Stories: A Story

Abstract

When the history of your people comes from faded and partial records, how do you fill in the gaps? When so much of modern media depicts the lives of your ancestors only in terms of their trauma and not of their triumphs, how do you come to terms with that history? Do you imagine the full lives of the people who are just names, or numbers, or merely qualifiers on ownership rosters and inventories? And do you color in the lines by soaking in the stories of people who might have had the same questions as you? When what can be called historical fiction might be the best idea you have of where you come from, you take what you know and turn it into something that you hope those who came before you could only imagine in their wildest dreams. Stories: A Story is just that. More than just stories of trauma passed through generations, but the purity and simplicity of human love, hope, and joy found in the connective links of family passing all that they had, their stories, down from one era to the next, uniting each generation to those before and after. Following five fictionalized characters based on real, sparsely recorded people, we get a glimpse of what their lives may have consisted of outside the hardships they endured, and that instilled in them a love for what truly matters; connection to who they are, where they come from, where they are going, and the ones who will get them there.