Good morning again, FoodWorks Fellows.

After some extremely productive conversations with Ariel, Mae, Heather, and Sophie, I have a clearer sense of how the remaining weeks of our course might productively shaped.

The syllabus initially left the readings for the weeks of July 13 and July 20 to be filled in, but I can tell you now that for the week of the 13th we’ll be looking at the selection of “Community Voices” which come up when you click on “Grassroots/Why Hunger dot org website” on our electronic-reserves page. These are dozens of little profiles (with outstanding photographs) of farmers. Though issues of food-security and justice certainly arise in their stories, the overall effect is of celebrating a visionary and inspiring group of people. Please read around widely in these pieces during the coming week and select one to focus on in your posts for next week’s blog. I found that once I started reading them it was like eating popcorn–impossible to stop before finishing them. In addition to being truly fascinating, these narratives of lives devoted to raising food also pulled together many of the themes we’ve been exploring together. Have fun!

Our last videoconference felt so productive that I explored fitting an additional such session into the schedule for next week. That won’t work, but the concluding videoconference of the class, on July 31 will still round off that aspect of our class as well as focus on the final digital stories.

Mae, Heather, Ariel and I share the same, evolving sense of how the digital stories might be approached. While FoodWorks Fellows at each site can definitely still choose to draw from some of the very interesting interviews folks have been posting each week, they can also decide to frame and produce new digital stories that convey themes and images particularly important to their summer’s experience. Aylie Baker is standing by online to offer feedback about technical, thematic, or aesthetic questions that may arise as people conceive of and produce these digital stories. Since these are ambitious culminating projects, we’ll allow the last two weeks of the class for work on them by our local teams. Therefore there will be no readings assigned for the week of July 20 and no expectation for blog-posts that week. The blog will remain up if anyone does want to add an entry.

I’m very excited about how our activities and conversations of the summer are finding their final shape, and hope that you are too.

John