Stories are the currency of humans.

The fundamental belief behind this project is simple: humans bond over stories. Whether it’s gossip whispered between friends or a tale told over a fire, stories are how we’ve always met each other.

So much so, in fact, that until a very old age our perception of the world comes from stories. Our parents teach us through them. The shape of right and wrong, the names of fears, the texture of places we’ve never been; we receive almost all of it as story before we receive it as anything else.

As a young kid I ventured out and found more stories, and I fell in love with them. Stories can be as huge as the Iliad or as small as one moment plucked from inside it. The grand epics and the grandmother’s tales belong to the same family. They all need to be preserved, and they all deserve to be brought together.

That’s what this is. An open archive of human story, from mythology to folklore, from oral history to personal memory, from creation myths to a single afternoon someone doesn’t want to forget. While anyone can contribute, every story is moderated before it joins the archive, so quality is ensured. The author can be a name, or simply “grandmother.” Everything shared here is shared freely, under a Creative Commons license, so the stories can keep moving the way stories always have.