I grew up in various far-flung corners of Southern Africa where my brothers and I had the idyllic privilege of being taken on long expeditions to wildlife reserves in the beloved family Land Rover.

These trips sparked my love of wildlife, and curiosity about the world. Each evening we ate supper around the fire and recounted what we’d seen and done that day into our father’s portable recorder. As I write this it occurs to me that decades after those  firelit faces with their shining eyes have become childhood memories, here I am doing something similar: people tell me their stories and I gather them using my modern version of Dad’s Grundig tape recorder. 

We are perhaps the only species that tells stories. What we know for certain is that our entire human experience is formed, understood, and connected through the telling. Individually, and collectively, we are our stories.