Robyn Budlender

REDI Lab Project: Stories That Aren’t Obvious by Jayne Kay

My project is to create a book or an online blog about the people in the world around me. I will be talking to a wide variety of people from kids at my school to adults at a hospital in order to hopefully get stories about persistence, and portray that everyone has a story that isn’t obvious. While we talk I will be recording important things that they say or things that stand out to me. From there, I will either write a story about each person or copy down the interview or tell a specific story they told me. Each to represent the specific people I have interacted with. I’m also taking their picture. Each person will have a fun portrait and a story that goes along with it for their page in the book.

I really am looking to put myself out in the world and force myself to be more aware of my surroundings. I feel as if I’ve unintentionally put myself in a bubble and there’s so much more to the people in this world than surface-level small talk. Also, I’d like to reach out to people that don’t always have a way to tell their stories. I want to be someone that will listen intently to their experiences.
Yesterday I spent half an hour with first graders during their art class. I asked a few questions hoping to get them to express what they thought were important parts of their life. Getting them to talk to me was easier than I expected. Everybody wanted to answer my questions or have their picture taken. They thought they were going to be famous because I told them that their pictures would probably be presented in the high school. The hard part was getting material that I could turn into an interesting story for others to read. I ended up with a lot of small answers and not a lot of details or one story that was impactful enough. Of course they are young and haven’t experienced many hardships but there wasn’t much to create a story that portrayed the persistence of the human race like I thought my theme was going to be.

This was more of a test before I went to other places outside of school. It was a good place to start because now I know that I need to make my questions a little more clear and direct and target my audience a little better than I did this time to get the answers I was looking for. These answers will be a great starting point if I keep my book’s theme as Strong or persistence. I can maybe use some of their answers for talking about what strong means to them and that it’s so much more than being able to “lift a car over your head” as Sydney said it was.