Folklife Center Collaboration Focusing on Communities’ ‘Sense of Place’
Contact: Pauleena MacDougall, 581-1848; George Manlove, 581-3756
ORONO — The Maine Folklife Center at UMaine and Cultural Resources, Inc., a Rockport-based organization that helps community groups preserve cultural traditions, are co-sponsoring a training workshop on perfecting methods of collecting, documenting and presenting local stories.
Local stories include personal experiences and local folklore, which can contribute to identifying a “sense of place” for people. The term sense of place means many things to many people and usually involves what is considered a person’s place in a culture, community or some other environment, according to Pauleena MacDougall, associate director of the Maine Folklife Center.
Taught by a team of documentary specialists and folklorists, participants in the June 23-26 “Story Bank Institute” workshop will learn fieldwork techniques, audio and video recording, digital photography, archiving and developing public presentations.
The purpose of the four-day institute being held in the Totman Room of the Memorial Union is to train a limited number of community members to collect and preserve local stories. Stories resulting from the workshop will be archived at the Folklife Center and possibly included at the story bank at this year’s American Folk Festival in Bangor in August.
Funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Story Bank is free to selected participants. MacDougall says applicants will be reviewed and invitations extended to about 15 people interested in receiving the training.
The schedule includes the following highlights: “Sensing Place,” with Kathleen Mundell, a folklorist with Cultural Resources; “Capturing Community Stories through Audio Recording,” with Rob Rosenthal, an audio specialist at the SALT Institute in Portland; and “Creating Documentaries with Photo & Audio Recording,” with Bill Kuykendall, photographer and photography instructor at UMaine;
The June 25-26schedule includes “Video Documentation,” with videographer Jim Starkey; “Archiving,” with Pamela Dean, archivist at the Maine Folklife Center on the Orono campus; “Presenting Community Stories,” with folklorist Jo Radner; and “Writing Community Stories,” with Margaret Yocom, a folklorist at George Mason University and the Rangeley Lakes Logging Museum.
To apply or for more information, contact Kathleen Mundell at Cultural Resources, (207) 236-6741, or Pauleena MacDougall, Maine Folklife Center at (207) 581-1848.