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Voices magazine is available only to members of New York Folklore Society. To ensure that you don’t miss another issue of Voices magazine, return the form with your membership or renewal check right away! Voices calls on you to join! Check our submission guidelines for authors. Send your letter to the editor here. Folklorists are writers. We write every day: monographs and scholarly articles, field notes, festival and event brochures, exhibit texts, grant applications, final reports, press releases, proposals. In fact, I would say that time spent writing is more than fifty percent of any folklorist’s annual cycle of work. The essentials of folklore—the ethnographic material—are fundamental to a great story. As any fieldworker can attest, entering into the personal experience of another individual is expansive and illuminating. The everyday becomes novel when viewed from the viewpoint of the uninitiated. The job of the folklorist is to translate that experience to those who may not get the opportunity to go through it themselves and to help the reader to find meaning in the experience. The history of folklore scholarship is replete with examples of good writing. The founding of the New York Folklore Society’s New York Folklore Quarterly in 1945 acknowledged the multitude of folklore materials and the many talented writers in the field of folklore. Benjamin Botkin, former head of the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress and a New York Folklore Society founder, encouraged the publication of folklore for a popular audience, as did founders Louis Jones and Harold Thompson. In the first half of the 1900s, folklorist Zora Neale Hurston wrote novels based on her fieldwork experiences, while at the same time publishing scholarly articles on African American folk culture. Contemporary folklorists, including Edith Cutting, Betty Belanus, Kirin Narayan, Joanne Mulcahy, and many others, have published poetry and fiction that draws upon ethnographic materials gathered in the field. Within the academy, folklorists have found their unique niche in designing and offering writing classes that draw upon student experience. ... The New York Folklore Society remains in the forefront of a creative movement. The impulse in 1945 to publish the folklore of New York State for the people of the state is continued today through this publication, Voices. The editors of this publication encourage your submission of scholarly writing, as well as nonfiction, fiction, poetry, memoir, and other forms of creative literature. Ellen McHale, Ph.D., Executive Director New York Folklore Society New York Folklore Society P.O. Box 764 Schenectady, NY 12301 518/346-7008 Fax 518/346-6617 nyfs@nyfolklore.org |
PUBLICATIONS | VOICES | BACK ISSUES | FOLKLORE IN ARCHIVES | FOLK ARTISTS SELF-MGT | ORDER PUBLICATIONS | SEARCH Listen to New York Folklore Society’s executive director, Ellen McHale interviewed by Steve Black for his radio show, Periodical Radio
—Anna Lomax Wood, Director, Association for Cultural Equity FROM THE DIRECTOR From the Spring-Summer 2009 issue of Voices: Our History The New York Folklore Society was founded in 1944 by a group of folklorists, historians, writers, and enthusiasts— dreamers and visionaries emerging from the Great Depression. Sharing a vision for cultural democracy after World War II, they felt that it was essential to collect, save, and share the folk arts and cultural traditions of the many cultures that made up the urban and rural areas of the state, its historic regions, and the American literary traditions it inspired. The founders’ goal was to “plow back”: to give back traditional arts to the people who created and maintained them. Today, NYFS is a service organization that provides assistance to more than one hundred community-based cultural organizations, professional folklorists, and folk and traditional artists of all artistic genres. Our flagship publication, Voices, can be found in the Russian State Library, Bulgaria’s Academy of Science, and Italy’s Ministry of Culture. Articles on topics such as September 11 street memorials, cobblestone architecture in Ontario County, and the stories of Vietnam vets provide citizens of the world with a means of acquiring a genuine understanding of people in New York and in the United States. Sixty-five years later, the organization founded by Louis Jones, Harold Thompson, and others is in economic crisis, as one of more than 570 organizations that lost funding due to the New York State legislature’s $7 million cut to NYSCA’s budget. This budget cut means an immediate loss of salaries for two full-time and at least three part-time staff members at the New York Folklore Society. We have halted our assistance to Haudenosaunee Mohawk basket makers and Tuscarora beadworkers who have been developing their own educational materials. Services provided to community cultural organizations engaged in capacity building are also on hold, and we cannot proceed with our workshops training artists and musicians in the business aspects of their art so that they can make their skills sustainable in today’s economy. These losses weaken the state economy further and threaten to diminish all of us in subtler ways. NYFS recently sent a challenge appeal letter asking for donor assistance beyond membership. The society’s grant applications and corporate and individual solicitations will also increase in 2009. If you have already responded to these fundraising appeals, we are very grateful for your support. According to folklorist Bill Ivey, former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts and head of President Obama’s transition team for arts and culture, a cultural Bill of Rights begins with a right to our heritage: