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 especially two men who were important to my Mom, to our community, and to my perception and experience with the death tolls from AIDS. Almost as soon as I learned, via their website, that the Quilt is stored and the foundation headquartered here in Atlanta, I called, left a message, and asked to visit–especially to see the two squares I had been pouring over, Craig’s and Parnell’s.

Photos on Craig's quilt square, of Parnell Peterson (left) and Craig Koller, from Parnell's family

Richie, a veteran of the NAMES Project Foundation, called me back after the MLK holiday weekend, and I planned a visit for today. This morning I spent some time crying, touching the quilt, reading the many lovely words, poems, thoughts contributed to each of their squares, and learned more about these two men via the wonderful memorial that this Quilt provides. It provides a way to remember, in a very communal and large-scale way, yet allowing for quite private and personal time with those who are being remembered. Richie pulled up the information on these two squares, 2744 (Parnell’s) and 5508 (Craig’s), so I could see where they had traveled, where they had been requested, and where and when they were each on display.

I learned that the demographic who has been contributing the most new squares–they receive on average about 400 new squares each year–are nieces. Girls my age, who have memories, however clear or unclear, of their uncles who died while we were young, and who have now reached the age in which remembering them properly has been an important part of grieving, or becoming an adult, of understanding how this illness has devastated families. I am exactly that generation, that demographic, though I have to consider myself an honorary niece only.

I made a donation in honor of my parents, who have been caring, compassionate examples for my brothers and me, and in honor of Craig and Parnell, obviously, and for each of their families. The wonderful (small) staff gave me a book of some quilt squares, and a calendar I have already poured over several times. I felt so welcomed, and depending on how much longer I am in Atlanta, I want to help quilt squares together as they need me. Seeing a modest and hard-working organization and staff like that also reminds me that I am in the right field; non-profits, working to educate and engage the public, and ensuring that life has been well-spent by taking care of the issues that matter most.

Take a moment to drink in how enormous each panel of this quilt is. Each square is intentionally 3 feet by 6 feet, about the size of a human grave. I was not prepared for the commanding presence, and for how much more meaningful seeing each component up-close truly is.

That's me next to Craig's square

The portion my family contributed to Craig's square, which is on the bottom, in the very middle

Parnell McKenna Peterson's square (double-sized, like Craig's). The entire bottom is littered with lovely messages to him.

I especially enjoyed seeing all of the contributions made by people who loved each of them. Their lives and memories matter to many.

My mom, Craig, and some other of their high school friends here, also part of Craig's square. Craig is on the bottom left.

Parnell

Craig

Craig, in the center of his beautiful square. (Hazard of storing thousands of quilt squares, creases.)

The modest headquarters of the largest piece of community folk art in the world. The Quilt weighs 54 tons. They're all stored here.

Take-home goodies: book, calendar. There are very generous, wonderful people taking care of this quilt.

My family's little square on Craig's quilt square

I bring these up now because I have been thinking so much about the illness, the virus, the stigma, the massive too-little-too-late effort to stem its spread, and the continued work by scientists, doctors, activists, and others to find long-term resolution (if not a cure). I bring up these memories because it is curious to me why I should remember them both so clearly, I can picture the rooms, and where I was sitting. I don’t have similar memories learning about cancer (several types having affected my grandparents), or my mother’s heart rhythm disturbance, both of which affected my own life in much more direct ways.

There is just something that hurts so deeply when I think about it. Yet it is a feeling I have embraced, it is important to feel deeply on this earth, in this life, especially when I have my health and so many do not.

Two of my Mom’s high school friends, Craig Koller and Parnell Peterson, died of AIDS. Parnell, who I do not remember, died in 1991, at age 33. Craig died in 1997, at age 40. I remember visiting Craig and his mother and sister’s family in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in spring of 1997, and I knew at that point that he was sick (though I’m unsure if I knew what was making him sick).

It’s strange what I’ve been feeling recently, since finding the images of each Parnell and Craig’s quilt squares on the NAMES Project Foundation AIDS Memorial Quilt. I am going to see the quilt next week, and they have pulled these two squares for me to see. My family, my Mom, Dad and siblings, contributed a tiny portion to Craig’s square, at the request of his mother, and so we are part of a collage of love surrounding Craig’s image on his doubly-large square. I did not know this until very recently, as that is one part in my saga that I do not recall.

Square 05508, Craig Koller's portion is the bottom, middle. My family's photo-transfer contribution is third down on the right side panel along his square.

