If there is a storyteller in my life who taught me to love every part of creating stories, that person is my father.
My father would make up stories for me all the time, and would frequently pull me in to help him create the story (though I would have been perfectly happy listening to him simply tell me a story). He would make up stories based on things we had seen or talked about. Eventually, I started craving repetition: not the same premise told a dozen different ways, but one story, told in a certain way.
I had two favorites. One was a story about a baby bird who falls out of his nest while his mother is out finding worms to eat, who then sets out looking to find his way back to his tree. The other was a story about a raccoon in the US and a Koala in Australia who become pen pals through messages in bottles thrown into the ocean.
My favorite game was also a game we called Friends, which was essentially a game of pretend. We would pretend to be somewhere else, and pretend to explore that place or play there. I have one particular memory of playing Friends at the Beach when we were at the top of a mountain. Another parent may have said, Why don’t we play Friends on the Mountain, so that we can enjoy being here? But not my father.
In fact, my father was frequently attempting to engage my imagination in ways that sometimes seemed to distress others. For instance, when someone would read me a fairy tale or show me a Disney movie, and they would tell me at the end that “They all lived happily ever after,” my father would point out, “No they didn’t. What about the stepmother?”
I don’t recall whether he did this with me as well, but when my sisters were young, he frequently told them variations on fairy tales, perhaps becoming the catalyst that kicked off my love of adaptations of fairy tales and folklore. I have a particular memory of his version of Cinderella, in which the stepsisters and stepmother are kindhearted and Cinderella is the antagonist. This is perhaps one of the reasons why I so enjoyed Alex Flinn’s Bewitched, which told that same story, but making the stepsister far less altruistic and more human, crumbling under her step-sister’s self-victimization and manipulations.
I didn’t recognize my father’s skill in storytelling until, one day when my father was gone on a business trip, my mother offered to read me a book and I asked her to make up a story instead. I awaited her story with bated breath―and was underwhelmed when she told me about an episode where a girl watches a baby’s diaper being changed. The twist―“That girl was me!,” ended my mother―did nothing to improve my opinion of the story. I asked her to tell me stories two or three more times afterwards, but it was always the same: an episode out of her own childhood with no arc, and neither a beginning nor an end. (Essentially, things happened, but there was no story there. Funnily, my mother was capable of telling engaging stories out of her childhood, but only if it happened naturally over the course of a conversation and she couldn’t seem to call up these stories simply in the name of a story.) I learned to ask my mother to read to me and to ask my father for the made up stories.
Eventually, there came a time when I tired of the same repeated stories and asked for new ones. My father would tell me that he would tell part of a story if I would continue it for a time, then he would pick it up again. I remember a story we were making up this way, night after night, until one night I was making up a scene about a few of the characters (various animals) running up a downwards escalator in a mall at Christmastime when I realized that I could no longer remember how the story had begun. I also realized that I had no sense of the story trajectory any longer. Immediately, the whole venture seemed pointless. The following night, I asked my father for the story about the raccoon and the koala. I began to resist attempts by my father to draw me into storytelling: I would think of the animals running up the downwards escalator and think of the pointlessness of it all, and didn’t want to repeat that experience.
After my sisters were born, storytelling between my father and myself became a rarity. As I grew older and learned to read, I discovered a whole world of stories, and the father-daughter tradition of storytelling died out altogether.