Friday Video: Where Do They All Go?

Today’s Friday Video is a preview of the upcoming film, Where Do They All Go? by Tom Davenport.

Davenport is currently raising money to finish the film on Indiegogo.  This film follows Dr. Jerry A. Payne, “Entomologist, Georgia Naturalist, Uppervillian, Friend and Artist,” who remembers, as a child, looking at dead animals in the woods and wondering how they al disappeared.  As he says in the preview, “Animals die all the time.  Where do they all go?”

According to the producers, this film will be of special interest to anyone who enjoys watching birds and butterflies, those interested in the intersection of science and religion, entomologists, forensic scientists, and anyone interested in the history of northern Virginia.  It will also be of interest to those who find themselves pondering concepts of death, aging, and friendship.  Isn’t that all of us?  Sounds utterly fascinating, doesn’t it?

Here’s Davenport’s full description of the film:

Jerry and I met each other in the 1950s, riding the school bus to our small rural Marshall High School in northern Virginia.  His high school nickname was “Osmosis” because of his interest in the biological sciences.

Jerry grew up in a tenant farmer family on Llangollen, a 4000 acre estate and thoroughbred horse farm in Loudoun County near Upperville, VA.  Jerry describes his family as “hunter gatherers”.  His father and mother came from Appalachian backgrounds, with only grade school educations.  But Jerry’s mother Becky Payne, encouraged him to get an education so he could leave the farm. “When I got to college and they closed the door of the classroom, we were all equal.”

Jerry excelled and completed his PhD at Clemson University in South Carolina.  With the encouragement of his beloved teacher, the entomologist Dr. Edwin Wallace King, Jerry did a remarkable study of insect succession in carrion, using dead baby pigs he collected from local farms.

This study attracted national attention in Time Magazine and Scientifc American, and became a foundation of modern forensic science.  Jerry donated his 16mm time-lapse footage of the decomposition of a baby pig to the Smithsonian Institution, and on Youtube the clip has over 2 million views.

After retiring from a career in the field with the US Department of Agriculture in Georgia, Jerry and his wife Rose devote themselves to their 80 acre nature preserve near Macon, Georgia which they walk nearly everyday in the tradition of Darwin and his wife.

Both he and Rose excel at the taxonomy of birds, butterflies, and native plants, and they are active in naturalists circles in Georgia where they often bird and butterfly watch with Father Francis Michael Stiteler, the abbot of the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit near Conyers, GA.  Jerry’s artwork (he paints bones and odd pieces of wood he finds in the woods) is often a prize in fund raising efforts by the Enviromental Resouces Network (T.E.R.N.)

Click on the link below to watch the video. 

Friday Video: Almeda Riddle: Now Let’s Talk About Singing.

From the Arkansas Encyclopedia

This past week I had my students watch a few films from the wonderful resource, Folkstreams, an internet site hosting hundreds of folklife films.  One of the films we watched was Almeda Riddle: Now Let’s Talk About Singing.  The film was produced by George West in 1985.

It had been a few years since I’d seen the film, and after watching again I discovered how many layers can be found in this story.  There are underlying discussions about the role of music and memory, tradition and future, even tradition and tradition bearer.  In case you are unfamiliar with ballad singer, Almeda Riddle, here’s a short description of the fim from the Folkstreams site:

Almeda Riddle was born in 1898, near Greer’s Ferry, Arkansas and lived her entire life in that area. Her father was a fiddler, a singer, and a teacher of shaped-note singing. The church she attended throughout her life used unaccompanied singing and this practice reinforced her use of traditional unaccompanied style as a ballad singer.

This video tells how and where Almeda Riddle began her 10 year stint of singing old ballads all over the country. In an informal manner, folk musician Starr Mitchell chats with Riddle about her singing tours and her commitment to preserving the past for the future. The video was filmed two years before Almeda’s death in 1986.

Almeda was “discovered” by John Quincy Wolfe, a professor at Arkansas (now Lyon) College who brought her to the attention of Alan Lomax, John Lomax’s son. Alan had, by this time, taken up the work his father had begun and was the best known collector of American traditional music. Usually called Granny Riddle, Almeda traveled to such places as Harvard and the Newport Folk Festival to sing, and she left behind an extensive body of recorded traditional songs.

More than eighty field recordings of Almeda Riddle can be heard, along with scores by other Arkansas singers, on the website “The John Quincy Wolfe Collection: Ozark Folksongs”.

Due to copyright  laws I can not embed the video here.  Click here to stream the video from the Folkstreams site.  

To learn more about Almeda, read her entry at the Arkansas Encyclopedia here. 

Monday Music: Meg Baird “Dear Companion.”

Photo by Mike Fleming from the blog Gonna Do it Anyway. Click on the photo to visit the blog.