But since seeing these fuzzy images online, and trying desperately and ineffectively to zoom in enough to see both of their faces clearly, I have been experiencing what I can only say is deep grief– to the extent that I can understand it, which I know I cannot fully. I have not lost a parent, or a sibling, or a spouse or lover or very close friend to this illness– or even to any illness. I have not had, as a deep-feeling adult, any such loss from any tragedy or illness. And yet, I think of lives gone too early, of what Parnell might have liked to do in his life, and I sob. I cry, I get angry, I am sad. It’s usually in the car rides home, during my commutes. Certain songs, or lyrics, and thoughts, and prayers, and images either on the road or in my brain, and I am heaving again. I do not remember crying so deeply about something so big, over which I have no control, except when I read The Kite Runner, and spent a few nights in my room, on my bed, reading and sobbing for Afghanistan. (The whole thing, the whole place, every person in that country, which has seen so much. If you’ve read it, you understand the injustice and the pain and the violence that cannot be escaped, and the hatred that runs deep along ethnic lines.) Other than that, I have not cried so much over people I remember so little about, or in fact, if we look at the larger loss, of millions of lives taken by HIV/AIDS, of people whose stories I don’t know.

I find myself wishing deeply, searching in futility, to learn more about their lives–Parnell and Craig. I search for anything I can find on the internet, time and again, on Parnell. On Craig. I’ve looked at the cold, simple statement of their deaths on Ancestry.com’s death index about a hundred times. I long to know what Craig did for a living, what he liked to eat and watch, things beyond his illness and pain. I wonder what Parnell was doing in the 1980s, as a twenty-something as I am now, so sure that he has his whole life before him, as I feel now. Thirty-three is not so far away. Did he know anything about the disease, as it was spreading? The things I’ve been reading about, the “gay cancer” and the doctor’s fears, and the devastation it would bring to the huge steps the gay community had made in those years before, what did he think of it? Who were his friends, how did he share his diagnosis with them, with his family? I do know that his mother, Mary Peterson, seemed like an amazing, talented woman. My Mom vouched that it was so. I wish I could talk to her now.

How long did Craig live with HIV before it became AIDS? Where was he in the 1980s? I know he and Parnell both lived near San Francisco; were they the kind of high school friends who made sure to keep in touch? Who did he lose to this epidemic before he succumbed to it? One of the most heart-wrenching parts of the story of AIDS is the proximity, the high number of friends some people lost in those first decades, to the disease, as the latency period was so long and the specific communities affected were so defined. It breaks my heart, truly, to imagine the young men who died alone, and who were not given memorial services by their families because of a denial or unacceptable of their son’s sexuality. Doctors and nurses tell of miserable, terribly painful deaths some endured alone. No one to comfort them.

That is what makes me so happy about the AIDS memorial quilt. I pour into it so many hopes, that unknown names, that the memories of countless people who are remembered no where else have been stitched lovingly into these 91,000+ squares. The squares are all shaped to resemble coffins, which is a stark and essential reminder that these are lives, lost. People loved them, people rejected or hated some of them, but they all had lives, beliefs, love, careers and causes, before HIV/AIDS. Randy Shilts, in his book And the Band Played On, talks about how there was a very clear line, for every gay man, in their lives and experiences: there was life Before HIV/AIDS, and there was After. I was born into the world of After, the world as we know it from now on With AIDS. And as Stevie Nicks so eloquently says in “Landslide”–a song it is impossible to not cry to–time makes you older, children get older, I’m getting older too. Time makes us older, literally, but also, it makes us older with the heavy things it lays on our hearts. As an adult, I am brave and I accept uncertainty, but man, does the world scare me, overwhelm me.

I cannot on my own find a cure for HIV and AIDS. I am sad every day that I do not know more about the lives of the two men who were loving, caring friends of my Mom’s, whose generation (all three of them were born in 1957) was most directly hit with this unimaginably unforgivable and deadly disease. But I can love others, love those around me who might be different, but who are people all the same, like me, trying to survive in this big world, that has so much hate. I can also keep Craig and Parnell in my heart, grieve the loss of their lives, and keep their memory alive. I wish I could tell them I love them; I hope they know somehow that I do. 

And here I shall stop; I am sobbing again.

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 on life and what’s occurring in mine.)

I have squealed in delight when a respected writer or journalist responds to me on Twitter. It’s like little brushes with fame, or relative fame, and with people whose work you greatly admire but that you would almost never meet in your entire life. Yet here, on Twitter, it’s like they are those living, breathing people, who pass their thoughts along into the Twitter-sphere like the rest of us.

