Entries tagged as ‘stories’
Happy Monday! I hope you’ll enjoy this week’s collection of tasty links. If you look no further than Great Storytelling challenge, you’re in for a remarkable piece of storytelling by Daniel Beaty. Don’t miss it! And for all of us who make presentations from time to time, don’t pass up Make Better Presentations. You’ll find a wealth of good information.
- Library helps memoirists capture their experiences. “In Candace Thompson’s Lincoln Park condo sit hundreds of yellowed pages filled with the loopy cursive writing no longer in favor… But filtering someone else’s experiences into a book is no easy task, so Thompson enrolled in a memoir-writing workshop at the Pritzker Military Library that is designed to help fledgling writers capture their experiences and those of others for a historical record.”
- ACT UP encore. “Created in 1987 by six gay activists, the Silence = Death Project soon came to symbolize a potent rising protest movement: The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)…But to the dismay of Helen Molesworth, Harvard Art Museum’s Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art, many of today’s generation have forgotten the imagery, the movement, and its importance…She aims to change that with a new exhibition at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts titled “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993,” opening today (Oct. 15). The show examines the history of the movement through a series of powerful graphics created by various artist collectives that were part of the influential group.”
- Contemporary Approaches to Heritage Planning. “Although heritage often appears to be an issue of saving significant buildings, there is another, equally important conversation that I feel often gets short shrift: the preservation of intangible heritage. Intangible heritage is the associative heritage that characterizes a community; it is made up of the stories and symbolic values that attach themselves to and come to define the built environment.”
- 30 Old Books Worth Buying For the Cover Alone. “These are those books that catch our eyes, that demand to be picked up and opened, and that make us want to possess them. Enjoy these exquisite examples of beautiful books, and treat yourself to something lovely and collectible – most are surprisingly affordable. “
- What is The Moth? “The Moth, a not-for-profit storytelling organization, was founded in New York in 1997 by poet and novelist George Dawes Green, who wanted to recreate in New York the feeling of sultry summer evenings on his native St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, where he and a small circle of friends would gather to spin spellbinding tales on his friend Wanda’s porch.”
- Great Storytelling Challenge: Sometimes It’s All in the Delivery. “…rising to reader Raf Stevens’ challenge for me to present more examples of good storytelling in this space, I give you another one that is making the social-media rounds…, this one depends on spoken words. The spoken words give it a huge portion its power… The rest of its power comes from the delivery by actor, singer, writer, and composer Daniel Beaty, illustrating just how much a teller can bring to a story.”
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Categories: Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged: link roundup, Resources, stories, Tips
Another Monday and another roundup of interesting, story-related links. Enjoy!
- DigiTales. “… takes the ancient art of oral storytelling and engages a palette of technical tools to weave personal tales using images, graphics, music and sound mixed together with the author’s own story voice. Digital storytelling is an emerging art form of personal, heartful expression that enables individuals and communities to reclaim their personal cultures while exploring their artistic creativity.” [Thanks to Kathy Hansen at A Storied Career for alerting me to this site.]
- Houston Public Library Launches Oral History Site. “Houston Public Library (HPL) is a pivotal partner in an ambitious oral history project, a multiyear, collaborative effort to that will help preserve important parts of the city’s history through the voices of its inhabitants.”
- unpaper – Post-Processing Scanned and Photocopied Book Pages. “Have you scanned bound books, only to find that the pages are curled near the center binding? You also may have noticed that some of the pages are skewed. A program called “unpaper” may solve those problems. Please note that the software only runs on Linux systems.”
- Storybird. “A service that makes it simple for families and friends to create short, visual stories together that they can share and print. For artists and writers, Storybird is next-generation publishing: global, viral, and instantaneous.”
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Photo by iStockphoto.com
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Categories: Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged: Tips, personal histories, stories, oral history, link roundup
Today’s Link Roundup includes two video segments, The Letter From Iwo Jima and Being imperfect. Both are moving testaments to the power of remembrance. And for something practical be sure to check out Safely Storing Digital Photos.
The Letter From Iwo Jima: “A letter taken from a soldier killed in the battle of Iwo Jima is returned to his family.” ~ A New York Times Video [Thanks to Pat McNees for alerting me to this video]
I went fishing and hooked my lost family: “Peter Culver, 75, was cut off from his birth family after he was fostered at the age of five. He spent the next 70 years searching for eight lost brothers and sisters, before a chance meeting during a fishing trip changed his life forever. Here Peter, a grandfather from Beaminster in Dorset, reveals the story behind his emotional reunion…”
National Punctuation Day: 24-hour mark of our failure. “There’s no question that Canada urgently needs a federal Punctuation Improvement Program. The evidence can be found at the heart of our national life, in the logo of the only fast-food chain ever described as a Canadian icon by people who like to call things icons, the so-called Tim “Hortons.”
American Family Stories: “For the last five years storyteller and audiographer Joe McHugh has traveled around the United States meeting people and recording their family stories. These stories have been featured on public radio stations, NPR’s Morning Edition, and Voice of America. Here you can enjoy some of Joe’s favorite stories while viewing Paula McHugh’s illustrations.”
Bridging Gaps, Telling Stories: “Everybody’s got a story to tell. The idea for Cathie English’s three-year oral history project came after a co-worker’s centenarian grandmother passed away unexpectedly, taking her stories with her. Motivated by her coworker’s loss, Cathie started the Aurora High School Oral History Project.”
