On third Wednesdays we publish Community Voices: Changemaking essays, articles, micro-flash, poetry, songs, monologues, plays and more from TLArtists drawn from community submissions. Maybe next time it will be yours?
We invite comments, questions, conversations and restacks!
I have been a dedicated fiction reader all my life. To me a story is a flower which blossoms and unfolds its petals in the readers’ minds and hearts. This fascination with stories and literature led me to learn about the ways stories elicit readers’ emotional and imaginative responses. It turns out that reading a good story is more than entertainment pure and simple.
Stories are a universal and cross-cultural phenomenon among humans: we tell, listen, read and write them in order to entertain, instruct, create community, instill values and ideals, preserve memory and events from the passage of time.
In indigenous and rural cultures these functions of stories are well known and cherished. But stories are everywhere, also in our urban societies. In fact, it is an in-built feature of us humans to be storytelling creatures.
According to literary scholar Patrick Colm Hogan, stories are based on “narrative universals”, basic narrative structures which are connected to the way we conceive our most common emotions of happiness, fear, anger, and so on. This means that across the world we humans tell only a limited set of stories in many different ways and that all of them are related to our way of expressing emotions and of picturing the situations which provoke them. In other words, stories and emotions are closely linked.
Moreover, recent studies in the psychology of fiction offer many pleasant surprises to passionate readers.
According to psychologist of fiction Keith Oatley, reading a story enhances our empathy, social intelligence and educates our emotions. This means that a story can teach us something very valuable while entertaining us.
Mythologist Joseph Campbell devoted his life to the study of the patterns of world mythologies and came to the conclusion that all stories are based on the “hero mono-myth”, a basic structure of narrative events whose elements the storyteller can vary or repeat at will. Maureen Murdock extended Joseph Campbell 's model into a Heroine's Journey suitable for the psychological life of women.
However you are inclined to think about the narrative elements and arc of a story, by extension, reading or listening to a story is a way of living a mythical adventure, whereby we are able to experience new and unusual events and situations: we live one thousand lives in one and, by so doing, we enlarge our world. It is no surprise, then, that reading can both heal and nurture our sensibility.
As fiction writer Richard Ford said, “if loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure”.
Reading or listening to a story is the passageway to another dimension, where we may find food for our minds, fuel for our souls, and a multi-coloured sky for our spirits. The fact is that a story is a portal, a gate whereby we travel and meet unusual, sometimes strange, sometimes outright numinous characters and we take on their lives, we enter their skins by a most surprising osmotic process. It is as if a permeable membrane were allowing the communication between the story dimension and a hidden part of ourselves, where our forgotten dreams, memories, longings, and hopes dwell.
And this is not all. Our bodies are affected too. We are embodied readers, and paying attention to the way our body reacts and is a site of emotions – while reading a story – will teach us how to be present fully, in body, mind and heart.
For all these reasons, reading fiction is truly beneficial and can make a huge difference on the quality of our lives in the long run. If we lose our stories, we are left impoverished. Stories are the way we make sense of and re-create our world and ourselves.
According to psychologist Jerome Bruner, we think in stories: even when we think we are just telling facts, we are putting together a basic story from our own specific and unique perspective.
Another reason why we value stories is that we need beauty in our lives. Beauty and good stories expressing it are not a luxury. It is unfortunate that in our modern societies we often think we cannot afford the time or the ease of beauty and art.
Stories are not for children only, but for the child-like, those who can preserve their sense of wonder and curiosity for life. When a story unfolds in us, through reading, listening, writing, or telling, something miraculous happens: the story envelops us, helping us become sensitive towards our inner world and our surroundings too. In time we may hope to release what we have been given through story in original and positive ways.
When we listen to or read a story, we are also imaging its elements in our inner space. This cannot happen when we watch a movie or a play, because the setting, situations and characters have already taken on specific features. In reading and listening, instead, we have to imagine as we go along, as the story unfolds: this is a world-making activity. Not two readers imagine the same character or fictional place in the same way.
This is a fundamental difference between fiction and visual storytelling. The former enhances your imaginative faculties and freedom, while the latter is more pre-determined. When we enjoy a story we can switch on all of our senses and picture a whole world in a very personal way. Because of this, in my experience nothing beats the pleasures and gains of reading fiction.
Paradoxically, the experience of losing one’s identity, even if only for a while, and taking on a fictional character’s life, is an excellent way to improve our ability to envision new possibilities and think in a divergent way. Good stories can lead to personal wellbeing and enlightenment, as in the case of the ancient tradition of Zen stories.
When I look back, I remember long rainy afternoons in the company of my best-loved stories, whose atmosphere still lingers in my mind. Many stories have sparked my imagination and have uplifted me. Giving oneself or another the gift of a story is a kind act, like giving a flower. Only, the beauty of a story is not of the fading kind. It branches off and spreads throughout our whole being.
Francesca Aniballi received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Glasgow and a MSc in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh. She is a creative practitioner with professional qualifications in expressive arts therapies, creativity and writing based in Italy.
You can visit her website at https:// www.blueplanetvision.com, and read some of her stories, poems and reflections at https://www.francescaaniballi.substack.com.
TLA-Focused Calls for Submission
Our good friends from Text Power Telling Magazine are accepting submissions for a special Pride Issue to be released June 2025. The call ends on Sun, Apr 20, 2025 11:59 PM.
TPT Magazine’s mission is to create a supportive and healing community for survivors to use their writing, art, and creativity to take back power from sexual trauma. We seek work across the full spectrum of human experience, including amplifying stories of the most marginalized artists. For this issue we are seeking work by survivors who identify as LGBQT+. Follow this link to review our submission guidelines and submit your work: https://www.textpowertelling.org/about-magazine
Growing Together, Apart: TLAN online events & Classes happening in May
You can find all classes, free community events, and our annual conference here. Scholarships are available.
Storytelling and the Body // with Danielle Bainbridge, Jane Hseu, & Kimberly Gomes
begins 06 May 2025 • 4 week online personal growth course
begins 07 May 2025 • 3 week online professional growth course
Revisioning Motherhood: Writing a new Story of (and for) Mothers// with Amanda Lacson
10 May 2025 2:00 PM • 3 hour online personal growth workshop
Transformative Language Arts Network Community Circles
18 May 2025 5:00 PM • 90 minute online free community gathering