Archive for the ‘Community’ Category
Visiting the AIDS Memorial Quilt
The squares are bigger than you could even imagine. They command the room, the space. What a powerful source of memory, of honoring those who we have lost to AIDS. As I have written about a few times already , I have been exploring the many squares on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and have been remembering [...]
January 23rd, 2012But time makes you older
At one of my favorite childhood places, the children’s wing of the Dickinson County Library in Iron Mountain, Michigan, I have two specific memories. One is a compilation of the many hours I spent sitting in the carpet-lined claw-foot bathtub someone had brilliantly installed there, making it suddenly the most fun place to read a book. The [...]
January 21st, 2012“With the digital age come new conceptions of authorship.”
I have waxed poetic about my love for Twitter before. Its way of lessening the distance between artists, authors, and other people we admire is my absolute favorite reason for the micro-blogging social network. (A close second place is how it has changed the way I think in my own head. In pithy little statements [...]
January 16th, 2012Single Girl quilt face, done
Me excited to see the quilt in baby-size, 4 complete circles. At this point I had 12 left to combine. This fall I took my first quilt class, at Whipstitch Fabrics in Atlanta, because I wanted to tackle a quilt design based in circular design. In particular, I had long coveted Denyse Schmidt’s Single Girl [...]
December 11th, 2011The craft and character of oral history
Final presentations of our oral history projects, in this last week of fall semester My oral history class ended today, with the last batch of final presentations by my classmates. I want to remember this class forever. It was inspirational to listen to my classmates over the semester, to hear their tales from the field [...]
December 1st, 2011Oral history in practice: find the people, and a project becomes real
Lots of kiddos at Best International School in Zhengzhou, China, May 2007 I’ve started putting into practice the things that up until this point in my oral history class have only been discussed, that existed only in theory, as things we would eventually have to do. I’ve begun the process of cold-calling a list of [...]
October 5th, 2011“Art was not separate from everyday experience.”
The face jug is a staple motif in southern folk pottery, portraying the humorous "aesthetic of the ugly." I spent over two hours of pure joy and pleasure this weekend drinking in an exhibit that told its story with folk art: hand crafted chairs, cotton-picking plows and tools, buttons made of sea mussels, the most [...]
September 3rd, 2011Pep talk from mom: find meaning, serve others, survive
Twitter has proved an essential tool for communication in the wake of Japan’s series of disasters, when phone lines and other forms of communication have not been accessible or functioning. Not my mom. Translator Aya Watanabe has been translating tweets coming out of Japan in the weeks following the devastation they have been facing. I [...]
April 18th, 2011StoryCorps and the lives of ordinary people
Recently I’ve taken a keen interest in oral histories, and in the technical and artistic feats behind creating audio stories and making them powerful and relevant. I am overwhelmed by how natural the journalists on NPR and its member stations make it seem. There is a lot of work, a lot of practice–and a lot [...]
February 28th, 2011Place: “writing from a place, from a community, from a location in the world”
Reconnecting with my Upper Peninsula past in the summer of 2010, I visited the Iron Mountain Iron Mine, one of my most favorite historical locales as a child. Part of the profession of writing and studying history demands an indifference to place. One reason for this is the slim chance of finding an academic position [...]
January 27th, 2011