Category: Reflections

iBooks

Last summer, I turned my grandma Ines’ memoirs into an interactive book using iBooks Author. It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed combining her words with old photos, video interviews, digital stories and other archival material. And the editing process enabled me to reconnect with her and remember her stories and gestures.

I hoped that I could share this book with my family and that it might enable us to start talking about the farm again. Since the farm was sold in 2004, my family hasn’t talked about it, or our sense of grief over its loss, that much. But, that sharing never happened. Why? Part, but not all, of the reason was because not everyone in the family had an iPad (the book came out before iBooks was available for laptops).  Even those who could get the iBook, didn’t have the time to read it.

After this failed attempt at connection, I decided that the iBook couldn’t be the only way that I should share farm stories. So, I started thinking about a more ambitious project, the one I’m working on here. But, even though I didn’t want to limit my story project to an iBook, I still envisioned incorporating iBooks (at least 2) into my project: 1) the already completed, Memoirs and 2) a short book combining a homemade photo book that my mom crafted in the summer of 2001 with my video footage and memories from that same summer. 

This afternoon, I came across another idea for an iBook: Post Script. Here’s a description:

Made exclusively for iBooks, Post Script
offers you a literary and cinematic experience like no other. Watch as an independent film production unfolds through a curated collage of words, sounds, and images taking you deep into the creative process. Starting from the first e-mail conversations between novelist Leah Hager Cohen and director Patrick Wang (In the Family, witness the novel The Grief of Others find life as a film.

Post Script

I love the idea of documenting the process of creating the project! I’m trying to do that (to a lesser extent) on this blog.

Interactive

(According to MIT’s Moments of Innovation)

The use of the term ‘interactive’ in our contemporary era has a twist. The user doesn’t simply activate a static text; rather, in interacting, the user co-creates the text, making choices that define their experience.

I like this definition of interactivity: users as co-creators. What do I want users to co-create with me? 1.  Stories (about the farm, about losing home, about remembering past home spaces, about the UP), 2. The Experience of Being at the Farm (cultivating sense of community + engaging in deep reflection + developing creative/artistic projects)

Immersion

This morning, I’m checking out an amazing interactive site about the history of documentaries and technology. The first section is about Immersion. I wanted to make note of this passage:

The word ‘medium’ has many meanings in English, most going back to classical Latin. But by an odd chance, two ‘new’ meanings first appeared around 1851: medium as a channel for mass communications (‘the photographic medium’) and medium as an intermediary between the living and the dead (‘the medium organized a séance’). One transmits information from point ‘a’ to point ‘b’, and the other ‘makes present’ that which is impossibly distant. The immersive urge that has accompanied our media from the very start seems to embrace both definitions, to tell us about another place and to make that place as present as possible.

I’m struck by the line, “as present as possible.” A key part of my project is to craft a space that replicates the feeling of being at the farm. As much as I want people to “feel” like they’re farm, I know that that farm feeling is only always a replication, an approximation. Is there a way to make that acknowledgment visible in the project?

I’m also struck by the line, “make present that which is impossibly distant.” The farm is impossibly distant. Now that it has been sold and I can’t visit it every summer, it is forever “there,” when it used to be “here.” The only way I can repeatedly access it is through old photographs, stories/interviews and video footage from the early 2000s.

Wow. I want to think about this passage some more and find ways to incorporate it into my project.

Unremember?

I just finished Wendy McClure’s really entertaining book, The Wilder Life. It chronicles the author’s attempts to access and inhabit Laura (as in Laura Ingalls Wilder) World, the world that Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose crafted in the Little House books. She includes stories about the books and the television series, traces (and troubles) the relationship between truth and fiction in Laura’s accounts, details her own adventures (and the unique individuals she encounters) visiting the various Laura historic sites sprinkled throughout the midwest and critically explores her own investments in trying to become part of Laura World.

While there are many different reasons I enjoyed this book, perhaps the biggest were: 1. McClure’s efforts to reflect on her own investments in the project (especially as those investments connected to the recent death of her mom from cancer) and 2. her willingness to push beyond searching for the Truth (what really happened) to explore the space in between fact and fiction, where we can craft stories that should have happened or that we wished had happened or that did happen, but not quite in the ways that we imagine/remember.

