Heal the Storytellers, Heal the World | LegendHaven 2025 Keynote by Dominic de Souza

I grew up waiting for the end of the world: stockpiling candles and canned beans for doomsday. Instead, I discovered that stories (not survival kits) are what save culture

Imagine this: I was a tousle-haired 13-yr old with aviator glasses, and I lived in Australia. I was inspired by another 13 year author I saw on the back of a book in a bargain bin. “If he could do it, I can.”

So I grabbed a ballpoint pen with blue ink, and handwrote my first novel. The faintly sweet smell of that ink is still an exciting memory.

By the end of each day, my fingers were stained and aching, a small red dent pressed into the side of my middle finger like a badge of courage. And after 50 typed pages, I wrote ‘The End.’ It was incredible. I had discovered a magical, imaginal power: I could step through a door in my mind anytime I wanted and not come back until I’d met every flying horse, bargained with dwarves, or crossed blades with sorcerers scheming in secret mountains.

I could taste the hope in it all, and it was intoxicating. No matter how bad things got for my character, or frankly, no matter how many battles and accidents and monsters I threw at them, I wasn’t worried. Because I loved them. Because I wanted them to get through. And maybe, deep down, I was trying to prove that if I could get them through the dark, maybe I could get myself through too.

You see, the ‘real’ world I lived in was not a happy, hopeful place. In this world, we were like hobbits holed up on the inside of Mordor, waiting for fire from the heavens to finally come crashing down on a sinful world, break open the earth and summon the last days. Maybe we’d survive, maybe not.

I was stuck in deadzone in a war, a war between competing stories.

If you feel stuck and helpless, you’re probably there too. Just like our culture, and our world. A lot of us feel like there’s nothing we can do.

Now, I don’t think that’s true. I think that anyone can have a dream of a better world, a better way, and if they can find the right fellowship, they can do something epic about it.

So here’s my bold idea: heal the storyteller, heal the imagination, heal the culture.

Why?

Because when culture crashes, storytellers are the first-responders.

Stories always come before anything.

Stories come before everything. They come before you start cutting the shape of a sword from carboard as a kid. They come before you slather a brick with mortar to build a family home. They come before you can form a philosophical thought.

Stories are frameworks that make sense of the world, because stories are about people. Always. We might present the characters as cute kittens, blue aliens, or gummy bears. That’s window dressing. Under the glamor, we are storytellers inventing stories for each other.

And right now, we need stories more than ever.

As an author with several published books and novels (and several more unpublished novels that I will to share one day) this is not an academic, arm-chair topic. This absolutely matters to me, every single day of my life.

You see, it’s because stories are how our souls survive. Data and ideas are for your mind, stories for your soul.

And today, our cultures around the world are crackling and breaking apart into smaller and smaller groups. We don’t know how to be kind together, how to welcome and care for strangers, how to build a future we believe in. The best many of us can do is burn down all the parts we hate.

And as anyone who suffers from scrupulosity knows, that’s a mental habit that ends with the whole world on fire.

That’s not a future I want to build. I believe in the kind of radical hospitality the Good Samaritan shows an abandoned stranger. Stories like that parable tell us how to be by showing us how we can act.

When everything feels bleak and broken, like daily life is about keeping your head down and staying in neat lines, taking what you’re given and not breaking the rules, and definitely keeping away from the mazes of barbed wire of public opinion, because self-appointed watchdogs love cancelling people and virtue signaling with flame throwers…

I refuse to live in a world like that.

Life is too great and beautiful, and too full of good and bad dragons, to roll over and let a few bad eggs ruin it for the rest of us. We’re here to do the greatest good we can with the time and skills we have.

So what can we do about this mess? We can band together with friends and start telling a new story.

My story is why I launched the LegendFiction community, the LegendHaven con, and all the programs that I can’t wait to share with you.

My story is that I was born into a special kind of cult, not the kind that wears funny clothes, or lives in special gated communities or farms, although some of us did all that. This was the kind that lives alongside everyone, pretends to be normal, but talks out of both sides of their mouths. I was taught to believe that I was a remnant of a secretive society of saviors. Now, I will always be grateful for the heroic efforts my parents and family put into our lives, striving to give us a better life than what they had, in spite of the awful ideas we all had to live with.

Every year, we were afraid the world was going to end in an apocalypse of demons and tanks rolling across county lines and nerfing the power grid into three days of darkness. We literally stored cans of food, beeswax candles, and spammed St Michael prayers like air freshener. All the doomsday media we watched reminded us that in a few months, or next year, it was all over.

My brothers and sisters regularly asked me what the point was? What was the point of school, or getting a job, or doing anything?

I didn’t have an answer. No one did, and there was no one to go to for help.

