May 2010
The project, “Patchwork: A Chronicle of Alabama in the New South,” is complete. These thirteen podcasts, twenty-three videos, and two hundred blog entries reflect a sampling of my experiences in what I have called “a year of paying attention.” As not all of the interviews became podcasts, and not everything I saw shows up in a video, and not everything I thought appears in a blog . . . this project serves as a testament to roughly what I have been doing.
So what have I been doing? When I proposed this project to the Surdna Foundation in the spring of 2009 for one of their Arts Teacher Fellowships, I did it with the idea that the Alabama I had experienced in my life did not resemble the Alabama of legend. From the 1970s and 1980s when I was growing up, the George Wallace I remember was a gray old man in a wheelchair. For this project, I wanted to go out and drive around, to talk to people, to ask questions, to surmise what this place is now. The Surdna Foundation granted me the opportunity to pursue that work from June 2009 until May 2010.
The history of Alabama is a well-beaten path. And the stereotypes are abundant. But this project is about asking, “What else?”
I spent a year paying very close attention to my home state, Alabama. In addition to the interviews posted here, you can find videos on YouTube with some images from my travels, and a blog where I was writing as I went. I was traveling around the state at intervals and reading books and news articles while I was at home. One thing that made this project a little easier was living in the capitol city of Montgomery, where the state’s political business gets done, sort of.
What you will find here is the groundwork for a forthcoming book, a work-in-progress right now, about what I found when I look a long, hard look at this enigmatic place: Alabama.
-- Foster Dickson
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