I remember where I was when I heard the news about our current President-elect making comments about his ability to grab women's crotches without consequence. I remember it because, like so many other women, I’ve experienced this kind of groping, at the hands of an entitled male. For me, it was when I was 12. I'm still wondering how to talk about all of this with my feisty eight-year old daughter.
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Somewhere in a box, stored either here or there, is a framed, aerial photograph of an offshore semi-submersible drilling rig – the Ocean Ranger – being pulled out to sea just off the coast of Newfoundland. The derrick in particular, if I remember correctly, is lit soft orange by early morning sunlight and the ocean is dead calm.
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I remember my first assignment at the Colorado History Museum when I started working in the education department there many years ago. I was twenty-five years-old, recently returned from graduate school in Tucson to my hometown of Denver, and ready to get to work.
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In April, staff at the Center held their spring retreat. These retreats happen twice a year, a chance for us to get together so we can talk about the work we do and explore ways we can do it better. With so much to discuss and much at stake, they are as challenging as they are vital.
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A few weeks ago, I co-facilitated a daylong workshop on personal storytelling and participatory media for staff of Futures Without Violence. At one point, I asked participants to respond to a timed writing prompt and then pair up with a colleague to share and discuss the experience.
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“I told myself then, 'Never forget this day,'" Mohammed Alyaqubi tells me while I eat dinner with him and his mother, Khalida, my friends who are refugees from Iraq. "I came home from school – I remember what I was wearing. I threw my bag down and the phone rang. ‘Congratulations – on June 11 you have a flight to the U.S.’ We started dancing, turned on the radio, Mom cried."
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“With the creation of a narrative, a fragmented present tense becomes a coherent past tense. To narrate one’s life is to have agency. To know and feel this agency is important for everyone, especially for those who have been victimized.” – Michelle Citron, 1999
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The place where I worked is no longer there.
I started working in this building when I was 14. It was a shell, we put a floor in, walls, shelves for a gift shop named “Chan & Chee” (for Chandler and Conchita). She was born in the same building. Two years later the steel ball struck the building. Now it’s a county owned garage.
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Janet, the rancher I worked for in the late 1990s, called me out of the blue last week . . . Recently I was looking at a photograph I took during that one of those calving season. Why I was looking at this photograph had nothing to do with working at the ranch, but rather to do with my work at CDS, about desire paths, about wanting to be acknowledged and feel enabled. I don’t tell Janet this, although she would have listened deeply. Instead I describe the photograph to her and in doing so tell a story. She remembers…
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Our stories focused on the centrality of food to our individual and communal identities. Not surprisingly, everyone had powerful stories to tell about their connections to food, and the initial introductions had us hungry for finding out where this journey would take us, but also just plain hungry as we sampled the best of the nearby Cake Cafe.
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First, I have to paint the scene. We were in Bangladesh working with storytellers representing various NGOs from South Asia. Every workshop has interesting twists and challenges- quirky technology keeps you hopping, or stories hold onto you for weeks afterwards, but this workshop was the ultimate opportunity for me to practice presence… in chaos.
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Maybe it was the synchronicity. Blue was an unexpected gift from the woman in the bookstore where Marie was passing time, before a doctors appointment at John Hopkins. A chance encounter, a passing statement (“the color of the throat chakra is blue”), the gift of an agate.
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"Look," I said, "let's take him to Chitral! There's a jeep in the baazar. Let's go." But Taleem Khana Nana said she wanted to wait for her husband to come home, surely he would be home soon and then he would come with me to take the baby. I said we should go now. I said I would pay for the jeep and the hospital. She said, "Surely he'll come. Let's wait."
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For 20 years (this month!), the Center for Digital Storytelling has been supporting people in sharing meaningful stories from their lived experiences – because stories matter. Last week, Joe Lambert (our Founding Director) and I were in L.A. teaching a workshop at the Museum of Natural History. As we drove past the American Film Institute, he said, “This all started right here 20 years ago this week, at our first digital storytelling workshop hosted by AFI.”
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