New Bedford Guide Your Guide to New Bedford and South Coast, MA
Over the past ten years the Working Waterfront Festival has recorded every performance and conversation on our stages, creating a rich audio archive of music, fisher poetry, storytelling, and more. This year we were fortunate to receive funding from Mass Humanities to support the work of a Scholar in Residence, Diana Lempel, to listen to our Narrative Stage audio recordings and help us use them to understand family and community identity in the commercial fishing industry.
Diana will be sharing some of the most compelling moments from the Festival’s Narrative Stage as part of the December AHA, Thursday, December 11th at 7:30 pm at the National Park Theater (33 William Street). A multi-media exhibit of Diana’s work can be viewed at https://shiptoshore2014.wordpress.com/.
This work is part of the Festival’s Community Documentation Project which has also collected over 120 oral history interviews with a wide range of individuals connected to fishing communities in New England and beyond. Many of these interviews were incorporated into a series of 24 radio programs called Voices from the Port and a book, Voices from the Waterfront: Portrait of the New Bedford Fishing Industry. All of the oral histories have been transcribed and are archived as part of the NOAA Voices from the Fisheries web-based archive: http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/voicesfromthefisheries/ .
