Stories let me soar when I have neither wings nor airfare. Made up or personal, and whether I’m reading or novel-writing, words heal my spirit and body. When I think I’m merely seeking amusement, they teach me. They expand my compassion for others and for myself.

Author/poet Jenny Irene Gunnarsson blogs and tweets and emails from Sweden. There she tends her trees and communes with the gorgeous outdoors. One day she’ll make a living as an author. In the meantime, she’s a teacher who’s done a bit of everything, from working as a guard to caring for all sorts of people. When life overwhelmed her, she self-published Burnout, which she describes as, “a small book about something big, twenty-five poems about burning out and moving on.”

Happiness between tales by Jenny Irene Gunnarsson

Picking the sweet fruits

all the morsels of inspiration

all the lush treasures of fallen words.

My garden will be

filled with endless beauty.

Every story known to man

my sky and sparkling fountain.

Endless penmanship

on every emerald leaf.

Your voice

will ring there too.

When I first read this blog, I read the title wrong and thought it said Happiness between tales. Even after I got it right, I couldn’t stop thinking about this. Any person who enjoys reading knows that there is, indeed, such a thing as happiness between tales. This happiness is not only about the enjoyment of having read a good story. Tales open our eyes to details around us and make our imagination bloom like a garden in spring, enhancing the world in the process. Every story that makes any impression on us at all also affects the lives we lead when we are not reading.

For me, the love of tales began before I could even talk properly. As a three-year-old, I was brought along to a house my mother wanted to buy and as she wandered the rooms; I went off to explore on my own. This turned into a panicky situation for her later on, when it was time to go and she could not find me. When she finally thought to check the closets, I was sitting in one of them, in a cardboard box containing fairytale comics, so enthralled that I had not heard her scream my name. Even today, over forty years later, I can still remember how I was caught by the magic of those pages filled with pictures and signs I could not decipher, so different from the books I had previously been shown. It was love, no, obsession, at first sight. My mother had to carry me away from there, kicking and screaming because I could not take my treasure with me.

I spent the next year pestering everyone in my environment to teach me how to read. They all said that I was too young, which only made me pester them more until they finally relented. When I was four, I finally got to crack the mystery of letters and every bookcase I saw became my treasury, quickly looted of its contents by my hungry mind. The world has never been the same after that, especially since I have always had the ability to open any book and fall right into it and, on top of that, have a very vivid imagination. All at once, the world became so much more exciting than it had ever been before and I was its explorer, its Neil Armstrong and its Sherlock Holmes. When I was not reading, I wandered the woods around our house, searching for fairies, trolls and Baba Yaga among pines and blue anemones I was sure hid some vital clues to their whereabouts. I and my friends were Batman, Lucky Luke and Supergirl, taking turns to be fearless heroes and every old man I met was a wizard, either good or evil, depending on how he looked. I also kept opening and closing every door at home, trying to make them let me into other worlds and was equally disappointed every time it didn’t work. Do not get me started on the wardrobes. You all know where those lead.

There was an age-rule at the library, so I had to keep to the children’s section until I was twelve-much to my own and the librarians’ frustration. I came in at least three times per week, asking if there was anything new and they almost always had to tell me no. One time, when I was ten, one of them took pity on me and sent me into the adult section to find something to read. I was in absolute Heaven! There were hundreds of books-and they were thick enough to last me for days. After having wandered around for an hour and almost kissing the shelves, I picked the thickest book I could find and triumphantly returned to the loan desk. The librarian looked at the book, looked at me, looked at the book again and then sent me back to the children’s section in humiliation and close to tears. I borrowed Stephen King’s It from a friend that summer instead. It gave me nightmares for weeks, but it is still my favourite book-my first, thick love.

