Tales from wyoming

Field Notes: Tales from Wyoming: On Storytelling, Yodeling, and Why We Do This

Some stories are true. Some are almost true. Some are Wyoming true, which is its own category entirely.

On May 10th, ALCES Community Works was proud to serve as partner and fiscal sponsor to Daisy Innes and her event Tales from Wyoming. An afternoon gathering with Shawn Hess, Hillery Lynn, and J. Shogren—three people who love Wyoming music and storytelling enough to spend a Sunday doing some talking, fibbing, singing, humming, yodeling, and more. Free admission, four hours, one room. The kind of event that trusts its audience to show up for the thing itself, not the spectacle around it.

Wyoming has always been a storytelling state, even when—maybe especially when—it doesn't call it that. Stories live in the way people describe a drive across the basin, the particular way a rancher talks about weather, the songs that travel from bar to kitchen to truck cab and back again. What Shawn, Hillery, and J brought to the room on May 10th was that tradition, alive and a little loose at the seams, the way good storytelling always is.

ALCES was also proud to commission Audio Library of the West to make live recordings of the afternoon. We believe Wyoming voices deserve to be documented—not archived and forgotten, but held onto, passed around, listened to again. We're planning to press the recordings to vinyl, because some things should exist as objects in the world. Something you can set a needle to. Something that takes up space on a shelf and asks to be played.

We love what happens when people gather around a story. We love what Wyoming sounds like when it's given room to speak. Tales from Wyoming was both of those things, and we're glad it happened.

Stay tuned for updates on the vinyl release.

Partners include: Daisy Innes, Western AF, Re-Storying the West, Alice Hardy Stevens Center, UWYO Department of American Cultural Studies