Community Collaborations: Telling Your Own Story

The Rochester Public Library, in partnership with local organizations and artists, was awarded a SELCO Community Collaboration Grant to support a “Telling Your Own Story” Arts Series, which took place from March 12 through April 15, 2015. In recent years, personal memoirs have experienced a surge in popularity, in no small part because it is a category of literature that is open to all people. “I love this genre in particular,” writes author Sonja Livingston, “because it says, ‘Your life matters,’ which I interpret to mean, ‘All lives matter.’” Individual life experiences—the lifeblood of memoir—reaches across all ages, races, and income levels. Everyone has a story to tell. Through this multi-layered series, which incorporated lectures, hands-on activities, classroom experience, and art exhibits, we encouraged community members to share their stories. The series consisted of over a dozen programs, including a four-part memoir-writing class, taught by Post-Bulletin columnist and Rochester Magazine associate editor, Jennifer Koski, MFA; a community art project led by multidisciplinary mosaic artist, poet and frequent artist-in-residence, Lisa Arnold; two author events featuring memoirists Catherine Friend and Sara Mansfield Taber; two poetry events, sponsored and led by members of the Southeastern Minnesota Poets; a bookbinding class led by librarian Pam O’Hara, and a week-long art exhibit and lecture presented by local artists Jon Allen and Tom Erickson. During the four weeks of the program, the Rochester Public Library collaborated with multiple organizations to make this series a reality, including the Southeastern Minnesota Poets, Rochester Magazine, and the Surviving Tsunami Waves exhibition series (sponsored by Mayo Clinic Dolores Jean Lavins Center for Humanities in Medicine, Rochester Art Center, and University of Minnesota Rochester).