A Wish from a Museum Lover: A Museum of Storytelling and Literature

In case you missed it—and if you read this blog regularly, I don’t know how you could have—I love museums and I love stories.

I can’t get enough of either, quite frankly.

And I got to thinking recently that nowhere I’ve lived and nowhere I’ve traveled has had a museum of storytelling and literature.

So I got to searching the web. Surely such a thing had to exist somewhere. Right?

I found museums in the houses and residences of former authors and writers, focused on that person’s work and career.

Not what I wanted, though.

I wanted a museum exploring how humans tell stories and the power and science of storytelling. I wanted a museum that walks through the development and expansion of storytelling through oral traditions and then on into writing, printing, and the internet.

Storytelling is a critical component of the history of human society and human development. Who tells stories, why they tell stories, what they tell stories about, when they tell them, and how they tell them connects directly to individual and societal growth, development, and upheaval.

And as far as I can tell, such a museum doesn’t exist.

The closest I could find was a museum of literature in Ireland that presents expositions on Irish authors and a museum that focuses on storytelling in images located in California.

Neither of these museums talk about the importance of story, the earliest record of story, how the earliest humans told stories, and how the recounting of stories has changed over time in terms of medium, message, and structure. How storytelling has been used in cultures and societies in the past and today. How the theory of storytelling has developed, even, and how that theory and practice differs between different cultures.

Honestly, I could go on. There is so much a museum of storytelling and literature could cover.

Pushback on the idea could come from people saying that a museum might not have much to display on the subject. Sure, true. But I have been to so many engaging museums and museum exhibits in recent years without a lot of physical artifacts. As long as the museum presents the information in a captivating way, it doesn’t matter that there aren’t many physical objects on display.

For example, I went to a museum exhibit not long ago about microbes, and while there were unquestionably microbes there, as there are everywhere at all times, very few viewable specimens sat in cases for visitors to examine.

I’m not a museum director, but to any and all of them out there, consider this an official plea: Create a storytelling museum, pretty please. I will be a vocal champion of the cause if you do.