The relationship between authors/writers and social networking is also changing our perception and idea of what exactly makes the writer/artist. And as the title of this post suggests (and the NYT article from which it came), the digital age is transforming the way we understand authorship. I, after all, am also a digital author, this website as my outlet for things that would only otherwise exist in my head or among my friends and family (who can only hear me ramble about some things so many times before tiring, understandably). This blog has changed the way I communicate with everyone around me, and so has Twitter. So it makes sense that it is doing the same thing to professional writers, authors, journalists, artists everywhere, best-sellers or no. Some authors become humorists on Twitter, as it becomes an outlet for personas they didn’t have an outlet for elsewhere. The internet is well-known to affect people’s actual or perceived personas. The fascinating New York Times article on authors tweeting is well worth your time:

At their best, social media democratize literature and demystify the writing process. As Suzanne Fischer tweets of following her favorite author, “It’s fascinating to learn what an unsettling & emotional process it is for her to write characters into the world.” When that mythic author comes down for a chat, she gets followers.

Some of my favorite people to follow on Twitter:

@patricox / Patrick Cox, reporter for PRI’s The World, and creator/host of The World in Words podcast on all things language.

@elizabethlittle / Author Elizabeth Little. She has the best sense of humor. I think we would be excellent real-life friends.

@jenny8lee / Jennifer 8. Lee: Journalist, freelancer, author, Chinese-American. Her real middle name is 8.

This pattern had been on my Amazon wish list forever, silently intimidating me with the giant-scale circles and all those tiny pieces. See, I’ve made several quilts, but they’ve been deceptive to outsiders, because every time I’ve made up my own pattern and motif, going off things I’ve seen and loved, but essentially, designing each myself. Following patterns is actually hard, and I wanted to force myself to stick to a method, follow directions, and patiently cut out all the pieces ahead of time, per the instructions, so that by the time you hate the giant queen-size you’ve set out to make and cut all those hundreds of pieces, you actually get down to the sewing, and time flies by, and then you have a massive, beautiful quilt top ready to be layered with batting and backing and grace your bed.

My goal for 2012 is to take this baby somewhere and learn to use a long-arm quilter myself, taking the required course and then using the circular quilting pattern that comes with Schmidt’s design for Single Girl. I started this quilt on the day after my 24th birthday, September 25, and so I want to finish the quilting by my birthday this year, my 25th birthday. I’ve made four quilts, this is my fifth one, and three of the first four have been gifts. The only one I’ve kept, a throw-size in all fabrics I loved, is wonderfully experimental, including my first raggedy machine-quilting stitches on my own machine. It’s a lovely token of early quilting technique, filled with trial and error (read: mistakes). I love it for that, but I am excited to tackle this quilt, a giant one that is made for my bed, and make it a beautiful work of art, showing how I’ve grown in my skill since I began quilting in 2008.

I can’t make it to my final quilt class today, because I’m handicapped from recent foot surgery, but I needed to post some pictures for the other ladies in my class, as well as our teacher, Diana. I hope you guys can post some for me to see, I’m really sad I will be missing seeing the final products! Please post them here, or e-mail them to me, or put them on Pinterest–something!

One circle, four quarters together

Graphic

In a bunch

Detail

Circle love

Happy with the two-tone scheme I chose for this quilt. All reds and creamy whites.

Across my bed, all sixteen circles, each turning a little differently

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 as we each figured out what the heck our projects would be about and how we were going to master (as much as possible) the art of the interview that yields vivid and meaningful stories out of narrators–those we interview–and then compose those somehow into an appropriate historical synthesis.

Not every college class is composed of such a diverse, engaged, and interesting crowd–not even in grad school. We had some of the best discussions in that class that I’ve had in my entire college career (of six years…). Today my friend Seth (an undergrad–the class is cross-listed) remarked that this was his favorite class in all of college.

I am under no illusions that anyone else will care to read about what each of my classmates did for their projects, but I need to write them down so that in a few years I won’t have forgotten this extraordinary body of work that we produced this fall, in a matter of weeks and months, in this year 2011. Listening to the clips in class, of the people we’d been hearing about all semester made for a remarkable week of class presentations. Also stellar to hear about the dirty details of trying to get people (sometimes relatives, sometimes strangers, some in between these) to talk to us, college kids out seeking a good story to contribute to historical narrative.

Jessie: I interviewed two women who are the mothers of girls adopted from China. I explored the notions of family, roots, identity, cross-cultural families, siblings, and the trials of the adoptions process–including public and private perception from family members, friends, and outsiders. I had wonderful experiences and learned so much. I will chronicle some of my own stories and lessons here soon. I will also share some of the most remarkable clips, details, and stories in audio form, so you can hear these women tell their own stories.

Chris: He interviewed three immigrant rights activists (one of them his wife) who had some live-defining experiences during the immigration drama that occurred in Arizona in 2009 and 2010, with SB 1070. Young people, a recent event, and powerful, emotional stories.

Aaron: Interviewed a WWII veteran who hadn’t planned on joining the military, but was drafted in the last month of the war. He wound up being a career soldier, the war truly changing the course of his entire life. He found this guy through another girl in the class, actually, after expressing his interest in doing something relating to WWII. This was an unexpectedly interesting story, because really, what new stories can you tell these days on the second world war?

Joleen: She focused on one elementary school in a county south of Atlanta, and sought the perspectives of teachers at the school who have seen the demographics of the school diversify enormously over the past ten years.

Liz: She delved into some perspectives of residents of her home county on what is considered the last lynching ever to occur in the South, in the 1950s, which happened in that county.

Denise: She interviewed four women who were leaders in the Georgia quilt documentation project that took place from 1989 to 1993 across the state. Her larger goal was to use these interviews to help her design her own documentation project to be expanded for her capstone project for the heritage preservation program (the same program I’m in). She wound up finding some heartfelt stories beyond the cut-and-dry facts of the documentation process itself.

Brooks: He interviewed his grandfather–from Savannah–about his career as a Georgia state legislator during the 1960s. He was elected in 1966, precisely because of the ending of the County Unit System, a unique and stunning old Georgia political structure that ensured that real political power remained with the rural parts of the state, even as larger and larger portions of the population resided in cities.

James: Interviewed three people who know or used to know the author Alice Walker, who is from Eatonton, Georgia–two classmates and her niece. He sought to define the person that is Alice Walker from a number of angles.

Michelle: She focused on her grandmother, a retired educator of more than 35 years, who was a black teacher at risk of losing her job when integration meant fewer teachers were needed.

Classmate X (Can you believe there is one girl whose name I don’t know?): Another school integration story, this time focused on people who went through the Marietta City school system during desegregation and who now teach in the same system. This was my least favorite of them all, just really oft-heard stuff, and I swear it is not because I have somehow predisposed to not like it just because I also cannot recall her name.

Danny: Interviewed three generations of his wife’s family, who own a farm in Yatesville, Georgia (population under 400), on the trials, memories, and questionable and perceived dark future of the farm and farming at large in the state and the United States.

Seth: He interviewed a personal hero and former boss, Anita Beatty, controversial advocate for the homeless and leader of the Atlanta Task Force–on which Seth spent four or five years working towards improving the lives of homeless in the city. He battled with the process, seeking the complicated private view of Anita, rather than the oft-seen and politicized public version she has so perfectly mastered.

Rosemary: Interviewed members of two families that have connection to the land that is now Arabia Mountain Heritage Area, people who were coming of age in the 1960s and ’70s, when the outskirts of the city were becoming part of the burgeoning metropolitan area.

Rebecca: Interviewed her grandmother, matriarch to her enormous North Carolina family, and strong woman head of household who ran a farm and raised dozens of children of the family over the years. Her grandmother is a pistol, for sure.

Laura: Took a journey into the histories of Commercial High School, Girls’ High, and the numerous incarnations the buildings have been since the early twentieth century. Her aunt was a student in Commercial High School, which sparked her interest, among other things–including her decades of work herself in education and as a school principal.

Last and most amazing:

Brenda: Since Brenda is a stage actor and filmmaker by training and profession as well, she used the oral history class for her own skilled perspective, and her final project reflected a creative and talented woman and a powerful story. She used clips of two women, her mother and another old friend, who are both–in different ways–part of a group of Hawaiian immigrants in the Augusta, Georgia and Aiken, South Carolina areas (through their husbands). Her own mother married a Japanese Hawaiian man, and the other woman, Millie, is Hawaiian and married a white man. Their quite distinct perspectives, when played side by side like conversation, brought out the similarities and the “Hawaiian Spirit” and tides of life that both have experienced, with Hawaiian cultural influences and as women in interracial marriages who moved to the South at a time when there were barely any people other than black and white. She made these into a film using footage of herself playing ukulele and photos of the people being mentioned and speaking. It was an apt use of her audio, fitting her own quirky style; and the story came across so powerful in this medium. Her 4-minute piece was inspiring. I was crying at her skills, at the power of these voices, at the potential we each have in us to tell a great story.

Laura also had some excellent summative comments on oral history, when she presented her process and conclusion. One is that humility, and in this, not always knowing what your goal is, can sometimes make for the most effective oral history interviews, because you are truly allowing the narrator to guide the meaning, and where it goes. You, the interviewer, are not trying to make them fit in some construct to fit your own assumptions or research goals.

Indeed, we all learned from our projects that we cannot assume to find anything, and we cannot expect to be able to form the project, the stories, into something we either anticipate or desire. We cannot possibly know the stories in store for us when that recorder starts rolling. I did other oral histories this semester for another class’s research, and so I was doing quite a few of these meetings, every one of them with someone I had either just met or had never met at all. Driving to each one, I felt that jolt, the excitement of not knowing what in the world I would learn in the next ninety minutes.

Who knows, anyone, until we ask to hear?

I’ve begun the process of cold-calling a list of strangers, to me, nothing more than a series of names and phone numbers that I found on a national organization’s Atlanta chapter site. And to them, I am a stranger asking to be let into their lives, who is asking to hear their stories, often quite personal and emotional. I am asking, after all, about the process of adopting their own children. This is a very strange thing to explain in a message on an answering machine to a person you’ve never spoken to.

And in several cases, I’ve had kids answer the phone, and take the message. This is even stranger, having to summarize in a brief sentence or series of key words to a child or teenager why this random graduate student wants to talk to their mother. (Note: It’s about them. Talk about awkward to explain.) “My name is Jessie, I’m a graduated student at Georgia State, and I want to talk to your mom about an oral history project I am starting, on families who’ve adopted children from China.” Hmm, random, indeed.

The first time I dialed a number, I was so thankful it was no longer in service, because I slammed the phone down and felt my heart rate come back down from through-the-roof heights. A few deep breaths, and onto name #2 on the list. Many calls later, I am slowly but surely reaching out to some families. All in its own time, I am in no hurry, and want these families to feel they can respond to my request in time. We’re all busy people.

At the risk of seeming creepy, I do take pictures of adorable children when visiting foreign countries. China is no exception. (Luoyuang, China, May 2007)

This is, by the way, preliminary work for what will be my master’s capstone project: an oral history series and podcast series, compiled and stored on a website that also allows for interaction and visitor submissions, on the stories and histories of Metro Atlanta families who have adopted daughters from China. This enormous diaspora of Chinese girls has spread far across the world, and Atlanta is just one corner of that vast space. This community, the girls and their adoptive (and biological) families, are part of an important historical event, beginning largely in the early 1990s and reaching a peak around 1999 – 2005, and waning in recent years as the process has become extremely cumbersome and slow for adoptive families. This twenty-odd-year period marks an important occurrence in China-U.S. relations that reaches directly into the homes of American families whose families have changed forever because of it; and I want to study this in that historical context, by compiling the oral histories of those living it.

To do this, I’ve had to muster up some courage I haven’t used since my days in student journalism–when it was nothing to phone a stranger and ask them some questions.

Hula-hoop skills at Best International, a bilingual elementary school

But oral histories are by nature very intense, quite distinct from a journalistic effort. And it has been thrilling so far, to find what’s at the other end of the line, when you call someone out of the blue–a total stranger–and ask them about something like the experience of adopting their own child.

Exhilaration even more enormous than calling as a journalist. No, I’m not a reporter, I’m a historian, and I want to record your oral history. Just as we have talked about in class, people immediately begin to question you (“How did you get my number?”), and question themselves, retrospect on their own life–”I haven’t done anything important.” But they have and that’s the point of oral histories. They are a part of history.

I am awestruck all over again, every time I think of the phone call I received last night, in return to one of my messages left with a woman’s daughter. She was rightfully questioning of me, but I clearly passed the test, because she became so open and willing and engaging, by the time I hung up with her my jaw was literally hanging open. I sat in shock in the driver’s seat of my car.

This family has an extraordinary part in the history of Chinese adoptions, from a very early point in the larger narrative timeline. Each of their three daughters is from China, adopted in the 1990s. I have researched this process and read books and articles, and I have never heard of a family like this, ever. And they are part of the exact Metro Atlanta community that I so want to document. I absolutely cannot wait to speak with her further, and collect her story (stories, for sure).

There is a huge difference between theorizing and structuring and dreaming up a plan, a project, and executing it–and making the final product effective, interesting, helpful to participants and the larger public. Without knowing who is out there to talk to, I had no idea if this would even work. I now feel that it is not only possible, but it has the potential of being extremely fruitful. The families who have adopted from China are an extraordinarily connected and close-knit community, across the nation. I hope this small project can somehow contribute to those within that cross-national community, and inspire other initiatives. It’s an important international event that deserves to be contemplated in its proper historical context. I’m so excited to bring us a step closer to doing this.

I went to the Atlanta History Center for the sole purpose of visiting their many exhibits–for the first time in my life. This is really sad, considering I have a degree in history, I’m earning a master’s student studying museums, and I’ve lived in Atlanta for more than five years. In my defense, I’ve been there once to see one specific exhibit, and we also got a tour of the innards of the place, including their giant holdings areas down below where they keep the collection pieces that are not on display in exhibits. I have also been to their Kenan Research Center on several occasions for research purposes. But this was my first time going to meander my way through their permanent and temporary exhibitions.

