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"path": "/2026/06/04/storyteller-poet-qualities/",
"publishedAt": "2026-06-04T21:15:31.000Z",
"site": "https://www.themarginalian.org",
"tags": [
"culture",
"psychology",
"creativity",
"Elias Canetti",
"philosophy",
"Rainer Maria Rilke",
"Walt Whitman",
"read article"
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"textContent": "Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, when it ought to be a door. All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctly other than our own, whose very otherness clarifies ours, returns us to it magnified and annealed. To be able to build such a world, to make it believable and beguiling, to leaps across the abyss that gapes between any one consciousness and any other, the storyteller… read article",
"title": "Very Necessary Qualifications of a Great Storyteller"
}