Everyone has a story to tell. Some are big, stories about travel and adventure, others are smaller, more personal, stories friendship or growing up. With the Story Me project, we aim to capture your stories, both big and small, to share and preserve them for everyone.
Story Me collects your stories through interviews with the residents of the Kingston-Frontenac area from all walks of life. Recordings of these interviews, and any images or other material we collect, are added to the Digital Kingston collections and presented on the Story Me blog.
Events and Interviews
Story Me events are held throughout the year, during which residents are invited to contribute their stories. Private interviews can also be arranged by appointment.
We record each interview and upload it to our digital collection. Any additional material, like photos or other object important to the story, are photographed or scanned and added to the collection as well.
Collecting and Preserving Digital Material
A free digital copy of any scanned or photographed material will be emailed to the story teller. All story-tellers are asked to authorize KFPL to publish and archive the materials and confirm that:
- the photo is from a personal collection and not under copyright to anyone else, and
- any living person who appears in the photo has given permission for the photo to be shared and made available on the internet.
All images and recordings will be stored on the Digital Kingston collection as well as a back up copy on the Internet Archive. We will also add as many stories as possible to the Story Me blog.
Past Initiatives
StoryMe Seniors
KFPL and StoryMe was awarded a Seniors Community Grant to expand StoryMe to seniors. The grant program, which was administered by the Ontario Seniors' Secretariat and funded by the Government of Ontario, allowed us to send our interviewer to record stories from people living in retirement residences, long-term care homes and seniors' housing all over Kingston/Frontenac. We were also able to interview the very many seniors who do not live in special seniors' housing by going to meetings of organizations, clubs and associations which include members who are seniors. The grant ran from August 2016 to February 2017.
Telling Your Story: Memoir Excerpts
In 2017 award-winning author Jean Rae Baxter approached Kingston Frontenac Public Library with a proposal. She wanted to offer a five-week writing workshop, in which she would show interested seniors how to use the tools of fiction to write about their life experiences. The first Telling Your Story Seniors’ Writing Workshop Series was held at the Calvin Park Branch in January and February of 2018 and was so successful that we were able to offer two more series of workshops that year. In March and April the second series was held at the Isabel Turner Branch and in September and October the third series took place at the Sydenham Branch.
To date dozens of seniors have participated enthusiastically in Jean’s Telling Your Story workshops and have produced a wide range of memoirs and family histories to share with their family and friends. In June and again in November we held Telling Your Story Showcases, where workshop graduates were able to read excerpts from their writing to friends, family and community members.
In order to preserve these life stories we invited Telling Your Story participants to share examples of their writing on this page of the KFPL StoryMe blog and through the Internet Archive.