Folk art meets daily life necessity: rice hulling mortar and pestels, circa 1800s (used into the 1900s). This is the most enormous mortar and pestel I've ever seen.

I knew I needed to pick one to highlight for yet another assigned exhibit review for a class (this makes about the fifth review I’ve done), but I didn’t really go in thinking of any one in particular–especially not, for some reason, the folk art exhibit, which I’d heard one or a few classmates discuss before but never given much thought. But this semester, I’m taking a class on Material Culture, on the things we adorn with a human touch, and make with a purpose, be it necessity, pleasure, tool, comfort or any other reason we have to create something. In the wake of this summer’s interior design class, I already feel that I am more aware of the conscious designs and historical components surrounding aesthetic, style, and the use of the things around us.

The first two weeks of class already have me thinking even harder about the things we design, make, buy, use, sell, throw away, repurpose. It was truly serendipitous that after a few other galleries, I wandered over to the Shaping Traditions: Folk Art in a Changing South gallery while deciding where next to spend my time. I had been planning to review a different exhibit, for a different class than Material Culture, but here it was in front of me, and there on the introductory panel was John Burrison, a professor at my school and friend of many of my professors, in a photograph with some of the pieces in the collection. I had a memory flashback and realized that I remembered learning that most of this collection–thousands of items–was his–he had been collecting southern folk art since the 1970s, and turned his collection and his lifetime of knowledge on folklife into an exhibit–a stunning and approachable work in itself.

From this leftover bit of mussel shell, you can see how they made buttons out of them. Incredible!

There on the same panel was a name that suddenly meant a lot to me: Henry Glassie. I had only just finished reading one of his books for my class, his 1968 classic within the folklife field, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States. I got really excited, and from there, it was several hours later before I noticed how much time I had been spending at each panel, examining each piece of folk craft, studying the selection of photos that accompanied throughout.

My favorite part, obviously really, was the section devoted entirely to southern textiles, quilts, motifs, and influential styles. The designers came up with a truly ingenious method to display and preserve the six quilts within the exhibit: each one rolled out on its own giant display board, once prompted by a visitor who pushes a button–which sits below a description of the type, material, quilter, and estimated year of creation. I must have pushed those buttons more than a dozen times, engrossed in their pattern and fabric choices, old as they were. Each was so beautiful, and they combined to tell a distinctly diverse story of the variety of quilting styles and influences that play into southern quilting.

The clever system within the exhibit that only exposes the quilts to light when visitors choose to roll them out--it's also fun to use!

The textile section had an essential "touch me" section, for those of us who were dying to feel the quilts and had to contain ourselves.

"Barn Rising" variation of a Log Cabin quilt, early 1900s

"Eight Point Star" variation with strips, by Estella Daniel, Emerson County, Georgia, 1930s

"Whig's Defeat," by Susan Loyd, Rome, Georgia, 1856

"Brick Work" and strip pattern, Annie Howard, Madison, Georgia, 1957

(Read on for a bit more about the themes of the exhibit; it’s worth a few minutes!)

The exhibit was consciously created to revolve around its stunning artifacts, to tell the larger story of the relationship between folk craft and folk art in past and present southern life. The overarching thesis the exhibit aims to impress upon visitors is that there has been both continuity and change in southern folk art, and that the relationship within it—southerners and their handmade products—is an important component in the history of the South.

Craftsmen-made ladderback chairs

The exhibit has an incredible collection of folk furniture, with all the requisite textiles, potter-made earthenware, and other pieces that defined home life in preindustrial Georgia.

Modern-day artists and immigrant groups who have added their cultural traditions to the South in the last half century are featured near the end of the exhibit space, proving that folk art in the region, while no longer necessary for our work or daily life essentials, is still an important part of our cultural lives; we are surrounded by the artistry and traditional techniques of those who continue to practice and pass on our folk arts. Shaping Traditions tells this story through the objects that define the subject.

Go see it.

Ben stopped by to say hi to my camera

Ben's note in the guest book. Haha. True statement.

This is what pure giddiness looks like.

Also: Nose-picking in the Metropolitan Frontiers exhibit

Translator Aya Watanabe has been translating tweets coming out of Japan in the weeks following the devastation they have been facing. I found her story, actually, also via Twitter, and she was reading some of her favorites. The translations are obviously longer than 140 characters in English, since in Japanese, far more can be said in the space of one character, and so many of them were quite poignant and in-depth, and beautiful.

This was my favorite.

