An Experiment in Storytelling
Recently, a question has become lodged in my head: What would the result be if I mailed a small digital recorder to a friend, asked him to tell a story, and then mail it onwards to a friend or family member, etc. until the recorder filled up or someone didn’t feel like doing it? The cast of storytellers would (hopefully) be strangers to all except the people immediately before and after them in the chain, but yet they’d be very intimately and unknowingly connected, at least on a cosmic scale. I have a hunch that, reviewed in their totality, these disparate stories of half-strangers might have more of a coherence than blind randomness. Or so I’d like to believe.
So I bought a cheap digital recorder and wrote a letter to whomever receives the package in the future.
Dear Friend,
What you’ve received, and what you now hold in your hands, is an experiment.
The purpose of this experiment is to explore the thread that weaves through all our lives. This package is like a glass bottle, sealed with a message inside, and thrown into the ocean current of my life to find distant islands. When the ocean current brings it back to me, having washed up on islands I cannot imagine, will we learn anything about the map of the world in which we exist?
In this envelope, you will find a recorder. I ask you to think of a story and tell it to me. The story can be biographical from your own past, or it can be a dream of your future. It can be a regret or a near miss. It can be an odd thing told to you by a stranger at a wedding, or a bizarre experience you cannot explain. It can be short, or it can be long. The only condition is that it is True. I promise True stories are easier to tell than fake ones, but remember, the best fiction can still be True.
I know it may be awkward to talk to a recorder, so I encourage you to brew a cup of tea or pour a glass of wine, wait for everyone in your house to go to bed, and talk without thinking. Don’t worry about editing or restarting — embrace the silence, stutters, and mistakes.
Please start your story with your name, the date, and where you are located when you make the recording.
After you have recorded your story, think of someone in your life – maybe a friend you have not spoken to in a while, or a family member who lives in a distant state. I encourage you to write a letter to the person you chose and place it in one of the small white envelopes I included in the package.
Then, write your name and email (or physical address) on the list I’ve provided so I can share with you the finished project.
Finally, place it all back in the manila envelope and take it to the post office, where you can fit it into a flat rate envelope and send it to the person of your choice. I do not want money to inhibit this experiment, so if text me at xxxx, I will send you $10 via Venmo or Paypal to cover the cost of shipping – no questions asked.
If the recorder does not have any memory remaining, or if it isn’t working, or if you can’t think of anyone to send this to, or you just don’t want to participate, please return it to me. My address is below.
I can never thank you enough for participating in my little experiment. One day I hope to meet you and repay you for taking the time to do this.
I recorded the first story last night, and admittedly, it wasn’t much of a story, but more like a fragment of a memory. Maybe that’s what I hope to accomplish with this experiment: maybe these not-so-strangers, by telling their own stories or memories, can give closure to my own fragment. But of course maybe all these meta-literary hopes are vacuous and rather banal; in that case I’ll at least have some interesting stories and hopefully a cool map of where the recorder has traveled.
How will people react when they receive this package? How would I react were I to receive this, unsolicited, in the mail? It puts me in mind of the old quote from Schopenhauer:
To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.
I hope when people receive this little experiment, they are excited and curious.
All that remains now is to choose my first guinea pig and mail it to him — to cast my message in a bottle into the ocean’s current and see where it goes.