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Hello Utaahhhhhh!

For the third year in a row, STA and I, along with our kids, FWA and RJP, are driving to Zion National Park in Utah. This year, all four of us have iPhone/iPod cameras. I’m hoping that we can use them to experiment with different ways of telling our stories. I’m especially interested in finding ways to counteract the telling of a “single story”/ master narrative about our trip. So far, our Utah digital stories have been from my perspective. I’m curious, how do STA, FWA and RJP experience Utah? What stories do they want to tell about it?

a tentative plan

Each family member is required to create a daily digital moment of our trip. These “moments” should roughly be a minute long and can use voice-over, photos and/or video footage shot on that day and edited using iMovie for iPhone. Should we able to use each other’s footage too?

The primary goal is to create a collection of stories that don’t tell the same story and that reflect our different experiences on the trip. Another goal is to get the kids experimenting with iMovie. It’s really easy to use and I think they might enjoy creating their own stories–especially RJP.

Returning (again)

For some time, I’ve wanted to create a separate space for blogging about my storytelling-self. Initially, I created a “process” blog, housed in my big storytelling project, The Farm. But, I was never really satisfied with that solution; it tied my storytelling practices too closely with The Farm and my experimenting with and development of that project. So, now, finally after over a year, I have established this blog as it’s own storytelling space. I’m hoping to use it as an open-ended space for all things related to storytelling, where I can craft stories, reflect on the process of storytelling, question methods and reasons for why we tell stories, experiment with new techniques, analyze existing technologies, imagine and plan out new ways of telling and sharing stories, and more.

Fletcher on the phone

A few years ago, while looking through old video footage, I found this:

I love this clip of my son Fletcher, shot by Scott. Fletcher is three and a half in this video and he’s just learning to use the phone. I can’t decide what I like best. Is it his hair? Fletch has very thick hair. When he was little, and it was just starting to grow, it would stand up in the back, like this:

Maybe it’s the giggle? As he’s grown older, Fletcher is a lot more solemn and reluctant to express enthusiasm for anything…except Clash of Clans. It’s rare that I hear him laugh, much less giggle. It’s not that he isn’t having fun, he just doesn’t want others to know it.

The Bath, two versions

As I prepare to move from the home that I’ve lived in for the past 10 years (the longest that I’ve ever lived in one place), I’m inspired to create some stories documenting the house. Over the next few weeks, I’m looking through old footage and collecting stories from family members.

A lot has happened in this house, including the birth of my daughter Rosie, in 2006. She is now 8 and a half. I don’t have that much footage of her over the years, but I do have some of her taking bath when she was 8 months old. So, I created a brief digital story/video from it. I want to put it beside a bath story that I created from footage of Rosie’s older brother Fletcher taking a bath when he was 15 months at another important home space, the Farm:

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It’s fascinating to put these two stories together and think about my choices as a storyteller. The Fletcher story is much more reverent and nostalgic–both for the farm and for baby Fletcher. While the Rosie story is playful and celebratory (?). Why? I want to think about that question some more.

Two storytelling sources

A graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg entitled The Encyclopedia of Early Earth that features a storyteller who travels the earth in search of a tiny fragment of his soul that was lost when the Medicine Man, on the behest of three sisters, split his soul into three parts.

A podcast story by Michael Lewis about the unreliability of our memory and the stories that we use to define who we are and how we are understood by others.