Mom’s Pep Talk
Called my Mom to let her know I survived the quakes. She lives in Kagoshima, on Kyushu Island, a thousand miles south of Tohoku. Thought she was worried about me and wanted to calm her down. Instead of tears, what I got from her was a pep talk. “Know, with all your heart, the meaning of your being where you are, at this timing and age in your life. Do the best you can to serve others.” Mother, I am proud to be your son. I will live through all this.

See more of them here.

I’m interested because I am starting the groundwork on my own podcast project, a history podcast. The topic or range of themes, I don’t know yet, but I have a few ideas I am working on. I want to take the notions of community and of roots, and really challenge notions of identity and nationality through the stories I seek (or happen to find) and the questions I ask. Anyone who has read this blog knows that I am fascinated with the fluidity of nationality and its meaning in lives and across national boundaries. So when I sit down to think about communities, I inevitably return to this thought, to this theme in the multicultural lives we live today. There are more specifics that I can expound on later when I have solidified my project further.

Sarah Littman and her son Joshua managed to impact a lot of people through a simple recorded conversation at the StoryCorps booth.

But one of the first places I began looking for inspiration, of course, was the StoryCorps project, which is an initiative of NPR, and both are funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The StoryCorps project records regular people (with often far beyon regular stories to tell) who are interviewed by a friend or family member in booths located at various spots throughout the country (and in the traveling booth). Interviews are housed in the Folk Life Collection at the Library Of Congress, where they stand as historical record that the lives of everyday people matter in our past and in the present.

Beside the fact that NPR is absolutely my primary source of news, and I am admittedly an NPR-podcast junkie, the goal of StoryCorps is valuable and significant in ensuring that people feel both connected to the past, and feel that they matter themselves. This project cannot disappear now, just when technologies are allowing us to share stories in more ways than we ever could. It is a brilliant way of collecting oral histories, focusing on whatever the interviewer wants to know about their loved friend or family member. I am thinking I will take my dad sometime very soon.

I was reminded the other day of one of the most memorable stories ever to air on Morning Edition, the morning program that regularly airs a brief interview from the StoryCorps booth: that of mother Sarah Littman and her then-12-year-old son Joshua, who  has Asperger’s. Their poignant conversation (which you can read more about and hear, here) received an incredible response, and is still considered a milestone event in their lives. Littman wrote about it recently, in an effort to illustrate how important StoryCorps’s mission is, and to remind everyone how much it meant to her, her son, and everyone who heard and was moved by their story.

She had this to say:

I’ve tried to analyze why our interview had such an impact on so many lives. I’ve wondered: Is it because it helped raise awareness about Asperger’s syndrome? Is it because the interview helped people understand that seeing the world “differently” isn’t necessarily a bad thing? Is it because—and this is the gift of StoryCorps—it showed how much we learn from “ordinary” people (whom, it turns out, are really anything but) if we take the time to sit down and listen?

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all of these things, but at the core of it all is that last question from my son. This question is at the root of what all of us, no matter who we are or what our age, gender, race, religion, or social status, wonder. Deep down, we all have the desire to know—Do you love me the way that I am? Am I who you expected me to be?

Josh is now 17 and a senior in high school. When applying to colleges for the fall, he chose to write his application essay about our StoryCorps experience. I plan to take him back to the StoryCorps Booth after his first semester for another interview to talk about this next chapter in his life.

StoryCorps’ single largest funder is CPB. The elimination of federal funding for public broadcasting would essentially be a death knell for StoryCorps, which not only has brought so much joy to so many, but in our celebrity-obsessed culture is an incredibly important reminder that every individual matters, and that there is so much to be learned from our stories if we’d only take the time to stop and really listen. This isn’t a partisan issue. It’s about what really matters.

Her sentiment and thoughts on the matter really got to the heart of how I had been feeling about the issue, and about how NPR and the programming I love could take a huge hit in the very near future. She just expressed those thoughts much better than I. So I ask you to also stand up for the value of all of our lives, big and small. Let Congress know everyday stories and lives matter in our collective past. I got a response from Sonny Perdue’s people last week.

Do it for me! Where else will I get my daily 2+ hours of news and entertainment?

Local and public history is almost exactly the opposite. For the people living in their home, in their city or town, in their region, they begin with a place they care about and ask what happened there, in that spot that they claim, maybe even identify with.

