Last week I shared a workshop at iTRAC on digital autobiography, and in that setting, I shared a tradition my family had at Christmas: watching slideshows and 8mm home movies.
It was a great tradition that I did not then appreciate, of course, being a kid. The added value was not the popcorn or the movie itself; it was instead the folklore, the family narrative, the voice-over provided by a chorale of familial voices laughing and chiming in on that time my cousin covered herself with talcum to be a ghost or how I once said "boobs" at a Thanksgiving gathering. Almost all those voices have been stilled now by mortality, and in that era none of us thought to record them. (I sure wish we would have!)
The tradition lives on, at least that of storytelling. Every night I am called upon to offer up a long short story. I've been doing this nightly for over ten years now. I'm unschooled in storytelling, but I've learned a lot on the job. What gets a laugh. What's memorable. What gives the kids bad dreams...and I'm wanting to up my game as they get older and read the works of "real" storytellers like Mark Twain. I hope to take several workshops on storytelling in the future.
Often our stories are collaborative efforts. My wife is amazed at how I build stories from ingredients. I will solicit the kids for one ingredient each, then I spin it into the story in a significant way. They might offer, for instance: pirate, chickens, uncle and underwear. I cannot get away with something like "Your uncle became a pirate and drew chickens on some underwear which he then flew as his flag."
And, lesson learned from the 8mm days, sometimes I record the stories as they're told, or I "can" a story by recording it in advance, saving a few up for when I might be on the road or something. These are digitally recorded and stored up to someday give the kids' kids.
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