Oral Histories

Rooting the Slip: Artists and Agrarianism

The ongoing project Rooting the Slip traces the symbiotic, often fraught relationship between creativity and land stewardship—in my own life, as well as in the lives of writers, artists and farmers in my far-flung community.

The project includes conversations with NPR correspondent Noah Adams; farmer/poet Wendell Berry; farmer/artists Jennifer Gleason and Jim Lally; writers Nikky Finney, Maurice Manning, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, and Crystal Wilkinson; and others. Grants from the Kentucky Oral History Commission and the Kentucky Foundation for Women have made this work possible.

This Is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors

This project began in 1998 as a series of 14 in-depth interviews with Holocaust survivors who have made their homes in Kentucky. The interviews were supported by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Kentucky Oral History Commission, and are now housed in the archives of those two institutions.

In 2005, photographer Rebecca Gayle Howell and I mounted an exhibit at the Lexington History Museum based on these interviews and Howell’s portraits, and in 2009, the University Press of Kentucky published This Is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors Speak. The exhibit was made possible by a major grant from the Kentucky Humanities Council, as well as by grants from the Kentucky Arts Council, LexArts, and the Zantker Foundation.

A few of my words + pictures are based on interviews I conducted over a span of ten years with one of the survivors, Robert Holczer, who I met when I worked at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC and he lived on a rural Kentucky horse farm.

Life After the Holocaust

This United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on-line exhibit explores the lives of Holocaust survivors after they arrived in the United States. See Life After the Holocaust. Also, read my reflections on creating this project.

Interview Guidelines

I co-authored the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Oral History Interview Guidelines, written to be useful not only in the process of interviewing Holocaust survivors, liberators, and other witnesses, but also to any survivors of intense trauma. Download for free via the USHMM’s website.