Towards the beginning of the book, McClure spends time researching the history of the actual Laura, scouring old records, scholarly books and popular biographies, trying to determine what events in the LHOP (Little House on the Prairie) books are real and which are imagined. But, at certain point, she realizes that this determination isn’t necessary. She writes:

I knew what was real…and what wasn’t…and there was a lot of stuff in between that I wasn’t quite sure about….But maybe those distinctions ultimately didn’t matter as long as I recognized them; maybe I didn’t need to sort truth from fiction from exaggeration in order to go further into Laura World (48).

McClure
This passage makes me think about the Puotinen farm and my own relationship to it as a real and imagined place, the Farm World. I could spend a lot of time reflecting on my own understandings of truth/fiction and real/imagined at the farm. For me, the distinctions do matter, but not in way that privileges one over the other. I keep thinking about the “stuff in between” and the possibilities it might offer for new understandings of what’s real and what’s imagined.

McClure closes the book with a chapter entitled, “Unremembered.” I’m intrigued by the concept, even as I can’t quite understand what she’s trying to say with it. Here’s how she describes unremembering:

Maybe the Little House books have always been a way to unremember–a word that I kept coming back to…I know technically it means to forget but somehow, in my mind the definition changed. To me unremembering is knowing that something once happened or existed by remembering the things around it or by putting something else in its place. Laura Ingalls Wilder unremembered being hungry by writing Farmer Boy, and Rose Wilder Lane unremembered her terrible childhood by helping her mother write about hers….You don’t deny something when you unremember it, you just give it a place to live (324).

I wonder, how does/doesn’t this idea of unremembering connect with my understandings of not forgetting and remembering?

Follow-up note: I just found an interview with McClure in which she briefly discusses “unremembering.” She suggests that it involves “making a place for something, even if it’s too difficult to remember it directly.” As I write this, I’m still not sure I understand what she means.

It’s Not Just a Story

Note: I’m cleaning out the drafts in my WP dashboard and I came across this one from Oct. 1, 2013. I’ve added a few lines at the end. 

Right now I’m revisiting Trinh T. Minh-ha’s chapter, “Grandma’s Story” as I think through how to structure and shape my stories. I first encountered this chapter in my second semester of graduate school, way back in 1997. Eventually, I used it in my doctoral exams (2003) and the second chapter of my dissertation (2006). Four quotations from it were also featured in the second farm film. It’s very helpful to revisit it now; it’s enabling me to think through my own resistances to certain forms of storytelling. Here’s a passage that is particularly thought-provoking:

It’s Not just a story.

I do not remember having asked grandmother once whether the story she was telling me was true or not. Neither do I recall her asking me whether the story I was reading her was true or not. We knew we could make each other cry, laugh, or fear, but we never thought of saying to each other, “This is just a story.” A story is a story. There was no need for clarification….

Trinh T. Minh-ha

As a storyteller, my mom often embellished the truth. She liked to exaggerate experiences or make small details more significant than they might actually have been. She also liked to shape the facts to fit her current perspective.

Mostly, I love my mom’s passion for storytelling and her wondering, curious, imaginative spirit. I loved hiking through the woods and listening to her tell stories about Finnish immigrant women or Grandma Ines and how she picked raspberries with her sister Tynie. But, her storytelling did have a dark side. The meanings she created were often too exaggerated, crafted not only to make sense of our experiences, but to fit with the realities that she needed to believe existed in order to cope with difficult situations. While these stories were never just stories, they often ignored events, experiences, feelings that didn’t fit with the meaning that she wanted to create at that moment.

As I think about my mom’s storytelling, I’m reminded of something that she said during her second interview in 2002:

When you’re trying to explain how you feel about something, or what your relationship to that place or thing is or to other people, it is so often clouded by the particular events that are happening at that particular moment in your life.

Judith Puotinen

Here my mom suggests that our stories are “clouded” by our current experiences/situations in ways that we don’t always recognize.  She’s talking specifically about my dad’s first interview (shot in 2001) and how, as he tells stories about the farm, he seems to be deeply affected by his recent struggles with leaving his job. I wonder, how much of her own embellishment of experiences/histories/events in her storytelling was deliberately crafted, and how much of it was an unconscious effort to make sense or or endure her situation? Maybe this shouldn’t be an either/or question, but a both/and explanation. 

Part of my project involves reflecting on why and how we tell stories. So, in the upcoming months, I want to keep pushing at questions about storytelling and its relationship to truth/Truth. What’s the difference between embellishment and manipulation? How do I tell stories? Do I, like my mom, use them to cope and craft the worlds in which I want to live?