Road Reports

South Carolina Key Ingredients Tour Featured on Radio Program

Check out the following radio program featuring a discussion of the South Carolina tour of Key Ingredients! T.J. Wallace with the Humanities Council South Carolina joined Rhonda Matthews, an extension agent in Abbeville County, on "Your Day," a statewide radio program produced by Clemson University that airs on the South Carolina Educational Radio Network. You can access a streaming audio version of the program at the following link: http://cufan.clemson.edu/psaradio/YD080828.asx. The Key Ingredients segment begins about 40 minutes into the program.

Enjoy Key Ingredients in South Carolina!

-- Robbie Davis, MoMS/SITES, Washington, DC

Still Chewing!

Four months after Key Ingredients left the state of Maryland, the exhibit's legacy lives on. While doing a little internet surfing today for another project I was pleased to see this promotion for a reading and discussion program the Maryland Humanities Council funded related to the exhibition. This same food in poetry series was presented at the Dorchester Public Library while Key Ingredients was showing at the Dorchester County Historical Society in March and April 2008. The Worcester County Library will offer it again in October. Here's what they have to say:

Sustenance for the Soul: Food in Poetry

Do you find poetry in food or food in poetry? Either way, you will find nourishment for your soul with this series. Poets and other writers have long used food as a muse and a means of stirring memory, creating new imagery, and for description of emotion. From Shakespeare, who uses food and appetite as a way of characterization (Falstaff comes to mind); to Emily Dickinson who used eating as a means of description everyone would understand ("Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate"), food plays a large part in our literal and figurative survival. This series takes contemporary poets' writings about food and eating and turns them into food for the soul. Read about the poets, explore their takes on all things culinary, and then try your hand at creating your own nourishing poetry.

October 1 -- Food Settings in Poetry
Tenderly -- Stephen Dobyns, pg. 109
Supper -- Andrew Hudgens, pg. 229
The Acolyte -- Denise Leverton, pg. 299
The Two -- Philip Levine, pg. 314
Steps -- Naomi Shihab Nye, pg. 357
The Shapes of Mouths at Parties -- Naomi Shihab Nye, pg. 360
Personal Poem -- Frank O'Hara, pg. 367

October 15 -- Poetic Descriptions of Food
In the Pea Patch -- Maxine Kumin, pg. 278
Onions -- William Matthews, pg. 330
Field Mushrooms -- W.S. Merwin, pg. 342
The Traveling Onion -- Naomi Shihab Nye, pg. 363
Fork -- Charles Simic, pg. 441

October 29 -- Food Stirs Memory
Tomatoes -- Stephen Dobyns, pg. 110
Crab-Boil -- Rita Dove, pg. 114
Maple Syrup -- Donald Hall, pg. 183
Blackberries -- Yusef Komunyakaa, pg. 265
Persimmons -- Li-Young Lee, pg. 292
What Brings Us Out -- Naomi Shihab Nye, pg. 361

All selections are included in Contemporary American Poetry, 8th edition, edited by Al Poulin and Michael Waters.

The Worcester County Library will present its Sustenance for the Soul: Food in Poetry program on October 1, October 15 and October 29 at its Berlin, Maryland branch. For more information, visit the library's website at www.worc.lib.md.us.

-- Jean Wortman, Maryland Humanities Council, Baltimore, MD

Kentucky MoMS Tours Highlighted on Radio Program

Give this a listen! There's great stuff happening for Kentucky's tours of New Harmonies (currently underway) and Between Fences (which has its Kentucky debut in October). Yesterday, I had the great pleasure of joining the Kentucky Humanities Council's Kathleen Pool; Randy Matlow from the Bullitt County Public Library in Shepherdsville, currently hosting New Harmonies; and Nancy Theiss with the Oldham County History Center in LaGrange, who will host Between Fences beginning in April 2009 for a radio interview on "State of Affairs," on WFPL in Louisville.

Kathleen, Randy and Nancy talked about their experiences with both exhibitions in Kentucky and how they planned for the project. Kathleen also shared the successes of past host communities on the New Harmonies tour. Their enthusiasm was really infectious!

Thank you to Kathleen, Randy, Nancy and host Julie Kredens and producer Robin Fisher with WFPL for a wonderful hour. I had a lot of fun!

-- Robbie Davis, Museum on Main Street/SITES, Washington, DC

Watch This Space as Journey Stories Develops

Little more than a year ago, in March 2007, New Harmonies: Celebrating American Roots Music opened in five states. Now, we're just a few months away from the May 2009 debut of our next Museum on Main Street exhibition, Journey Stories. Whew.

Even though the exhibition does not open until next year, it has been in development for nearly three years. Back in the fall of 2005, the theme of the exhibition was selected. Later that year, the MoMS team began meeting with our curator, William Withuhn, from the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History to map out the content of the exhibition and begin developing the script. It's been a great process every step of the way. Now, our designer at the Smithsonian's Office of Exhibits Central (OEC), Tina Lynch, is putting the finishing touches on a colorful and creative design that we're looking forward to showing visitors all over the country in the years to come.

Our colleagues at OEC are doing a masterful job of fabricating the exhibition. From designing, editing, and printing graphic panels to crafting mounts to hold objects in place to outfitting crates for traveling the exhibition, their skilled craftsmanship is critical to the success of the project. Please come back to this blog and visit the "Journey Stories Fabrication" photo album in the right column as we track the construction of the exhibition. We'll be snapping photos until every crate is filled.

Journey Stories is an incredibly rich and diverse tale of Americans, their embrace of personal mobility, and the transportation systems they developed. We hope that you'll have an opportunity to see Journey Stories in person when it debuts in 2009 in Illinois, Kansas, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Oklahoma as host state humanities councils and communities add their important local stories and experiences to the exhibition.

-- Robbie Davis, Museum on Main Street/SITES, Washington, DC

Key Ingredients Website Mentioned in New York Times Blog

Check out the following link to a wonderful blog entry from the New York Times on the "American Cookbook Project" section of the Key Ingredients exhibition website.

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/mouths-wide-open/index.html?ref=dining

The wonderful recipes and stories that visitors to Key Ingredients and members of the general public have left on the website over the years are really spectacular, and as Rachel Harris noted in her entry, often very touching. A recipe for Blinn, a Polish potato pie, always stays with me because of the personal story that accompanies the entry:

"I have fond memories of my grandmother making this when I was a child...recipe brought with her when she entered this country at age 14. I can't believe at the age of 14 she kissed her parents goodbye at the train station in Poland, knowing she might not ever see them again (and she didn't) to come to this country for a better life."

That's powerful stuff -- clear evidence of the role foods play in how we remember our families and our communities. As we've been working on MoMS' new Journey Stories exhibition and exploring the stories of immigrants to America, how they traveled here, and the elements of their culture that they brought with them, it is easy to see how food, family, community, and culture are so intertwined. America's food history is full of individual expressions, but it is also grounded in the wonderful foods and traditions that Americans bring from other places and carry with them for generations.

Don't forget to leave your story and favorite dish with us! Just visit the Key Ingredients website at www.keyingredients.org and click on the "American Cookbook Project".

-- Robbie Davis, Museum on Main Street/SITES, Washington, DC