wounded storyteller

"Through storytelling the wounded are transformed from those who are cared for into those who care for others. They become potent healers. The wounded recover their voice through the difficult act of storytelling. The whole body speaks. Eventually everyone becomes a wounded storyteller. 'It is our promise and responsibility, our calamity and dignity.'

To tell a good enough story, we must go deep enough: this is storytelling as archaeology. We should experience the pull of the future: this is storytelling as eschatology. We should seek a story aesthetically ripe and set in the midst of stories larger than our own: this is storytelling as poetry and myth-making." 

Donald Heinz, 1998, The last passage: Recovering a death of our own, Oxford University Press.