Telling Stories

I started to write “Vagina Stories” as the headline for this post but changed it because it sounded a little shocking and could be misunderstood.  That’s when I realized the power that Eve Ensler’s  award winning play’s title has had on normalizing the word vagina.  Not only can people actually say it in public but it screams from posters all over town.

In the original Broadway version of The Vagina Monologues, Ensler performed every story herself.  The V-Day University of Arizona Benefit Production will feature undergraduates, graduates, faculty, and alumni who have joined together to bring you three nights of hilarious and captivating performances.

These stories are particularly powerful and moving because they are told from a personal point of view. According to Wikipedia, “Every monologue somehow relates to the vagina, be it through sex, love, rape, menstruation, mutilation, masturbation, birth, orgasm, the variety of names for the vagina, or simply as a physical aspect of the body. A recurring theme throughout the piece is the vagina as a tool of female empowerment, and the ultimate embodiment of individuality.”

V-Day is a global movement to end violence against women and girls that raises funds and awareness through benefit productions of The Vagina Monologues.  Thousands participate each year in raising awareness and have contributed to over $70 million raised to stop violence against women and girls.

Performances are February 18, 19 and 20 at 7:30 p.m. in Social Sciences 100.  Doors open at 7 p.m. so that attendees may peruse educational displays and booths by campus and community organizations.

Tickets are $10 in advance (available on the University mall) and $12 at the door. Additional donations are welcome. All proceeds will be donated to the campus OASIS Center For Sexual Assault & Relationship Violence and the V-Day Spotlight Cause: The Women & Girls of The Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has been chosen a second year
as V-Day’s spotlight campaign.  The women in the DRC are at a large
risk for gender-based violence.  Though the war is officially over,
the chaos of unregulated military forces have lead to a devastating
situation for women and girls in the DRC.  V-Day is currently working
on opening the City of Joy, a facility for survivors of sexual
violence.

For more information about The Vagina Monologues, please contact azvagwarriors@yahoo.com

Last year we were fortunate to capture a video of Maurice as he presented the story of his life at A Colorful Life series. Those of you who were in the audience will fondly remember his vitality and how excited he was to be in the spotlight and share some of the fascinating adventures he’d had in his 81 years.

With Maurice’s unexpected passing last week that video is even more precious because now we have another way of remembering him and his accomplishments.  You can see some of it on YouTube.  Goodbye, Maurice, you will be missed!

When I was the Senior Programs Coordinator at Wingspan, Southern Arizona’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Community Center, a member of Senior Pride suggested that we start the Colorful Life project in order to preserve our LGBT history and the stories of our elders.  With the help of some wonderful volunteers and camerawoman Luanne Withee using Pan Left equipment, we were able to make six videos that are available at Wingspan’s library.  Our storytellers were – Richard Zelens, Alta Fly, Hannah Blue Herron, Shellie Lynn, Maurice Grossman and Deitrich Benjamin.

Now this important work will continue under the auspices of StoryArts Group, Inc. an Arizona non-profit (disclaimer, I’m one of the organizers).  Our big project, The Adobeland Project, will be a film documentary of the life of Joan “Adobe” Pepper and telling the story of Adobeland, women’s land west of Tucson.

LGBT elders tend to become even more invisible than their straight counterparts.  Some are not out, some don’t think that their stories are important, some don’t want to relive painful memories, some are estranged from their families.

Arden Eversmeyer and Margaret Purcell are working on  remedying this by writing A Gift of Age: Old Lesbian Life Stories through the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project (OLOHP).

The Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project seeks to find and document the lives of old lesbians who were born in the early years of the last century. The lives that they led were difficult and in many way difficult for us, today, to understand. There were no lgbt publications, institutions or even personal examples to help guide their lives. They had to make it up as they went along. We seek to record their oral histories, known here as their herstories, to preserve what will soon be lost when they are all gone.

Let’s keep the stories alive!  Please contact me if you or someone you know would be a good candidate for the next Colorful Life.

As part of my year end / new year ritual I am in the habit of consulting a few oracles that I find interesting and sometimes challenging.   For me, it’s a way of inviting information into my life.

My method is not very elaborate nor official.  I randomly choose two cards, one from the Medicine Card deck and one Angel Card and then I read interpretations of the card and write about them in my journal.

