This is a form of note-taking to bookmark tidbits that particularly spoke to me from the book, Your Life as Story, by Tristine Rainer.

We are no longer a tribal people, but we are entering the age of the global village. We now have a technological campfire, the Internet, that allows us to find other members of our tribe — people who share our general mythology about life. We could use our technology to enrich our collecctive wisdom through autobiographic storytelling — but we have lost the skill.

The lie is not in the new popular forms: factions, docudramas, nonfiction novels, personal journalism, dramatic nonfiction, the literature of fact, creative nonfiction, autobiographical novels, nonfiction narrative, and literary memoir. Mixing of fiction and nonfiction has been enjoyed by other cultures for centuries. The art of the earliest Japanese diaries lay in blending the author’s experience with imagination so the reader could not tell where fact ended and fiction began. The lie in our culture is in not recognizing that we are now sophisticated enough to enjoy this kind of writing and entertainment, and that this is what we are doing.

For the curious who might want to see how I’ve created my mini-course — or who just want to see how obsessive and compulsive I can be — you can peruse it at your leisure. Incidentally, I wrote this post as a means of postponing the first exercise in her book; I’m wrung out from last night. Tomorrow!