.png)
About Us
Why?
For over half a century, performing storytellers have developed the everyday practice of “storytelling” into a public art form that has profoundly impacted our understanding of how storytelling connects people across cultures and age ranges, and shapes us as individuals. As aging practitioners pass away, their legacy for the youth of the artistic community they fostered is in danger of being lost.
Through The Storytellers’ Legacy Project (SLP), The Storytelling Resource Place (SRP) serves the professional storytelling community, as a diaspora of working artists who defined an art form, as they document, remember, and share their legacy of working knowledge in the process, craft, and practice of this art form, for the immediate and direct benefit of our next generations.
The professional storytelling community is:
-
highly diverse,
-
highly underrepresented, even within the arts world itself (professional storytelling’s emergent and hybrid nature has often resisted both definition and recognition), with its practitioners’ artistic knowledge
-
largely undocumented. Storytelling is an ephemeral art, and its elders are dying out, often with their work and lifetime of wisdom unrecorded and uncollected.
The SLP is a community-based contribution to a larger—yet limited—collection
of other interviews by scholars, storytellers, festival producers, and others who
have recorded professional storytellers’ wisdom so that it is not lost forever.
We’ve assembled as comprehensive a list as we can of these other fine
collections—please visit the “Connect” page above to link to these resources.
The SLP is a long-term project of the SRP, connecting artists with artists, elders to younger generations, and story-listeners to this cultural arts community.
Who Benefits?
Retaining and celebrating these artists’ lifetimes of working knowledge benefits not only younger practitioners of this live art, but also younger audiences who will continue to experience high-quality community storytelling events that link these professional artists with the public.
We hope this project provides the benefits of:
-
Artists Connecting with Artists as a Diverse Creative Community: building community through honoring and sharing stories among a diasporic artistic group
-
Educating Aspiring Young Storytellers from Diverse Backgrounds: developing intergenerational connections with elders in the field
-
Connecting Story-Listeners in a Diverse Multicultural Community: bringing together communities through live in-person events and ongoing exhibits at the Storytelling Resource Place (Jonesborough) and the SLP’s virtual (Zoom-based) events and digitized (web-based) material and oral archives, hosted by the SRP.
Storytellers and story-listeners can, both in-person and virtually:
-
Engage in community-building interaction with professional storytellers' stories & their cultural artifacts
-
Learn life lessons on the art and craft of storytelling from master practitioners in their own words
-
Witness the cultural histories of the storytelling community through unique oral and material records
Project Goals
To ethically and with high-quality documentary resources: record, edit, catalog, house, and share oral history interviews and material artifacts of professional storytellers with audiences by four primary means:
(1) In-Person Exhibits – permanent and rolling exhibitions of material and oral history archives during regular operating hours at the SRP,
(2) In-Person Events – special on-site events featuring interviews with storytellers and viewings of their archival artifacts
(3) Virtual Collection – an interactive website linked with the SRP website, that catalogs and contains the oral history interviews along with images of the material archives, accessible and searchable by theme/topic/teller, for the benefit of storytellers, story-listeners, and researchers,
(4) Virtual Events – online events, such as watch-parties, that invite audiences and storytellers into dialogue with one another and into engagement with the collections (material and oral history)
Who Runs It?
The SLP was envisioned by acclaimed storyteller Elizabeth Ellis and operates under the direction and labor of a Community Review Board (CRB) comprised of award-winning and highly-diverse leaders in the professional storytelling community, who ensure that their community’s legacy is preserved and perpetuated as a living archive and ongoing dialogue.
The CRB works closely and diligently with the project director, and currently includes: Charlotte Blake Alston, Adam Booth, Bill Harley, Beth Horner, Olga Loya, Bobby Norfolk, and Anne Shimojima. They are a working board who serves the community well!
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​\\\
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​​
The creation and design of having a Community Review Board to run the project, springs from the methods and ethics of performance ethnography, empowering communities to tell their own defining stories about themselves, in their own words. In 2023, project founder Elizabeth Ellis and SRP Director Dr. Pamela Miller asked Dr. Hannah Harvey to help develop the Legacy project. Hannah is an Appalachian storyteller with a specialization in performance ethnography and qualitative research. In consultation with Dr. Della Pollock, Hannah and Elizabeth structured the project under the direction of a Community Review Board, which Elizabeth created. The Project facilitates the goals and desires of the Community Review Board in service to the larger community.
Elizabeth, Hannah, and Pam, along with web designer and video editor, Brittany Connolly, meet regularly with the CRB to plan and help execute the goals the CRB sets out.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
Charlotte Blake-Alston
www.charlotteblakealston.com
Adam Booth
www.adam-booth.com
Bill Harley
www.billharley.com
Beth Horner
www.bethhorner.com
Olga Loya
www.olgaloya.com
Bobby Norfolk
www.bobbynorfolk.com
Anne Shimojima www.anneshimojima.com
What Ethics Guide the Project?
The SLP has been carefully designed with and for the storytelling community with a focus on ethics and responsibility to our community.
We want this collection to honor these storytellers and the community. Among
other aims, we are guided by principals of do no harm, informed consent, and
contextualization. In other words, we facilitate storytellers being able to share
with the public the legacy lessons and stories they want to tell, in their own
words.
We also want to give storytellers the most authority possible over the stories
they generously have shared here. Storytellers retain all rights and ownership to
their SLP-sponsored interviews. Prior to sharing with the public, storytellers are
given the opportunity to view their videos and have full authority over edits.
All of this extra effort to serve and do right by our community is made possible
through the generous support of our donors, listed below. Many of our
videographers and staff volunteer their services and labor for this project.
Without this support, the project would not be possible.
Who Sponsors It?
The Project is sponsored by the Storytelling Resource Place, Jonesborough, TN. Since its inception in 2016, under the direction of Dr. Pamela Miller, the SRP has exponentially grown its collections and collaborations into a 1,828-sq ft. facility housing highly multicultural exhibits and resources and hosting regular community engagement events. The Storytelling Resource Place is THE place to go to see all the Storytellers’ Legacy Project archival artifacts in-person, and to learn from the larger collections and resources there! Check out the SRP here.