\u2022 All reporting is foreign reporting. If I go to Romania, I’m in a foreign country. If I go next door to sit with my neighbour, that’s also a foreign country for me, because that\u2019s not my life. So what I learned by reporting in other places has helped me report better back home because I need to always do what you do when you\u2019re a foreign reporter: translate, listen, hear, experience and not judge.<\/p>\n \u2022 We must marvel at what is different, and be open to it, but we mostly need to marvel at what we share, and look for it.<\/p>\n \u2022 Writing for me is like going into coal mines, but it has always been my way of paying the price for what journalism gives me, which is the licence to go into other places and other people\u2019s lives and experience other worlds. I use my notebook as a passport to cross borders, as an invitation to walk into other people’s shoes for a bit.<\/p>\n \u2022 Somebody said the most powerful feeling in the world is not love, it’s the desire for home.<\/p>\n \u2022 Choose details that don\u2019t just describe, but reveal, and really look hard. Don’t just asusme it, see it.<\/p>\n \u2022 Be aware, pay accute attention. And always, always, try to see through fresh eyes and through the eyes of another. Try to see lives to the eyes of those that you are writing about, not your own.<\/p>\n Carmen Bugan<\/strong> then talked about the power of writing to transform history \u2013 her personal one and of the collective history of her country, Romania.<\/p>\n Bugan, the author of an internationally acclaimed memoir<\/a> on life under the communist regime, left the country 26 years ago, together with her family, after her father had been arrested for “propaganda against the socialist regime\u201d several times. Much later, she received access to files that were kept by the Securitate during her father\u2019s various rounds of prison terms.<\/p>\n Now back in Romania for #Story15, she discussed the process of creating literary work out of personal testimony.<\/p>\n \u2022 Reading my personal biography in the secret police files sends me back to a self I’ve always recognized and I don’t, creating another place of writing, which I wouldn’t have imagined before.<\/p>\n \u2022 I’m caught in a conflict between the free, fluent language of memory and the shackled, impersonal language of surveillance\u00a0reports.<\/p>\n \u2022 The Securitate portrayal of my youth writes over my memories and into my memory gaps, turning me into a palimpsest\u00a0that combines the public voice of the documents with my private experience.<\/p>\n \u2022 Writing about the secret police narratives in my life in Romania started as an attempt to \u00a0detangle myself of this extra\u00a0narrative. However, lately it has turn into a process of questioning whether memory can rescue and rebuild a sense of personal and indeed artistic identity out of the surveillance records.<\/p>\n \u2022 We are all versions of the past, ours and of the others. The past of our countries and of our languages.<\/p>\n Leslie Jamison<\/strong> charmed the audience with an honest keynote on personal writing. \u201cPersonal experience is infinite, but I also believe there are many kinds of infinitudes,\u201d she started off. Leslie said she was drawn to essays that follow the messy threads of grief and remain ragged.<\/p>\n Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi<\/strong> showed some of his work and discussed how “making art in a dictatorial society means you have to invent a language for a space that isn’t free.”<\/p>\n Dan\u00a0started his speech by telling us\u00a0he is \u201emore into story-drawing than storytelling\u201d, so we will let some of the images speak for themselves, just like he did:<\/p>\n Wendy MacNaughton<\/strong>, the next speaker on stage is also an amazing visual artist that mixes art and journalism. “I tell stories using pictures and words. The pictures are often drawn from life, and the words are often of the people whose stories I\u2019m telling.\u201d<\/p>\n Wendy described her path to illustration<\/a>, one that took her from art school to advertising, then to drawing an educational campaign for the first free elections in Rwanda, back in the States for social work studies, and finally to drawing people\u2019s stories.<\/p>\n She showed us some of her stories related to place, like Meanwhile, the San Francisco Public Library<\/a>, and then\u00a0examples of her work that illustrate how journalism works:<\/p>\n “This is a portrait that can tell a story quickly”:<\/p>\n![\"poze_InaIonescu-6507\"](\"http:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/poze_InaIonescu-6507.jpg\")
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\nShe also wondered whether empathy could be taught and how personal experience and specificities could link to abstract inquiries. Leslie discussed the notion that confession can often be associated with \u201coversharing\u201d and how society can shame such manifestations. \u201cAre you making yourself vulnerable? Are you asking for too much? Are you asking for anything at all?\u201d, she asked the audience. Still, what we receive as a response for confession might be worth it: \u201cSometimes we receive absolution, and sometimes we receive more than that\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>
\n“This presentation will be a metaphor of walls.”<\/p>\n<\/a>
\n“I try to make an entire novel in one frame.”<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n\n