A close friend of The Power of Storytelling Conference, Pulitzer Prize winner Jacqui Banaszynski has been part of the line-up since the very first edition. This October, she talked in front of a crowd of 350 people about the role of place in stories: what it means to storytellers and to the people we tell stories about.

Here is the video recording of her speech, and some highlights:

“Writing has always been my way of paying the price for what journalism gives me, which is the license to go into other places and into other people’s lives and to get to know other people and experience other worlds.”

“I use my notebook as a passport to cross borders, I use it as an invitation to walk in other people’s shoes for a bit, I use it as reason to sit not in judgement but to bear witness to other people’s realities, to the things that make them marvelously unique and different, but also to the things that never fail to surprise me because they are so familiar to me.”

“To me, that is the ultimate purpose of this work we do in whatever form we do it. We travel into other worlds, we immerse ourselves into other lives, we stand at the edge of another human experience.”

“These stories that we tell don’t necessarily end when we go away, they have a life beyond that and they affect people’s lives, and we have to remember that.”