Heart Stories Welcome & Mainstage Location
Cotton Building
607 Water Street
Port Townsed, Wa 98368
USA
https://cityofpt.us/parksrec/page/cotton-building
(360) 344-3064 (Parks Dept)
Happy Heart Stories Day! We are looking forward seeing today for Heart Stories; we’re going to share in some truly remarkable storytelling and experiences together!
A few reminders and notes for you:
1.We have a sold out event! Wow! Heart Stories All-Pass tickets (like yours, including Mainstage performances) were all claimed within just a couple of hours – congratulations for acting quickly and scoring your tickets! That said, we know that sometimes plans change, so if you have a tickets but are no longer going to be able to attend please email Magdalene@adenovaconvenes.com to let us know and we will assign your spot to a lucky person on our waiting list!
(*Please note that late arrivals (after 4:30pm) will need to wait till breaks between stories to enter, so that we don’t pierce the warm and supportive atmosphere we are creating for our vulnerable personal storytellers. Thanks for your understanding!)
3. Since we are not feeding you at Heart Stories, we recommend that you arrive with full bellies and we’ll focus on filling your hearts!
4. $15 Donation Recommended: Thank you to those of you who donated online when you registered, your donations are incredibly meaningful to Heart Stories creator Bonnie Obremski! Your donations are an important way to support Bonnie in her twin commitments to making this a free event while also finding a way to pay our talented artists (though not nearly what their efforts are worth). We hope that next year we will also find a way to pay Bonnie! If you haven’t donated yet but would like to, we will be accepting donations at the door, we are recommending $15. Thanks again for your support and participation whether you are able to donate or not; your open hearts and warm support is wonderful!
Happy Heart Stories Day! We are looking forward seeing today for Heart Stories; we’re going to share in some truly remarkable storytelling and experiences together!
1. Arrive at the Cotton Building @ 4:45pm: Registration begins at 4:45pm for all Sea of Stories Exclusive ticket holders. Plan to check-in at the main registration table at the Cotton Building (607 Water Street), there you will receive your event creditials which will grant you access to your Sea of Stories venue. From there you will walk to your Sea of Stories Venue. We recommend arriving promptly at 4:45pm to get your event credentials at registration and then find your seat, and say hello to friends and neighbors as you await the beginning of the program beginning promptly at 5:00pm*.
(*Please note that late arrivals to Sea of Stories venues (after 5:00pm) will need to wait till breaks between stories to enter, so that we don’t pierce the warm and supportive atmosphere we are creating for our vulnerable personal storytellers. Thanks for your understanding!)
2. Since we are not feeding you at Heart Stories, we recommend that you arrive with full bellies and we’ll focus on filling your hearts!
Jefferson County Museum of Art and History:
Judy Duncan: Rush: Grow up, get old, start over
Leslie Tapper: An Octopus’ Garden By the Sea: A story of adaptation, survival and finding true colors
Zinnia Hansen: The story of a smile
Northwind Arts Center:
Brooke Weber: My Killer Big Toe: A Nonlinear Narrative of Living
Cheri Kopp: Thanks Mom: A story of love, loss & longing
Judy Duncan: Rush: Grow up, get old, start over
The Cotton Building:
Ward Serrill: Cracking the World Open: How a dog saved an accountant’s life in wild Alaska
Jenny Lee: The Calling of the Sea: A story in song
Cara Faith: How I Won a Lip Syncing Battle at Seven Cedars Casino: Do you ever wonder if it’s possible for a nighttime dream to become your daytime reality?
Heart Stories is an opportunity for members of our community to connect in meaningful and joyful ways through the artistic expressions of personal storytelling.
Our desire for Heart Stories is to create opportunities for more people in our community to deepen their relationships to the arts and to one another through the potent connecting force of story sharing.
Heart Stories is about people speaking from the heart to share personal stories, using a variety of artistic mediums and a sustainable practice of vulnerability.