I’m always struck by the stories that are connected to these symbols.  For example, the Medicine Card that I pulled was number 44, Hummingbird - Joy. The description starts:

Hummingbird is associated with the Ghost Shirt religion, which taught that a certain dance done properly would bring about the return of the animals, and that white people would disappear.  Once again the Original People would know the joy of the old ways.  In Mayan teachings, Hummingbird is connected to the Black Sun and the Fifth World <more stories>. Hummingbird can give us the medicine to solve the riddle of the contradiction of duality.

Being a white person that would disappear in order to cause other’s joy, I have to read another message into this story, one that applies to my life. Hummingbird inspires us to protect the environment and to preserve old traditions that are in danger of being lost.

That’s the real benefit of using stories; they give you the opportunity to interpret information in ways that make sense to you.  It may require a little digging but the lesson is firmly planted by the effort.

My Angel Card was Adventure.  That seemed pretty obvious.  I’m going to have a joyful adventurous year and I wish the same to everyone!

There are many more decks of divinitory cards, you can check out some Tarot cards here

This summer you could be enjoying the cool days of Canada and participating in a five day storytelling conference, International Perspectives on the Art and Tradition of Storytelling. Plus, history buffs can partake in the celebration of the 400th anniversary of English settlement on the island of Newfoundland.

The theme of the conference put on by the Storytellers of Canada-Conteurs du Canada, is”Picture it. Summer 2010″.

This is the description from their blog:

Storytellers from throughout the world will merge in one place - St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador – for the 18th annual conference of Storytellers of Canada. For five days, participants will be engaged in an international meeting place of culture, art, and tradition with performances and workshops by storytellers from Canada, the United States, Italy, South Africa, Denmark, Netherlands, Ireland, Scotland and England.

This summer’s conference is brimming with opportunities for professional development. Participants will learn international perspectives about the art and tradition of storytelling. They will gain marketable skills to help them with the business side of their storytelling performances and teaching. Most importantly, they will be immersed in the story telling and story sharing of Newfoundland and Labrador.

For centuries, we’ve opened our doors to people from throughout the world. We’ve shared stories of mermaids swimming at sea, fairies hiding in woods, and mummers visiting our homes. Participants will be invited to listen to our stories and music; meet our people; explore our rocky coastline; and attend celebrations for the 400th anniversary of English settlement in Cupids, a community within an hour’s drive from St. John’s.

So plan ahead for your get-out-of-the-heat excursion.  The dates are Wednesday, July 28 to Sunday, August 1, 2010.

Author, storyteller, poet, teacher, and Poet Laureate of Kansas, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., will be in Tucson on a book tour this weekend and you might want to hear this dynamic and creative woman.  I spoke with Caryn on the phone yesterday.  She was in a coffee shop in chilly Lawrence, KS, I was home in sunny Tucson, just one of the reasons she’s excited about visiting our town.

Caryn is the founder of Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College. According to their website,

Transformative language arts is a new and emerging academic field focused on social and personal transformation through the power of the written, spoken, or sung word. Drawing on all of the language arts, transformative language artists bring the language arts to community-building, cultural and ecological restoration, personal development, and many other areas of individual and collective liberation.

Transformative Language Arts  include storytelling, writing, theater, spoken word  – anything with words out loud and on the page.   Caryn is also a member of the Healing Story Alliance, a special interest group of the at National Storytelling Network, the purpose of which is to “explore and promote the use of storytelling in healing”

Caryn sees storytelling as one way to bring communities together.  She told me about an experience she had organizing a political  group of very diverse people.  The way the group found what action it made sense to take was when all 60 people told each other their stories.  It was a way to understand the motives and history of each other, dispelling prejudice and making the group more cohesive.

On her website there is a reference to Tikkun Olam, a tradition in Judaism stating that the world is broken and it’s our job to help repair it. According to My Jewish Learning it has “come to connote social action and the pursuit of social justice”.  According to Caryn, the way people make lasting transformations in their lives and heal the world is through story.  If people can learn from the stories they are living they can use storytelling and writing to change their lives for the better.

