The Wanderer
A quote about storytellers that has stuck in my head for three decades.
One brief musing about storytelling per day (or, more likely, as frequently as I can muster).
Feb. 18, 2026
TODAY, NOTHING MORE than a quote to ponder.
More than 30 years ago, when I was living in Philadelphia in my mid-20s, I read this in the city’s alt-weekly newspaper in a review of a novel by William T. Vollmann called Butterfly Stories.
“...the journalist is the quintessential outsider, a grotesque, somewhat absurd figure who has lost any sense of the coordinates that may locate him within the world and himself: `What did the journalist really want? No one thing, it seemed, would make him happy. He was life’s dilettante. Whatever path he chose, he left, because he was lonely for other paths.’”
— Philadelphia City Paper, 24 Sep 1993
It remains in my head all these decades later (and in my long-ago journal from those days). As my life in my profession has unfolded, I think of this quote in many different respects, and it has meant different things at different junctures.
It makes me wonder if then-undiagnosed-and-now-diagnosed ADHD led me to my career as a journalist. It also raises the question: What are the drawbacks of being a storyteller? Do we just wander from one story to the next, looking for something, compelled to spin tales — kind of like Scheherazade without the death threat? And the notion that this quote summons about being an outsider — no matter what — resonates with me as well.
So I’m curious — and these are questions to both my journalist and non-journalist readers: What does this quote make you think about? Are we, as storytellers, quite this unanchored?
And now, Dion. (Kind of an unpleasant song when you listen to the words, actually.)