But then I lost my apocalypse.

12 years ago, in 2012, I like to joke that Our Lady of Guadalupe saved us from the Mayan Apocalypse, because her feast day was on the same day as the deadline. 12.12.2012.

What actually did happen is that I left the cult. I had too many questions, no one had answers, and honestly… I wanted to love life too much.

• I’d met too many people who were genuinely amazing.

• I loved too many cool stories like Stargate and Star Wars and Batman Begins, and Inception and Last Samurai, and the list goes on.

• I’d read too many myths, and read too much about history, and spent a year in college meeting thoroughly amazing students from across the country.

I realized that I was living a story I no longer believed. My story was a bad one. It kept me isolated in a cell in my own mind, terrified of God, of myself, of my own interests, of the world, of other people.

When I left the cult, I decided I needed a new story.

I felt like a parasite had dropped off my brainstem, something black and squirming on the ground. I decided to trust that life was good, that God was good, and that all the exciting things I wanted to do in life might also be good.

And the biggest one… I wanted to tell epic stories. I wanted to help heal people.

But the first thing I realized is that I was not the Good Samaritan. Not yet.

I was the banged up, bruised, and broken soul on the side of the road who needed help. You know who came to save me?

Stories.

The voices and spirits of past authors with their thrilling, stirring, troubling stories came to heal me like Good Samaritans. People like JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Michael Crichton, George Macdonald, and tons and tons of movies. They showed up for me when I felt most abandoned, and they brought cakes of lembas bread and wine and Narnian air. That started healing me.

I didn’t have enough ideas and stories to handle the world.

I needed to hide away in a hobbit hole in my soul and heal for a decade, and fill myself up with a thousand stories.

GK Chesterton once said: “Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas.”

We can say the same for stories.

Some of us have one story in our minds, only one way of seeking the world and solving its problems. That risks turning us into moral terrorists.

A healthy human diet has a variety of all kinds of good food. That’s your best chance of a healthy immune system, so that you can get out into the world, roll up your sleeves, and get digging and exploring and building and climbing.

Our souls need all kinds of stories too. Stories for every year of your life, for every kind of job you take, for every relationship you’re in, for every sorrow and trouble you can’t escape, for every joy and success you discover.

And more importantly, stories share things deeply true about reality, because they take root in the soul. Our soul exists half-in, half-out of time and space. CS Lewis calls us amphibious, one foot in matter, and one in spirit.

That means we have daily access to the Perilous Realm, the realm of angels and spirits and mythic things.

Storytellers have a special set of skills to forage food and ideas from that realm.

That’s why a world today that tells you and me a story that you don’t matter, that human life is an embarrassing smear of bacteria on a rock in a gazillion miles of empty space, is an awful story.

And… it’s not true. A story like that fills us with terror. Deep down, when you believe that story, you feel like you’re Rose, clinging desperately to plank of wood, floating in a black Arctic ocean under a black sky. Letting go means oblivion. Making the wrong decision, even if you didn’t know any better, means your eternity is a hellhole.

Our soul rejects that idea like a fever. It causes your imagination to curl up and hide in a corner, because it can’t do anything in a world like that. It’s not made for that kind of world.

But we have do other stories.

Christians have a story that every human is wanted, loved, and on a journey of infinite adventure. That we are born in a garden of good possibilities, and sure, there’s snakes in the grass, and we have to learn how to deal with them. But the point is that life is an adventure, and the soonest you can learn to ride the bike without falling off, the sooner you’ll get out of the playground and into the glorious eternity of the wilds of God, filled with a billion billion people who can’t wait to adventure with you.

In that kind of world, the imagination can stretch its wings and grow, because your imagination is the part of you that bridges you into the luminous realm of angels, these continents and countries of meaning that hum in our souls, but are hidden from our eyes.

Every generation needs a million storytellers to take these deep stories and translate them into the words and worlds of their time. Immersing yourself in the classics is not enough. Inspiration and imagination haven’t died

Our world today suffers from an erosion of morals, erasure of artists, and an elision of wonder.

• Erosion of morals means we can’t agree on ways to live together and get along together, ways that are practical about building a future we believe in. Morals aren’t optional. Every parent trying to keep their family together knows that all persons are welcome, but not all behavior is welcome. The morals you live out depend on the story you live by. We need good stories to get along.

• Erasure of artists is an ongoing problem, not just because of predatory practices in markets, or from tools like AI, but from artists themselves. A creator has a calling like a prophet, where their imagination is a community garden where angels can plant inspiration in. We need artists to stop commodifying their talents for only money and success, and hiding themselves in the bestsellers bins or the dollar deals sections. We creators are training people to ignore us by erasing our own contributions to the human story, the human family. We must reclaim the call to inspire and imagine a better world through a million new stories.

