Glynn Washington: What Do Our Stories Make of Us?

Did you have an aha moment? Was there a show? Was there something that made you go like, story's cool as shit? Or was there something that happened where it's like, story is amazing, but it's also scary? Did you have an experience like that?

I'm a bit of a nerd.

For some reason, for a lot of reasons, as a child, I was a speed reader.

Maybe 10 seconds a page.

I read The Hobbit.

And I read it 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.

Besides kind of these apocalyptic Bible stories that I was force-fed, I would say that was the one time I can remember just being, whoa.

But from the stories I've heard you tell, the way you grew up, there was an apocalyptic fear in terms of the narrative.

How did that shape your understanding of maybe about what stories can do to us and what they did to you?

Yeah.

So I grew up in a fundamentalist Jesus cult that preached that the world was coming to an end imminently and had to be ready.

It was end of days, apocalyptic, white supremacist, all sorts of stuff, led by a guy called Herbert W. Armstrong.

and had a television show that was, at least as far as distribution, had the biggest distribution footprint of any religious TV show during the 80s and maybe the early 90s.

It's called The Worldwide Church of God.

And they were very, very early proponents of all sorts of graphics that were kind of early computer-generated types of almost horror graphics, mostly focused on the Book of Revelation and the beast in the Book of Revelation.

And some of those images stay with me to this day.

And the creator of those images used to work for Mad Magazine.

He was an artist who illustrated the children's books that all of us in this cult kind of came up with.

And for a lot of us, these images are emblazoned in our psyche.

Images from like the story of the Tower of Babel, the flood, We're grown now.

We're grown now.

But show any one of the people.

It's like you see a PTSD response to some of these images from people like me.