Vulnerability takes courage and willing hearts for both the storyteller and audience, and it rewards our open hearts with deeper and more resiliant connections and relationships.
We are specifically inviting new and emerging artists of all ages, backgrounds and abilities to make their voices heard in a joyful and supportive environment.
At Storyborne we committed to supporting other people in our community who are interested in strengthening skills in a style of leadership that is rooted in compassion, authentic relating and vulnerability. In our opinion, that kind of leadership is what we need to build a stronger and more vibrant future. Join us!
607 Water Street
Port Townsed, Wa 98368
USA
https://cityofpt.us/parksrec/page/cotton-building
(360) 344-3064 (Parks Dept)
Bonnie Obremski is the founder of Storyborne and the creator of Heart Stories. She is growing fully into herself and celebrating the re-integration of cast away parts. She is tossing her head back and letting joy and wild abandon flush the sticky bits of her past from her throat, inviting in a rush of crisp, salt air.
Raised in a time when language and culture was already fading, Jefferson Greene of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation was still being groomed to teach the generations to come. Culturally and academically educated, Greene has remained involved in several arenas around spirituality, education, entrepreneurship, music, culture, fatherhood, community development, and arts. He is currently an Ichishkín language & Cultural Liaison serving tribal members both on and off the reservation, incorporating cultural harvesting, song, dance, story, identity, communication, and goal orientation into students' upbringing just as he had from his elders.
Charles is a learning & development leader and mindfulness pioneer at Microsoft. His approach to personal transformation blends his career experience in engineering leadership, graduate studies and research in secular mindfulness, deep personal experience in Tibetan Buddhism and a burgeoning interest in Jungian psychology.
Entering its 20th season, the Poetic Justice Theatre Ensemble is a multi-ethnic, multi-generational (teens to elders) team of citizen actors. Very few members are trained, professional actors. We are artist/activists from the community. We are students. We are parents. We are educators and workers. We are concerned citizens willing to volunteer our time and commit to being in service using Theatre of the Oppressed and Playback Theatre as our primary tools for social change.
Brooke Weber's superpowers include excellent night vision, consistently cooking vegetables to the right degree of al dente, and a good head for directions in the wilderness. She can frequently be found meandering her way through a variety of stories and she firmly believes those who wonder are not lost.
Judith R. Duncan writes poetry and short stories. She is published in a variety of literary journals and local anthologies. After seventeen years she retired from software development and moved to the Olympic Peninsula. Here she offers relaxation therapy and a curated lifestyle for abandoned and mistreated hens. This is her inaugural effort at oral storytelling.
Jenny Lee is born and built of the Rocky Mountains with a heart that belongs to the sea. She is owner and photographer of Jen Lee Light, making a living capturing the intricacies and beautiful scomplexities of the human condition. She is a mother to two young boys, a friend to many, and a companion to all manner of creatures, especially those of the feathered kind. Her inspiration for the song, The Calling of the Sea, came from a deep longing, battling depression and betrayal, and a lost sense of self. This is a way to uncover the story, buried for too long, and shared with others so that they might not feel so alone when faced with such sadness of their own.
Ward Serrill is the award-winning director of The Heart of the Game, released by Miramax to wide critical acclaim. He has created more than ninety short films including Building One House with Robert Redford and Wild America with Sissy Spacek. He wrote and directed Something in the Water for PBS and the feature documentary Song of the New Earth as well as TreeStory, a series of films to inspire our relationship to trees. His latest film, The Bowmakers was released in 2019. Currently, he is working on Dancing with the Dead: The Life and Times of Red Pine. His first book, To Crack the World Open, the memoir of a runaway accountant and a dog seeking a fierce freedom in the Alaskan wilds, will be published this year.
