A graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg entitled The Encyclopedia of Early Earth that features a storyteller who travels the earth in search of a tiny fragment of his soul that was lost when the Medicine Man, on the behest of three sisters, split his soul into three parts.
A podcast story by Michael Lewis about the unreliability of our memory and the stories that we use to define who we are and how we are understood by others.
I haven’t been writing on this blog that much recently. It’s mostly because I was busy working on another project (The Talk). But it’s also because I’ve realized that my project is too ambitious. I’m trying to rethink how to make it more manageable, which is difficult for me because I like thinking BIG. Usually too big. I think it can overwhelm potential collaborators. Like my 11 year old son. I might have freaked him out with my “epic” plan for our video game about The Farm. I am hopeful that, if I can rein myself in, we can create something to share with others this summer.
I was reminded of my grand video game plans this morning when I came across an article for Sundance, Future is Now: 5 Things Pushing the Art and Form of Storytelling. One of those things is Games! Video games and board games. I like the idea of imagining my Farm game as both a Zelda-esque video game and as a board game. Part of the fun of this project is exploring and learning all about the different possible forms for storytelling. My academic/nerd self loves to do the research and learn more about it. As I was writing this second paragraph, I realized that I just made my project more, instead of less, ambitious by suggesting that it should be both a video and a board game. Ugh! Maybe it’s going to be harder to rein myself in than I thought? Oh well.
In one of his interviews, my dad discussed how they often listened to Gabriel Heatter when he was a kid. Here’s a audio clip of Heatter:
In an interview that I conducted with some relatives, they mentioned how many Finnish-Americans from the Amasa area had been recruited to go to the Soviet Union, to the northwestern Russia area of Karelia. They were eventually killed by Stalin. I decided to do a bit of research about it, and came across this film, Letters from Karelia:
For more information, see Disillusionment on the Grandest of Scales: Finnish-Americans in the Soviet Union, 1917-1939
Here are two random bits of information that I just uncovered about my great grandfather, Elias Puotinen. First, he owned his own logging camp in 1912 (source). Second, he sponsored a lot of immigrants coming over from Finland:
Mr. Puotinen was a prominent Finnish gentleman who was at one time manager of the Hematite Mercantile Store and, together with Matt Hurja of Crystal Falls, helped arrange for the immigration of his countrymen to work in the local mines. It is said that Mr. Hurja had agreements with the steamship lines in New York and was so well known that when men from Finland disembarked at New York, they were pinned with a tag which read “Matt Hurja”, and sent to Crystal Falls (source).
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Bonus: Also found this narrative by “Hap” Puotinen (my dad Art’s uncle/Grandpa’s brother) about logging in the UP.