Letters Aloud: I wish you all the best
“I wish you all the best” is an outreach literacy and performing arts series, an extension of the Fairbanks Concert Association’s project with Letters Aloud.
Letters Aloud is a professional performance where audiences experience private letters as they are performed in public.
Leading up to the public performance we seek to engage numerous and varied communities within Interior Alaska with the practice of writing, reading and archiving letters. The project includes wide audiences, from young children to elderly persons, rural, military and local experts. Our goal is to share experiences and pass them along to those who follow immediately behind.
We have several goals:
Throughout October we plan to reach out to the community and encourage letters to someone who follows them in some way — by age, academic class, experience or profession — telling them about what they know as they move on to the next stage. This could be a retiring CEO or a student entering second grade explaining “this is what I wish I knew about first grade” to a younger student. It could be a military spouse writing to say “this is what I wish I knew before being deployed to Interior Alaska,” a rural resident writing saying “if only I had known this before living way out here,” or a 70-year-old writing to a 60-year-old. Just as easily it might be a life transition, the loss of a loved one, an instance when disappointment turned to joy.
October is the Celebration of Writing (CoW), a University project which has grown each year. In addition to the obvious platforms like classrooms, we have set up writing stations throughout Interior Alaska. We will collect and curate, scan to our website, and create a display for the public library which will be available November 1- 15.
Public readings will be presented by participants, theater students, and some local leaders. On November 15th, the display will be moved to the Great Hall of the University of Alaska for the Letters Aloud performance at Salisbury Theater. On November 16th, Letters Aloud performs in Delta Junction and November 17th in the Denali Borough.
Our Plan:
FCA always actively seeks partners to expand the boundaries of what we can do as a small organization. Last year we partnered with the UAF Theater Department with great success. With this project, we expanded to include UAF departments of English, Theater, Film and Journalism – as outreach to the University and Interior Alaska residents.
Included in this project are military, Alaska native and rural residents, and students in the school district.
We have writing stations set up at the Delta Library, the Noel Wien Library, the Children’s Museum, Hoodoo Brewery, Raven’s Landing, on campus at RSS an the writing center and at the Healy Tri-Valley School Library reaching out across the Interior to nursing homes, libraries, school district, politicians and retiring leaders. Many of these have already committed to the project.
In addition to the Interior, Letters Aloud will travel to Homer, Kodiak, Anchorage, Valdez, Skagway and Juneau.
Through this project we hope to build community, bring disparate and isolated members together, and provide valuable documentation for future generations.
The hope is that your letter will go to the specific intended recipient, with a copy to FCA. Those who wish to participate can drop their letters in a collection box or send to the Fairbanks Concert Association, P.O. Box 80547, Fairbanks, AK 99708. Groups can contact FCA at 474-8081 and we will pick them up.
I have attached templates to help get you started but it is not necessary to use them.
Wishing you all the best,