Da Eun Yoon The Storytelling Fairy Korean & English Voice Over Artist

Stories — books, theatre, film — have accompanied my life for as long as I can remember. They have brought me great joy and just as much heartache, because I follow the characters closely and step into their world as though it were my own. And each time one ends, I find I am carrying something out of it that I never brought in.

That is why I have fallen in love with this craft. Everything moves so quickly now that we barely have time to look into our own lives, let alone a neighbour’s. A story is somewhere to stop and breathe — to live a while as someone else, and come back holding a small piece of what makes each of us human.

Once, in an acting class at Northwestern University, we were asked to bring in someone from our own lives and play them. I brought my Korean grandmother: the one who sat by the window and prayed, somewhere far inside a world of her own, who never seemed to hear a seven-year-old asking her to come out and play in the snow.

What has stayed with me is what happened when I finished. Every one of my classmates had something to say. Something in it had found them, or risen up in them unasked. Some had seen their own grandmother. Some had seen themselves — the child doing the calling. Some had seen a person they spent years trying to reach and never did.

Nothing in that piece was familiar to them: not the language, not the country, not the century my grandmother seemed to be living in. Six and a half thousand miles lay between that classroom and the window she sat at. And still it found them. That was when I understood how far and how deep a story can travel — straight through the walls we build to keep ourselves safe, and then grow too afraid to open, in case the whole house comes down.

It doesn’t. It only adds another room. That is why I tell stories, and why I believe every one of them deserves a corner of the world’s bookshelf. I would like to help yours reach the corner it is looking for.

Thank you for coming this far. You have heard mine now — so tell me yours. Turn the page, and let us find out what we might make together.