Pondering our predicament as Americans, I have been reading a lot and studying about Paul Robeson, and this well-done short piece on Joe Hill ends with Robeson singing “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.”
Grandma’s Puzzle
I’ve been working up a story based on cutting the apple to reveal the 5 pointed star inside. So far the figures I have in the story are the Inuit House–playing a temporary home for a couple of mice who scurry away when the children try to pick up what they thought was an old birdhouse. Then there’s an apple figure, my invention, after the fashion of Ann Glover’s stories, and a triangular knife to prepare for the coming star. In the intro I do Osage Four Diamonds, also known as Jacob’s Ladder.
I found a wonderful painting of a grandmother doing a string figure as her hair merges with the web of stars in the sky above her, and got permission from the artist to use her image as an illustration for the blog about my stories. Many thanks to Jo Jayson for her kindness.
Grandmother Spider – The Weaver © Jo Jayson 2016
www.jojayson.com
jojaysongoddessart.etsy.com
Residency at Watsonville Charter School of the Arts
This week I’ll be finishing up a semester-long residency at the Watsonville Charter School of the Arts, teaching string games and storytelling to the entire elementary school, ten classes: two classes each at every grade from Kindergarten to Fifth grade. I was able to do only a few brief lessons with the middle school classes. Now my dream is to get a grant to support coming back to WCSA to facilitate the middle school students doing a series of films of the elementary school kids telling stories with their strings!
National Storytelling Summit Workshop, presented July 27 in Fremont, CA
I was honored to present a workshop “String Stories for Brain Health and World Peace” at 8:30 am on Saturday, July 27, in Fremont, CA, USA, as part of the National Storytelling Summit. The workshop was very well received – one of the most interactive of the Summit, several folks said. Hope to post some highlights soon.
Jack Kerouac reads On the Road, Steve Allen plays the blues
Change Music
Radical Fiber at the MAH, Downtown Santa Cruz, This Friday, 5 pm-9 pm!
Excited to do my third session at the MAH, bringing along my basket of strings to tell stories, and rabble-rousing with the Radical Fiber crowd…
Hope you can join us, 5 pm-9 pm at Abbott Square, to the side of the MAH and the Octagon, with Cooper Street blocked off!
Jon Young and the 512 Project
I’ve been to two events with Jon Young now, one of them a videotaping for this wonderful project:
Please support his Kickstarter! This is amazing, powerful, vital work. He’s bringing the knowledge of nature-connected cultures from around the world to all of us.
Life saving string story: Aymara weavers plug holes in hearts
From AJ+, videos from Al Jazeera
I love this story, such the perfect illustration of what I call tradigital stories, where there is an intervention of binary-code empowered contemporary technology, fused with and inextricable linked with a traditional technological art.
It’s like the story of the pilots crash-landing or parachuting into New Guinea, during World War II, and routinely being killed by the locals, until someone suggested each pilot be given a loop of string and taught a few string figures, with the instruction to begin immediately to show their figures to anyone they encounter. Reportedly, many lives were saved. Yes!
Fiber arts save lives!
#CLMOOC Twitter chat ends, #F2Fdropin group sits down to write
Just checking out the Twitter chat, and the #CLMOOC references–love the beach plastic project, and I just shared with Dan, my colleague in the F2F group, about the burlap bag project. More on that soon. Here’s an embed of the egrets: