Roy’s Sunday Letter for July 13, 2025

HEALING STORIES IN TROUBLED TIMES

Recently PBS and local KERA filmed an Arts & Culture series by bringing together Santa Fe high school students, from area schools. Each were asked to write about themselves or a news topic. The students then shared their writing with another student. These Santa Fe students took the risk of being known by someone unknown. Although nervous at first, the majority increased their comfort in sharing their thoughts and experiences. To invite someone outside our family and close friends is an active way of resisting withdrawal and isolation, at any age. The benefits of the exercise could broaden to seniors or a new moms group. If high schoolers can take the risk of letting others inside who they are, we readers of the SL can take our own risk. Reference The Power of Stories in a Divided World, 6/30/25 – 7:58.

• Women have telling stories from around the village fire to where we are in the digital are. There are regional women storytellers as well as national women as J.R. Rowling, Anne Lamott, and Natalie Goldberg. In every age and in every culture, there are “women who tell our story.” An initial search will identify 20+women storytellers and their contributions in print, film, art, or podcasts.

Mark Yaconelli is the author of “Between the Listening and the Telling; How Stories Can Save Us.” Based in Austin, his practice focuses on mass shootings and natural disasters such as now in Central Texas. He and his team bring those who witnessed, those who survived and family members of those who did not. He and his team coach these persons and families on telling their personal or family story. Depending on the event the telling of their story may be a local school, church, or outdoors in a park. Both the Telling and the Listening important.

• What is it that draws your attention to a story? Characters, plot line, or perhaps the setting. What then keeps you turning the pages, moving to the next canvas, or waiting to see how the movie follows the book? What would be your favorite story? Does your story change if cold and snowy, hot and dry, rainy season? We laugh, cry, feel emptied or fulfilled by some’s story, as they are by ours. We are all storytellers, some well-practiced, others just beginning. The telling and the listening of the Texas floods will continue and continue and continue.

Beth will move from Senior Editor to Writer and Publisher of the Sunday Letter for Sunday August 3. The style, of writing and content will be hers. Beth will add fresh energy and point of view her own.

Roy, coming to storytelling late in life.