RE-STORYING THE WEST
Wyoming contains multitudes. Ranchers and refugees, teachers and tradespeople, veterans and artists, long-timers and newcomers — the everyday people who cook our food, educate our children, build our homes, and hold our communities together through good times and hard ones. Their stories are rich, complex, and too often untold. Re-Storying the West exists to change that.
This statewide initiative hosts story-gathering events across Wyoming designed to amplify the voices of everyday citizens in all their diversity of identity, experience, and role. Through innovative humanistic methods, Re-Storying the West creates space for people to share their lives on their own terms — and for those stories to be heard, preserved, and celebrated.
ALCES as a Community Partner
ALCES is proud to serve as a community partner in bringing Re-Storying the West to life in Laramie and beyond. Our role is woven through every layer of the project. We co-organize events alongside the Re-Storying team, helping to shape gatherings that feel welcoming, rooted in place, and genuinely reflective of our community. We center youth leadership throughout, ensuring that young people aren't just participants but active contributors to how stories are gathered and shared.
We also serve as a liaison between Re-Storying the West and Laramie's creative community — connecting local artists and creatives with meaningful opportunities to contribute to the project, while investing in Albany County's creative economy through commissions, hiring, and collaboration. And we maintain the project website, keeping the work visible, accessible, and alive between events.
What We're Building Together
The outcomes of Re-Storying the West reach well beyond any single gathering. The project is working toward a sharable repository of tools and materials for anyone pursuing storywork in their own communities, as well as a living public archive of Wyoming stories generated through methods that honor the humanity behind each one. At the university level, the project promotes high-impact humanistic practices at both the graduate and undergraduate levels — modeling what it looks like when academic work is in genuine dialogue with the communities it exists alongside.
At its core, Re-Storying the West is an investment in relationship — between university and community, between neighbors who might never otherwise share a room, and between Wyoming's present and the stories that will shape how it understands itself for years to come.
Partners include: University of Wyoming English Department, Mellon Foundation, Lincoln Community Center, Laramie Plains Civic Center, Rock River K-12 School, and many, many more.
