Rachel Coleman's Bio and Response

Hi my name is Rachel and I'm addicted to reading.

Stumbling late into class from the remote rural town of Manchester, Maine––which I like to describe to my friends as: "think middle of nowhere, think single stoplight"––being addicted to reading is not a bad thing. I'm addicted because existing suspended in the web of a story is my meditation, my peace. At Stanford I have been fortunate to channel this addiction into my Comparative Literature major, and right now my focus is on postcolonial literature and mixed race narratives.


Is there such a thing as a new story? 
One of my favorite quotes from Jean Rhys, author of the eye-opening novel Wide Sargasso Sea, articulates my initial instinct about stories. She said: “All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.” Though she is referring to the art of writing more generally, and even more broadly to the body of all creative expression, her point has this imperative momentum to it that makes me want to sit down and immediately start writing down my 'mere trickle.'

What does this have to do with the question of a brand-new, never before read, story? Well, I think the lake is already there. I think that what makes a story a story is it's incarnation of humanity. The infinite variation in how an author frames the human journey––whether in the epic form of the Odyssey or the modernist prose of Woolf––does not mean that there is such thing as a new story. Cultures and civilizations and technology may change the outward appearance of a story but it does not change its heart. The human pulse of a story beats out a rhythm that resounds with the echo of all other stories that came before it. There may be new incarnations, but the subject, the arc of human conflict and resolution, remains the same.