What Stories Will You Capture This Holiday?

Hi Good People,

If you’ve ever had to host a holiday, you know the key is to give yourself enough prep time. That’s why, even though I’m a stickler about giving each holiday its time and not jumping ahead to the next, we’re going to talk about Thanksgiving before Halloween has even come and gone.

With Thanksgiving and the holidays on the horizon, our next convening will focus on how to start and navigate family history conversations with your loved ones.

Between travel, cooking, games, and joking on your cousins, it’s easy for the time together to fly by. And if I’m being honest, raising certain conversations can feel a little awkward, especially if it’s not how your folks normally get down.

That’s why thinking ahead and having a plan can be helpful. Join us Wednesday, October 22 at 7:30pm ET to create one.

This will be a hands-on session: bring the questions you want to ask, and together we’ll come up with strategies for how you can organically connect with your family member(s), deepen your bonds, and unlock new stories.

RSVP

Keeping with the spirit of the holidays, this year we’re hosting our first ever “Home for the Holidays Challenge” - a set of prompts to inspire storytelling within our families during the festive season.

Part of my inspiration for Black Storytelling Week was my desire to get to know my Grandma, my dad’s mom and my last living grandparent, beyond her role as our family and community matriarch. I had a revelation when I turned 30: I started to see all these people who raised me as people. And it made me crave a new kind of relationship with them.

For my Grandma, I was curious to understand what it felt like for her to leave Alabama at 18 with my grandfather, saying goodbye to her parents and ten siblings. I wanted to hear about how she built a life and found friends — and eventually an extended chosen family — in New York. I desired real talk about what it was like to raise six kids in the 1960s and 70s, and how she maintained her sense of self. My grandma is fly, always dressed to the nines. She was a deaconess who also enjoyed her rum-and-cokes, and she still plays the slot machines and sports long red nails to this day. I needed the tea on managing haters, because she had to have more than one!

Over the years I’ve gotten some of my questions answered, and others I haven’t yet had the opportunity to explore. As you likely already know, this work is not linear. For me, it’s just as much about the relationships and connection as it is about the stories and history. This moment calls on us to cultivate both.

As I prepare this challenge, I’d love to hear from you: what kinds of stories are you most interested in exchanging with your adopted, blood, or chosen kin? You can reply to this email, or leave a comment on Substack to let me know and shape the challenge.

From time to time, I’d like to use these bulletins to share examples of family storytelling, archiving, and memory work that inspire us. If you come across work that makes an impression, I invite you to share it with me via email or chat.

In “The Nickersons,” Brooklyne beautifully honors the life of Rodney Nickerson and the legacy of the Nickerson Garden Housing Project in Watts, CA, where her family lived while transitioning from Mississippi to California in the 1950s.

See you soon,

Martina