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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 —Lee Haring, Professor Emeritus of English, Brooklyn College, CUNY
—Anna Lomax Wood, Director, Association for Cultural Equity FROM THE DIRECTOR From the Fall-Winter 2009 issue of Voices: Our History As we look back on our organization’s sixty-fifth year, I would like to thank all of our supporters on behalf of the entire New York Folklore Society family. 2009 was a year of great upheaval and rethinking of the organization. We told you about our current financial situation in the last issue of Voices, and you responded with an outpouring of support. In this issue, you will find our members and donors listed. Thank you all for your generosity, especially those who joined at the Harold Thompson level of $100.00 or above. This class of membership saw our largest increase. Heartfelt thanks and a debt of gratitude go to past president Karen Canning and to Anna Lomax Wood of the Institute for Cultural Equity, who became major donors in 2009. Their combined gifts helped us through our most tenuous period. Our fundraising concert in May 2009 gave the New York Folklore Society some additional visibility. We thank concert planners Paul Mercer, Eileen Condon, and Lisa Overholser and all the volunteers who helped that evening. Thanks also to Proctors in Schenectady for providing a venue and assisting with ticketing. Of course, we couldn’t have done it without our fine musical entertainment for that evening: George Ward, Dan Berggren, Colleen Cleveland, Kim and Reggie Harris, John Kirk, Joe Bruchac, and Fode Sissoko donated their precious talents for our benefit. It was a great evening! New partnerships were formed in 2009, including a partnership with the Capital District Community Loan Fund, a nonprofit community agency for sustainable development. We are pleased to join this network of socially concerned investors. Partnerships in 2009 also helped us to realize programming goals: Union College, the Albany Institute for History and Art, the City of Schenectady, and the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor were invaluable in helping us to continue to provide folklore and folk arts programming. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the National Endowment for the Arts and its role in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. With this support, the New York Folklore Society was able to maintain its core capacity. We are indeed humbled by the support of so many. We are facing the new year with a renewed sense of purpose. While we were able to sustain our activities through 2009, we need your help in 2010. We ask that you continue your support at a similar level over the coming months. We look forward to continuing to serve you with technical assistance and professional development opportunities, a web site that provides up-to-date resources, and this publication: Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore. Ellen McHale, Ph.D. FROM THE EDITOR From the Fall-Winter 2009 issue of Voices: The articles featured in this issue of Voices contain a variety of voices whose messages are “traditional”—in the surprising, the comforting, and even the most alarming senses of that disciplinary keyword. In the photo essay “Carving Out a Life: Reflections of an Ithaca Wood-Carver,” self-taught carver Mary Michael Shelley describes how she responded simultaneously to her Northeastern farm family heritage, liberal arts education, and the emerging feminism of her time to claim a form of man’s work—carpentry and carving—as her own. In the article “From Wild Man to Monster: The Historical Evolution of Bigfoot in New York State,” sociologist Robert E. Bartholomew and historian Brian Regal offer us a wealth of primary source narratives of Bigfoot and other “wild man” sightings in New York State, from the early nineteenth century to the present. Pete Rushefsky’s profile of a Manhattan-based Chinese hammered dulcimer master, Xiao Xiannian, captures not only the pedagogical evolution of a virtuoso yangqin player, but also the determination of a Chinese family to survive political persecution and economic oppression by encouraging musicianship among their children. And in Trevor Blank’s honest and disturbing report, “Fieldwork, Memory, and the Impact of 9/11 on an Eastern Tennessee Klansman: A Folklorist’s Reflection,” we are challenged together, as readers, to join a young ethnographer in making sense (with Klan-buster Stetson Kennedy’s help) of an encounter with an American racist, struggling with partial—but not complete—remorse for his views and hate-group affiliation after the events of September 11, 2001. As folk artists and culture workers, we spend much time considering what speech, art, ritual, belief, music, material culture, customs, work, play, and other cultural forms may be worth remembering in New York State. We may have devoted our lives to working toward their preservation. Are there portions of “tradition,” however, which might be better forgotten than preserved or examined? Under what circumstances should the details of the political persecution of immigrants before their arrival in the U.S. be recalled, for example, and for what purpose? Does the history of hate groups in New York State, or any other part of the United States, fall into the first category or the second? Do we evolve past hate by speaking it and remembering it, sometimes verbatim—or through silence, healing, and forgetting? Or is there more involved in the process, the progress toward and beyond “tolerance”? For more on the history of hate groups in this state and across the nation, visit Alabama’s Southern Poverty Law Center web site, www.splcenter.org, and click on the Hate Groups Map, as well as What You Can Do. Voices welcomes Dan Milner in this issue. Dan’s new “Songs” column will bring the depth of his lifelong song scholarship and ballad and folksong performance experience to bear on investigating New York song texts and their histories, contexts, and meanings within and beyond New York State. Please keep your thoughts coming our way, in the form of full-length feature articles, personal essays, field notes, photography, artwork, and letters to the editor. We look forward to reading and publishing your responses to this issue. Eileen Condon
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