voiceseducation.org/content/stories-arrival -
[Cached Version]
Last Visited: 9/23/2009
Stories of Arrival: Youth Voices was designed by poet Merna Ann Hecht to bring the use of poetry, drama, and literature to youth who were recent arrivals to the U.S., many of whom had experienced war, been born in refugee camps, or immigrated under considerable hardship.
Ms. Hecht approached us with the idea for supporting this project in partnership with a one-time start-up grant from the Seattle chapter of Bread for the Journey and a grant from The Institute for Poetic Medicine in Palo Alto, CA.
She had already establsihed a working relationship with and support from both Jack Straw Productions and KBCS 91.3 FM Radio.
We immediately signed on as project partners.
Hecht worked with students to help them create poems about the experiences that led to their immigration or relocation from another part of the world or country to their current residence in Tukwila, WA.
The poems generated in this project reflect and celebrate a patchwork quilt of global traditions and cultural heritage as expressed by young poets from places as diverse as Eastern Washington, Mogadishu and Baghdad.
In the last two years, under the guidance of Ms. Hecht, more than 50 Foster High School students have been involved in writing about their experiences of immigration.
...
Ms. Hecht had already established a solid working relationship with Foster High School where she had been a poet in residence for three prior semesters under the auspisces of the Seattle Arts and Lectures Wrtiers in the Schools program. (WITS) The Stories of Arrrival project was inspired by a War Stories Project that Hecht ran for the Foster students in 2008 in which the students were given support and instruction in crafting narrative poems about their experiences of war and conflict.
Their work was recorded by a Jack Straw sound engineer at the school and broadcast on the KBCS-FM One World Diversity Program.
...
However, Hecht learned from the War Stories Project that students were not prepared to use their voices to full advantage, and decided that they would benefit from professional voice training before they recorded for public broadcast or gave public performances.Therefore, the Stories of Arrival project was designed so that the students would work with Jack Straw Studio voice coaches to prepare them for studio recording and public presentations.
...
At the outset of the project Ms. Hecht stated the core values from which the project developed: