Nothing is more delicious than a chance to visit with Jim and Randy Weiss at their beautiful home. On a recent visit, I joined Jim in his studio to record two podcasts on storytelling and the arts. Anyone who’s heard his magnificent CDs, or attended his workshops knows what magic he creates through his gift for telling stories. Plus, he puts the starting point at a place all parents know well: reading aloud. “Reading aloud and just being comfortable telling stories in your own words is a vital part of development.”

The key word here, for me, is “development.” Story-telling does develop over time—in this case, the lifetime of your child. And the meanings of the stories, the fruit they bear, cannot be known until a child grows up and leads his or her own adult life.

I was blessed with a daddy who loved to tell stories, although I didn’t always like his topics: many were stories of the Depression, which didn’t strike me as very entertaining back then. (What a treasure they are now.) He also liked to talk about his time in the Army during WWII. (That also didn’t strike me as very interesting as a child, but I cling to every morsel I can remember of them now.) The best stories were of his own childhood in a coal-mining town in West Virginia. He painted vivid pictures of his relatives and the townspeople, as much by what he skillfully let dangle as by what he said in detail.

Without question, my sense of heritage and identity was shaped by these stories. No set of documents or photographs could be more vivid than these stories. Or, as Jim Weiss said, such stories are “the way a family or an entire culture hands down the things it truly believes.” These stories are what Weiss calls a “bonding tool.” And in an age when families are torn into so many separate directions, families have to fight against so many influences antithetical to building a strong family. The power of story-telling can be a glue that works in surprising ways.

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