KALW Inspires and Partners with the Litography Project
By Martha Sessums
KALW promotes telling community stories. That focus helped inspire a set of entrepreneurs who saw a new way to use technology to support the storytelling traditions of San Francisco, both cutting edge and old school.
A group that includes some KALW Audio Academy fellows and station volunteer/trainee alumni founded the Litography Project. Acting as the GPS map of San Francisco’s literary storytelling culture, the Litography Project will interactively map the city’s storytelling activities of the past, present and future.
“We define the word ‘litography’ as the collective art of mapping the literary character of the city,” said Ninna Gaensler-Debs in a SF Weekly article. She is one of the founders of the Litography Project and a KALW trainee alumnus. Nina and her team have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the project.
The Litography Project will interactively map current literary events in San Francisco, be it a book or poetry reading, writing workshop, an exquisite corpse game or any other literary event. The goals of the project are to be an information site about San Francisco’s literary culture and events, encourage creative, multimedia storytelling and to support the creative community by commissioning stories from all sorts of artists.
And the story creation has already started. Angela Johnston and Jasmine Lopez, current KALW Audio Academy fellows, aired a story on KALW about the history of bookbinding in the Bay Area, with more stories on Crosscurrents to come.
Making a book from beginning to end, with one of San Francisco’s last remaining bookbinders
In addition, Cal Tibuena-Froli, a KALW trainee alum, is the project site designer who brings the blue map on the web site (and more) to life.
The Litography Project has received support from 826 Valencia, 99% Invisible, Litquake, Green Apple Books, the Kitchen Sisters, Radio Ambulante and more. These are big players in the San Francisco community that champions telling local stories.
But the Litography Project team needs financial support first, so if you care about encouraging the creation of storytelling in our Bay Area, go to Kickstarter and help get the Litography Project started. Now, that’s a great story to tell.