For those who cherish civil and human rights, this is a year of many anniversaries. One is very much on our minds right now: the epochal events of August 28, 1963, when 250,000 Americans joined the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom." StoryCenter is planning a series of free All Together Now Storied Sessions as our gift to communities across the nation this fall. If you like the idea, we'd love to hear how you can help. We'll announce the schedule in coming weeks, so please watch this blog for information on how to take part. 

In another case of science sort of proving what we’ve known for a long time, the following article contains powerful, useful, and practical information. The article’s only flaw might be that it wasn’t written as a story itself.

It’s always a good thing to confirm and even harmonize brain science and knowledge of mind, in this case: What we feel is true about stories and what that actually looks like brain activity wise. Because a brain is a strange thing, and one we aren’t near understanding. It’s tricky because we’re using our brains to try to figure out our brains, which sort of seems doomed at the outset, like trying to see your eyes with your eyes, or to touch the tip of your finger with the very same tip of your finger. But, I think, it is important to try to know, and we can use all the help we can get. That’s what I really liked about this article; it’s so straightforward, relative to the work that I’m interested in, and it comes with directions at the end...

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 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.

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.

When I decided to create a digital story about a recent Intro-to-Facilitation Training Workshop – while I was attending it – I already knew what the first and last lines would be. In fact, I had written them down in my notebook on the plane. I was that sure. The middle, though, was still a mystery. My plan was to soak up those details in between, to pay close attention to the chemical reaction that would begin the moment all sixteen of us came together.

“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."

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.

I came across this four-part video series on storytelling, by Ira Glass from public radio’s This American Life, on http://aerogrammestudio.com/.

Each video is only 3-5 minutes long, but the first one is particularly relevant for digital storytelling. Ira shares his thoughts on the two most important building blocks of a great story: the anecdote and the moment of reflection.

Of course, who can explain it better than Ira Glass?

In the last three videos, he discusses what it takes to find a good story for broadcast - and the willingness to “abandon crap” (my favorite line!); having good taste in stories (and the time that it takes to develop your abilities to match your taste); and, finally, two common pitfalls that beginners often make: not sounding like yourself and leaving yourself out of the story.

- Allison Myers, Storycenter Blog Team

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

In the world of storytelling, words and numbers have a complicated relationship.

When I was an Americorps*VISTA volunteer at the Center for Digital Storytelling, I was privileged enough to bear witness to hundreds of stories. Sitting in that circle and listening to folks from all walks of life share of themselves and their experiences never got old and, when my time at CDS came to an end, I carried so many of those stories with me into the world.

I knew that the experience had changed me fundamentally, but couldn’t quite figure out how and what that change actually meant. I was also trying to figure out what storytelling meant for the world at large beyond developing a greater sense of empathy for individuals. I would like to believe that increasing empathy in the world and storytellers taking control of their narratives are in and of themselves radical acts that create an inevitable domino effect of healing communities and rebuilding broken systems, but some days it seems like that burden is just too heavy to bear. How do we, not necessarily as storytellers, but as members of the storytelling community, communicate how individual stories relate to these systems on an institutional and societal level? How can we find patterns in individual experiences that suggest new solutions?

The Center for Digital Storytelling has been busy facilitating workshops in which the inspirational participants brought together by the Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness Center's (A&PIWC) Banyan Tree Project have told the stories that are featured in these events to celebrate Asian and Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day on May 19. Since March 2012, the Center for Digital Storytelling has partnered with the A&PIWC on four workshops in the Bay Area, Guam and Honolulu, and will teach three more workshops this summer.

Reposted from Barry's Blog.

Barry: You talk about giving “cultural impact (the impact of our actions on a community’s cultural fabric) standing in planning and policy decisions.” And you talk about something I heard you speak about some time ago – the idea of a Cultural Impact Report (as a companion to the Environmental Impact Report) requirement for building projects. I love that idea. How do we make that a reality?

Reposted from Barry's Blog.

Arlene Goldbard is one of the nonprofit arts sector’s most insightful analysts and observers. An artist, blogger, author, and consultant, she is keenly intelligent and a passionate visionary for what might be. And, she writes beautifully and persuasively – an elegant wordsmith who intuitively knows how to communicate. For anyone who appreciates writing as both an art and a craft, reading her words is a sublime experience. While I am more the skeptic and cynic, I know intuitively, from observation and from deep in my heart, that it is not the skeptics and cynics who change the world, but rather those like Arlene who can envision a better world, and ask simply, “Why not?" She pushes everyone to think, and to move towards that better world. While her two new just published (and complementary) books urge a monumental paradigm shift in how we approach life in America, she is a realist and fully understands how hard this will be.

Sometimes this job affords you amazing contrasts. Here is one week in April:

Tuesday afternoon.
New Haven, Connecticut.

A mad dash to finish a group of stories by rambunctious teenagers. Hip hop music is playing. They are getting up and wandering around and laughing with each other. Especially the tall skinny kid from California; he seems like he belongs there, trading rap lyrics and talking smack.  

They must have been friends for years, right?

But most of these young people only met three days before.

My work with the Center for Digital Storytelling is what I often refer to as my heart work. . . the work closest to my heart. . . work that isn’t work at all, but vital in keeping my head and spirit straight as I navigate, along with my husband, the raising of a young son and teen daughter, and managing the uncertainties of working in the non-profit arts sector. 

About eighteen months ago, Stefani Sese, CDS’s East Coast Regional Director, asked if I was available to co-facilitate a digital storytelling workshop with participants from the National Park Service (NPS) and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) “Digital Storytelling Ambassadors” program. This year is especially poignant as we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington and CDS, NPS, and ASALH are intent in collecting both the memories of elders who participated in the March, as well as reflections and thoughts of a generation who recently voted to re-elect the country’s first African American president.

I call them flower portraits.

I've been a landscape gardener in Berkeley, California for the past three years. I can't imagine living in a city without it, not just because we humans need to touch the real, live earth from time to time, but also because the plant landscape has become a surprisingly dominant feature of my urban experience. I know more about the plants I walk past every day than I know about the people inside the buildings beside those plants. I can hardly take a stroll with a friend through my neighborhood without interrupting our conversation with, "Look at that marvelous Echium over there – finally blooming!" or, "What sweet California poppies! Aren't they early this year?" (Now I even add insult to the injury of interrupting whatever my dear friend was saying by pulling out my camera and lovingly snapping a few shots of that marvelous Echium and those perfect California poppies.)