Stories Matter - Even If You Think They Don't

 

For three weeks in September, I attended a memoir writing class with a group of women at a retirement community. I attended this class to introduce this group of people to www.storychip.com. My notion was that as soon as people who have lived long enough and like to write, find out about Story Chip, they would be flocking to the site, eagerly pouring out a lifetime’s worth of stories. I believed that I was offering my fellow classmates and their friends, relatives and fellow residents, a great opportunity to share the great wealth of their experiences. I was wrong.

I was not wrong about offering them a great opportunity to share the great wealth of their experiences. At Story Chip, history is told from the original stories of the people who experienced it. It is a website where anyone can post a story. Their story will not be edited, and we do not pick and choose from the submissions – they are all posted. Each little piece of history is important. Each of us participates in history in our own small way and each of us has a lifetime’s worth of stories to tell.

Who I Met on Summer Vacation

National Cathedral before the quake

Story Chip's editors have logged a lot miles this summer. We have driven from the west coast through Arizona when the smoke from the wildfire there was so heavy that you could not see the road. We were in Abiquiu, New Mexico just before the fires that forced the evacuation of Los Alamos. We were in Santa Fe when the fire began in the mountains north of town. We have seen prairie fires all over Texas in the worst drought on record there. We visited the National Cathedral weeks before the earthquake damaged many of its spires. We were in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware just before Irene swept past en route to landfall near Cape May, New Jersey. We have traveled across Pennsylvania and New York en route to Ontario.

It has been a tough year for our uneasy relationship with mother nature. Starting with the floods and tornadoes that razed places that we used to live, going through drought and fire to finish with earthquake and hurricane. Now, back in Austin, we are in the middle the central Texas fire season. All of these natural disasters take center stage on the nightly news, but for us this summer has been about the people and their stories. Events grab the headlines, but people make events real. Some travel pictures after the jump.