Looky Here It's My Field Practicum Blog

  Some folks from my workshop showing off their zines! The first day of my practicum in January was a blizzard and my last day today it's 80 degrees. I couldn't have asked for a sunnier mood to conclude my practicum experience. I led a zine workshop in the room next to the archive. I talked about what zines are (self-published or independently published periodicals), their legacy, and my history with them (as a publisher, distributor and former bookstore manager that sold them). And because it was Library Week, we talked about zines in libraries and archives. Then we jumped in! I led everybody into a writing exercise, and I also showed how to fold and cut a piece of paper into 8 pages. Then everybody transferred their content to their zines, and we shared them. People made great stuff as they always do when I do this workshop. It's so fun to see people going from knowing very little about an art form and then straight into being makers. The power of accessible DIY! Then we ...

Yesterday I attended a really good online event sponsored by CSU for Library Week (organized by my site supervisor Kheir) with journalist and writer Arionne Nettles talked about podcasting. I loved her book We Are the Culture: Black Chicago's Influence on Everything , and it was fun to hear her talk about audio journalism and the crafting of news stories and podcasts. I took a screenshot of a slide she put up of some of her takeaways from advice she gave. For me the main takeaway was to write how you talk. I tend to do this anyway, but then again I don't tend to do that anyway. Ha! What I mean by that is that when I am writing something that I know will be a spoken piece, I write in a casual way, but more along the lines of the casual way that I wish I talked . There's a difference. Sometimes that works to my advantage and sometimes it does not. It's all about context I guess. It’s a bit like how a really good stand up comedian is themself, but a layered and more articu...

Today is one of my last days in the archive, because the semester is ending soon! Today Kheir and I talked about the evaluation letter he has to write, as well as what the next couple weeks will look like for me. Next week I'll be doing the zine workshop as part of Library Week at the archive (info about that here) , and then the week after that Kheir will be out of town. So for all practical purposes, this is my last day to actually actively work on things in the archive, and specifically with the Lerone Bennett Jr. collection I was working on. So what I did was organize all my notes to pass them along to Kheir to help with fleshing out descriptions with the finding aid. He mentioned that it would be helpful to have more description about what the archive holds, so I rewrote the pre-existing bio and added some of the highlights of the things I found. That way there's some good selling points to entice people to come look at the archive. I guess I'm kind of proud of what I ...

Hanging in the Third World Press Archive Today we had a tour of the famed Third World Press on Chicago's South Side that publishes books about the black American experience. It was founded by Haki R. Madhubuti in his basement in 1967. He is one of the architects of the Black Arts Movement, former CSU professor (also named CSU's first University Distinguished Professor), and founder of CSU's Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing, among many other things. He's also written a ton of books, won a ton of awards and is a Chicago legend. The staff gave us a great tour. We got to see a selection of the books they published (both front and backlist) as displayed up front, the editing room where decisions are made about which submitted manuscripts to publish as books, Madhubuti's office and more. We spent some time in the archive looking at the items the staff archivist pulled, like first editions of early books/chap books and issues of Black Books...