More Stories We Carry

I am thinking more about  how some stories have informed my own  young adult novel with a teen protagonist. My book’s about survival and does feature a dog (Call of the Wild). But there was a Chekhov story I kept going back to and re-reading all through high school. “Grief.” It is about a man who drives a horse-drawn carriage for hire in a Russian city. The man’s son has just died and all through the evening’s “cab-driving,” he tries to share his grief with passengers too caught up in their own worlds to pay any attention. Finally, the evening’s over and as the man rubs down his horse, he pours out his heart’s grief to the patiently attentive animal. It's so sad, yet beautiful. You can read the story (with the title sometimes translated as “Misery” here: http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/achekhov/bl-achek-misery.htm)

There was something in that insensitivity of the world to one person’s condition that resonated with me then and now. The deep need for connection in an insensitive, self-centered world is something I tried to bring out in my book. e.e. cummings’ poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” which I loved as a teenager, has the same theme.

My main character, Dara, has lost her mother and found a silver armlet with the power to heal. She hides her light under a bushel, so to speak, and the first ones she heals are a maimed dog and a homeless woman. When she heals the homeless woman, there are echoes of her own mother, and the world passes by without taking any notice of the miracle. Dara's plight goes under the radar of the world, and Dara must learn to exercise her own power, let that light shine for others to see.

What are the stories that continue to resonate for you and how do those stories manifest today?