AJ Hawkins is an artist and advocate using fine art as a research medium to explore death, grief, illness, and other challenges of living in a mortal body. Drawing on her background as a painter, sculptor and custom fabricator, AJ often creates hybrid art works that blur the lines between two and three-dimensional, traditional and experimental. Her artwork and writing have been published on the websites of the Order of the Good Death, Death & The Maiden, Death/Scent, Unquiet Things, Haute Macabre and Death Salon. She has shown at Ghost Gallery in Seattle, Washington and Ford Gallery in Portland, Oregon. When not in her studio, AJ runs KALMA, her death positive brand for the living, full of inspired, eco-friendly and curious goods for heart and hearth.
Zinnia Hansen is a junior at Port Townsend High school. She writes short stories and is currently mustering the stamina to finish a longer novel. She is passionate about language in all its various forms, and aspires to understand how It shapes who she is and how she is seen.
I've had jobs from A to (nearly) Z: artist, business developer, caregiver, consultant, curator, editor, fundraiser, interviewer, manager, programmer, quilter, retail associate, systems developer, teacher, university lecturer, volunteer, wearable artist. Whew! One I've wanted to add to my list, storyteller, brought me to this moment. The story I'm sharing is about my mom, and me, and how our lives intertwined at the end of hers. And of how the final few years of her life, and my reflections on her life, 21 years after her death, continue to set direction for my own life. In preparing to share this story with an audience, I wrote it all down, for the first time.
Leslie Tapper is 36 and has lived in Port Townsend for 11 years. She was born on the East Coast but has done most of her "adulting" in Washington State. She is the mother/stepmother to three amazing kids and a goldendoodle. She lives quietly tucked in the woods with her fiancée Ari and their family. She is a lover of this human experience in all of its sensual glory. You will likely find her by the water, in the kitchen or curled up with her family. She is an artist with food and clay and as a listener of stories, which mostly happens in her role as a local bank teller. She also is a writer and a student massage therapist.
Doors Open!
Opening Welcome
Sea of Stories
Intermission
Heart Stories Mainstage Finale
Heart Stories 2019 was a big success, with more than 40 artists and community members coming together to produce a three-act stage performance in front of a packed audience in the Cotton Building. (More details about last year at storyborne.com/engage/heart-stories).
I am an independent artist with a big vision who has lived in Port Townsend for six years. I began my career as a journalist, earning a degree in outdoor adventure travel writing at Hampshire College in 2004. I interned at the Los Angeles Times Outdoors Section, and worked at the North Adams Transcript in the Berkshire Mountains. My outdoor passions also took me to places like Alaska, where I worked as a guide and ice climbing instructor and to the sea, where I worked aboard several historic tall ships all along the Eastern Seaboard and throughout the Caribbean. I moved to Port Townsend to become a sailmaker with Hasse & Co. Port Townsend Sails. From there, I took on a job at Centrum and then ultimately decided to fully pursue my creative passions and founded my own media production company, Storyborne, which is all about the creative expression of personal stories.
Magdalene has developed her professional skillset around building and maintaining positive pairs, teams, networks and communities. She believes that cultivating an open and genuine sense of curiosity is one of the best ways to build high-trust relationships, and therefore resilient communities. And that when we are truly listening with curiosity it is impossible to sit in judgement, of others, or indeed ourselves; when we are able to avoid judgement and enter into genuine curiosity about the world and those we meet, that we are likely to discover those common threads that connect us.
Magdalene sees Storyborne’s Heart Stories and its focus on cultivating inclusivity through vulnerable personal storytelling as a wonderful expression of high-trust community building and is honored to contribute and support Bonnie’s powerful vision for this event and our community.
Magdalene runs her own event business: Dreamcraft Events. She specializes in wedding & event managment/design (With a special focus on non-profit fundraising galas and community events) as well as business & Board retreats and strategic planning & facilitation. To learn more reach out to her at magdalene@adenovaconvenes.com or call 360-643-3255. (Her Dreamcraft website is in the works and will be released this month, in the meantime she welcomes emails and calls!)
Thank you for being part of Heart Stories 2020!
