All We Ever Really Have Is Story

About this episode

The episode explores the significance of storytelling in shaping identity and community.

In this month’s episode of The Hagstone , Chaise Levy sits down with Scott Richardson-Read to trace the living force of story shapes nations, roots itself in land, and moves through communities as something more than metaphor. Beginning with the claim that “all we ever really have is story,” the conversation travels from Scottish political identity to digital worlds, from local hillsides to role-playing tables, asking what holds people together when institutions falter. Drawing on folklore, landscape memory, online gaming culture, and oral storytelling practice, they explore story as a form of belonging. We track how shared imaginative space also for identity to be tested, inhabited, and transformed. The episode considers how a wide variety of otherworlds can function as contemporary mythic terrain, how communal storytelling generates a kind of “group body,” and how the teller becomes less an author than a mouthpiece for something moving through the room. Ultimately, the conversation gestures toward a radical reorientation: imagination is not escape, but participation. Story is not distraction, but ground. What would it mean to recognize narrative not as illusion, but as the…

People in this episode

Host: Chaise Levy

Guest: Scott Richardson-Read

Topics covered

• storytelling
• identity
• community
• folklore
• imagination
• myth

Keywords

• story
• narrative
• community
• folklore
• identity
• imagination
• mythic terrain

Mentioned in this episode

Places: Scotland

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