I was honored to speak with Malcolm Guite, a poet and Anglican priest, about storytelling, attention and contemporary life. Guite’s latest project is a retelling of the Arthurian legends in verse, beginning with Galahad and the Grail.

Arthurian legend might seem an unusual place to start for a conversation about technology. But I believe that repairing our relationship with the internet and the devices that permeate our lives begins with changing how we pay attention.

Much ink has been spilled about how the digital age has fractured our attention spans and much less on what it looks like, practically, to fix them besides the old panacea of “log off,” “touch grass.”

In my estimation, the best – and most human – place to start recovering is the art of the story. Here is a small part of our conversation:

‘An instant wow, an instant sensation… and then it’s forgotten and you’re on to the next thing’

‘An instant wow, an instant sensation… and then it’s forgotten and you’re on to the next thing’

KATHERINE DEE: It seems like the art of story has been lost in the digital age.

MALCOLM GUITE: A story is the opposite of random. It’s coherent. It’s meaningful. It’s got a beginning, a middle and an end. We’re not only storytelling creatures but story-bearing creatures. We work best when we know we’re inside a story and it’s a good story.

KD: Part of it, I think, is that the internet warps time. We don’t have a........

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