You can catch Caryn at the following venues for the next 3 days:

Friday, January 15 at 7 p.m., readings from The Sky Begins at Your Feet and Landed at Silver Bells Trader at 7119 N Oracle Rd, 520/797-6852.

Saturday, January 16 at 6 p.m., following Havdallah Service, “Finding the Sky That Begins At Our Feet As We Change and Age,” reading and ceremonial writing at Temple Emanu-El, 225 N. Country Club Rd., 520/327-4501.

Sunday, January 17 at 10 a.m., “Landed: Poetry, Wonder and the Power of the Word to Land Us in Our Own Hearts,” at Temple Emanu-El, 225 N. Country Club Rd., 520/327-4501.

Sunday, January 17 at 2 p.m., Harvest Y Courtyard (5th Ave. and University) “Coming Home to Earth, Sky, Body and Community: A Reading with Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and Special Guest Jefferson Carter” sponsored by Sky Island Alliance.

Monday night I told a story in San Francisco at Porchlight’s newest venture, the casual Open Door Storytelling.  The structure is similar to a slam but not so judgmental.  Similar to an open mic but someone wins $50.  A nice mix of the two.

The back room of the Hemlock Tavern has a small stage, lights and a few mics, all you really need.  As people came in they could sign up to tell a five-minute personal story.  Out of approximately 60 people attending, 10 volunteered to get on stage and tell on the theme “The Old Me”.

Hosts Arline Klatte and Beth Lisick chose a random audience member to be the judge and the parade of stories began.

They’ve only been using this format for a few months and the audience is growing.  Open Door on the last Monday of the month is an addition to the regularly curated Porchlight shows on the third Monday of the month at the historic Verdi Club.

P.S.  I didn’t win the fifty bucks.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is celebrating it’s 75th anniversary on January 18th .  They are presenting a series of exhibits (I saw the amazing retrospective from their collection yesterday!) and events to celebrate.  Many of the events involve telling stories – by artists, collectors, cultural visionaries and community leaders.

According to their website,

The exhibition will be complemented by two related projects featuring visitors’ perspectives, the Oral History Project and Phone Booth. Since 2005, SFMOMA has been collaborating with the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library to create a record of its own history through video and audio interviews with individuals whose contributions have shaped the institution. Historical interview clips from the museum’s Oral History Project will be shown alongside recently collected commentary from SFMOMA visitors and community members. The Phone Booth captures visitors’ voices through an interactive phone installation; visitors are invited to pick up the phone and record responses to questions about the museum’s collection.

Arts organizations, non-profits and corporations are finding the most effective way to share information about their projects, products and  history is to tell stories.  They’ve discovered that it’s better to enlist people who have benefitted from the organization and have them tell about their relationship to the product or service than it is to have a company spokesperson trying to convince you of the same thing.

So, instead of the mining company coming out and saying how much you depend on their product, their ad tells the story of how many trees they planted to reclaim the land that they devastated all to convince you that they are responsible global citizens.

The idea isn’t new but the slant is.  Stories are hot.

It’s up to us as creative consumers to hear the stories we want to listen to.  I choose to enjoy the SFMOMA stories and to ignore (as much as I can) the noise of obvious propaganda.

If you Google “holiday stories” you will have some choices – funny, inspirational, classic, or for kids.  I chose the funny link and found these stories at City-Data.com.

“My aunt once served pheasant with the buckshot still in it”.

“I inadvertently grabbed the breast milk when I was ordered to fetch the cream!”

And this one that cracked me up:

Okay, 25 years ago, my brother is an actor, and he’s up in Anchorage, Alaska, for Christmas.

He sends down a big UPS box that arrives at my mother’s house when my sister, my brother-in-law, and my brother happen to be there. My mother is off running errands.

So we unpack the box, which is filled with presents, each nicely wrapped. And at the bottom is a small Glad bag filled with an herb that looks suspiciously like….well, you can guess. There’s a tag attached that says, “A little extra Christmas cheer.”

Well, my sister, bro-in-law, and bro all look at each other, and my brother produces some rolling papers. A few minutes later, they’re smoking a doobie on my mother’s back deck (I don’t partake). My buddy Keith shows up, and he decides he wants a hit. They’re all sitting around toking, speculating on how good the joint is.

