An Evening with Sarah Broom

Wednesday, February 12
7:30pm
Cubberley Auditorium

Free and Open to the Public -Tickets Required.

Reserve Free Tickets Here:
http://bit.ly/SarahBroomStanford

Sponsored by The Stanford Storytelling Project and The McCoy Center for Ethics in Society

Join us for a special evening with Sarah M. Broom, author of The Yellow House, winner of the 2019 National Book Award and featured on dozens of 2019 Best Books lists. Through the intimate story of her family’s home, The Yellow House offers a new story about not only New Orleans but about defying the forces of race and class in the American neighborhoods we rarely see. Broom will read from her work and discuss how its blend of memoir, journalism, and historical analysis offers us a way to recover from the mythologies that so frequently distort our understanding of ourselves and our country.

Sarah M. Broom’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Oxford American, and O, The Oprah Magazine among others. A native New Orleanian, she received her Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. She was awarded a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016 and was a finalist for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction in 2011. She has also been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony. She lives in New York State.

“Every few years, a book comes along that teaches readers of memoir how to read and writers of memoir how to write. Calling Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House a memoir feels wrong. Somehow, Broom created a book that feels bigger, finer, more daring than the form itself.”

— Kiese Laymon.

Gerald Vizenor on Native Survivance and the Literature of Engagement

Wednesday, January 15

5:00 PM

Paul Brest Hall

RSVP required

Please join us for the Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor Lecture on Public Service and the University with award-winning author and Native American advocate Gerald Vizenor on January 15, 2020. The reception begins at 4:30pm, followed by the lecture from 5:00-6:00pm, in Paul Brest Hall.

Gerald Vizenor, professor emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is a citizen of the White Earth Nation in Minnesota. He has published more than 30 books, novels, critical theory, cultural studies, and poetry collections. Native Provenance: The Betrayal of Cultural Creativity, a collection of essays, and Blue Ravens and Native Tributes, two historical novels about Native Americans who served in the World War I in France, are his most recent publications. Mr. Vizenor has received many awards, including the American Book Award for Griever: An American Monkey King in China, and the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award.

His presentation, entitled “Native Survivance and the Literature of Engagement” begins with a reception at 4:30pm, where you can meet and talk with Mr. Vizenor, followed by a lecture at 5:00pm in Paul Brest Hall at Stanford University.

Please RSVP here.

Each year the Storytelling Project offers courses on story craft and practices, with special attention to how to use stories for personal and social change. Courses are designed primarily for undergraduates and listed in departments and programs such as Oral Communication, History, Education, Theater and Performance Studies, LifeWorks, and American Studies. Register through Axess. See also our Past Courses, many of which are offered in alternating years.

Oral Documentary Workshop

ORALCOMM 126
Instructor: Tiffany Naiman
Fall 2019, Fridays 10:30-12:20
1 Unit

This workshop will lead students through the process of turning interviews, archival tape, and other recorded material into an accomplished audio documentary suited for public radio and major podcasts. Students will learn how to build story out of their materials, design and create a script, edit and mix sound, and distribute their final product. Suited especially to students returning from summer documentary and oral history research projects. Instructor Permission Required

Learning Medicine

We visit five places on campus where future doctors are learning how to practice medicine. We’re going to real classrooms: anatomy lab and wet lab, lecture halls, we visit a Stanford Free Clinic, bike across campus to the mausoleum, and head down the road to Webb Ranch. We’re asking: How are students learning to practice medicine, thoughtfully?

Story 1: The Healing Power of Getting Stoked
Sometimes, a word can help identify exactly what’s missing. Urban dictionary says: to be “stoked” is to be completely and intensely enthusiastic, exhilarated, or excited about something. Those who are stoked all of the time know this; being stoked is the epitome of all being. In our next story, State of the Human Producer JJ Kapur learns the healing power of getting stoked.

Producers: JJ Kapur and Esha Dhawan
Music: Thunderstorm (Pon VIII) by Kai Engel; Slimheart by Blue Dot Sessions; Ghost Surf Rock by Loyalty Freak Music; The graveyard by Loyalty Freak Music; Blue Highway by Podington Bear; Our Only Lark by Blue Dot Sessions; You Don’t Surf So Shut Up by Waylon Thornton and the Heavy Hands

Story 2: Warlock Genetics
For many doctors, it takes four years to complete their degree. But physician-scientists — doctors who have an MD and a PhD — have eight years of school. These physician-scientists treat patients and conduct cutting-edge medical research. Our producer tries to figure out if learning medicine and learning how to conduct medical research is the path for her. To make things more complicated, Victoria grew up in an Eastern Medicine household, so pursuing an MD in the Western tradition is already lifting a few eyebrows.