So this is our second week for the new series Music Monday, where we feature a song that’s on heavy rotation around here.  Some of them are new releases, but most of them aren’t .  There are people out there who do a great job of keeping up with amazing new artists or albums.  I’m not one of them.

Personally, I think the best way to come to music is through the advice of friends, jumping down rabbit holes in search of a links between musical projects or inspriations, or just randomly stumbling upon a little melodic gem.

So here’s a recent stumble, Meg Baird.  She’s a founding member of the band, Espers, which is another musical project that’s on heavy rotation around here.

Meg Baird records for Drag City and her most recent album, Seasons On Earth, came out last year.  This song is the title song from her first album, Dear Companion, which came out in 2007.  To learn more about Baird visit her webpage here.

Yes! Magazine’s Breakthrough Fifteen: The Power of Storytelling, Vulnerability, and Community Action.

Henry Red Cloud, Yes! Magazine. Photo by Dan Bihn.

If you’re a frequent reader of the Boiled Down Juice, you know that Yes! Magazine is one of our favorite publications.  With the tag line  “powerful ideas, practical actions,” Yes! showcases and explores the concepts and people on the front lines of democracy, social innovation, and community action.  Back in November they issued their winter publication, The Breakthrough 15: The justice warriors, eco-innovators, happiness architects, and change artists who are shattering our sense of powerlessness.  

I recently picked up a copy (a little late, I know) of this special issue dedicated “to the power of the 99 percent—and to a group of people who aren’t looking for leadership from those with entrenched wealth and influence.”  The main goal of this special publication, Yes! claims, is to profile “a group of people who are shattering our sense of powerlessness.”

I especially love that the introductory essay, written by Madeline Ostrander, highlights the power of storytelling, noting that “personal stories remind us that others face the same difficulties and vulnerabilities we do. We discover our own power when we realize we aren’t alone.”  It’s this focus on difficulties and vulnerabilities I find particularly important.  Too often the media portrays activists as larger than life, endless whirlwinds of ideas and energy, when in reality they’re fragile humans who experience frustration and confusion just like anyone else.  Most importantly, their ideas and strategies have been forged within these frustrations and confusions.  We need more stories that illuminate this gray area between observation and action.

Ranging from the stories of Henry Red Cloud, the director of Lakota Solar Enterprises which provides renewable energy to poor Native American communities, to Lily Yeh, the founder of Barefoot Artists, an organization using the power of art to transform neighborhoods, the magazine is diverse collection of portraits of people recognizing and utilizing their skills in their own communities.

For the rest of the week we’ll be taking a closer look at some of the people featured and the work they’re doing.  Some of the people we’ve discussed before, such as the amazing work of Grace Lee Boggs, but some were new to us.

You can read all the profiles here on Yes!   Tell us if you’ve read this issue and what you enjoyed.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Friday Video: Alice Walker

From AALBC.

We’re back up and running with a Friday Video after a few weeks without a dependable computer.

This week’s video features poet, novelist, and activist, Alice Walker.  She’s most well known as the author of the novel The Color Purple and the person who saved Zora Neale Hurston from historical obscurity.  The name of this blog is drawn from a Zora Neale Hurston quote, and no doubt I’d never come across her work if it weren’t for the diligence of Walker, who revived her legacy and place a tombstone at her burial site.

A few years ago when working full time for public radio I had the opportunity to interview author Evelyn White about her then recent book, Alice Walker: A Life.   I’d loved Alice Walker for years—poured over Once during college and underlined 3/4 of the story “Everyday Use.”  But it wasn’t until I read her official biography that I began to fully comprehend the layers of Walker’s influence as author, social radical and freedom fighter. Walker is both loved and hated, lauded and discredited.  Her work brings out strong emotions, asking people to wrestle with questions of race, peace, environment, and self.  Her biography remains one of my favorite books of all time.

Yesterday ColorLines magazine posted this video, in honor of Walker’s 68th birthday.  It was originally released in 2010 by Google, but I’d never seen it until yesterday.  It’s full of timeless concepts, so it’s not dated.  It’s a long one, and I have not had a chance to get through the whole thing yet.  But what I’ve watched so far discusses her work in Gaza regarding International Women’s Day, her belief in the power and democracy of new media, and the importance of imagination in empathy and action.  She also talks about her “literary formothers,” including Hurston, her own mother, and others.

You can visit Walker’s blog here. 

If you have’t read it already, I highly reccomend her biography written by Evelyn White. 

Imagined Family Heirlooms, Tintype Photos, and the Work of Keily Anderson-Staley.

From Imagined Heirlooms

I recently came across this project by Keily Anderson-Staley while wandering aimlessly through Kickstarter projects.

“Imagined Family Hierlooms” is a collection of modern tintype portraits paired with found objects set up to resemble the way such heirlooms are often displayed in homes.

