The Healing Power of Story
by Seth Roskos

“The pen is mightier than the sword,” or so said The Bard. Yes, that one. The first book I wrote was in the fourth grade. It was about my pet cat. Her name was Velvet. And, in my book at least, she was a total bad-ass. She discovered an underground passageway beneath an abandoned house and battled some goblins. I bound the book and drew a picture of Velvet on the front. She was a level nine wizard. Thus began a life of fiction or, as some like to say, “a fiction of life.”

As for the pen and sword analogy, it seems to me that The Bard was remiss, or perhaps he merely lived in ignorant times. For as dangerous as the pen can be, I’ve found it to be more of a healer than a weapon. There is nothing that raises one’s spirits and improves one’s health more than a good story well told. I must admit I was not the happiest of children. But my parents read to me every day, and before long I was doing it myself. To this day I can’t shut my eyes on the pillow in the dead of night without at least checking my latest texts. And usually a page or two on my Kindle.

Yes, I’m a techno-file, which means I know what QWERTY stands for, or at least did at one time. I feel safe in exposing myself because this article will likely never touch paper. You are probably reading it on a smartphone at this very moment. Hopefully, just before bed. If I’ve done my job you will wake with scratches on your biceps and a hairball in your throat. At which point you can grab your device of choice and give it another read. Luddites be damned. They’ll bring us all down with them.

When I say I was an unhappy boy I mean it in the most clinical of manners. Depression. My darkest days contained no story at all; I’d go weeks without reading a single word. I think it was Anne Lamott who extolled the value of writing for mental health, a few bad examples notwithstanding (think Hemingway, Fitzgerald, et al). After my kitty adventure, it was onward and upward. I wrote a paper in high school on the psychoanalysis of literature. My instructor marked one section “dubious” when I suggested that Laura Ingles Wilder had violent tendencies. I’m still waiting for them to unearth the bodies in her backyard. Yet her yarns of the Northwestern Plains saw my family through many a multi-day journey, our destination Orlando, Yellowstone or far off Chincoteague. When we weren’t lamenting the diminutive nature of our home, we were scratching around the back of a musty wardrobe, the prose reflecting off the windows of a pale blue minivan, occasionally pervading the headphones of my Sony Walkman.

Years later, Brett Easton Ellis (American Psycho, Less Than Zero) would applaud the virtues of Phil Collins and Huey Lewis, a topic I enjoyed immensely due in large part to those long rides with Aslan (the lion from C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia) and Mrs. Wilder. Mr. Ellis is another example of the salutary effect of the written word on the mental state. These days I read and write mostly for its therapeutic value, therapy being so expensive and what with the paltry sums afforded most writers in our time.

I recently sent an email to Rivka Gilchen, whose novel Atmospheric Disturbances featured a narrator most readers deem unstable. My email had the subject line “love your work” and the following body: “You are totally batshit crazy. Not in a bad way. I would really like to meet you. I don’t think I ever will. But if I do, I’ll definitely mention this email. Not that you’ll have read it.” Thinking back, it appears my parents equipped me well to roll with the punches often thrown by this life, not the least of this equipment being the power of story. And Velvet, too.

Seth’s story “Don't Be Stupid” appears in Dammit, I Learned a Lot from That Son-of-a-Gun. Click here to learn more about him.