I've been fascinated with severe weather since I was four, when I

Jenna Blum, teller of stories woven with memory and tempest, once revealed: “I’ve been fascinated with severe weather since I was four, when I saw a tornado at night in my mom and grandmother’s southeast Minnesota hometown while everyone else was asleep—an experience I encoded in The Stormchasers.” These words, simple in form, rise like thunder in their meaning. For they remind us that the experiences of childhood, even fleeting ones, can shape the entire course of a life, bending it like a tree in the wind toward destiny.

The ancients believed that nature was not random, but a teacher, a mirror of the divine. To see the heavens aflame with lightning or the sea whipped into fury was to glimpse the hidden powers that govern the world. When the young Jenna saw a tornado—dark, twisting, unstoppable—while others lay in slumber, she was awakened to awe and fear alike. That moment became not only a memory but a mark upon her soul, one she would later transform into the living words of her novel. Thus, from the chaos of the storm was born the clarity of her vocation.

History holds many such stories of inspiration drawn from nature’s fury. Mary Shelley, on a storm-lashed night by Lake Geneva, imagined the tale of Frankenstein, a story of lightning, power, and man’s struggle with creation itself. Newton, beneath a tree shaken by wind, saw an apple fall and discerned the law of gravity. In each case, what others dismissed as ordinary or terrifying became, for a mind awake, the spark of vision. So too with Blum—the storm that might have been forgotten by most was etched forever in her imagination.

There is also in this story the sacred presence of mothers and grandmothers, the ancestral home, the lineage into which Jenna was born. The storm did not descend in some nameless place, but in the soil of her own family’s history. This connection reminds us that inspiration is often not abstract, but rooted in the earth where our ancestors walked, the towns where our families built their lives. The hometown becomes both setting and symbol, the place where personal memory meets collective story.

Her words also remind us of the power of storytelling. For the storm could have remained only a private memory, a whisper of childhood awe. Yet she “encoded” it into The Stormchasers, transforming private experience into shared narrative. This is the eternal duty of the writer: to take what life has given them—sorrow, wonder, terror, love—and to turn it into a gift for others. In doing so, the storm ceases to be only hers; it becomes ours, too.

The lesson is clear: the events that shape us most deeply are often those we experience when others are “asleep.” They may be literal storms or inner ones—the losses, revelations, and moments of awe that catch us unguarded. Instead of burying these experiences, we are called to honor them, to ask what they awaken within us, and to let them shape our path. To ignore them is to fall back into sleep; to remember them is to walk awake through life.

Therefore, take this teaching into your heart: when life sends you a storm—whether in nature or in the soul—do not flee from it, but learn from it. Record it, transform it, encode it into your work, your art, your living. Like Jenna Blum, let the winds that once terrified you become the winds that carry you toward your calling. For in every storm there is not only danger, but revelation.

And so we are reminded: storms will always come, but it is the awakened heart that transforms them into stories, and the brave soul that shares those stories with the world.