This site was active from 2013-2017. It was dedicated to tracking, processing, experimenting with and sharing resources on storytelling. It was also a space where I began work on cultivating and experimenting with a storytelling self.
While writing here, I created a half finished interactive documentary about my family’s farm, over a hundred digital stories about my research/family/home, and a mostly finished memoir about my academic life as a student and teacher. In 2017, I started a new online writing project about running and shifted my writing to that space.
In 2013, I was very excited about experimenting with social media and new online technologies for storytelling. In the last few years, I have lost that excitement for it (partly because of the shitty direction of social media and the web, partly because of how Trump has destroyed Twitter, and partly because of deteriorating vision). Now, I am interested in physical objects. I still write a lot on my run blog, but I’ve been creating chapbooks and writing a lot more in my notebooks.
About Sara L. Puotinen (from 2013)
When I was writing the second chapter of my dissertation in 2004 on feminist role models and radical subjectivities, I didn’t anticipate that I was constructing a plan for my future selves. In that chapter, I discuss the value of three radical feminist subjects: the troublemaker, the storyteller and the outlaw. Shortly after finishing that dissertation, I got a job teaching in the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies department at the University of Minnesota and spent six years researching, writing, teaching and practicing forms of troublemaking and trouble staying. Now, since leaving the university, I’ve been experimenting with various forms of storytelling.