The GEMS Story Project is finally launched!

I am a bit of a story magnet. People tell me their stories. Wild stories, sad stories, stories that will make you cry laughing, stories that raise the hair on the back of your neck, and stories that you wouldn’t believe if you didn’t know the person telling you was a truthful one. 

I’ve always been a willing magnet, and have welcomed stories from friends, family, and strangers alike. Why? “I don’t know” would be the simple answer. The longer version is akin to Walt Whitman’s quote: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then…I am large, I contain multitudes.” I guess the bottom line is that I find people fascinating, and I have a bit of the cultural ethnographer’s curiosity about how people think and feel, the choices they make, the things that drive them, the things that move them, and more than anything, the living, shimmering, rambling contents of the human heart. 

There is so much that people do that I find touching or inspiring, and even amidst all the mundane dust of our lives, it seems like everyone has these jewels inside of them: turning points, “Aha” moments, transformative times where they were impacted by the big world, or where they impacted the world in some big or small way. 

Every one of us is trying our best to navigate a world with no maps, to make the right choices for themselves and others. I feel like everyone has something in them that deserves to be honored, preserved, celebrated, witnessed. I have been shaped, moved, transformed and inspired by every story I have heard, and have realized I want to share some of these stories with a larger audience so they can benefit from them too. 

This is my way of offering people from every walk of life, every station in society, a way to tell their story, a way to know that something of the wisdom they have gleaned from their experiences will continue on. 

My story catching also comes from the experience of loss. 

From a young age I have known countless people my age who died before they got to live their full story. I have also been blessed with many older friends and relatives who shared bits of their precious lives with me before joining the ancestral realm. Sharing some of their stories is my way of keeping their memories alive. 

There is a cultural and even political aspect as well. 

In my work as a high school teacher serving a highly diverse population, I integrated oral history and research projects into my English and Social Studies classes. Students interviewed elders in their families and communities, researched and wrote about their countries and cultures of origin, the historical and political moments and movements that their elders had been part of, and they produced remarkable multimedia projects that told their stories. Often it was the first time my students had asked their parents and grandparents about their lives, and they were often instilled with a sense of pride, awe, and respect for the resilience, courage, and ingenuity that they displayed. This in and of itself was transformative for many students, especially those who struggled to feel proud of the places and people they came from. Kids deserve to feel proud of and knowledgeable about their cultures and about the people and places they come from. 

My personal motivation was shaped by my own family history. My parents came from very different backgrounds with regards to culture, class, religion, and immigrant status. One side of my family has been in the US for a very long time, and they come from many countries across Western and Northern Europe. As a teenager I became interested in building a family tree, and my grandmother generously gave me a type-written history of our family going back hundreds of years. It was a generalized, glorified and sanitized version of the family history, but it sparked my curiosity and gave me a launchpad into the past. My dad’s side of the family were working class Catholic immigrants who arrived in the early 1900’s, and it was a much different story– or lack thereof. My grandparents assimilated into the American way of life and left much of their home culture back in the old country– they didn’t even teach their children how to speak Croatian, their native tongue. The pressure to assimilate into American culture combined with a general suspicion in that era of anything that sounded German, so they chose to speak it only to each other, and to a few of their immigrant friends.  

I realized after their deaths that the key to decoding my Croatian culture was lost with them. My grandparents came from a small sliver of the Croatian diaspora that fled the Turkish invasion in the 1500’s and took refuge in Austria. They were offered land on the border of Hungary, and the ability to keep their culture and language alive, and they did, for 400 years. The dialect of Croatian they spoke in the early 1900’s was long left behind by modern-day Croatians, and has since become one of the many endangered languages around the world that have a dwindling number of native speakers. By the time I became aware of this, it was too late for me to learn it, and too late to record my Grandma’s stories about growing up in a village with no electricity or running water, with dirt roads and horses instead of cars. I was lucky to hear a few from my dad, who knew the value of stories, and since then I have scrapped together a few more from my cousins who grew up down the street from her. 

But yes, lesson learned. Once those elders pass away, so do their stories, and the door to the past is closed. As an old African saying goes, “When an elder dies, a library burns down.” 

So part of my motivation for launching the GEMS Story Project is to give people the tools they need to record and share stories to be passed down through generations. 

To help train young people to cultivate curiosity and to record the stories of their elders. 

To make it easy for elders to share their stories, solo or in good company. 

And to help Gen Xers, the sandwich generation, the ones raising kids and taking care of their aging parents at the same time. They often know the value of their parents and grandparents stories, but with busy lives and mouths to feed, they don’t have the time and energy for one more project.

That is where I come in. 

Whether you want to do a storytelling project with your family and need to make it fun and easy, or if you need more assistance in conducting interviews and creating a finished product you can enjoy, I am here to assist families and individuals in that process. 

I am also here to offer classes to people of all ages who are interested in learning how to do it themselves. 

Youth, middle age folks and elders will all have classes that are tailored to their needs, interests and skillsets, and there will be multigenerational classes where everyone can learn and practice together.