Through this workshop, we learned more about the connection people make between stories and maps, about the process of story mapping, and also about how to use new technology and create trust and a safe space through digital communication tools.

As if by magic, by day three of the workshop, I created a digital story about resilience. Then, at the end of the workshop, a screening of all the group members’ videos occurred. It was breathtaking. What an experience!  I immediately knew I wanted to do it again–someday.

Sometimes, when I think about the control that was stolen from my mother at such a young age, I want to hold her and mourn with her. But, that's not a place we can go. Sometimes, when I uncover a new scar or tenderness in my life based on what happened to me, I want to reach out to her. But, that's not a place we can go.

“Trauma. This is trauma, Katie,” I tell myself. And, just like that, I can breathe again. I feel the depth of my humanity, and of the driver’s, and it feels Incredible, to breathe it all in, and let the fear, the shame, go.

The storytelling process is not one that I had explored before with this group of colleagues, and we moved through our stories together -- first by sharing them out loud, giving them our voices, and then by creating and crafting the digital stories. Our stories centered on the broad theme of social justice and yet, they were very personal, real, clear, relatable. These were smaller acts of justice given voice by a group of nurses.

When a last minute cancellation created an opening, I found my role transformed from organizer to participant, requiring me to become vulnerable, too. I discovered StoryCenter’s process of guiding storytellers to find their “ah-ha” moment, as an art form. Common threads bound each unique story, and the bonds between participants were deepened.

After a rocky start, with plenty of naysayers breathing down my neck, I piloted the Words Beyond Bars program at Limon Correctional Facility, a vast teal and purple themed concrete and razor-wired Colorado prison complex. I sat in a circle in the visiting room with my first 12 participants wedged behind tables, with a copy of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and a 79-cent composition book in front of them. The men exhibited empathy, wisdom and gratitude right from the start. Slightly mystified by my energy and encouragement, they shared their own stories of the burdens they carried.

I was fed a steady diet of stories as a child, and I became them. Many were about my mother’s childhood. She emigrated from Liverpool, England in the sixties and married an American, so daughter of an immigrant has always been one of the ways I defined myself. Like her, I talked funny, held a fork differently, and felt like a stranger.

Colorado’s Medicaid Buy-In provides healthcare to 6,000 working, tax-paying adults. If the American Health Care Act is passed, the state’s Medicaid program will lose $340 million in the first year, and my friends and neighbors may be forced to move away from the communities they’ve built and into nursing homes, in order to receive the support they need.

I witnessed my own evolution, from the insecure photographer to the confident one. I saw how the chains from within were holding me back, and when other doors opened, I walked right in. I have a story, and it is being told. I really hope all women can hear it. I hope they will be braver to be what they want to be.

I went to my first StoryCenter digital storytelling workshop in August of 2014, at the old Lighthouse Writers Building in Denver. It was a summer I will not soon forget. I’d just learned of my sister’s diagnosis of stage four lung cancer, the same disease that had claimed my mother’s life barely a year before. 

No big deal, I thought. As a historian, I pretty much write and tell stories for a living.

But then the story specialists at StoryCenter taught the other institute participants and I *how* to write a script for digital storytelling, and I began eyeing the door. Not because it was too big or difficult, but because it was so small and succinct. How was I going to tell a full story worth hearing in fewer than 250 words? I've probably written longer sentences than that!

February is Black History Month, and we couldn't imagine a better way to celebrate and honor it than by sharing some incredible stories from our All Together Now project on civil and human rights. With great admiration and appreciation for all the stories and storytellers in the project, we have selected a few stories to share with you here. 

I was driving fast through the Ozarks when I saw Ronald McDonald sitting like a yogi on the side of the highway. I was in a hurry: I had a frequent guest discount at Deb’s Motel in Paragould, Arkansas and wanted to get there before dark. My Chevy Sprint had no air conditioner so I drove with all the windows down, blasting Depeche Mode and New Order. I was 21, working as a sales rep on straight commission covering Oklahoma, Arkansas, and northern Louisiana for a novelty show room in Dallas...

His name was Ronald. Not Ron. He made certain everyone knew that. He worked at an independent coffee shop I occasionally visited. While I admit I found Ronald cute, we had never done more than exchange small talk. That changed one hot Sunday afternoon during an open-mic poetry reading the coffee shop was hosting. I arrived late, just after he had finished serving a long line of readers and listeners. The first poet was adjusting the mic, and rather than make her compete with the whirr of the blender, I simply grabbed a bottled water out of the cooler. Ronald didn’t say a word as he rang up my drink and took my money...

I don’t have any bumperstickers on my car.

I noticed this a few years ago. Nothing… and justified it by saying that I didn’t need to share my views with anyone.

But I didn’t have any. Truth.

It was probably my dad, leaning against the oxidized green Volvo sedan, who took it. It can’t imagine it had been anyone else.

In 2005 I was part of a group who produced stories about the impact of child sexual assault through StoryCenter’s Silence Speaks initiative. Initially after viewing the stories at the end of the workshop, I felt curiosity and surprise at the immediacy of impact: I felt proud, visible, and necessary – quite different from how I had walked into the Berkeley lab feeling on the first day. What has become clear was that this process of internal re-structuring has continued to this day. Making Listening and Telling was the beginning.

Small Fists by Ryan Trauman is the first post in our BackStory series... The Story Behind the Picture.

This first BackStory is made up by someone (Trauman) who has no clue about the photo.

Here's how it works:

Someone submits a photo, and we ask our readers to write and submit their 250-300 word BackStory – what they THINK the story behind the photo is... everything you can't see in the picture.

This time, to give you an example, we asked our friend Trauman do the first one. 

The owner of the photo – in this instance our very own Daniel Weinshenker – will pick his favorite submission and we'll post it, along with the REAL BackStory by Daniel.

Please email your BackStory submissions or questions to: blog@storycenter.org by May 30th for consideration.

If you have a photo that you'd like to submit to BackStory, please send it along with your BackStory script and we will consider it for a future posting.

Thanks!

– Storycenter Blog Team