When I grew up, there was no Internet and no smartphones and the libraries had a limited selection for my tastes. I have always been a fast reader and my brain was constantly screaming for more, more and more, so after having borrowed every book that interested me at least three times, I went to town on the rest of them-including Classics and English literature. This had the unexpected benefit of my grades suddenly sky-rocketing, which mystified me greatly until I understood the reason for it. Despite my forays into more serious literature, however, I never let go of my love of tales about things belonging to other worlds than my own. My mother told me at fifteen I was too old to read fairytales and comics and fantasy books. I told her those were the reason why I was getting A’s in Spelling, Literature and English and she never mentioned it again after that. Yes, I told a fib. They might have added to my grades, but they were not solely responsible for them. I just loved them so much I could not bear to give them up, even if it meant I had to lie a little to get out of hearing about how they did not ‘suit me’ since I was getting older. Even now, I think they suit me just fine.

As children, we have that golden period of time when magic is real and fairytales can be considered truth. This time is eventually left behind and often mourned, as we feel magic has become a part of the past, never to return. A precious few keep their belief in magic, but growing up, the tales of our childhoods is seen through different eyes. This all sounds kind of depressing, but reading tales is a gift that keeps giving, despite life trading our starry-eyed gazes and scrubbed knees for reading glasses and paying bills and we go on to read a lot of tales that have no happy endings.

Even if we no longer believe in fairies and other realms, there is still magic in every tale we encounter-and this magic is always with us. So, if everything is so magical, why do we not all glow with happiness every time we read a book? I think it is because we have to dig a little deeper and think a little harder.

To a child, the golden nuggets of stories are left out in the open thanks to its willingness to believe the impossible. He or she has only to go out and look around to find that gold and get rich. Adults, on the other hand, have both minds and lives that are more complex and are a lot less likely to believe in things outside of normalcy. They also read more complex stories, often written by complex people who may, or may not, have something they want to say.

If you think this sounds like mumbo-jumbo, try taking a course in literature and poetry.

You would be amazed by how much meaning is to be found in anything from where the story takes place when it is written, what language is used and which objects are most often described. Events described can be metaphors for things happening in society, existential truths, human nature and anything else there is, or ever has been, between Heaven and Earth. This meaning, these metaphors, whether we understand them or not, we bring with us as we look at the world and it changes our understanding of both ourselves and others-no belief in the impossible required.

Nowadays, I behave like the almost middle-aged woman I am.

At forty-four, I cannot run around and look for Russian witches or fight evil minions on my lunch break.

I am oh so calm and adult-but if you took one look into my mind, you would be surprised. It is always, at least partly, up in the sky somewhere, chasing as many witches and other fantasies as it pleases. Other, more serious, parts are constantly debating tales I have read and how they can be applied to my everyday life, hopefully also making me a little wiser. I have never read a story that has not taught me something about humanity or life, whether it is in the story itself or in how it is written, and I do my best to take advantage of what I learn. Then, there is one part; my favourite part, the part making up much of my heart, the part feeding my life much of its meaning-that is spinning tales of its own. Anything can be turned into a story I can tell myself or others, bringing me joy and sharing the magic. My car is an aeroplane, flying me through the sky on a secret mission while Spotify is thundering my personalized soundtrack through its interior-making my heart beat faster and life feel more exciting. As I ride my bicycle, I imagine it to be a noble steed, carrying me in a rush of freedom across open plains to deliver me to an exotic destination I have never visited. The small figurines of Buddha and an elephant on my window sill, beneath an inside rainbow who must have lost its way, are actually a story about friendship and meeting on a mountain to relight the lamp of the sun and bring daylight back. There are thousands of more tales strewn around me. Some, I write down, others I only tell in my head. There are tales never finished and tales forever rewritten. Tales have affected and always will affect my life in many different ways. They have made it so much richer and given it so many more nuances than I believe I would ever have found without them. This would not have been possible if there had not been people there to write the tales in the first place. Writers, myself included, are forever reminding me that the magic and the joy is still there if we only look for it. I firmly believe that there is happiness in and between tales as long as there are tales, no matter the age of the reader.

How do reading and writing help you?

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