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In early February, a stellar line-up of poets, storytellers, and writers signed on to share their gifts at the HerStories Benefit Show and Open Mike. And tomorrow, March 27, is the fundraiser for the Women’s Center of Greater Lansing! The fun begins at 4:00pm at Everybody Reads Bookstore.

Featured are ten local artists sure to make us laugh, cry, and revel in word art. Also joining the event are guests at the Open Mike!  Check out the program as of today:

BENEFIT SHOW
*Marilyn Mayer Culpepper – Never Will We Forget
*Charles Thornton – storyteller
*Nancy Allen – poet
*Lee Sayles – I Have Nothing to Say
*Becky Payne – poet and storyteller
*Laura Apol – Crossing the Ladder of the Sun
*Silvana Alfaro – poet
*Tim Lane – Pure Pop, director of (SCENE) Metrospace
*Logic – organizer of Spitfire Poetry Slam and Open Mic, Nu Poet Collective
*Christine Pereira – poet

OPEN MIKE
*Chey Davis – Bad Dog Behavior
*Rosalie Sanara Petrouske – A Postcard from my Mother
*Shirley Bradley – Lansing Storytellers
*Margaret Beard – poet
*Aaron Curtner – visual artist, poet
*Melissa Dey Hasbrook – the land, once called DeWitt; HerStories organizer

Tomorrow is the third day of events for HerStories! Andrea King Collier gives a reading at 1:00pm from her award-winning memoir Still with Me: A Daughter’s Journey of Love and Loss (Michigan Notable Book 2004, American Society of Journalists and Authors honorable mention 2004) followed by workshops with emeritus MSU professor Marilyn Mayer Culpepper at 2:30pm and writer-publisher Virginia Law Burns at 3:45pm.

Tomorrow’s guests are sure to transport us with stories about women as did last week’s. Here’s a summary of March 13 including photos from the day:

* Ena Baker (Lansing Storytellers) introduced herself as someone whose name is forgotten for what she accomplished: Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to survive a trip over the Niagra Falls. Speaking as Annie, Ms. Baker took us along this adventurer’s cross-country travels as a dance teacher to the plunge that brought her short-lived fame.

* Charles Thornton passed out golden haloes to ready listeners for stories about children’s “right to be bad”. Woven throughout his childhood adventures, like the tricycle getaway, was Mr. Thornton’s clear and shining admiration for his mother Fanny May.

* Mary Catherine Harper (Defiance College) sparked our imaginations with poetic prompts linking the spiritual and sensual, as workshoppers examined objects with hands rather than eyes and took surprising turns across the page.

* Dawn Comer (Defiance College) guided an exploration into character development with photographs of women unknown to us by face though familiar to our experiences, and the writing led us to China, Vietnam, England, and emotional depths.

In anticipation of  tomorrow’s program, here are insightful words shared by Dawn Comer from Virigina Woolf’s “Professions for Women”, which inspired Ms. Comer’s workshop title “On Becoming a Fish”:

I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of–what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist’s state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers–they are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women.

Read the latest article about HerStories published today in the statewide weekly paper Between the Lines!   Many thanks to Jessica Carreras for writing “Telling TheirStories”.

Thanks to WLNS 6 – and especially Weekend Producer Erika Koski and video journalist Liz Gelardi - for covering HerStories on March 6!

Photos from HerStories on March 6 are  now available! View the full set on Flickr.

Jean Bolley (standing) from the Lansing Storytellers and Lynette Brown (sitting to Bolley’s right) from the Michigan Women’s Historical Center and Hall of Fame in character as Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Photo by Ashley Guerrant.

HerStories is listed on Facebook as an event by Everybody Reads Bookstore. Check out the event listing and let us know you are attending!

“Storytelling for all ages” kicks off the first two Saturdays of the HerStories program at 1:00pm at Everybody Reads Bookstore, 2019 E. Michigan Ave.

On March 6, Jean Bolley ( Lansing Storytellers) tell tales about women from Michigan history and Lynette Brown (Michigan Women’s Historical Center) comes in character as Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Ena Baker (Lansing Storytellers) and Charles Thornton are featured on March 13.

Michigan Avenue Printing is a sponsor of HerStories! Thanks to owner Margaret Lifsey for donating services with promotional materials and to manager Mark Lifsey for his professional assistance.

Updated March 4, 2010.

Check out the City Pulse article “She Said/ She Said” (March 3) about The HerStories Project! Thanks again to Bill Castanier for pursuing the story.

This post is the first to speak directly as the organizer of The HerStories Project, an endeavor to celebrate stories about women taking its initial form this month. A few weeks ago, Lansing Online News invited me to write about how HerStories in March 2010 came into being from my perspective as organizer. My thoughts now are published on LON as “Creating Spaces”, and I hope the piece gives participants a promising preview of the program.

Sincerely,

Melissa Dey Hasbrook