Tell Your Story Booth - Record your story sound bite

by: Bay Path College

Tell Your Story Booth – Record your story sound byte

In keeping with the theme of conference, you have the opportunity to tell your story in our story booth. The story booth mirrors the style and spirit of National Public Radio’s StoryCorps, which since 2003 has collected thousands of Americans’ life story interviews. Our story booth will offer you the opportunity to narrate your personal story. Grab a friend to interview you and sign up below to voice your story. (Each participant will receive a copy of the professionally edited audio recording as a sound byte via email after the conference.)

How do I tell my story? Where should I begin?

To help you prepare before recording, visit the experienced “story coaches” at the booth, who will check you in and assist you prior to entering the story booth. Our coaches are experienced writers, teachers, and journalists who collectively have interviewed hundreds of people during their careers and know how to find the heart of a personal story. Their warm and encouraging approach will put you at ease, and their skillful questions can help you get closer to what you truly want to say.

The following questions, adapted from National Public Radio’s StoryCorps, will give you an additional idea about where to start:

• What was the happiest moment of your life? The saddest?
• Who has been the biggest influence on your life? What did that person teach you?
• What is the single most important lesson you’ve learned in life, and how did you learn it?
• What are you proudest of in your life? How did you achieve this?
• When in life have you felt most alone? What helped you during this time?
• Who has been kindest to you in your life? What did that person do to encourage or support you?
• Has your life been different than what you’d imagined?
• How have you changed from the person you were ten years ago? Twenty? Longer?
• How would you like to be remembered?
• What is the best life decision you ever made?
• What does your future hold? Where do you see yourself in five years?

We encourage you to reflect on the questions above and choose one or two to answer in depth during your recording. If you have additional questions, or simply want to talk through the process, please feel free to contact Leanna James Blackwell, Director of the Bay Path MFA in Creative Nonfiction, at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing your story.

Learn more about your story coaches

AINE GREANEY is the author of the books Writer with a Day Job, The Sheepbreeder’s Dance, The Big House, Dance Lessons, and the gift/travel bookNewburyport: a Photographic Portrait. An expert on wellness, journaling, and the steps to getting published, she leads writing workshops at various schools, arts organizations, libraries and colleges in New England and beyond. Among her writing awards and shortlists are the Hennessy Award for New Irish Writing, the Rubery International Book Award, the Frank O’Connor Award, the Steinbeck Award, theIrish News Short Story Award and Indie Lit 2011. She is member of local and regional arts and writing organizations, including Pen New England, the New Hampshire Writers Project, the Cape Cod Writers Center, and the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Aine presents illustrated lectures on Irish culture, literature, and the writing life, and travels frequently to Ireland. Her personal essays and fiction have appeared in Under the Sun, the Boston Globe Magazine, Salon.com, Stone Canoe: a Journal Of Arts And Ideas From Upstate New York, The Daily Muse, Forbes,Generation Emigration (The Irish Times), Merrimack Valley Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, The Literary Review, The Fish Anthology, Natural Bridge, Image Magazine, and The Sunday Tribune. She lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and has taught at Emerson College, the Frank O’Connor Festival for the Short Story, the Mayo Writers-Ireland, and the Ocean Park, Cape Cod, and Sea Coast writers’ conferences.

LEANNA JAMES BLACKWELL is director of the Bay Path College MFA in creative nonfiction. An award-winning essayist and documentary playwright, her articles, profiles, and personal essays have been widely published in academic, literary, and popular magazines, including Brain Child: the Magazine for Thinking Mothers,The Best of Brain Child, Literary Mama,Amherst Magazine, Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly, 580 Split: A Journal of Arts and Literature, and Hidden Manna: the Journal of Faith and Story. She has also appeared in the best-selling literary anthologies A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption and inToddler, winner of an Independent Publishers Award (Seal Press). She was a Fiction Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center and a participating writer at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Squaw Valley Conference for Writers, and the Bay Area Writers’ Project.

Her most recent play, The Wendy Chronicles, on the life and work of Pulitzer Prize-winner Wendy Wasserstein, premiered at the Rooke Theatre in 2012. She is a founding member of the Playwrights Lab of Northampton, former artistic director and playwright-in-residence of TKO Theatre and the Inner Stage in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the co-founder and director of The Place for Writers at Mills College in Oakland, California. A writing coach and public speaker, she writes and speaks frequently on the arts, family, and social justice. Leanna was on the faculty of John F. Kennedy University in California for eight years, teaching writing, performance, and public speaking. She is a frequent guest lecturer on women’s literature, contemporary theatre, and leadership skills at Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges in Massachusetts, where she also served as a senior director of programming and communications. Leanna graduated from the MFA program in creative writing at Mills College in California.

TOM SHEA is reporter and columnist who wrote for the Springfield Republican for thirty years, covering sports, religion, politics, the courts, and elder issues. His weekly column, which highlighted local unsung heroes, began in 1995 and ran for 17 years, winning multiple awards including the New England Associated Press News Award for best New England column. His freelance pieces have appeared in New England Monthly (where he writes on music), Sports Illustrated, and Baseball America. He is currently senior foreign editor of The National, a news publication based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Before joining the M.F.A. faculty at Bay Path, he taught journalism, feature writing, and writing for the media at Springfield and Elm Colleges, and at Holyoke Community College. His awards include a Pulitzer Prize nomination and an honorary doctorate from Western New England University. He lives in Bondsville, Massachusetts, with his wife, writer Suzanne Strempek Shea.