Life & Wisdom Quote by Russell Banks

Storytelling, in Russell Banks' framing, isn't a boutique art form or a personal brand. It's civic work. By calling it "ancient and honorable", he yanks literature out of the MFA workshop and drops it back where it started: around a fire, in a room, in a community that needs its members to remember things out loud. The phrase "role to play" is doing quiet, muscular work here. Banks isn't describing a hobby; he's describing a job with obligations - to witness, to translate experience, to circulate hard truths a tribe might prefer to bury.

The subtext is almost an argument with modern prestige. In a culture that treats writers as solitary geniuses or content providers, Banks insists on the old model: the storyteller as a social function, not merely an individual talent. That aligns with his fiction, which so often sits with people pushed to the margins - working-class families, the morally cornered, the casualties of American mythmaking. The "community or tribe" language isn't quaint; it's a reminder that every "we" has an outside, and stories decide who gets counted.

Then comes the small, honest pivot: "fortunate enough to be rewarded for". He acknowledges the transactional reality of publishing without surrendering to it. Gratitude, yes, but also a subtle confession of discomfort: not everyone who performs this necessary labor gets paid, heard, or canonized. Banks positions himself as beneficiary of a system while still claiming the deeper legitimacy of the work - service first, reward second.