Story Week 2008

Ever since I was a child I always loved to listen to stories. From children stories, to ghost stories, to stories that my grandmother used to tell me about the “old day” and what things were like back in the day, I loved to listen to all of them. So when I heard that Columbia was having Story Week 2008 I was very interested in attending it. Story week 2008 is the 12th Annual Story Week Festival of Writers: Stories without Borders. It was basically a panel discussion of writers and story tellers who talked about the world of story telling: where it has been, where it is, and where it is going. The panel consisted of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, acclaimed writers Aimee Bender, Junot Diaz, Cristina Garcia, ZZ Packer, Fiction Writing Department Visiting Artist Colin Channer, performance artist and author Hillary Carlip, as well as some other readers, panelists, and performers. There was a brief Q&A segment where you could ask questions and concluded with the farewell and the notification that books of the panelists have wrote were on sale at the tables in the lobby of the theater.

Although I am not as die hard about writing and story telling as some of the people in attendance, I was very impressed by the whole event: It was held in the very nice downstairs theater in the Harold Washington Library and it had a very good turn out as far as people who were as interested as I was to come and see the event. But mostly I was impressed, interested, and entertained by the conversations that the panelists were having. It was not boring at all, which was not what I thought walking to the event. I was given a lot of incite into the writing/story world, including what was happening in the news about a woman who wrote a memoir about being a “Crip” gang member, and actually was a privileged suburban woman who had never been exposed to anything like that. I never knew there were so much politics in the world of writing.

Lastly, the panelists told stories: about there lives, and there pasts. One of the speakers talked about growing up in Jamaica, and how it has it flaws and problems he talked about the beauty and the good from the island. Its stories like this that shed light on things that others like my self have not been exposed to. I think that this is one the most important things about story telling, to carry on a legacy, almost like a chronicle of historic events. I once has a teacher who once said that everything what we know of today about anything that happened in the past was past through time by telling stories: from caveman to your grandparents telling you about there childhood, from historical events to current events. Overall I really liked this event. It was fun as well as informative. I am sad that I am graduating this year because I would love to see it again next year, but who knows, I might be in the neighborhood.