Being imperfect: “What makes our loved ones so precious to us? You probably jumped to all the good and impressive things first. And that’s fine. But what about those little quirks? What about those sometimes annoying habits? Maybe their imperfections are just as important.”
Safely Storing Digital Photos: “It’s important to keep copies of your digital photos in different places in case a disaster destroys one set of images.”
Photo by fdecomit
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Categories: Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged: link roundup, oral history, personal histories, stories, wisdom
Another Monday and a potpourri of fascinating links to the world of stories. Two of my favorites this week are Mapping Main Street and a talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on creativity. And for those of you considering self-employment be sure to read Leo Babauta’s piece on getting started. He’s got some very practical advice.
- Put Your Ancestors on Our Cover! “We’re looking for a great ancestral photo to feature on the cover of the January 2010 Family Tree Magazine (that’s our 10th anniversary issue!). Maybe your family photo is the one.”
- Mapping Main Street: “… a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets. The goal is to document all of the more than 10,000 streets named Main in the United States.”
- Interview: Sue William Silverman on Memoir Writing: “Sue William Silverman’s newest book, Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir, reads like a memoir about writing memoir – and that’s exactly what the accomplished and respected nonfiction writer had in mind when she decided to do a book about writing craft.”
- Once upon a time in Palo Alto: “Unlike their bigger oral history counterparts, these videos are low-budget and brief but they give watchers impressions of a city that most of us probably don’t know too well, if at all.”
- I Love My Librarian Award: “… encourages library users to recognize the accomplishments of exceptional public, school, college, community college, or university librarians. The award is administered by the American Library Association with support from Carnegie Corporation of New York and The New York Times.”
- Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity: “Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius. It’s a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.”
Photo by fdecomit
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Categories: Monday's Link Roundup · Resources · Tips
Tagged: life story, link roundup, links, Personal historian, Resources, self-employment, stories, Tips
This past week I’ve been reminded how much our treasured possessions are a window into the stories of our life. My frail, ninety-one year old, mother has started to go through her modest collection of jewelry. She’s carefully trying to match each piece with a relative or friend she thinks would appreciate having it after she has died. Sitting with her, she began telling me the stories behind each piece. There are the art deco black-and-white earrings she bought to go with a very fashionable dress my father bought her shortly after they were married. A silver bracelet brought back by my dad from Pakistan during WWII is tarnished but her memories of my dad’s war experiences remain vivid. Each piece unlocks a story in my mother’s life.
And then there was a colleague at Victoria Hospice who told me of a unique funeral celebration he attended. A friend of the deceased gave a eulogy that was built entirely around photos of the shoes in her friend’s life. Each pair of shoes had a story to tell.
In The Globe and Mail newspaper on Thursday, I read an essay entitled Family Ties. It tells the story of a son’s remembrance of his father through the neckties that were passed down to him. Here’s an excerpt:
The other day I was getting ready for work and went into my closet to get a tie…I reached for a brown-, blue- and white-striped tie and I remembered that it was one of my father’s. He died last year and shortly afterward my mother, who was almost 80, made the decision to sell the big house we all grew up in. It took her a while, but she finally tackled the job of cleaning out my father’s closets… My father had a lot of ties – dozens and dozens and dozens of them…. And so, on this morning, I found myself knotting my father’s tie, remembering how we stood in front of the mirror years ago, him teaching me how to get a half-Windsor just right. I smiled, knowing I might be the only person in the building that day with a tie on.
Another interesting use of objects to tell a story appeared on the NPR website. Entitled A Catalog — Literally — Of Broken Dreams, it reviews the book Important Artifacts, by New York Times op-ed page art director Leanne Shapton. The NPR article points out:
Foregoing narrative entirely, Shapton tells the story of a couple’s relationship in the form of a staggeringly precise ersatz auction catalog that annotates the common detritus of a love affair — notes, CD mixes, e-mails, photos, books— and places the objects up for sale…. In choosing the conceit of an auction catalog, Shapton reminds us that the story of love can be told through the things we leave behind, but also by the condition in which we leave them.
All of this got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be interesting to do a memoir or life story built around the special things someone possesses? Something to keep in mind. Have you already done something like this? Love to hear from you, if you have.
Photo by Kylie
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Categories: Life stories · Memoirs · Personal historian · Tips
Tagged: family keepsake, favorite things, memoir, Personal historian, personal histories, preserving, reflection, stories
Warmest wishes to all my Jewish friends and viewers. This is a wonderful time to reminisce about past holidays. A tradition of National Public Radio for nearly two decades, Hanukkah Lights presents brand new fiction to celebrate and illuminate the holiday season — moving tales of discovery and reconciliation, the persistence of hope and the promise of undimmed light — read by Susan Stamberg and Murray Horwitz. You can treat yourself to some wonderful stories by clicking here.
Photo by Nancy
Categories: Holidays · Life stories · Memoirs
Tagged: Hanukkah, memories, National Public Radio, NPR, stories
StoryCorps has declared November 28th to be the first annual National Day of Listening in the United States. The day after Thanksgiving they suggest that you:
…ask the people around you about their lives — it could be your grandmother, a teacher, or someone from the neighborhood. By listening to their stories, you will be telling them that they matter and they won’t ever be forgotten. It may be the most meaningful time you spend this year.
I think this is a terrific idea and urge you to participate. You can find out more about how you can become involved by clicking here.
Photo by Omar Bárcena
Categories: Life stories · Preservation
Tagged: life story, listening, National Day of Listening, stories, StoryCorps
