My father is a reader.
Not an academic reader. Not a man who underlines things or keeps a reading journal or obsess about narrative structure. He likes Wilbur Smith and Clive Cussler and Louis L'Amour. Men's men writing men's books, adventures that move, stories that don't hang about. He has no patience for a novel that doesn't know where it's going.
He is, in a lot of respects and in the best ways, an ordinary man. He will not mind me saying this. I think he would agree.
But there is another thing that I also know about him. When I was a child, he made up songs for me. Ridiculous, wonderful, completely unhinged songs that had plots and characters and running jokes that went on longer than was strictly necessary, which was exactly right. He read to me at bedtime in voices, each one distinct, each one committed to, none of them borrowed from anywhere I could identify. He performed. He narrated. He took ordinary evenings and made something slightly larger out of them, something that felt, when you were small and it was dark outside and the story was just getting good, like magic.
He sang me half the FAK Sangbundel (yes, that enormous, improbable book that contains more of this country's soul than most people realise), and he treated it less like a cultural artefact and more like a setlist. He sang me Koos du Plessis' "Sprokie vir 'n Stadskind" (A fairytale for a city child). I grew up in the Karoo. He sang it to me anyway. It worked perfectly. He taught me South African music. Rock and roll. That a song could tell a story, that a story could have a melody, that the two things were never really separate to begin with.
He don't think he actively thought of any of this as literary. He was just being a storyteller: fully, loudly, with both hands, with a different voice for every character.
Storytellers don't announce themselves. They turn up as fathers, mothers, grandmothers, teachers, uncles who visit twice a year and talk too much and are absolutely wonderful. Sometimes they turn up as a song on the radio, or a librarian who pressed the right book into your hands at exactly the right moment. If it wasn't a father who gave you stories, I hope it was someone. And if it was no one, if you found your way to books entirely on your own, then honestly, that's a story worth telling too.
We often talk about storytelling as though it belongs to the people who publish books and win prizes and give interviews about their influences. And those people matter, and their books are on these shelves, and I love them. But the first storyteller most of us ever had was someone ordinary, in an ordinary house, who made something extraordinary out of nothing more than a child who needed a story and an imagination willing to provide one.
I think about what that did for me. The reader I became. The shop I built. The fact that I am writing this email at all, to people I mostly haven't met, about books and why they matter. There is a direct line between that and a man doing voices in the dark thirty-odd years ago, and I don't think I say that enough.
He has never bought anything from this shop. He has, however, packed boxes, carried books, and helped in the ways that fathers help, quietly, without being asked, because that's what you do. He is, as I said, an ordinary man. But boy, he made some magic. And I am still living inside it.
If your father is a reader, he might like a book this Sunday. If he's not, he might like one anyway. Something to sit with, something that tells a story in the way he always did. And if you're not sure what to get him, a gift card is an honest thing. It says: I know you have a shelf, and I trust you to know what belongs on it.
If your father is gone, I hope this email finds you gently. Father's Day has edges for a lot of people, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. I hope there's a story of his somewhere in your memory that still makes you laugh, or cry, or both at the same time, which is often where the best stories leave you.
And if you are a father, if you are the one doing the talking, the performing, and the slightly unreliable retelling, know that we hear you. Even when it seems like we're not listening. Especially then.
Every reader has an origin story.
I've just told you mine. If you feel like sharing yours (the person, the book, the song, the moment), my inbox is open and I am a good audience: info@thestorystation.co.za
PS: I love that storyteller is not an official job title. No business card. No LinkedIn profile that says "primary architect of this child's interior life." Storytellers just show up, make something up, do it in a funny voice, and leave you to figure out the rest. The audacity of it, honestly.