By Porter Anderson / @Porter_Anderson
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Sharing Recipes and Life
Recetas de mi vida — a lovely title that means “Recipes of My Life” — is more than a book, Anisa Onofre tells me. And it’s just the kind of collaborative effort with community creative talent that San Antonio’s Bexar County BiblioTech, a digital library, is known for nourishing.
Onofre is Publications Director for the 23-year-old Gemini Ink, a program which sees its mission as serving both writers and readers.
“Not just a cookbook,” Onofre says, Recetas de mi vida is “a collection of stories and recipes.”
She goes on:
The name comes from the writing workshop from which the stories and recipes were taken. The workshop was one of three from the Tinta Digital project, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Tinta Digital was a “year-long festival of literary arts education and outreach in San Antonio’s Southside,” and a collaboration between Gemini Ink and BiblioTech Digital Library.
The goal of the Recetas de mi vida workshop was that seniors share recipes and memories that would be featured in an ebook and shared via the Bibliotech Digital Library.
And this is the sort of project that SELF-e logically supports, bringing libraries and their writers and readers in digital contact.
Bexar County’s BiblioTech already has drawn attention for its all-digital configuration and its wide-ranging efforts in community outreach. As the library’s Laura Cole told me for an earlier story at Thought Catalog, “For us, finding SELF-e was a great fit. We looked a long time for how we were going to make this happen. But SELF-e was a package that we could just accept.”
In this case, Gemini Ink’s Writers in Communities (WIC) program has a chance to shine.
“We work with people who don’t usually consider themselves writers,” Onofre says, “so often we end up with voices and stories that one might not normally find in mainstream literature.
“We also place published experienced writers in these workshops.” Recetas was led by Bárbara Renaud González, Latina journalist and author of Golondrina, why did you leave me? Bárbara’s very good at working with the seniors in our community. She has a way of unearthing the most interesting stories from students.
There’s more to this story: Read the rest
By Porter Anderson Follow @Porter_Anderson
SELF-E Blog: Cuyahoga County Public Library & SELF-e: New Skirball Writers’ Center
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