“The stories we tell ourselves create the very space that we as a group, any group, inhabit. Place is made by story. Recall the end of the Odyssey when Odysseus is instructed by the gods to hoist an oar on his shoulder and walk inland until no one recognizes the tool, until someone asks why he is carrying the winnow out of season. The true regions of the world we live in are mapped by the stories we tell.”

“Mythology, and I keep thinking of a biological/mechanical metaphor, seeks to attach a cultural memory into our experiential wiring. Stories are viral. A good example of this is the collection of folk legends, both urban and rural, that get repeated as the truth… I am self-consciously altering the details or making up the ones I do not know. In doing so the storyteller faces the existential dilemma of fact and fiction. The things we do are done. We are always left with the residue of events, evidence. And all that residue can, by definition, be manipulated and shaped for many purposes, one of which is myth building. Myths are local, connected, and self-conscious. Tell them I am Odysseus, Laertes’ son, of Ithaca. In the stories we tell ourselves, we tell ourselves.”