humanimaginings

This is a painting on the wall of a limestone cave in Indonesia.

It depicts three human-like figures and a wild pig. 

Some researchers believe the figures are hunting the animal. Others think they may be in a ritualistic encounter. Either way, the picture is telling a story. 

Similar images – animals, human figures, scenes of pursuit and interaction – have been found across Europe, Africa, and Asia, made in the same period by people with no contact with each other.

Which means 50,000 years ago, humans were displaying a pre-linguistic impetus to tell a story. 

Several thousand years later, in an oral culture in pre-colonial North America, someone is telling a story. A lowly girl – mistreated, abused and overlooked – undergoes a transformation, and in the end marries a rich and noble god/man. It’s the story we now know as Cinderella. What’s strange is that the same story was being told independently across places in Egypt, China, Europe and across the world, despite no cultural exchange. 

That story arc didn’t arise from shared cultural references but from shared embodied experiences of life, which come from the material conditions and internal realities of being human. 

The raw materials of a powerful story come from somewhere that precedes written text, inherited cultural artifacts, or even language itself.

Take babies for example. They are always in dialogue. Long before the baby has a word for anything, she is exchanging deeply embodied information with her caregiver through a rhythmic, physical, emotional back-and-forth in which sounds correspond directly to felt experience. 

All of these facts teach us something about the origins of language and of storytelling. Storytelling precedes the rational or intellectual development of codified, structured language systems. It comes from somewhere older and more embodied than that.

At humanimaginings, we love the written word. But we acknowledge that as language moved through manuscript culture, print culture, digital media and modern education, it travelled further and further from its physical origins. The scholar Walter Ong called it “the separation of the word from the living present.”  

With AI and LLMs, words have travelled another few steps removed from the physical realities that first produced them. Inside the machine’s linguistic model of reality, there is no window into the actuality of the living world around it. And if we rely on it too heavily, we can become stuck in there too.

We love writing and putting words on a page. But we believe the best writing connects us back to the pre-linguistic emotions and body-mind-sensations that are the raw material of all great storytelling. 

There is no single, prescriptive way to return to that place. But an emphasis on process before output is a good starting place. 

Ursula Le Guin opened her guide to the craft of writing by saying: “The sound of the language is where it all begins. The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make, the sounds and silences that make the rhythms marking their relationships.” 

Then there is the example of Mary Shelley. In the summer of 1816, she was eighteen years old, stranded inside a lakeside villa in Switzerland during a stormy season, in the company of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. The conditions were physically and socially intense, and emotionally charged. It was from that context that she had the monstrous vision of the Frankenstein monster. Writing that emerges from a specific physical and emotional context carries the imprint of that into the work. 

These examples are clues into how we can continue the human tradition and living practice of powerful and life-changing storytelling that connects us to each other.

And it’s why we are a human-first and process-driven magazine.

In an increasingly automated and prompted world, the idea of physically writing rather than digitally generating can feel long-winded, arduous, or even pointless. But that mentality requires you to believe that getting an output to slot into the machine in exchange for some kind of capital is the only thing that matters.

We don’t believe that. Every piece of writing has a human origin story, however mundane, and the extent to which that origin story is alive and somatic will influence its effects on other living, breathing people. That origin story is also where the writer herself grows and learns the most.

By encouraging writers to immerse themselves in process – using our challenges and pillars as starting points – we want to resist the idea of writing as purely an activity of a disembodied mind, and invite people to access somatic, lived-in experience as a starting point for unique perspectives and departures into the imagination. We want to give readers a more textured experience of relationality and community, and a richer transfer of ideas. By sharing windows into creative processes, we want to encourage and inspire young people and new writers not to give up on the important work of storytelling.

And in doing all of this, we want to preserve what we believe is a vital human endeavour that enables us to access the wisdom of each other’s experiences, the exchange of lived-in emotional information, and an understanding of the endlessly diverse yet deeply interconnected expressions of human life.