down.
—Wick