Category: Community Journalism

On a new year, and the nature of inspiration

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

The first resolution I have for this new year–though I am not a fan of resolutions–is to write more. I’ve gotten somewhat out of the habit, and it’s not quite like riding a bicycle.

But in order to write more, I need to think about the nature of inspiration. I’m not one of those folks who’s ever considered “The Muse” to be a source of inspiration. As a professional journalist, I never had time to consider writer’s block, for example. The story content was already there, waiting to be shaped. I had to make sense of it, shape it, and write it. There’s no room for doubt about how words go together in that kind of pressure cooker, and significant experience with that method of writing also means leaving those words behind when they’re out on the page.

I think that’s why I have a hard time going back to an earlier work to revise it. In my mind, I’ve completed the story and moved on. Being prompted to go back and revise sections of something, therefore, feels challenging in a way I can’t really express properly.

Still, that’s something of a tangent. The thought today is, how do I go about the resolution to write more?

I think the theme this year will be writing about the lost.

Last spring, I worked with a group of students in an experiential storytelling class to uncover and tell the many local stories that have been lost to time. We uncovered so many, in fact, that it should keep me busy for quite some time. We’re even soft-launching a web site to house them this semester.

The big advice I gave students last semester is to get out from behind the computer screens and explore local archives, museums, historic sites, parks, and other spaces that they’d not been before. I think, for this year, I’ll take my own advice. There’s always something out there to write about.

On Looking Out Tacy’s Window

~ Amy Lauters ~ 1 Comment

It probably will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I enjoy reading the books by Maud Hart Lovelace that feature her childhood self, Betsy Ray.

Lovelace wrote about her childhood in Mankato, Minn., thinly disguised as a community called Deep Valley, and her friendships with two other girls that became lifelong friends. The first book, Betsy-Tacy, shows readers how Betsy met Tacy, the five-year-old across the street from her house, and their epic friendship. The pair could see each other from their bedroom windows, and send messages.

I recently brought my storytelling students to the former homes of Lovelace and Tacy’s true-life counterpart, Frances Kenney. Both homes have been lovingly restored by the Betsy-Tacy Society. While I’ve visited them several times, with this private tour, I finally had a chance to peek out Tacy’s window to see Betsy’s house across the street.

I admit I geeked out a little. I’ve been focusing on experiences and how they can inspire us to be creative, to seek stories, and to tell them. In this instance, I had an opportunity to stand in Tacy’s shoes, peek out her window, and see her best friend’s window across the street. I definitely felt inspired, and I took the picture that represents this post. I found that experience to be immediately applicable to the overall lesson of the class; my glee in the moment could be reflected in the grins of my students.

The Betsy-Tacy houses will open for the season with a party honoring Betsy’s birthday: April 14. While the upstairs portion of the Tacy house is not normally open to the public, the lower floor houses family artifacts and a gift shop, and it’s a gathering place for those looking to tour Betsy’s house across the street. Other sites mentioned in the Betsy-Tacy books can be found all over Mankato, and a handy QR code on Tacy’s front porch will unlock a tour. you can follow on your phone.

On Investigating Lost History

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

One of the particular challenges of investigating the past lies in the lack of evidence. This semester, I’m teaching a class in experiential storytelling that focuses on investigating lost stories and local history, and we’re uncovering some really interesting stories.

One of the first steps took us to the Marilyn J. Lass Center for Minnesota Studies on our Minnesota State University, Mankato campus. The archivists there showed students a wide variety of primary source materials, including diaries and personal papers, that form the basis for additional research or storytelling. Students found everything from cookbooks to community histories of soldiers from the first Great War, and each emerged from that session with three great ideas for future stories. Our archivists/librarians also demonstrated several databases available through the campus that provide information, images, and other resources for storytelling.

Our next trip took us to the Blue Earth County Historical Society, which hosts a wide variety of primary source materials that students found inspirational. One student was particularly taken in by a diary of a soldier from Mankato who served in World War II. I can’t wait to see what he does with it.

I, too, have been inspired. The challenge of seeking lost history, as I noted earlier, is a lack of evidence. Period newspapers only cover stories of interest to those who were producing and reading the paper. In some cases, that can lead to total ignorance about some people in the population. Women’s history, black history, indigenous history, and other overlooked history must be gleaned from the “margins”, or the absence of their stories in such public records. As regular readers of this blog know, much of my own research has investigated farm women’s history, in particular. That interest forced me to seek alternate sources, including a single farm woman’s magazine and oral history, to try and uncover their stories in the U.S. Midwest in the 20th century.

Primary sources such as those that start in archives, however, can lead investigators to new pieces of history that have rarely been uncovered. One item I was delighted to discover at the historical society was a meticulously collected series of “social notes” for communities surrounding Mankato, including communities that no longer exist. I plan to dig more deeply into these notes to see if they can shed light on those who lived in such lost communities, and into the character of those communities.

The class has a great deal more to do. We plan field trips to the Minnesota Treaty Center, as well as other sites related to the Dakota War of 1862, and we plan trips to “lost” Mankato sites such as old Front Street and Victorian homes. Along the way, we work to ask these questions: Whose story is told here? Whose story is missing? Where can that story be found? If it can’t be found, what have we lost?

