This oral history interview is an intimate conversation between two people, both of whom have generously agreed to share this recording with Oral History Summer School, and with you. Please listen in the spirit with which this was shared.
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This interview was conducted with Lisa Dolan, a fifty-five year old reading coach at Hudson’s Intermediate School and lifelong resident of the city. In the interview she discusses her work at the school and the reading mentorship program and book festival that she founded and organizes. A significant portion of the interview is also devoted to her thoughts on reading and the power of the written word. She also discusses her Childhood in Hudson, her parents and their parenting philosophy, her sisters, and Warren Street in the 1960’s. She goes on to describe her husband, their parenting strategy, and their three children, including a son who had a stroke when he was young. She discusses his long recovery from the stroke as well as how that event affected her. She also discusses her upcoming birthday, first marriage, recent changes in Hudson, her attachment to the city, her need to continually be doing new and different things, and the newspaper article about books that she writes.
Eli Plenk was born and raised in Cambridge Massachusetts and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. He is twenty-five years old. Eli attended Hampshire College where he majored in American studies and developed an interest in history from below. Currently a writer, community organizer, and English teacher in New York’s prison system, he is interested in the power of oral history in relation to social movements and structural violence.
Oral history is an iterative process. In keeping with oral history values of anti-fixity, interviewees will have an opportunity to add, annotate and reflect upon their lives and interviews in perpetuity. Talking back to the archive is a form of “shared authority.”