I like stories. Always have. “Like” might be an understatement. They’re the lens I use to understand the world. Ever since I was a toddler watching all three Star Wars movies in a day because my mom was on bed rest and what else was she supposed to do with me, I’ve loved them. They were explorations of people and situations I might meet (or not), heroes I could examine and emulate, reminders that no matter how dark things got, there was always hope.
I love ancient stories that people with lives I can never hope to understand told. I love retellings of those stories that take them apart and put them back together in ways that challenge my assumptions. I love stories about worlds entirely different from the one I know, and stories of humanity that continues no matter what planet they’re set on. I love stories that force me to imagine what it is to be someone else, someone whose appearance or struggles or beliefs are alien to me.
I love telling those stories, too. I love pacing and thinking and pacing and thinking and wondering what it is to be a sentient robot, or one of the Fair Folk, or a dragon. I love discovering the personhood in those characters, even when they do things I would never do.
One of my favorite things about people is that every single one is different. No two people experience life in precisely the same way. No two people make precisely the same choices. No one sees the world exactly as anyone else, and yet we constantly find common ground and ways to connect. They might be fumbling, grasping connections, full of misunderstandings and unintentional hurts, but they’re connections all the same.
Stories are a lot of things to me. One of them is a chance to celebrate all the ways we are different, and all the ways we are the same.
Dragon Harris 