I’ve always enjoyed making things. A friend once introduced me to a retired Wycliffe missionary who taught me to weave and allowed me to borrow a small four-shaft table loom. I didn’t weave again for years. Then in 2015 I did a special project as part of ethnographic research in the Solomon Islands: the banana-fiber…
Stories were an integral part of my childhood. Both of my parents were talented storytellers with no shortage of interesting material: a childhood in pre-war Germany, life through WWII and immigration to Canada. Their stories were often highly entertaining, featuring family characters, historical events and important life lessons. Thanks to their diligence as raconteurs of…
This gentle, informative children’s picture book is based on the true story of the time author David Robertson and his father returned to the trapline of his father’s youth. In this fictionalized version, a young boy and his moshom – his grandfather – fly to northern Canada. The boy is excited because they are going…
“One of my lifelong dreams is to visit the Holy Land!” My wife Karen and I often hear those words when people learn that we lead guided group tours to Israel. For most individuals a visit will be a once in a lifetime experience, and many approach such a trip with a singular purpose in…
I was reading a magazine recently, and the phrase narrative medicine caught my eye. That’s not quite the right expression. “Eye-catching” sounds blinding. This phrase caught me like a burr, a seed pod that turns up on socks after hiking. It scratched at me and travelled with me. I turned it over in my mind,…
The endless prairie all around is so bereft of people and buildings today that coming up on St. Stephenie Scandinavian Church from any direction is a resounding joy, even though the old church is but a shell of its former self. It’s hard to imagine the neighborhood teeming with Danes and Bohemians and Virginians, a Great Plains melting pot, each family – eleventy-seven kids too – trying to make a go of it on 80 acres.
I was in my early teens during the years of World War II, 1940-1945, having been born in 1930. Though those events took place more than half a century ago, I remember some details clearly.
One cold and wintry prairie night, a lone motorist had the bad fortune of a flat tire and, to his dismay, discovered that he had no jack or tools to install his spare. The cold and bitter wind removed all possibility of spending the night in the car.
TOWARD THE END OF The Two Towers, by J.R.R. Tolkien, Frodo and Sam, on their way to destroy the Ring, take a rest “in a dark crevice between two great piers of rock” on the stairs of Cirith Ungol. As they rest, Sam gets to wondering: “‘I wonder what sort of tale we’ve fallen into?’”
In our time of overwhelming media input, it’s easy to get confused about love. C.S. Lewis bemoaned the deficiencies of the English language with it’s single word for love, whereas the Greek language offers four separate words! For this reason I am very grateful for Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Set in post-revolutionary France, this story focuses on the tragic and beautiful life of Jean Valjean who fleshes out a picture of sacrificial and responsive love.
“In the richly imaginative world of this story, a tree is lonely and a girl needs a cool, quiet place to read. These simple but universal longings drive the narrative, which is enriched by its credible dialogue and plucky protagonist.” – comment by judge Angela Reitsma-Bick
Leading researchers can often give mind-expanding talks and tell their scientific stories clearly and precisely, pointing to the wide-ranging implications of their work. Younger scientists and students, while doing good work, tend to demonstrate less storytelling skill.
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