From the project’s Kickstarter page:

I  bring objects together from a wide range of places and times, sometimes even my own family, but no real family is represented by the installations. They are potential but imaginary heirloom collections, fragments of other collections that have been forgotten in boxes or abandoned to thrift stores. When combined with my own work, each of these objects is put into a new context, a new history, even as the individual object still evokes the unique past it has been separated from. Read the entire write-up here. 

Staley’s project explores the role of photography in creating family history and sheds light on the gray area between fact and fiction, which is the undercurrent of family identity.

Besides the pure aesthetic delight of this collection, I love how the artist is exploring the contextualization of images and stories and their role in the creation and perpetuation of individual and collective identity.  Endlessly fascinating. Have you seen this exhibit?  What are your thoughts on it?

From Imagined Family Heirlooms.

Watch her Kickstarter video here:

To see more photos and learn more about the artist and her other work be sure and visit her page here.   Anderson-Staly works in Arkansas and appears to have a studio here, and we hope to have more posts on this artist in the near future.  Stay tuned.  If you know the artist or are familiar with her work, please let us know!  We can’t wait to learn more.

Digital Storytelling and Open Learning

From the center for Digital Storytelling webpage.

We’re proud to introduce a new contributor to the Boiled Down Juice, Emily Puckett Rogers.  An Arkansas native who makes her home in Michigan, Emily is the Education Coordinator at the Open.Michigan Initiative.  She discusses the importance of storytelling, its role in new media, and an example of how digital storytelling “provides a way for hospitals, schools and organizations to think about their work from a personal perspective and to use that perspective to connect more fully with the communities they serve.”

It seems, these days, that storytelling is experiencing a great renaissance. We have aurally-based initiatives like the Moth and StoryCorps. Though we still primarily listen to stories, historically storytellers often use visual cues or props to illustrate a point or encourage the imagination. In today’s digital world, storytelling has taken on new facets of presentation and preparation. Digital tools have given us podcasts and YouTube and now the technique of digital storytelling is gaining momentum at institutions like the University of Michigan (where I work, facilitating open educational practices).  While efforts like the Moth provide us with powerful personal stories, often these stories are told by thespians, writers, comedians or other performers. The work StoryCorps focuses on is the transformatively personal story that connects families and people around shared experiences or histories.

At work I’ve been participating in discussions about using digital storytelling to teach and impart information to others. A few months ago, the Center for Digital Storytelling came to the University of Michigan to teach faculty, librarians, administrators and instructional designers how to use digital storytelling techniques to connect with our communities of learners and patients. It sounds like a no-brainer but as someone who has now given dozens of presentations on why it is important to share and how to share well, I think digital storytelling techniques are particularly valuable to anyone who is a teacher (aren’t we all, in some form or fashion?). 

Digital storytelling blends narrative with images and music to create a mosaic video that can be listened to and seen. This is a method that individuals can use as well as institutions (departments, units, schools, initiatives). It has the potential to be a very powerful tool if done thoughtfully and this is where the storytelling part is more important than the technology part. Digital storytelling is appealing to folks in my field precisely because it is a technique suited to the impact-driven social mediated world we live in today. It also reunites teachers with the basic rule that in order to be effective teachers we must connect with our learners in a meaningful way. 

One of the most important features of the method behind the the Center for Digital Storytelling is the story circle itself. It’s the space where storytellers get feedback and support based on community (who are also storytellers) input. Everyone shares their ideas for a story and everyone gets constructive feedback. It allows those who want to tell stories to help each other tell the stories well. This group support encourages the community of storytelling and embeds this practice back in the realm of communitas. So while the result of digital stories are often told from the perspective of the individual, there is a community of support behind the stories. You can find all the steps of the Center for Digital Storytelling’s methods at: http://www.storycenter.org/coremethod.html

What I think the Center for Digital Storytelling brings to the table is a way for people like me to do my job better. It provides a way for hospitals, schools and organizations to think about their work from a personal perspective and to use that perspective to connect more fully with the communities they serve. It allows us to move from the general (“It’s good to share”) to the specific (“When I shared, other people recognized my work and asked to collaborate with me and this is why sharing is good.”). The audiences of these kinds of stories can be exposed to a richer, more intimate set of examples that showcase the “why” behind the “how” or the “heart” behind the “mind” of the organization. I hope this trend of storytelling continues to become embedded as a practice of teaching and social service institutions because it is a powerful tool that connects us to the very roots of our humanity: connecting our communities together through personal narrative.

Emily Puckett Rodgers is the Open Education Coordinator at the Open.Michigan initiative, which fosters a culture of sharing at the University of Michigan by supporting open learning practices and creating open educational resources. Emily conducts training about how to create and share open content, identifies collaborations across campus and the nation and tries to make sure that Open.Michigan’s work serves and supports its community. She can be found on Twitter @epuckett and is a major contributor to the Open.Michigan blog: open.umich.edu/blog

N. Scott Momaday’s The Man Made of Words.

Quite often the posts here focus on newer publications. And while that’s certainly important, it seems also quite helpful to periodically revisit older publications. So this post begins the first in a series re examining essays, music, books, movies, and a host of other things whose ideas and themes are as relevant today as they were when first published. If you’re interested in contributing a post to this series, please let us know. We’d love to include you.

Last night I pulled N. Scott Momaday’s collection of essays The Man Made of Words off the shelf.  It’s dog-eared, full of scribbled notes in the margin, and has coffee stains on most of the pages. Published in 1997, this is one of those books that  I’ve returned to over and over again to contemplate concepts of place,  the power of communal and personal storytelling, the supreme importance of inter-generational dialog, and the practicalities of imagination in strengthening community. The work is broken into three inter-connected sections, Part One: The Main Made of Words, Part Two: Essays in Place, and Part Three: The Storyteller and His Art. At its the core the work is about the power of place and words, and the way this partnership influences us all.

I first heard of Momaday when he spoke at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas sometime around 1998. The details of the talk escape my memory, but I do recall being incrediably moved by his fundamental argument that stories and place are inseparable. There was in his voice a mixture of deep sincereity, an appreciation of the sacred, and a wonderfully offbeat sense of humor. After his talk I read everything of his I could get my hands on, and years later I still revist his works regularly.

Momaday is best known as the 1969 Pulitzer-Prize winning author House Made of Dawn,  which was the first piece of Native American fiction to go mainstream.   He identifies  as a Kiowa and Cherokee writer, and works such as The Way to Rainy Mountain examine the the mythical and cultural history of his father’s people, the Kiowa, who were forced into resettlement in Rainy Mountain, Oklahoma. I can’t begin to touch on the bredth of his work here, but if you’ve never read Momaday before, I highly recommend doing so. I don’t think he ever uses popular catch words or phrases such folklore or sustainability or cultural worker, but he’s working with the same core ideas. Anyone with an interest in community, oral history, folklife, or cultural sustainability will find a deep well of information and contemplation in his words.

From KUNM webpage

The Man Made of Words brings together recurrent themes throughout his work, namely that language is intrinsically powerful and that in the interchange between language and place story is born. Stories guide our lives. He examines the interchange between the oral tradition and literature and the dichotomy between places both geographical and imagined, most importantly that one can imagine home in new ways and that these new ways are both ancient and the product of the youngest of generations.

I’ve picked out a few favorite quotes that deal with some of these themes. There are so, so many more. These barely scratch the surface.

What about you? Have you read this work? What did you take away from it?

From the Introduction:

“A song, or a prayer, or a story, is always but one generation removed from extinction.  The risk of loss is constant, therefore, and language is never to be taken for granted.  By the same token, the storyteller, the man who takes it upon himself to speak, assumes the responsibility of speaking well, of making his words count.”

From “An American Land Ethic.”

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe.  He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it.  He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listen to the sounds made upon it.  He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind.  He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of dawn and dusk. 

I am interested in the way that a man looks at a given landscape and takes possession of it in his blood and brain.  For this happens, I am certain, in the ordinary motion of life.  None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable.

In speaking about So-sahn, a Kiowa elder who exists in Momaday’s memory and imagination as sacred storyteller and community historian:

In Ko-sahn and her people we have always had an example of a deep, ethical regard for the land . . . Surely that ethic is latent in ourselves.  It must now be activated, I believe.  We Americans must come again to a moral comprehension of the earth and air.   We must live according to the principle of a land ethic.  The alternative is that we shall not live at all. 

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“Knit One” on Ozarks at Large

Last week my radio piece about Knit Night at Knit 2 Together Yarn Store in downtown Russellville aired on the Ozarks at Large program on KUAF 91.3 FM Public Radio. This piece serves as a companion piece to the written story published in The Courier and  features the voices of many area knitters discussing how they learned their craft, why they enjoy it, and the importance of knitting together. I am so thankful to these knitters for allowing me to listen to their stories and share them with you.

If you want to listen to the entire Ozarks at Large Program for Friday February 4th click here. The knitting story airs toward the end of the show.

If you want to just hear the knitting piece then click here.  Because this story marks the first time I’ve done a radio piece in quite some time, per the request of my boss, I wrote and recorded an introduction explaining where I’ve been, what I’ve been up to, and how I came to begin writing radio pieces about central Arkansas.

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The oral history and folklore of Climate Change and an extension of what we mean by PLACE.

In working with a few different oral history programs, I have always been intrigued by how much information these interviews about rural life in North Carolina, Arkansas, or central Kentucky contain about climate change. When men and women in their 80s and 90s discuss their childhoods, they often recall extended winters, greater amounts of snow, creeks running so deep they would flood their banks, and trees so filled with robins that robin soup was a popular dish.
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