Event: Famous Lost Words: Recording and Preserving Oral History with Maurice Gandy
Time: Wednesday, September 18 4:00 p.m.
Event Type: Oral History Presentation
Location: Selma Public Library
Event Website: http://artsrevive.com/current-events/
Sponsor: The Ossian Club, ArtsRevive, Alabama Humanities Foundation
Contact: alabamahumanities.org or call (205) 558-3980
Info: Alabamians are justly proud of their personal heritage, but unrecorded stories, anecdotes, and legends within families (and communities) are often lost when storytellers pass on. Many of these experiences have been part of local, national, or even international historical events, including wars, hurricanes, and societal changes. This presentation, “Famous Lost Words: Recording and Preserving Oral History,” motivates participants to use basic techniques of interviewing and recording to save the human side of their family and community legacy. The interactive session concludes with handouts from oral history Internet sites, and research tips from archivists utilized by the facilitator in his own research as a college/university English instructor and a feature correspondent for the Mobile Press-Register. A question and answer period follows the presentation. The personally fulfilling challenge of oral history is to “preserve it or lose it!” And the time to start is now.
About the Scholar
Maurice Gandy is a teacher and writer who finds “news” in history, especially oral history. Gandy recently retired after three decades as a journalism, literature, and creative writing instructor at Bishop State College in Mobile. He continues to teach American literature and technical writing as an adjunct English instructor at the University of South Alabama. In December 2007 iUniverse Publishers released Gandy’s book, The Capocalypse, a 392-page coming-of-age allegory set on the West Coast in the late 1960s. The work earned a Publisher’s Choice award from iUniverse and is currently available from Amazon.com and selected Barnes and Noble Booksellers. The Web site is www.TheCalpocalypse.com.
In addition, he has been writing articles as a feature correspondent for the Press-Register newspaper in Mobile for the last 16 years. His specialty as a journalist is oral history, drawing on interviews with long-time residents, military veterans, and their descendants, to preserve stories, anecdotes, and legends that would otherwise be lost. Gandy has three decades of experience as a speaker for academic conferences, civic groups, and private organizations. He has been an Alabama Humanities Foundation Road Scholar Speaker since 2005. His biography is included in Who’s Who in America.
About the Alabama Humanities Foundation
The purpose of the Alabama Humanities Foundation is to create and foster opportunities to explore human values and meanings through the humanities. AHF is a nonprofit organization funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (of which AHF is the state affiliate), as well as by corporate and individual donors. AHF conducts its own statewide programs, such as the Road Scholars Speakers Bureau, SUPER teacher institutes and SUPER Emerging Scholars for students, and awards grants, on a competitive basis, to nonprofit organizations for humanities projects. For more information on AHF and its programs, please visit alabamahumanities.org or call (205) 558-3980.