We’re also investigating memory. Of the stories we find told, who told them? Why? And what compelled the original storyteller to preserve it?

Examining these questions will help us all become better storytellers as we uncover lost stories.

On Favorite Black Authors

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

I’ve written before about some of the seminal influences on my writing, but I want to focus today on work by black authors I’d consider critical to my understanding of race, culture, class, and narrative. Regular readers know that, as an historian, I consider history to be something of a symphony, where all cultures and voices need to be present in order to make the music.

As a child growing up in a predominantly white area, my first exposure to African-American culture came through my television set. The first book on my list is one I first listened to on PBS’ Reading Rainbow, read by LeVar Burton. The book, Striped Ice Cream by Joan Lexau, was about a little girl who, like me, worried that she wouldn’t get the birthday present she wanted because her family was poor. I related to her on that level, and only peripherally noticed that her skin color was different from mine.

As I grew older, my aunt, who lived in and among the historically black neighborhoods of Minneapolis and St. Paul, introduced me to one of my favorite authors: Maya Angelou. The first work I read of hers was I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, and I rank it as transformative for me. I inhaled every other book and work I could get my hands on by Ms. Angelou, and I grieved when she passed. Her stories about growing up as a black woman, living as an artist, and working as an activist electrified me.

I already knew I wanted to be a journalist; Angelou’s work made me understand that the stories I told needed to come from all segments of society. She opened my eyes to the assumptions I’d internalized from my limited interactions with people from other backgrounds, colors, creeds, and cultures, and in demonstrating how she found her voice, I learned to find mine.

From there, it was Alice Walker. Toni Morrison. Audre Lorde. Alex Haley. Ralph Ellison. bell hooks. Zora Neale Hurston. It was Oprah, whose rise as a journalist offering space for her viewers to tell their own stories was stunning to witness. I read the works of Martin Luther King, Jr., and I started to read an up-and-coming columnist from the Miami Herald named Leonard Pitts, Jr.

I have been extraordinarily busy in the last five years, personally, but my original passion to find my own voice, and now, as an educator, helping others find theirs, remains. Education doesn’t stop as we get older. On my to-be-read list right now are works by former President Barack Obama, former First Lady Michelle Obama, and novels by Pitts, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2004. His latest novel, The Last Thing You Surrender, is on my e-reader right now.

I can’t honestly say this is a comprehensive list, in any fashion. In thinking about this topic, I Googled “favorite works by black authors,” and my list of new works to read easily tripled. As we move forward in this moment, let’s remember the importance of making our voices heard, and elevating those voices that could otherwise be lost.

On the Importance of Local Journalism

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

The news from Poynter Institute and other media think-tanks is ominous:  Local media outlets from around the United States are closing their doors and laying off staff. The economic challenges wrought by the pandemic have sliced that thin line that stood between these newsrooms and their loss.

In a time when local journalism is desperately needed, we are losing it.

When I entered the field as a news reporter for a daily newspaper in northern Wisconsin, the Marinette Eagle-Star, I had a newly minted bachelor’s degree in print journalism and a strong sense of the importance of journalism to society as a whole. I’ve lost neither of those. But I realized, soon after I started, that the routine stories I wrote for my local newspaper had significance beyond that.

My fellow reporters and I covered school board meetings, city council meetings, county board meetings, highway commission meetings, and many other gatherings of people who made decisions on behalf of their constituents. We talked to police officers and county deputies, superintendents of school districts and teachers in their classrooms. We haunted the offices of elected officials to find out what issues were being raised at the local, state, and federal level that might have an impact on our readers.

And we related all these stories to those readers. We told them about how a county sales tax might affect their bottom lines; how a move to a welfare-to-work program in the state of Wisconsin might affect not only their pocketbooks, but their neighbors; how a rise in gang violence locally had ties to larger cities to the south of us. We told them about a new thing called the Internet and how it might have potential to change how business is done, how many educational options could be offered, and even how individuals could access to information.

We explored the community we lived in, bringing stories about what our readers and their friends got up to in their spare time. We covered local sports, making sure our student athletes got their names in the paper and credit for their achievements. We shone a spotlight on the arts in our community, and we talked to leaders about transitions in leadership in their worlds.

We told reader stories, too, making an effort to find the interesting, unusual, and fun things they were involved in. We dug deep to record these things for the historical record. We also used that historical record, sometimes, to tell larger stories about the community in which we lived, such as that of the Peshtigo fire of 1871.

Readers let us know what they appreciated, and they let us know what they didn’t. Virulently. Ardently. We did our best to make sure we got it right, and we did our best to make it right when we erred.

In those pages, we told the story of community, of multiple communities. We printed birth notices, death notices, marriage notices. Notably, I typeset my own wedding announcement. I was also forced to write up my own accident report, to the light ribbing of my comrades. All careful, all a record. All a journal of what happened in that place, at that time.

Journalism, at its true essence, is public service. The bastardization of that service for profit has led to untold damage to journalism as a social institution.

As I watch the numbers rolling in of these losses, I mourn the loss of that essential community journal. No one ever got rich as a local journalist. But the impact of what local journalists do has been, can be, and will be immeasurable.