Writing Remix Ep.94: Note From Dan
For each episode of The Writing Remix Podcast, I’ve written a “Note from Dan.” These episode notes are in the podcast newsletter that goes out along with episode-specific reflection questions. This note is from 94. Preserving Oral Histories w/ Professor Lilit Keshishyan
“The oral story includes emotions, memories, personal relationships, the focus on one person at that moment and how they’re seeing the world around them […] it brings the human element to the historical record.”
–Lilit Keshishyan
This episode with Lilit Keshishyan is the perfect way to start the 2023 season of the podcast because it’s a reminder to connect to our inner humanity and the shared humanity between us all.
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There’s something uniquely powerful about listening to a personal story. I remember stories told to me by my grandfather about living in the tenements of Hell’s Kitchen, NYC, sharing a bathroom with an entire floor, and having to walk a few blocks just to find a shower.
I remember him telling me how he’d have to rush downstairs as a child to collect scrap pieces of wood that were just dropped in the streets to heat the apartment and cook their meals, and how he was running downstairs just as fast for horse manure to fertilize the tomato plants.
When he was 14, he stopped going to school and had to work on the docks. When he cashed his check at the end of the week, he’d go to a local bar, and buy the bartender a mint julip as a fee so he could get his money.
This is history, a local history, but it’s history, and you’ll never find it in any textbook, much like the forgotten and ignored Armenian history Lilit Keshishyan talked about in this episode.
Though, unlike the stories of my grandfather, Lilit is working to archive this complex history so that years from now there’s an undeniable record of Armenian experiences here in LA and beyond.
Our conversation is just a small preface to the rich and tragic history Lilit is collecting as Director of the “California History through the Armenian Experience” oral history project. The passion she speaks with, the knowledge that she shared, and the investment she has in this work were overwhelming in-person, and I believe you’ll feel the same when you listen.
With the “madness” surrounding ChatGPT, it might be time to consider the impact and value of oral histories, audio essays, and multimodality. It might be time to rethink and revise our approaches to the “academic” text and re-introduce the human element to the work.
Walking away from this conversation with Lilit, I felt hopeful, I felt creative, and I was excited to get into the classroom and mix it up again. Most importantly, I’m looking forward to seeing how I can include more oral histories in my assignments to create a deeper personal investment for my students.
I hope you enjoy this episode. Special thank you to Lilit Keshishyan for being the first in-person guest in two years, and for bringing so much energy and enthusiasm to this conversation.
If you have an idea or question you’d like me to discuss on a future episode, email me at writingremixpodcast@gmail.com.
Writing Remix Recommendations
Texts mentioned in and/or related to this episode’s conversation
Ties That Bind honors the people who nourish and strengthen us. StoryCorps founder Dave Isay draws from ten years of the revolutionary oral history project’s rich archives, collecting conversations that celebrate the power of the human bond and capture the moment at which individuals become family. Between blood relations, friends, coworkers, and neighbors, in the most trying circumstances and in the unlikeliest of places, enduring connections are formed and lives are forever changed. Buy Ties That Bind HERE!
First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. Paulo Freire’s work has helped to empower countless people throughout the world and has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is ongoing.
Buy Pedagogy of the Oppressed HERE!
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks — writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual — writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to “transgress” against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher’s most important goal. Buy Teaching to Transgress HERE!
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