“You know, in my whole life, no one’s ever said to me, ‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it's a great story.’”
- Martin Shaw
Why Stories?
Stories are like an artist’s paint. The picture only “happens” by the colors and contrast created by the arrangement of the paint. Similarly, we can only understand the shape of our own lives by means of the “character motivations” and “conflicts” that we experience… the stories. They are so naturally woven into our lives. It's incredible that we can barely remember what happened to us just two or three days ago, yet so many of us can recite The Three Little Pigs from memory with little effort. It’s mysterious and confounding. And we often find that it's the stories that are more mystical, more fantastic, the ones that travel into the land of the Faërie1 that stick with us and seep past the intellect and into our heart.
1 Used in the sense that Tolkien uses it in his essay On Fairy Stories
The Story of Inklings Bookstore
Stories, and our mutual love for them, are what we, Adam and Kaeli, connected on when we first met. This love to be surrounded by, immersed in, and share with others the stories that have touched us and humanity throughout time is what ultimately became Inklings Bookstore. Adam, with a background in film making and character animation, spent many years analyzing films to try to understand what it is that makes “good stories” so heart-wrenchingly life-giving, and what makes “bad stories” so maddeningly life-draining. Kaeli spent over a decade writing music, poems, works of fiction, and touring in a band whose album was written as a narrative, all pointing to the greater narrative of Life.
Be it through touring or our jobs, we found ourselves living transient lives, traveling frequently around the country. Something that was like home away from home were the small, independent bookstores we’d find walking through town centres. The older, dustier, and more mysterious, the better. It’s overwhelming that we can hold in our hands a story that is thousands of years old. When we are surrounded by old books and stories, our perspective widens further than the myopia of our present, and for a brief moment we see a much broader… older… Human Story.
There was nothing like this in our town of Cleveland. We found that certain stories, topics, or authors were difficult to find physical access to. We also had the desire to be in the community, to build wider relationships with our neighbors. All of this in our minds eventually culminated in the idea of Inklings: a place to meander, to slow down, to find a beautiful thing, to converse with your neighbor over good stories, and a place to contemplate the great mysteries that surround us.
We welcome you and sincerely hope you find this little space a place of rest and a place of enchantment.