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Attend An Event
With the support off the New Hampshire Humanities Council, the Monadnock Institute seeks to organize, promote, and conduct Stories Circles across the Monadnock Region. These events are designed to promote community cohesion as well as collect stories about memorable local people and places. Senior members of the community will be encouraged to attend these events, and to share anecdotes and reminiscences with new arrivals and school-aged children. Stories Circles will be open to the general public and will be facilitated by local writers and scholars including Howard Mansfield (see below), Ernest Hebert, and John Harris. See below for a tentative schedule of dates and themes. Each Stories Circle will be organized by the Project Director in collaboration with a local co-coordinator who is familiar with the community's history and the work of the Monadnock Institute.
These forums will take place at a centrally located site within the community, and will feature a facilitator, a recorder, and several members of the town's historical society. Stories sessions will be recorded on audiotape; historic photographs will be scanned into a laptop computer; and artifacts will be photographed using a digital camera. The entire event will be recorded, and all proper permissions for audiotaping and photographing Stories Circle participants will be obtained, as well as authors' consent before selected stories are edited and published in the online anthology. Soon after participants have shared their stories about local places and people, the audiotape record of the event will be edited, enhanced with photographs, and published on this anthology Web site. Stories Circles 2002 Schedule and Themes:
Stories Circle Project Humanist Howard Mansfield
As a flatlander, moving to a small New Hampshire town 18 years ago, I remember my first visit to the historical society on Main Street. Here was hardtack sent home from the Civil War, and fringe from the funeral car of the "late President Lincoln." Here were artifacts that caught a community in the act of commemoration. I was struck by the persistence of memory in New Hampshire. This became the subject of my second book, In the Memory House: the people and events that are remembered with monuments and holidays, and those who are excluded. I have also been struck by what is missing. Very often these are the most common stories of the day which, since they are well known, no one sets down. When a person dies a library is lost, says the adage, and I have seen this loss too many times. There was a woman in that small town who was the last living cattle drover. She had driven cattle from Massachusetts to the summer pastures in New Hampshire over what is now part of the Wapack Trail. I never got to talk to her. There are others, too painful to list. In each town there are people who have important stories to tell. "We really should record old Mrs. X," people say, and too often the interviews are never done. The Monadnock Institute regional stories project will record some of those stories. The stories project is a way to capture life as it was once lived, and as it is lived today. I was fortunate enough to see the first Stories Circle at the last Monadnock Institute conference. The stories were, by turns, poignant, funny, profound, and rich. We don't talk to each other this way often enough -- with no issues, no problems on the table, only a shared delight in defining this American place with stories. Good scholarship recovers a piece of the world. What was once forgotten, or ignored, is returned to us, enriching the culture. The stories project will help save the stories that define the Monadnock region. I think of it as mapmaking: charting the stories, the landmark memories, that constitute this land in sight of Monadnock. |
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