Big Sur Stories: The Next Phase Commences!

Thanks to a grant from Cal Humanities, we launched Big Sur Stories as a portal capturing the memories, insights, and reflections of individuals who have called this rugged, wonderful area home. (The picture to the left comes from last October’s launch party at the Grange.)  

We launched “Big Sur Stories” – an audio archive of stories told by folks who call Big Sur home! This was from the launch party at the Grange!

If you’ve yet to check out Big Sur Stories, please click here!

It’s exciting stuff, but as it turns out, we’ve only scratched the surface of our plans for Big Sur Stories.

Our next phase is unfolding as we speak. In short, our goal is to generate high-quality interviews and recordings that educate listeners about Big Sur’s artistic past and present, while also catalyzing discussion around the creative process in a region known for its natural beauty. 

For a longer exposition on what’s ahead, here’s the plan…

Join us Sundays in 2017 “Under the Persimmon Tree!” 

We have learned a lot about working with oral history since we began this and we are excited to launch one more program within the ‘Stories’ project. We call it our weekly “Under The Persimmon Tree” recordings.

 

The program, each Sunday afternoon, (there will be some gaps when other programs conflict but we will do our very best to keep every Sunday regularly scheduled) will include listening to audio from our archives as well as conducting interviews with community members and visitors. (Authors, poets, musicians, artists and persimmontravelers!) Selected recordings will become part of the archive and published online. We hope many will be podcast, eventually we aim to do a live podcast.

 

To date we have interviewed 32 community members and, material from those interviews will also be used in our Sunday afternoon programs . All of our complete interviews are still pending publication online. At this time we have some extracts published and we will complete editing, transcribing and indexing the interviews before publication them online. (In some case we also have to obtain permission to publish!).

 

A new series beginning Sundays in 2017!

 

We are committing to a two hour event every Sunday afternoon in 2017. There are several reasons we’re doing this, perhaps the most important being ‘regularity.’ People will know that on Sunday afternoon there’s an audio program/recording open to the public at the Henry Miller Library.

 

logo-2This will also inspire us to keep up the work! We also intend to have a few audio listening events at night during the summer. Our International Short Film Screening Series will be running each Thursday night June – August so that will offer us twelve night to use for information and audio teasers for the upcoming Sunday afternoon programs.

 

This is an ongoing endeavor of the Henry Miller Library and thanks to your support visiting musicians, artists, and writers will be able to perform and to be interviewed about their creative process and how Big Sur has influenced (or not!) their work and life.

 

If you like what you read and would like to help out, drop us a line at hmlib@henrymiller.org!

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