Some people spend their whole lives trying to figure out what story they want to tell.
Glynn Washington has spent a good part of his trying to figure out what stories have done to him.
Glynn is the creator and host of the public radio phenomenon Snap Judgment. Years ago, before I knew where any of my own storytelling would lead, one of my stories aired on his show.
So when we finally sat down together, I wanted to start at the beginning.
Not the beginning of Snap Judgment. The beginning of Glynn and story…
Glynn: “As a child, I was a speed reader. Maybe ten seconds a page. I read The Hobbit and I was so furious that it was over, that I was done, that I immediately started trying to slow myself down as I reread that book again. And I don’t speed read anymore because of The Hobbit and the love that I had for being in that world and not wanting to leave it.”
But there was another kind of storytelling happening around him too.
Glynn: “I grew up in a fundamentalist Jesus cult that preached that the world was coming to an end imminently. It was end of days, apocalyptic, white supremacist, all sorts of stuff. And what I understood later was the power of those images was the power of fear and the power of leveraging someone’s imagination against them. I saw the power of story deployed against me. I saw the power of story fill the pews every week. Even as the rhetoric became increasingly unhinged, people were still there, and they were there because of the story.”
That stayed with me. Because Glynn doesn’t talk about story as something automatically noble.
He talks about it as power.
Glynn: “The thing that sticks out is the malleability of story. Does story in and of itself have a quality, or is it just a tool? There’s lots of storytellers out there, and from my perspective, the mal-intent ones are winning. What we’re having right now is a crisis of empathy. And a crisis of empathy is a failure to see the world through someone else’s eyes, an inability to do so. And the only tool that I know to let you do that is story.”
From there, I wanted to know how someone with that relationship to story actually found his way into radio.
The answer was not a straight line.
Glynn: “I ended up in Japan for a few years. I did go to law school. I briefly worked for the State Department in Malaysia. I worked for a big accounting firm, but they had to fire me pretty quick. Then I moved to California and I was running nonprofits for some time. And then I heard about a radio contest. That kind of started me on my road to Snap Judgment.”
Then came the break. Sort of.
Glynn: “I had a bunch of darts at the board for various things. Screenwriting and novel writing and all this stuff. What happened was I entered something called the Public Radio Talent Quest. I found out about it on an actual iPod. Turned out the deadline was the next day, so I made a little tape. I ended up being one of ten finalists.”
Week after week, people were eliminated.
And eventually Glynn found himself battling another storyteller named Al Letson.
Glynn: “Every week he was coming up with this hot stuff and I’d try to battle him back. The next week he hit me again. And I thank my lucky stars, at the end of it they decided to pick two winners instead of one. It was me and this guy Al Letson, who went on to become the host of Reveal. At the time, my biggest rival. Now one of my closest friends.”
At this point. I was curious if there was a story about his own life he still hadn’t figured out.
Glynn: “A lot of the questions in my own life came from extensions of my parents’ questions that they had. I thought, what in the world was that whole insane childhood of mine about? But it was about people who were doing the best they could, trying to answer the big questions themselves and maybe coming up short. But we all come up short.”
He wasn’t finished with that story yet.
Glynn: “I know some of the negative aspects of it, but there were gifts. You build a lot of resilience growing up in a cult. There’s a lot of skills that can come up from that situation. And I’m really just trying to appreciate them more instead of running away from that story in some way. I want to embrace it, and I want to embrace them while I still can. Look, life is short. You better close these circles while you still can. Do it now. Talk to them in a different way. Even if you gotta put aside a lot of hostility, a lot of anger, a lot of things. Put that nonsense aside.”
So, my takeaway from our chat? So many things.
But story is a beautifully strange thing, isn’t it?
Glynn made it clear how story can be used for the wrong things, how it can shape people, mislead them, even harm them in terrible ways.
But he also made it just as clear that when we choose to use it for the right things, it becomes something else entirely.
Not just a tool for understanding the world and each other more deeply, but maybe even a way to move beyond the moments where we’ve been misled or taken advantage of and, if we’re lucky, finally a tool to help us understand ourselves.
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