they play the banjo in my office

Time goes by so quickly here in the mountains, but maybe that's because I've spent a good portion of the past month away from Whitesburg. I was in Oakland, CA, for a week for the Critical Resistance 10th Anniversary Conference. It was a great week of meeting people, and learning about other organizations and resources. And I got to lead a workshop. First I had volunteers from the workshop session read the Thousand Kites Play aloud. In this informal staged reading, a diverse group of voices were heard and a variety of experiences with the criminal justice system were expressed. Act 2 of the play is the audience's chance to tell their story. We heard from a man who was formerly incarcerated, a woman who's boyfriend is currently incarcerated, among others. It was a great conversation and I think that people walked away with some actions steps. Next time I do the presentation there are things I would like to do differently, but for a first go around, I think it went alright.

I also went to a session that was a planning group for a national coalition for prison arts work. I joined the technology team (so as to use all my new ctc skills!) and have created the blog for the group.This isn't technically part of my job, but my organization is part of the coalition, and it's something that's important to me, so I'm excited about it.

Last week I went to the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago and learned so much about radio! As I am a weekly radio producer, it seemed like a good festival for me to go to. Many big NPR personalities were there, and I learned a lot about radio documentary, and also about using social media to promote the work. It was a cool conference, indeed.

In the past month we also finished up the facilitation guide (attached) and have revamped the website. So now I'm finally able to really start in on our StoryLine project, which will use a digital google map as the key element. Right now I'm working on getting audio files into the website, and doing outreach to get more people to share their stories.

And next week I'm starting a creative writing workshop in the nearby women's prison. I'm hoping that eventually I'll be able to turn it into a digital storytelling workshop and since they have computers there it might be possible. That's not work related. It's just fun.

So needless to say, I'm busy down here. But the weather is still good, and I'm still getting some good hiking in!

And yes, I hear the banjo almost daily in my office. What would a good appalachian office be without a banjo?

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ThousandKitesGuide_final_lowres.pdf	721.21 KB

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