How I Work
Each year I organize seasonal fellowships for cohorts of 10-20 participants. These fellowships are designed with sponsorship from mission aligned institutions who help house, pay, and people them. In each I teach foundational storytelling skills alongside with tangible tools for harvesting and preserving stories.
The fellowships follow the seasonal harvest cycle - pulling inspiration from the rituals and practices of people listening to the land. These seasonal harvests are listed here. This means that each cohort learns harvesting and preserving techniques that are unique to the goals that they share, with skillshares dedicated to both fruit and story preservation strategies.
The fellowships themselves can operate as a single day workshop with a celebratory performance, or can be a four day retreat where we create an archive for the future. Each fellowship is meant to be created in collaboration with the sponsor.
The cohorts are selected in collaboration with the sponsor of that season’s fellowship. I work with the sponsor to curate a group of people who can provide depth to our mutual mission through an exploration of storytelling.
When I speak of story harvesting, I refer to the act of supporting a community in sharing their story. Oftentimes as activists or advocates we are tasked with finding and sharing the stories of others, and this can be an extractive and damaging process when done without care. Each retreat we explore activities that ask participants to engage in their own stories so that they get an embodied lesson in what it feels like to share your story and have it retold. We want our cohort members to go back into the world mindful of harvesting stories that want to be shared.
This means that our goal in harvesting stories is to help tell the stories that people are eager to tell. Conscious of the gift that a storyteller is offering when they are sharing vulnerably, I teach tactics that center the desires of the person sharing their story instead of the person extracting the story. Through this storyharvesting philosophy I prioritize self-ownership of the story and of the process of discovering the story itself. This is done through a methodology of story foraging that cultivates instincts of which memories are healthy and productive to delve into, while also offering tools of reflection that explore a teller’s desire to keep sharing.
When I speak of story preservation, I refer to the documentation of story. This act has power to frame a person’s memory in ways that can empower or undermine the storyteller. I teach methods that listen to and center the lessons that the person sharing their story wants to relay to an audience, as well as understanding who the audience is meant to be. This prioritization of the storyteller recalibrates our mission to be one in which we are collaborators instead of documentarians.
Preserving stories is a choice of where this story lives, how this story is heard and seen, and who hears this story. All of these choices demand care and thoughtful collaboration with the storyteller whose story you are preserving. I believe in inspiring an experiential practice of being the storyteller and story preservationist so that participants can experience both sides of a relationship that is vital for ethical story preservation. Therefore I teach practical documentation techniques alongside lessons that focus on relationship building practices. This means that we also learn low lift, and cheap methods of preservation that can be done in a variety of environments because sometimes the cultivation of the relationship demands that you go to your storyteller instead of making them come to you.