Why Read and Write Stories

Maya Angelou said there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Every time I read that quote, I think about the concentration camp survivors we hosted during a Holocaust presentation at Rogue Community College in Grants Pass, Oregon. Most of them were quite old and they’d just begun to tell the stories they’d kept inside. I was horrified and I was mesmerized by their words, by their courage and humility. One man, over dinner at our kitchen table, said something I will never forget. When asked how his life had been changed by his years in a concentration camp where he lost his entire family, he replied. “It made me more kind.”

Stories are our conscience. They teach truth and a respect for the past. Stories are like our connective tissue, they link us to the lives of others. If we keep telling and writing them, perhaps they will keep us human. Anne Frank was a thirteen-year-old child who wrote a diary while hiding in an attic. She didn’t survive, but her words did—inspiring and haunting us for generations.

After hosting those Holocaust survivors and hearing their stories,  I needed to write something—to connect in a heartfelt way—to add my voice and speak for the ones who'd died and were not heard. I needed to imagine myself as someone who'd experienced at least something of the horror. This poem came out of that need.

THIS BRIGHTNESS

All night I stood waiting

for sun to fill the room’s small window,

the glass still black where I paused

looking out as if for a signal

and remembering how dawn

releases the trees, mountains and each

fence from its shadow.

Still holding the nightfall between my hands

I whisper, “It will come.”

The dark yields slowly and this day

might have traveled here from the other side

of the earth, an avenue in Warsaw and a house

where a man has paced since midnight

the musty stillness of his attic, thinking

each time a board creaked that soldiers

moved on the stairs and imagining

that these would be his last moments.

Words like moths kicked up

from the tall grass could

trace his story back to its ink.

He knows the meaning of all time is words—

those small, unstoppable sounds

that fold, finger by finger,

across our bodies.

He would understand morning

is a kind of reprieve, its slow coming

the affirmation of everything night

called into question, and he might believe

that light passes from country to country,

one man to another, a sharing

that becomes personal like the space

between the living and the dead—

that otherness inside us we never touch

no matter how far down our hands might reach.

Time has passed since we housed those Holocaust survivors. We now have a granddaughter, Shenoa, who is the age you were when you wrote your diary. I think of her, I think of you. I salute your courage, Anne Frank. The way you left a message, a legacy, a poignant reminder of what it means to be human. I pray Shenoa will be brave like you. That she will have the courage to speak her truth, that she will never lose faith in mankind. That she will always believe in the goodness of the human heart.  

Susan Clayton-Goldner was born in New Castle, Delaware and grew up with four brothers along the banks of the Delaware River. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona's Creative Writing Program. Susan has been writing most of her life. Her novels have been finalists for The Hemingway Award, the Heeken Foundation Fellowship, the Writers Foundation and the Publishing On-line Contest where she received a thousand dollar prize. Susan won the National Writers' Association Novel Award twice for unpublished novels and her poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Susan's novels are currently represented by Elizabeth Kracht of the Kimberly Cameron Agency. 

Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Animals as Teachers and Healers, published by Ballantine Books, Our Mothers/Ourselves, by the Greenwood Publishing Group, The Hawaii Pacific Review-Best of a Decade, and New Millennium Writings. Prior to moving to Oregon and writing full time, Susan worked as the Director of Corporate Relations for University Medical Center in Tucson, Arizona. 

Susan shares a life in Grants Pass, Oregon with her husband, Andreas, a blue-eyed feline named Topaz, her fictional characters, and more books than one person could count. Visit her website at susanclaytongoldner.com.