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In June 2025, I received a Creative Liberation Fellowship through Waymakers Collective’s Appalachian Arts and Culture Assembly, which was an opportunity that offered something rare for a working creative practitioner: time. It gave me time to reflect, to revisit earlier methods, and to experiment with new approaches in my Storytelling: A Gift of Hope, liberation-focused storytelling practice centered on healing, dialogue, community transformation. My work for decades has been about harnessing the art of storytelling to create intimate healing and justice spaces that build dialogue, agency, and change for communities on their own terms. While this initiative builds on that lived and researched folklife practice, leveraging stories as humanity’s birthright to help build a socially just present and future, this fellowship gave me the space to slow down for some months, some of my less busy months over the winter season, and spend time deepening the work and projects for the new year. I spent time refining workshops, expanded toolkits, and piloted new methods across multiple settings, with the intention of helping activist artists, cultural workers, and community leaders respond to the challenges we’re all facing, telling our nation’s stories truthfully, more inclusively and positioning ethical and communal storytelling as central to shaping a fuller civic identity. My work as a folklorist and storytelling artist has always centered on creating spaces where stories can surface, spaces that support healing, understanding, and transformation. I’ve witnessed how ethically applied and communal storytelling helps people respond to crisis, process trauma, and transform narratives of fear into stories of power and change. But more than anything, with this fellowship time, I got to sit with these ideas and explore questions that felt urgent in this moment and begin shaping new storytelling futurism approaches cultivated in imagination, intersectionality, and collective liberation. I spent time revamping story circle formats for deeper intersectional dialogues that felt safer and relevant to the moment. Stories belong to everyone, but it doesn’t always feel that way. Across Appalachia, and across much of this country, communities are living through deep uncertainty. For many, particularly BIPOC, immigrant, LGBTQIA+, working-class, and disability justice communities, fear and isolation feel very real, along with the systemic and intentional silencing of our stories, when we know these are the very stories society needs to hear. For me, this fellowship became an invitation to explore a guiding question: How do we cultivate our stories to meet this tumultuous moment? I was able to focus on strengthening and expanding a series of projects and creative practices, including a previous Appalachian residency, Stories from the Front Porch, as well as develop a new The Storyteller’s Artist Palette and The Story of the Future exercise. I got to test these in various community spaces. Some of these activities were implemented through a socially engaged storytelling initiative called Gather ’Round the Table. While this work took place in Iowa, it gave me time to trial these ideas in a bridge-building-across-difference project before bringing the ideas back to my home region. That project involved youth, elders, immigrant families, veterans, civic leaders, and artists, through storytelling and listening spaces that included talk-back public dialogues, intergenerational story walks, creative writing sessions, and family porch-style storytelling gatherings. I also continued developing my own tools and strategies, which helped people visualize their stories in new ways. One of the most meaningful methods to emerge was what I came to call The Storyteller’s Artist Palette. This activity invites participants into a narrative mediation process, where they could visually map memories and connect them to personal values and experiences. These mapped memories, somewhat like small story vignettes, give participants a chance to weave them into intersectional conversations and place-based advocacy storytelling, as well as something they can physically take with them to develop further. Another method that grew from this period of reflection was the Story of the Future activity. I developed this in the context of the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States founding. As this milestone has become part of national discourse, I wanted to intentionally create an activity that ensured communities like ours were part of these dialogues, exploring what it means to be American, connected to this nation, and what issues and ideals we feel have been met, or are still yet to be realized, based on our own truths, that we hold to be self-evident. Not from the position of institutions, but from us as individuals, activists, and small intersectional collectives. In this work, through two piloted events, participants were invited to imagine futures in which belonging and justice could be envisioned without barriers. In one version of the activity, I drew from my work in museums and invited participants (special education and disability rights advocates) to imagine and design a hypothetical museum, a Museum of National Disability Rights. In another, with Appalachian practitioners, an Appalachian Museum of Liberty, Truth, and Justice. Here, groups wove personal stories alongside cultural narratives they felt were important to make visible. The exercise also prompted questions about whose voices had been missing, what stories deserved to be preserved or disrupted, and what future generations might need to understand about this current moment in history. The exercise was essentially about developing collective storytelling, identifying what intersectional threads felt important to the group as a whole, and, in the practice of telling, what reflections could become actual storytelling possibilities.  All of this work eventually, in February 2026, led to a culminating regional convening titled Storytelling, Futurism & Liberation: Cultivating Our Stories to Meet This Moment. Around 16 artist-activists, educators, organizers, and cultural workers traveled from across Central Appalachia to take part. Preparation began weeks in advance, with reflective applications that helped shape how I developed the workshop design and identify shared concerns. These included rising authoritarianism, harm to marginalized communities, the need for solidarity, and the desire to preserve distinct cultural stories that currently feel under threat. The gathering was intentional as a family-style storytelling space. Local Johnson City non-profit, Philosopher’s tea house provided the space. Together, we began with introductions, moved through story circles, narrative mapping, creative writing, and collaborative futurism exercises. Participants worked together to imagine their own museum exhibits representing liberation narratives in justice, belonging, and hope for their region, and the homes, issues, and causes they felt were important to include. A participant shared her words that sums up what this gathering meant. "Spaces where the soul can be nourished are rare. For a moment, we stepped away from the chaos and imagined something restorative." Looking back on this fellowship year, I feel deep gratitude for the time it created. I’ve long believed storytelling is a slow art form, something that requires patience in order to do justice to the story that needs to be told in all its complexity. The fellowship gave me permission to experiment, take risks, and grow creatively, to put some of my ideas into direct practice. It also gave me time to deepen my commitment to supporting communities in shaping their own narratives on their own terms. Since receiving this fellowship earlier this year, I was inducted into the AppalCore governing body for the Waymakers Collective. As such, I feel excited to bring what I learned from the fellowship into the practice of moving our collective work forward for the benefit of all the Appalachian communities we serve. In addition to supporting my own independent work through Storytelling: A Gift of Hope, wherever I’m called or invited to help. Sign Up to Storytelling: Gift of Hope Newsletters & Blogs |
