Students, Seniors, Immigrants Sought for Stories
Sharon Kennedy interviews Domenic Valente. Courtesy photo.
Medford Health Matters, a consortium which includes many organizations such as Mystic Valley Health Services, the Medford Senior Center, and Tufts University, is sponsoring a program called, “Medford Stories: From Long Ago to Right Now.” Beginning in the week of March 20 and continuing until the end of April, local professional storyteller, Sharon Kennedy, will meet with students from the high school and middle schools at the Senior Center at 101 Riverside Drive to collect stories from Medford Senior citizens and Medford immigrants. The meetings will be weekly on either Tuesdays or Wednesdays from 3:30-5:00. At the end there will be a presentation of some of the stories at the Medford Public Library. Sharon Kennedy is the author of “The Voices of West Medford”, a book of stories from African-Americans in West Medford. Her book is available at the library and online at sharonkennedy.com.
This exciting project needs YOU! We are looking for eighteen students between 6th – 12th grade to be paired up with either a senior citizen or someone who has immigrated to Medford in the last thirty years. Students will be given a crash course in American and Medford history and also in immigration patterns. Then they will learn interview techniques, how to operate tape recorders, and how to present their findings orally. Each student will work with another student as a partner and together they will use all their new skills with the senior or new immigrant they are interviewing. The high school will give “community service” credit for this six week program.
If you would like to tell your story we would love to hear it! You just need to be available to come to the Senior Center to be interviewed two or three times during our six weeks of sessions. In the first two weeks we could also use seniors or new immigrants to practice on. So this is an opportunity for someone who can only come once . We are interested in oral histories (family stories) from people who came to Medford long ago as emigrants from such places as England, Ireland, Italy, or the American South. We are also interested in family stories from people who have emigrated much more recently from places such as China, Russia, Brazil, India, Africa, Guatemala, Haiti, or Vietnam.
Sharon Kennedy, the facilitator for these workshops,works as a professional storyteller performing at libraries, schools, and festivals all over the United States.She has been featured in the Medford Transcript, Yankee Magazine, ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America”, and on National Public Radio. She makes storytelling CDs for children which have won Parent’s Choice Gold Awards. One of her CDs was nominated for a Grammy. Ms. Kennedy is a former teacher with a M.Ed. and she led this same type of intergenerational oral history project last April in Arlington, Ma. at the Robbins Library. For more information call 781-393-7566 or email sharon@sharonkennedy.com.
– Submitted by Sharon Kennedy