What if a Story is a Model?

Narrative in fixing people’s stories about what they do.

I’ve loved stories since before I could read. When I was five years old I begged my mother to teach me to read, infuriated by the injustice of being locked out of whatever it was that my brother enjoyed in our children’s books. There was something in there that he knew about and I didn’t; I was missing out – and as the youngest of three kids, I despised missing out. 

But, Mum wouldn’t budge and I had to wait until I was in school to learn to read. So - to make sure I was never missing out again – I read everything I could get my hands on. I was sometimes told “you should be a writer”, but I was never interested in my own stories – I was only interested in someone else’s stories. I wanted to experience someone else’s life, to explore the world in my mind and live as many lives as the books I could read: I didn’t want to write stories, I wanted to consume them.

Many years later my career in communications began with a Silicon-Valley startup – and I got to do just that. We were a crowdfunding platform in the early days of Web 2.0 and the early days of the storytelling boom. The startup was a nonprofit that enabled people to lend $25 to a low-income entrepreneur in the developing world; we were the first microlending platform, and our site was full of stories about people and how they made a living. It was thrilling: loan requests would be uploaded to the site and fulfilled by lenders who added their own stories about why they were a lender. 

Learn more about me here.