Literary Birthday – 17 September – Brian Andreas

Happy Birthday, Brian Andreas, born on 17 September 1956.

Brian Andreas On Telling Stories

1. You’re telling the story, so make it personal.
2. I like art that admits to being a part of life. The moments I have with my friends and family are really all that I need. I like to take them and weave them into stories that are filled with laughter and music and lunacy. And they are mostly true, but I’m not telling which parts…
3. Why should you know how to tell stories in the first place?  It’s simple. Because stories will forever & ever trump facts.
4. With any story, treat me like a friend. I’ll forgive a lot if you treat me like someone who matters. Then whatever story you tell me is one I want to hear. Another way of saying this is: it’s not about you. It’s about me. Telling a story is a very intimate act. You are asking me to listen with my child self. The self that wants to imagine & play along with you.
5. A good manifesto runs circles around a mission statement. That’s because a manifesto is bold & stupidly optimistic. A manifesto is about making the world a better place, righting wrongs, restoring justice when things get too out of balance (as things usually do). A manifesto, unlike a mission statement, isn’t about making a deal with the possible. It’s about imagining the impossible & then setting to work.

StoryPeople Quotes

1. He loved her for almost everything she was & she decided that was enough to let him stay for a very long time.
2. She always camouflaged herself as a crowd. I’ve never been lonely, she said, but sometimes it’s hard to think above the noise.
3. Are you a princess? I said & she said I’m much more than a princess, but you don’t have a name for it yet here on earth.
4. In the end, I think that I will like that we were sitting on the bed, talking & wondering where the time had gone.
5. ‘I was waiting for the longest time,’ she said. ‘I thought you forgot.’ ‘It is hard to forget,’ I said, ‘when there is such an empty space when you are gone.’
6. The first time her laughter unfurled its wings in the wind, we knew that the world would never be the same.
7. We lay there and looked up at the night sky and she told me about stars called blue squares and red swirls and I told her I’d never heard of them. Of course not, she said, the really important stuff they never tell you. You have to imagine it on your own.
8. Time stands still best in moments that look suspiciously like ordinary life.
9. I wish you could have been there for the sun & the rain & the long, hard hills. For the sound of a thousand conversations scattered along the road. For the people laughing & crying & remembering at the end. But, mainly, I wish you could have been there.

10. More Fair:

They left me
with your shadow,
saying things like
Life is not fair

& I believed them
for a long time.

But today,
I remembered
the way you laughed
& the heat
of your hand
in mine

& I knew that
life is more fair
than we can
ever imagine
if
we are there to live it

Brian Andreas is an American writer, painter, sculptor, and publisher known for an ongoing series of works – Story People. Andreas set out to ask people to share stories about their experience of being alive, using the Internet of the early 1990s. He is known for his simple short stories of 50 to 100 words. The Storypeople collection incorporates drawings and writings; colour prints of his drawings and short stories; and mixed-media sculptures  In 2012 he founded tumblecloud.com, a collaborative digital storytelling platform. Andreas’ first book of hand-stamped stories and black-and-white line drawings, entitled Mostly True, was first published in August, 1993. Still Mostly True followed in May 1994, and to date Andreas’ publications include a total of 19 books.

Source for Image: Michelle Waters, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BA001small.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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