Reynolds Price and Theresa Duncan

I had been reading Reynolds Price novels years before we became email acquaintances; we call each other "cousin" based on a shared middle name. (He had ordered a tile of the Chandos Shakespeare. Guillaume Jacque's Pere might have believed that his grandfather came from Loudeac or Carhaix or Fougeres or Paris.)
Before her death, Theresa Duncan's culture blog assumed rich and dear value in a day in which I would chase sticks with Hellhound the sheepdog, eat apples and oranges, make tiles, read books, and pass an hour or two concentrating on marveling that pharmaceuticals had altogether expunged from my life delusional paranoia and spatial hallucinations, and that technicians at the Cleveland Clinic had fiddled their knives in some judicious carving along the contours of the muscles of my heart. For some years prior to these revelations, I had wage-slaved in archives and historical repositories, and had consequently come to form rather strong feelings of pity and derision for those otherwise kind persons who preferred to find in what they erroneously called genealogy values they might be able to detect in themselves. A dispassionate observation of such self-replicating sketches reflexively formed in me the opinion that all that truly could be drawn from the outlines of the lives of one's progenitors was a dim genetic recollection of the stories that attached themselves to those pre-folk, which might as well have been told by a wine-sloshed but good-natured goof sitting around a campfire. My paternal grandfather was born in Jewel, Kansas in 1876, and then traveled by prairie schooner to Kansas City, and by train to upstate New York. My nerves and breath did something else.
One of Theresa's last posts quoted Price:

"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."