Archive for the ‘Community’ Category
Single 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, 2011Snow & solitude, a walk through the woods
Serenity. I love the crispness of color that a blanket of white snow brings to everything else around it. It’s like the world becomes black, white, and green only. I took an extra long walk today, walking cautiously along the sidewalks where I encountered some civilization in the form of other bundled-up walkers. But the [...]
January 11th, 2011A fluid sense of family: on adoption and the global diaspora of orphaned Chinese girls
It’s become a family joke of sorts that I may someday have a family that looks rather like that of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s. That is, a multicultural bunch of kids, a collection of orphans that I’ve taken under my wing. Whether this becomes a reality will remain to be seen, but I most [...]
January 6th, 2011Make sure you’ve had your tetanus shot, and other important things I learned as an archives intern
Hours of my life were spent removing the various metals used to hold documents together; I especially liked finding actual nails, like these, inside the accounting files. For six weeks this summer, I worked as an intern in the archives department of the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in downtown Kennesaw, Georgia. [...]
August 17th, 2010