The Strand Magazine: Mary Logue

Article by Mary Logue, author of The Streel

From “the reigning royalty of Minnesota murder mysteries” (The Rake) comes a striking new heroine: a young Irish immigrant caught up in a deadly plot in nineteenth-century DeadwoodWe are all storytellers.  We live in a sea of stories—gossip, news articles, anecdotes, parables, jokes, fairy tales, and, of course, books.   Having published many books and hoping to write a few more, I have been studying what role storytelling plays in our lives.  Also, teaching writing to others has pushed me to try to understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it by telling stories.

What I’ve found has been exciting, astonishing, and even a bit scary.  Storytelling feeds a hunger that we all have.  It is as essential to us as rain.

I’ve come to see that the shape of a story is a fractal, that it iterates down to the level of the sentence.  Fractals are natural shapes that follow a pattern—a shoreline is a fractal, so is a fern frond and a cloud.

 

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