A Storyteller's Story: One Student's Journey

Everyone has a story. As a documentary filmmaker, it is an honor to collect and tell stories that may not otherwise be heard. My roots in oral history prepared me for a career as a documentarian. The rush I got from conducting my first interviews fueled me to become a professional storyteller.

I learn by doing. So, when the opportunity came to jump into an oral history project as a junior in high school at St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, the kinesthetic learner in me perked right up. The project catered to every morsel of my academic learning style. I was thrilled to play with audio recorders and transcribing machines, and even more excited to create a visual project that helped tell the stories I had collected.

Oral history lets us explore, to delve deep into a subject matter, and to challenge our prior knowledge. It was this holistic and personal approach to learning that excited me. I was uncovering stories that would otherwise remain silent. My mission as an oral historian was to collect stories that added a layer of depth to history books, much like my mission now as a documentarian is to uncover and visually tell unknown and unique stories that speak to the human experience.

My first formal oral history was with the parents of a childhood friend. Mary Joyce and Peter Carlson illuminated me with their experiences as human rights advocates from the 1960s and 1970s. Hearing their accounts added a new dimension to what I knew about the civil rights and anti-war movements, and submitting their transcript to an historical archive empowered me as a young historian. This first project sent me on a path to find and tell stories whenever possible. As a high school senior, I created a second oral history project with a member of the All-American Girls' Professional Baseball League, keeping me excited and motivated about this hand's on style of learning. ¹

Fig. 1.

Mara Waldhorn with Bienvenido Anderson and two school friends after a day of summer school. Photo courtesy of Zhanyi Jiang.

Since high school, my approach to storytelling has evolved. Working for the Oral History Association (OHA), participating in large ethnographic projects, and making my first documentary film have shaped the way I approach telling stories and finding a place for them in the world.

Sifting through oral histories while working with the OHA helped me realize the impact individual stories have when part of an archive. Working with oral history archives such as the Three Mile Island Project, the Mexican Migration Mosaic, and the National Visionary Leadership Project ² showed me how oral history contributes to creating social awareness and change. I read and transcribed interviews that ranged from Coretta Scott King to migrant apple pickers to victims of a nuclear power plant disaster. Learning about different moments in history through the eyes of those who lived them gave me the thirst to keep searching for stories that were waiting to be told.

Immersion and collaboration were my next steps to learning how to tell stories. Beyond conducting individual interviews, I traveled to Mexico, New Orleans, and Cameroon with student groups working with communities whose stories were rarely told or heard. My skills as an oral historian helped me conduct, analyze, and contextualize these stories so that they could be used as educational resources and tools to inform people about social issues. More importantly, what I learned from immersing myself within these communities was how to tell stories with my interviewees as opposed to telling stories for or about them.

After college, my decision to make documentaries came from the drive I still had to tell stories and from my need to be creative and visual. The tools I acquired from my first oral history project, working as an archivist, and an ethnographer contributed to the process of making my first film.

Bienvenido, ³ my short documentary, follows 13-year-old Bienvenido Anderson during the summer between his seventh- and eighth-grade year after he...