It might be the disassociation, the impersonal way that we take history and dissect it, interpret it, and polish it up into a book filled with delicious complication and some big words, that sometimes causes our own alienation from everyday people, who consume a wholly different kind of history. While the doctoral works sit in the university library for other noble scholars to ponder and converse over, citizens of my city are consuming history through television documentaries and films, theme parks, mass market historical fiction, facts and tidbits on Snapple caps, and maybe (hopefully!) a museum every now and then. Part of why I find public history so important a field is that we see how both of these types of history are important, and, as Michael Frisch said in his book with the same title, we have a “shared authority.” The conversation about history is not only taking place in the university, nor should it. We are not allowed to shake our heads, smiling sadly, at the interpretations of Hollywood movies or History Channel specials if we are not willing to take the discussion to the table, equally set, to have a talk about the complexities and contentions in our past.

Jilbert's Dairy, another place emblazoned in my memory forever, when I visited Marquette, MI, July 2010.

A majority of the courses I took to earn my bachelor’s degree were on world history. I know a lot about Chinese history and politics, India and South Asia and their politics, West Africa, Central Asia, even a bit (though only a bit) about Europe. But not being from any of those places, there is only so much I can ever hope to know about them, and I may never understand them fully. That leaves me knowing not very much about the larger world, but even less about my own history. I learned a lesson, I grounded myself and thought headily about how much I need to learn about my own complicated past (and how it relates to all the other ones I’ve studied, which fold back into each other in beautiful important ways.) Wouldn’t you know, the American history and public history courses I did take had some of the most profound impact on me, and my career path.

The deeper I get into history though, I need to have my areas of expertise, of core interest, the parts of history whose facts I know, like the professors who sometimes amaze me with thee breadth of their knowledge. (I rest more easily when I remind myself that they’ve had a lot longer to learn all these things.) I don’t officially have my list yet. I don’t know what I want to study, maybe because there are so many things I would like to study.

Usually I’ll ramble off something about the immigrant experience in America, as that is an area I am extremely interested in. Regular readers will know I have an ongoing fascination with the notion of nationality and identity, and what happens when you are too many of those things, and what point in the spectrum garners you a hyphenated identity. It has been interesting recently, for example, to read of the Tiger Mom, Amy Chua, the strict Chinese mother (living in the U.S.) who has raised her children markedly unlike the American counterparts around her. But in China nowadays, Chua’s is an old guard of parents, a generation past. To Chinese people, the controversy is surrounding an American mom; she is an American mom to them. So who is she? What is she? That is just juicy, good stuff. So, that is one area I really do hope I get to work in. There are so many stories from so many countries that become part of our American history as soon as they enter our country. Some have been here a long time, others, not so long. They’re all important stories.

Anyway, this week I read historian David Glassberg’s Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life and it was brimming with quotable and thought-provoking observations and experiences in the minds and matters of the public and their past, and what it means. His concluding remarks were both a revelation in combining emotion and a study of the past, and in reveling in connectivity and separation at once, a challenge and aspiration for historians to tackle today. But he also spoke right to newcomers to the field, and reassured me that I have talents and ideas to bring to the world yet, and I’ll figure out what they are before long.

The distancing from life, the quest for perspective that historians learn in graduate school as the core of the historical enterprise must be balanced by a recognition of our personal needs for the past. Our own experiences, our own families, our own communities, can be the source of historical insights, not because we assume that everyone is like us, but because we can establish who we are only by writing from a place, from a community, from a location in the world.

So what will I tell my students wanting to become historians? Certainly to learn the history of the profession, and the skills necessary to earn a living doing history, whether through teaching or any number of other pursuits. But also to find a place from which to write, and to cultivate a humanity within yourself that allows you to connect with others in that place. To help the residents of your community to see the value of the ordinary places where they live. To help your neighbors to expand their time perspective beyond a generation or two. And perhaps most difficult, given the tendency Americans have to make histories that exclude others from their life-stories and neighborhoods, to help your fellow citizens to expand their social perspectives beyond their immediate families, so that they discover in their quest for a history and place that they can call their own, that they are part of a larger society and environment.

I have been sitting on an idea for my own historical and creative endeavor that I can hopefully turn into my larger capstone project for my master’s degree (that class will be next spring). And I can tell you that reading this passage makes me want to jump out of my seat and go start it right now. So many good discussions to have out there… so much amazing history, wrapped up in people’s lives and surrounding them every day. Since the day I decided I wanted to be a journalist, in high school, I’ve had the urge and the need to share stories that illustrate the grandness of human drama, and to show people the larger perspectives and how they fit in. That urge is at the center of everything I’ve been doing since then, although it has taken many positive twists and turns from that title “journalism.” It’s really writing. Telling stories. That’s what I do, have done, will do.

Andrew Carnegie donated the money to build this library after his visit to Iron Mountain, MI in 1901, when he saw there was a need for one. It was one of the earliest Carnegie libraries in Michigan. In 1971, it became the Menominee Range Museum.