"How It Happened That I Became An English Major In The First Decade Of The Twenty-First Century”
Liz Stunz 

If only I could make a seventeen year jump back in time to find myself as a toe-headed girl clad in a fuchsia swimsuit banging on the ivories and babbling of panthers and quetzals.  Two minutes would suffice to beckon her away from the keys and enlighten her as to why she envisions various animals with various octaves and just what this tendency to narrate affirms about storytelling and its universal roots. “Isn’t it thrilling,” I would exclaim, “that your, that our capacity to empathize enables us to identify with others and possibly heightens our appreciation of fiction?! Literary Darwinists believe that in adhering to and perpetuating the storytelling tradition we are illustrating a biological unity that has endured thousands and thousands of years of natural and sexual selection!”

With that I would leave the mystified girl to return to her instrument with a story that would evolve and grow (as she grows) in transparency. As Hsu’s essay, The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn theorizes, the story would be at the base of a heap, a heap that will amass and evolve with the self and allow social and cognitive development through repetition. According to Hsu’s evidence, once we develop a ‘Theory of mind’ and begin to empathize with others, we attempt to keep tabs on them and their experiences through narrative, pounding into our brains morals, warnings, and classic (romantic, heroic, “sacrificial”) scenarios. And to think, the little toe-head thought her animal narrative game was just a good excuse to bang on the piano.

            As a child, my own narrative endeavors found their outlet through stuffed animals’ and other toys’ mouths until Dad brought home our first video tape recorder. Then, nothing in my realm was more exhilarating than plotting (occasionally with paper and everything) skits and movie spoofs with friends and sisters. Some of our more thoughtful works included satires of the Maury Povich Show and an emission of our own creation, Deadly News. Deadly News consisted of three anchors with singular names that sought to illuminate the trials of odd children worldwide (and spend half the show reporting the weather), but most of all to make our parents laugh.

            Books flitted in and out through grade school, the more notable being The Babysitter’s Club series and The Secret Garden. Mildly fantastical fiction enthralled me for as long as my memory can accommodate. Early exposure to films The Labyrinth and Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal enhanced my yearning for the surreal and arcane, or at least the ability to communicate with animals, and books (I soon realized) were the best means for immersion.

            Perhaps my lingering in non-formidable young adult literature (I hadn’t read a speck of Dickens, Aristotle or Hemingway until college) aided my transition into the greats while retaining a mild disbelief (oh the cold, cruel world that refuses to open up its fantastical planes to me!) and cynicism of their real world relevance. Unlike Lee Siegel, I did not quell my idealistic disposition with Camus and Dostoyevsky, and my first bouts of infatuation with the disillusioned arrived in a lithe collection entitled Ariel. Although Plath (which subsequently led to Sexton and Woolf) and her scintillating turmoil could have hardened romantic aspirations and lead me to pose as a red-haired Lady Lazarus, I recognized what I wanted to emulate (nature personification, expert analogy and symbolism) and what I didn’t. I took up my pen and scrawled through fizzling flames and pins that stuck. I decided without taking the time to weigh my options what route (the one that uncoiled naturally) my academic endeavors would take.