Embodied Storycraft

Crows remember faces. Characters are how we meet the people stories carry.

They invite us into lives beyond our own, asking for attention before interpretation.

Stories carry people farther than they can travel themselves.

Sometimes they are the first place we encounter cultures, disabilities, relationships, religions, histories, and ways of living we may never otherwise know.

Representation enlarges our world.

But meeting someone is only the beginning.

We can flatten fictional people just as easily as real ones. Reducing them to identities, archetypes, symbols, or plot devices instead of encountering them as whole people.

Embodied Storycraft asks how we resist that flattening.

Meaning happens in specificity.

Attention is built through traces.

The things people carry.

The way they move.

What they notice.

What they avoid.

How relationships change over time.

The world becomes larger when we stop looking for categories and start looking for people.

Learning to pay careful attention to fictional lives changes the way we encounter real ones. It teaches us to resist inherited assumptions, remain curious, and allow another person’s interiority to emerge before deciding who they are.

High-control religion taught us to pay attention in order to change people. Embodied Storycraft asks what becomes possible when we pay attention in order to know them.

Where My Attention Led

When I think about Embodied Storycraft as a project, it’s funny to consider because this is simply how I learned to survive leaving evangelicalism. We were taught against thinking for ourselves and to have empathy only as far as it served a greater purpose. The result was a worldview that struggled to expand beyond its own boundaries. Even after leaving, that flattening persisted.
Over the last decade, I have been refining a different practice. A practice of humanization. Dignity through consideration. A practice of attention, choosing to resist the flattening that occurs because I am outside of something, a culture, a story, a community, a world.

I realized that meaning happens in specificity.

This is a practice of attention based on traces. Traces left in how a character behaves, what objects they carry, what throw away lines they say. When stories are intentionally built, characters can be expansive. So much so that with time and careful attention, they can start to form into a felt human being. I seek to find interiorities because it is a respect for people I may never get the chance to know.

Representation and attention to detail demystified people enough that conversation became possible. And not conversation like I was taught. Not apologetics. Not missionary hooks or evangelism. Real conversations about who they are, what they want, why they are the person that they are. And the world expanded into something really hopeful and wonderful. The world around us is full of such delightful difference, far more colorful and brilliant than we were ever allowed to see before.

Enter The Curation