the right to explore music, literature, drama, painting, and dance that defines our collective experiences as well as our individual and community traditions. New Yorkers have a right to participate in their heritage through continued and sustained funding for the arts at every level. Arts organizations provide arts education and programming for children and youth; maintain grassroots support for poetry, music, dance, handcrafts, and other performative family and community traditions; and encourage artists of every ability. New York’s county-based regional arts councils support professional folklorists’ documentation of ethnic, religious, and occupational traditions, preserving a huge diversity of art forms for generations to come. According to Americans for the Arts, the nonprofit arts industry—museums, theater and dance companies, performing arts centers, orchestras, arts councils, and so on—generates $29.6 billion in federal, state, and local tax revenues annually. Federal, state, and local governments combined spend less than $4 billion on support for the arts each year. The financial return on government’s investment in the nonprofit arts is, therefore, more than seven times the annual investment. The arts help New York State’s economy by providing destinations for its downtowns, support for its schools, and direct service to its small business owners. Sixty-two percent of arts budgets are used directly for employment. As a lifelong rural New Yorker who has worked as a folklorist in many of New York’s counties, I can attest that arts organizations are anchors in every community. To support New York’s arts organizations is to support Main Street in every county. In this difficult financial climate in which we find ourselves, it is not “business as usual.” Perhaps this is a window of opportunity to strengthen our mission and define ourselves. Please join us in this vital endeavor— your participation will sustain us. Ellen McHale, Ph.D. FROM THE EDITORS From the Spring-Summer 2009 issue of Voices: A Call to Action Just before the new year, along with hundreds of arts nonprofits across the state, the New York Folklore Society received alarming news. New York State’s deficit reduction plan instituted in December 2008 included extensive cuts to a number of state programs— including the grants budget of the New York State Council on the Arts. The cuts to NYSCA meant that pending requests for fiscal year 2008–9 funding, including the New York Folklore Society’s request for general operating support, could not be considered. While the NYFS is now scheduled to receive 2009–10 funding, the loss of this year’s funding has had a serious impact upon our finances. The NYFS has since applied for federal stimulus funding to the arts, which the NEA will make available to arts organizations nationwide after July 1. Nevertheless, the 2009 funding loss forced the NYFS, its director, staff members, and board members to revisit and reduce the costs of a spectrum of the society’s services to the folk and traditional arts communities of New York State. As part of a strategic plan to help our organization weather the current economic storm, NYFS board and staff made the decision to shorten this issue of Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore. The issue you are reading has been reduced to two-thirds of the normal length—thirty-two pages, rather than forty-eight—and its graphic design has been simplified. This decision enabled us to avoid delaying the release of this issue or canceling Voices for this fiscal year. More than ever before in the seven decades since the New York Folklore Society was founded, the society and its journal need your support to survive. The raw cost of producing and distributing each issue of Voices amounts to approximately $12,000. More than half of this amount pays three staff members to work on the publication: soliciting material for the journal from artists and writers all over the state, sending contributions out for review, editing content, copyediting, proofreading, handling photographs and other graphic elements, and designing each issue. Printing and distributing the journal costs the NYFS roughly $5,000 per issue. The journal is released twice each year, in the spring and in the fall, at a total annual expense of nearly $25,000. If you are already a New York Folklore Society donor, member, and Voices subscriber, we thank you for your loyal support thus far, and ask that in 2009, you consider doubling your annual contribution to the organization. If you are not yet a member of the folklore society, but read and refer to this journal regularly in your work or personal pursuits, we invite you to become a member and contributor to the society and journal now, at any donation level that may be comfortable for you. There are two ways you can take direct action to help us resolve this crisis. You can join us by making a financial contribution using the subscription and donation materials included in this issue—and you can join us for food, music, and celebration at a gala benefit concert and Voices release party on Friday, May 29, 2009, at 5:30 p.m. (reception) and 7:00 p.m. (concert). The event will be held in the GE Theatre at Proctors, 432 State Street, Schenectady. To purchase tickets for the event, please contact the New York Folklore Society at (518) 346-7008. See the concert announcement on our What’s Happening page of our new Music Section of our website for further details. We thank you in advance for your support. If you care about Voices and about the future of our collective work in the field of folk and traditional arts, please know that you stand in good company, as our history and recent testimonials both confirm. Eileen Condon
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