Season 5 of “6-minute Stories” begins with the Introduction to “Curious Stuff—mementos, treasures, white elephants, and junk,” Volume 6 from the Personal Story Publishing Project

 

Randell Jones, editor of the Personal Story Publishing Project anthologies, shares insight on the theme “Curious Stuff” and previews some of the stories you will hear this season, stories you can read right now in the sixth release from the PSPP. He is sharing the Introduction from the collection of 45 stories by 45 writers.

Author’s Talk

The cover photo is one I staged from my own collection of “stuff.”  

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The clock belonged to my father’s parents. They bought it during the Great Depression from a Sears catalog. It still runs. The home-delivery milk bottle is an artifact of my 1950s childhood. 

The pink plush lion is a hand puppet I used during my time as 1st grade Sunday School teacher. Watching the kids at that age as their teeth fell out other heads each year was more fun than sitting through adult bible study, so I enjoyed it for 15 years until some of earliest charges were getting married. That’s when I realized time does not stand still. Every year my students were 6 years old. How was I getting older? 

The slide rule was mine during my four years of incarceration at the Georgia Institute of Technology. We had 9,000 students back then. Fifty of them were women. Today it’s 40% of 16,000. 

The small washboard is the one my mother used in her Little Rock apartment during World War II for washing socks and “unmentionables” as they said in those days. She shared the apartment with an older woman from her hometown, one I grew up calling “Grandma Margaret” when she came to visit.  

The jar of seashells is a collection from one trip or another in decades past to various beaches in North Carolina, including our dash to see Halley’s Comet over a dark, pre-dawn ocean in 1986.  

The old Royal Crown bottle was underneath the floor of the log meat house at the farm we bought a decade ago. I found it when I reworked it into a potting shed, which is a bit generous as a description of what I built, but it was still standing when we sold the farm last year, my dalliance with the rural life satisfied. 

The two books I acquired at our annual community book fair as a fundraiser for Senior Services. People clear their bookshelves and donate them, then we all plow through the categoried piles and purchase other people’s books for cheap. My keepers are textbooks from the 1800s.  

The mask is a treasure, a creation by my younger daughter during her teen years, half her life ago. She has an eye for color and art and design that she did not get from me. But she is a word person, too, twice over, a professional translator specializing in the field of international development. As the mask suggests she sees and takes measure of the world from at least two perspectives—as should we all. — Randell Jones

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Further episodes of 6-minute Stories

Further podcasts by Randell Jones

Website of Randell Jones