Writing and Oral History: A session to help us create compelling written projects
Questions and registration via email: Jmonachina@berkshirecc.edu
Thursday, September 10, 4-5 p.m. EST, via Zoom
We sit with narrators and record their stories, often after project planning, pre-interview meetings, and sometimes while working as part of a bigger team. Then we have these extraordinary interviews, which we may place in an archive or use to create media projects. But there are stories and words that would resonate in written form. How do we take the transcript of an interview and make a written piece, something that is easy to read and as powerful as the interview itself?
Join us for an editing and writing session where we’ll work with oral history transcription excerpts and transform them into short and powerful narratives.
The Leaders
Fanny García is the Founder & Principal of Narratives in Practice, LLC, a trauma-informed and ethical storytelling consulting firm helping people capture stories that create meaning and change. García’s path to oral history began through her grassroots activism as a social worker, where she supported survivors of sexual assault and people living with HIV/AIDS. During this time, she wrote “Portrait of Ten Women,” a play based on oral histories with Latinas living with HIV/AIDS. García is the former Editorial Program Manager at Voice of Witness. She received a BA in English from UCLA and an MA in Oral History from Columbia University. She serves as a council member for the Oral History Association.
Judith Monachina is the Director of the Housatonic Heritage Oral History Center at Berkshire Community College, in Massachusetts. She has worked as a journalist and a career counselor, and her path to oral history came via journalism, when she worked in Milan, Italy, on a Fulbright journalism fellowship. There, in an archive of contemporary Jewish history, she came to appreciate the work of preserving stories, instead of simply interviewing for an article or book. Days of Memory: Listening to Jewish Italians who lived through Fascism and the Holocaust, came from that research. Now she helps community organizations in her region to plan, implement, and archive their oral history.