The Narrative Project is brought to you by The Writer’s Craft, a Master’s degree program on the campus of Holy Names University.
The easiest way to categorize this site would be to say that it is an on-line literary magazine or journal. But we see The Narrative Project as a “writing collective”—both a repository of composed pieces and a center for discussion about writing.
The typical journal would now tell you that its editors are interested in works that are edgy or environmental or futuristic or experimental or social or funny or instructive or some such qualifier. Instead, we will give writers prompts and suggestions, and then let the writing tell us how to describe it.
As the name implies, The Narrative Project is focused on stories—but not just the Story. We expect to explore narrative in all its formal variations: fiction, nonfiction, verse, drama, history, etc. We will celebrate the technical richness of stories and acknowledge their essential role in describing what it means for humans to live and die. Lots of things are said to define what it means to be human, but none has a stronger claim than narrative. Narrative records, shapes, and re-tells experience. It suggests an order (maybe not perfect) for experience, preserves memory (again, not always accurately), and (re-)creates the past.
Story is not equal to experience, but stories permeate throughout our existence. They mingle with our everyday lives and keep the past in our present. And there is story in the most unlikely places. I’m thinking of the poem “Design” by Robert Frost. It’s one of his surprise sonnets—you read it several times before you discover that it is a sonnet. This sonnet tells a tiny story—that of a spider killing a moth. Frost transforms a seemingly inconsequential event, something that happened and perhaps that he observed, into a narrative of a few lines. In those few lines, of course, Frost manages to question the order of the universe.
I feel like suggesting (I’m not sure enough to argue) that there is narrative in every sentence that employs the active voice and features at least one active verb. Take, for example, the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). For me, these two words tell a story; they form a narrative. Now I will confess that this sentence is part of a larger story (the story of Lazarus), which is part of a larger story (the Gospel of John), which is part of a larger story (the New Testament), which…you get the idea. But “Jesus wept” is enough to be narrative. It tells what happened and who did it. It features specific, meaningful, and evocative language. Think of what a different story it would be if it read “Jesus cried” or “He cried.” It says, “Jesus wept,” and that, to paraphrase Robert Frost, makes all the difference.
In the coming months, The Narrative Project will develop its own story that has begun here. We will issue calls for submissions, feature narratives from writers associated with The Writer’s Craft, offer commentary on writing and the writing process, and invite discussion on all of the above.
Stay tuned and keep writing.
