This is Bill Thomas, and I have become fascinated by a process, or exercise, called Where I'm From. It's a sort of poetic memory piece, and in North Dakota it's been promulgated by the North Dakota Council On The Arts. Troyd Geist, who works at the council, developed a protocol where a professional writer works with elders, and... You know what, before we get more into explaining it, let's hear one. Here is Matthew Musacchia, one of the writers who went out and worked on these.
Matthew Musacchia : I Am From a Cream Separator, by Gene Zahursky Klein.
I am from a cream separator,
from flour and John Deere machinery.
I am from the typical North Dakota small farm,
with white clapboard and old-fashioned sunburst gables,
that smelled of fresh bread and fried chicken.
I am from the French weeds that grow in the field-
(when you looked like you don’t have anything to do, your dad hands you a gunny sack and tells you to pick them),
and I am from the “tire-swing tree”.
I am from oyster stew on Christmas Eve, and from being hardworking.
I’m from Leonard and Audrey.
I’m from gopher trapping and swimming in the slough,
and from “Do you have the manners of a hog?” and “Come to life” and “He’s a good little man.”
I’m from “‘How’s the boy?’-‘I’ve seen worse but it’s been awhile’”
and from “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford.
I’m from summer family reunions at Tasker’s Coulee.
I’m from Bowbells, North Dakota, and from German (with a little Norwegian) ancestry,
from pig hocks and sauerkraut.
From accidently stabbing my brother with a pitchfork while we were shoveling manure;
he was going to kill me, but then thought better of it and ran to mom,
I finished on my own and we were fine by supper.
Dad’s army uniform, in the downstairs closet,
and mother’s birthstone ring, in my jewelry box.
Bill Thomas: So that's a Where I'm From poem, and that one's from Bismarck. If you go look it up... and by the way, if you do, you will see that Where I'm From is an open source thing. You don't have to pay a fee or be licensed or something to use it. Anyway, if you look up Where I'm From, you will see that it originated with a woman named George Ella Lyon, and in its simplest form, it can appear almost like a Mad Libs, a fill-in-the-blank template. "I am from," name of parents. "I am from," name of remembered commercial product. If you just did it that way, it would be okay, but I think the way it was set up to have elders work with professional writers, Maureen McDonald Hins and Matthew Musacchia in our case, it really elevated it. I asked Matthew how they did it.
Matthew Musacchia: What you do is you start off with an interview. The collecting information part is really about at least two days. I usually say you don't want to do it all on one day because if you start, people tend to remember something the next day. Memories sometimes take a little time, and a lot of the time, a little bit later, they'll remember something else they want to put in.
So you'll sit down with the elder and you'll have a rough list of the discussion and you'll go through them, and there'll be things like an object that you might remember seeing a lot at home. That, of course, can change a lot. Here I get a lot of cookstove, a lot of things from the kitchen or a cookstove seem to be pretty common, but they can vary wildly. There will be other questions such as about flowers or trees you might have around, why is that significant? The names or nicknames of your parents, or brothers and sisters, and maybe a short story or something like that.
A lot of this isn't just for the poem, you do it because it's something for the elder, the person talking to you. When they're remembering things it's mentally healthy to do that, in a lot of ways. It brings back a lot. It helps fight boredom, loneliness, and sense of helplessness. But long story short, it's meant to be a good experience for the elder you're talking to.
So you do that. You go through the first day and you'd get your main outline of the poem. The second day, you might narrow it down, and usually the things that mean the most, or are coming back to, are the ones that make it more to the poem. For example, probably one of the hardest ones is people remembering something they were told as a child. That one's been one of the most consistently hard ones. But on the other hand, things like flowers or trees, almost everyone has some memory of a flower or a tree, or some natural object nearby that meant something to them.
A lot of times when people are talking, what they're saying, it doesn't sound very significant at the time, or you think they're just mentioning it, but then when you put it in the poem, it sticks out more, because it's something that's unique to them or part of their life.
When the poems are done, there is something, I think, of a little bit of pride, at least I think so, of finishing them and having it. It's also, I think, pretty important for the families, because you almost always learn something about your parents, or however else you're related to them, in one way that you never knew, even if you thought you knew quite a lot. It's an important project in that as well. I think... well I know... some of them have been used in funerals, but it's important on many different levels. I think of it a little bit like a snapshot of someone's life.
Bill Thomas: Okay. Well let's hear another example of the Where I'm From project. This is read for us by who we've been hearing from, Matthew Musacchia.
Matthew Musacchia: This one was done by a man, he was in his nineties, more than 95 if I remember right.
“I Am From a Chicken Coop”
By Ralph Oehlke
I am from a chicken coop,
from John Deere and International machinery.
I am from the two-story house on the farm, smelling of coal or wood from the stove.
I am from the garden with a variety of blossoms,
and the evergreen trees used as a windbreak,
providing shade in summer.
I’m from Christmas trees and doing the best we could,
from Margaret and Fred and Lucille and Lynn.
I’m from coming when mom called for breakfast (and if you didn’t come down you’d have to do the dishes),
and from taking your things upstairs at the end of the day.
I’m from sports songs, anything with pep in it,
and I’m from visiting members of the family, wherever they lived, once a year
(it’s hard because you can’t just leave the livestock).
I’m from a farm between Enderlin and Alice, and German ancestry,
from ice cream and breakfast foods.
From busting an eardrum walking home in the hard rain,
I wasn’t dressed for it.
The picture of me from winning a baby tournament at the county fair,
my mom kept it in a box with other pictures.
Bill Thomas: A Where I'm From poem, from when they did the project in Enderlin, as you might have guessed from the references in the poem.
Now when the pandemic hit, they had to switch from doing these as in-person workshops to long distance collaborations. For this project, that worked pretty well. The Where I'm From project is sponsored by the North Dakota Council On The Arts, and you can find out more about this, and much, much more about what's going on in the arts in our area, by going to arts.nd.gov. That's arts.nd.gov, and there's more of these pieces also at prairiepublic.org. I'm Bill Thomas.