• We suffer from an elision of wonder. Elision means a forgetting. If storytellers gag themselves and their inspiration, and join the baggage train behind the goose-stepping squadrons of a culture, we frogmarch each other into knots. We train ourselves and our children to see a dead world, a dead universe, a fearful future, and our smartphones become Sauron’s palantirs. But these same tools can awaken a fascination, a curiosity, a hopeful awe and excitement that good things are possible too. We can remember how to hope, and use tools to create new freedom.

We can fix this.

We’re already seeing changes happen. Not because politics changed and pop topics changed. I believe that many of us are exhausted of preachy stories duct-taped badly around pushy agendas that we agree with, or disagree with.

I’m just so tired of watching myself and everyone twist ourselves into knots trying to make something true in a world that keeps moving the goalposts.

Thousands of authors are born every day with a dream of a novel or a story they want to tell. Most don’t plan to be bestsellers. But they do have something to share.

We just need to find them, heal them, train them, and then get out of their way, to let them do incredible things and share their worlds without end with the rest of us.

Remember we said storytellers are first-responders?

A first-responder is the first on the scene of an emergency, providing immediate assistance, provide crucial aid, and ensure safety while specialized help is on the way. A first-responder doesn’t judge what you’ve been through, only that right now, help is needed.

Storytellers act like this. We create fantastic, fictional care packages that can brim and bristle with life. Real life, not just imaginary life. Sometimes, these packs can show up right when someone needs it, and walk them off the edge for an extra day, or create an extra year of hope in their life.

Storytellers are field-medics for the imagination, with all the fun and epics and cautionary tales we tell.

LegendFiction is a place where we’re on this adventure together.

We anchor ourselves in meaning, morality, myths, and magic.

• Meaning is essential to being human, and it reveals our life mission. When meaning collapses, just like the meaning crisis we’re in right now, cynicism, apathy, and worse, take over. You need to discover it, probably by trying and testing a hundred different things, until it becomes clear to. Everyone suffers in some way, and needs a friend. We need to can figure out what to do with the time that is given to us. Our stories need to reclaim the grit of having a purpose.

• Morality is the way we live together to create human thriving. If life has meaning and purpose, then freedom matters again. It has meaning. We can’t do whatever we want, and we can certainly do more than we think. We have to work together to build up ourselves and each other, and build a future we believe in.

• Myths are the timeless truths across cultures that we revere and wrestle with. Beyond the Bible and ancient texts, mythic realities are the scaffolding of our pschye, the shared shape of how we are human. They don’t leave us alone, these ancient, deep stories that want to be retold over and over again, that thrill us and leave us breathless, and we can’t say why, and we can’t stop them. They return like rain, because they feed our imagination, and form our identities.

• Magic stands for our return to an enchanted universe full of beauty and wonder. I don’t just mean cool quantum stuff, but the fact that every garden, every back alley, and every wilderness has something good in it that can change you. You are a person, and you carry worlds within you. Every person does, and life is the adventure of discovering each other’s inner Narnias. As the world becomes more Blade Runner, we’re all lining up to go to Hogwarts, because we know its more human, and more true.

If we can heal storytellers, give them space to breathe and grow, then their imagination will knit back together.

The broken, bruised parts will grow back healthier and stronger, and fresh stories will come flooding through.

Healthy imaginations will create stories for all the billions of the rest of us who want to create a culture and a world we believe in.

We can heal this world, and it’s not enough to buy care packages and build more dams and create more schools.

We need more stories and a million more storytellers to give us fresh reasons to heal this world, and gather in fellowships to plant a village in Mordor. We’re a part of this world, not just walking about on it.

So here’s my call to adventure for us:

Study the stories at work in your own life. Talk about them, try to understand them. See if you still agree with them. A lot of times we are handed checklists that we don’t even agree with, stories we don’t believe in any more. Find your freedom.

And if you’re a story teller, start paying attention to the stories in your mind, in your soul. Start writing them down. Don’t share them yet, store them. Gather them. Let them green inside you, and start to grow.

And for everyone, pay attention to the storytellers in our midst, especially the new ones. It might be a grandmother, or a high schooler, or someone with scraps of time between laundry. Encourage them. Maybe you don’t understand what they’re trying to do. Maybe you don’t agree with everything. Maybe you don’t have to agree with everything.

Quote Treebeard: “That doesn’t make sense to me. But, then again, you are very small. Perhaps you’re right.”

Let’s wrap with my favorite prayer, that I learned from the movie First Knight:

May God grant us the wisdom to discover the right, the will to choose it, and the strength to make it endure.

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