Christmas afternoon, my brother calls from Anchorage and asks how we liked our gifts. After the usual Christmas chitchat, he asks, “Well, how did the cat like hers?” My sister asks, “What are you talking about?”

“Well, the catnip I sent her for Christmas.” We all started howling.

So the catnip story comes up every Christmas now.

One of my family stories is about the time I decided to spark up the Thanksgiving menu by serving a very exotic and delicious smoked pheasant. It was met with little enthusiasm by my very traditional eaters.  So the next year I outdid myself with a shrimp stuffed filet of sole to see if I could inspire them to creative holidays meals.  No go, they demanded their turkey. What is it with people’s insistence on repetitive rituals?

What are your holiday stories?

This seems to be a strongly debated topic in the field of storytelling.  There are traditionalists who continue the oral arts by telling and retelling tales and folk lore (with their own personal spin) in front of an audience – person to person – that comprise a large portion of the storytelling world.  And then there are all the variations brought about by interest, taste and technology.

According to Wikipedia

“Digital Storytelling” is an emerging term, one that arises from a grassroots movement that uses new digital tools to help ordinary people tell their own ‘true stories’ in a compelling and emotionally engaging form. These stories usually take the form of a relatively short story (less than 8 minutes) and can involve interactivity.

The term can also be a broader journalistic reference to the variety of emergent new forms of digital narratives (web-based stories, interactive stories, hypertexts, and narrative computer games).

As an emerging area of creative work, the definition of digital storytelling is still the subject of much debate.

The question seems to be, is Digital Storytelling  a new art form or the interconnection of a series of art forms and how do you treat the traditional forms of narrative within the framework of a new world of education, entertainment and self-expression?  This discussion is laid out in Digital Storytelling, Second Edition: A creator’s guide to interactive entertainment by Carolyn Handler Miller.

The Center for Digital Storytelling is an international not-for-profit community arts organization rooted in the craft of personal storytelling. They “assist youth and adults around the world in using media tools to share, record, and value stories from their lives, in ways that promote artistic expression, health and well being, and justice.”

They describe their approach to Digital Storytelling as having an emphasis on first-person narrative, meaningful workshop processes, and participatory production methods.  They offer Digital Storytelling workshops for organizations and individuals and serve as a clearinghouse of information and resources about storytelling and new media.

Leslie Rule has a good list of resources on her Digital Storytelling Association website.  She says “Digital Storytelling is the modern expression of the ancient art of storytelling. Digital stories derive their power by weaving images, music, narrative and voice together, thereby giving deep dimension and vivid color to characters, situations, experiences, and insights.”

You can learn about the 7 elements of Digital Storytelling at Joe Lambert’s website or find a step by step guide to creating a Digital Story at the UMass website.

Why would you want to be a Digital Storyteller? If you like a challenge and want to use and explore 21st century communications skills, this is an exciting, fun and inspiring area for you.

Anything that gets people telling and listening to personal stories is fine with me. Here’s a link to some books on the subject and maybe some inspiration.

Western North Carolina is quite beautiful in a rainy and cold way this time of year.  I am visiting Gordon Simmons in Forks of Ivy (near Asheville) which is only an hour away from Jonesborough, Tennessee, home of the International Storytelling Center.  Of course I had to go see it;  being this close to the mecca of storytelling festivals is much too hard to resist.

There wasn’t much going on at this time of year.  We peeked into the auditorium and checked out the gift shop where I bought some red clown noses for some children I know.

Their big event is the National Storytelling Festival in October when five circus tents are erected near the center in this quaint little town and storytellers and listeners from around the world gather. Their goal, through the power of storytelling, is to “build a better world—healthier communities, more effective workplaces and schools of learning, and enriched human life.”

It seems everybody around here in these small towns knows a storyteller.  We had lunch with a woman from Spruce Pine whose cousin from Boone is a professional storyteller. My host met Kathryn Tucker Windham while on a field trip with kids from a boarding school where he was working.  According to Wikipedia, Ms Windham (born June 2, 1918) is an American storyteller, author, photographer, and journalist. She was born in Selma, Alabama and was raised in nearby Thomasville.  Her specialty is stories about ghosts and growing up and living in the South.  You can hear her on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

Actually, it seems like everyone in the South is a storyteller.