Producers: Victoria Yuan and Sarah Griffin
Music: Never Forget by Ketsa; Multiverse by Ketsa; Tian Mi Mi by Teresa Teng; Syaba by Aoiroooasamusi; Slow Vibing by Ketsa; Robot Waltz by Ketsa

Story 3: Spiritual Cowgirl
In our next story, State of the Human Producer Aparna Verma visits Dr. Beverly Kane at Webb Ranch to observe Equine-imity. Formally a practicing doctor at Apple, and a family practice physician, Dr. Kane now teaches these courses at the Stanford School of Medicine. She also teaches another class called Medicine & Horsemanship, which trains medical students and practitioners to develop an awareness of the subtleties of communication that are necessary for a provider-patient relationship.

Producers: Aparna Verma and Linda Liu
Music: Loco Lobo, Sergey Cheremisinov, Kai Engel

Story 4: Anatomical Mnemonics
Mnemonics use information already stored in long-term memory to make memorization easier. Maybe you also learned PEMDAS for order of math operations. parentheses, exponent, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. In no field perhaps, are mnemonics more abundant than in medicine. For our next story, pre-med student, producer Victoria Yuan visits Anatomy Lab after hours to ask if learning mnemonics affects the way medical students think about people.

Producer: Victoria Yuan
Music: Kitty in the Window by Podington Bear; Awakenings by Ketsa; Dog Politics by Elvis Herod; Pictures of the Floating by Canada; Orange Sunshine by Rod Hamilton; Tinny Whistle by Elvis Herod

Braden Grant Information Session

Tuesday, January 21
5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Hume Center Lounge (Building 250)
Dinner provided!

Do you want to travel and tell a story about it?

Apply to the Braden Grant program!

Learn more about this exciting, one-of-a-kind program at our upcoming information session.

On Tuesday, January 21, join the Stanford Storytelling Project and recent Braden Grant recipients to learn more about the Braden Grant and hear excerpts from the podcasts produced by the 2019 cohort. We’ll serve dinner, review the application process, and answer your questions.

The Braden Storytelling Grant is a grant for students to learn to research, craft, and produce an audio documentary based on oral history archives or interviews conducted by the student. This is an opportunity to tell the story of a city, neighborhood, country, culture, music scene, history (of a song, a building, a book, an artwork, etc.), cuisine, political or protest movement or those involved in them . . . really anything outside of yourself. Your final project will be a well-crafted narrative told through the medium of podcasting. The grant awards up to $2,500 and offers one-on-one mentorship for the duration of the grant.

Applications are live now and are due by noon on Saturday, February 23.

Visit the Braden Grant website to learn more about the application process and apply. Listen to the 2019 Braden Grant podcasts here.

A StoryLab appointment is a requirement of the application process. Make your appointment online here.

Margaret Atwood in Conversation

Tentative date to come: school year 2021-2022.

Acclaimed writer Margaret Atwood will make a visit to Bing Concert Hall for a discussion on April 8, 2020. The author of more than fifty books including The Blind Assassin, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Edible Woman, Atwood is the recipient of the Booker Prize, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, and the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. Her 2019 release, The Testaments, is a joint winner of the Booker Prize.

Margaret Atwood in Conversation is sponsored by Stanford Live in partnership with the Stanford Storytelling Project and the Stanford Speakers Bureau.

Tools for a Meaningful Life

LIFE 101
Instructors: Jonah Willihnganz, Andrew Todhunter, Fred Luskin, Gigi Otalvaro
Winter 2020, Tues/Thurs, 3:00-4:20 pm
3 Units, WAYS-CE

Explores the foundational skills for a meaningful life. Features lectures by faculty from across the university and labs for experiential practice. Draws on research and practices from fields related to psychology, philosophy, literature, and neuroscience, as well as wisdom traditions from around the world. Focuses on developing human capacities necessary for a meaningful life including; attention, courage, devotion, resilience, imagination, and gratitude. Exposure to these capacities influences personal growth and its development in communities.

Sound Stories

ORALCOMM 129
Instructor: Tiffany Naiman
Winter 2020, Weds. 9:30-12:20
4 Units, WAYS-CE

This seminar is designed for students interested in creating audio stories for radio, podcast, and other forms of sonic narrative. Students will examine the craft elements of the audio form, popularized by programs such as This American Life, Radiolab, and Serial including skills for interviewing, scoring, and audio editing, and will then produce their own documentary, memoir, or investigative story. This is a hybrid class, equal parts classic seminar and creative workshop. Students will work in small groups, learning how to develop material, choose an effective structure, blend dramatization and reflection, ground insights in concrete scenes, create a strong narrative arc, and manage elements such as characterization, description, and dialogue in order to create engaging stories with social impact. Recommended for students interested not only in podcasting but also creative nonfiction, documentary, film, and sound art. No prior experience with story craft or media required.