a long time comin’.
My last post was Dec 4, 2020.
Today, it is Oct 22, 2022.
This is a wordy post. I don’t expect you to make it to the end.
and this is ok.
22 months, 2 weeks and 4 days have passed since my days of “Pathfinding”. The Black & Rural Project is still alive. I have completed nearly 40 interviews, I have listened, laboured, and learned and much has taken shape over this last long while.
I am now partnered with Pi Theatre, a city based theatre company in Vancouver who has taken interest in producing this very rural-based tale. Black & Rural the stage production will premiere on Pacific Theatre’s stage in April of 2023 and will, should life allow it, tour to rural and urban areas across the province and, perhaps, across the country. I am currently in a heavy writing period. God help me. The work is being midwifed into life alongside dramaturg and long time friend Angela Konrad, Artistic Director of Dark Glass Theatre; and has been generously funded now by the Canada Council of the Arts, the Columbia Basin Trust, the BC Arts Council, and the Nelson Historical Theatre Society. The work has been featured on CBC radio, Global News, CTV, and a host of smaller media outlets. It has been a whirlwind.
For 6 of the last 22 months I partnered with Heritage Saskatchewan to create a focus project on black rural life, historical and contemporary, in their province. The end result? A beautiful book that I wrote and shaped with support of the incredibly skilled graphic designer, Marieke De Roos and Folklorist/Film Maker/copy editor Kristin Catherwood. The book can be found virtually or ordered physically. If you are curious to see a physical copy, write and let me know. To complete the work, the book was launched with a mini-Storytelling tour throughout the province that I created from snippets of the tales collected across the plains.
I am now partnered with the Kootenay Library Foundation to hire two to four youth interns to work with me to research black history in the Kootenay Region of British Columbia. In addition to the research component, the youth will be given opportunity to create an artistic/creative response to what they do (or do not) find documented about black life in the region. Their work will be featured in regional newspapers, on the Black & Rural website and in other key locations.
lastly,
I am partnered with the Nelson Museum, Archives and Gallery to create a small gallery showcasing the story of Black & Rural, the interviewees, myself, and the intersection of real life experience and archival representation. Or something like this. It is in it’s infancy and I am honoured that the women who run NMAG are so passionately behind discovering what this gallery is to be. Our time line is generous and we may not see it live until 2024. Patience is a virtue.
As I said, the last long while has been a whirlwind.
Yet.
Through it all, despite it all, because of it all, I find I am still a woman hungry to weed through the noise and to find something real within. something real within those I’ve been given to know in my life. Whom I’ve been given to work with. given to struggle and rejoice with. Over the last 22+ months, my life has shape-shifted dramatically. I have been humbled by the realities of my own inner landscape and by the beautiful and strained ways in which my own yearning has impacted souls that I have loved. and somehow, through the churnings of life I am given a path that is asking me to create. to write. to perform. to seek out. to listen. to retell.
and so, I am facing this.
Life, that is.
and consequently my online writing is infrequent. But work is happening. somehow, someway. Even if only in my own heart.
I endeavour to offer a more straight forward, regular snapshot/portfolio of the work I am doing on a facebook page. If you are reading this and find you truly want to know more, you may see more here: www.facebook.com/wearestoryfolk.
with honesty,
shayna
