NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — December 8, 2014 — The following was released by the New Bedford Working Waterfront Festival:
Over the past ten years the Working Waterfront Festival has recorded every performance and conversation on our stages, creating a rich audio archive of music, fisher poetry, storytelling, and more. This year we were fortunate to receive funding from Mass Humanities to support the work of a Scholar in Residence, Diana Lempel, to listen to our Narrative Stage audio recordings and help us use them to understand family and community identity in the commercial fishing industry. Diana will be sharing some of the most compelling moments from the Festival’s Narrative Stage as part of the December AHA, Thursday, December 11th at 7:30 pm at the National Park Theater (33 William Street). A multi-media exhibit of Diana’s work can be viewed at https://shiptoshore2014.wordpress.com/.
This work is part of the Festival’s Community Documentation Project which has also collected over 120 oral history interviews with a wide range of individuals connected to fishing communities in New England and beyond. Many of these interviews were incorporated into a series of 24 radio programs called Voices from the Port and a book, Voices from the Waterfront: Portrait of the New Bedford Fishing Industry. All of the oral histories have been transcribed and are archived as part of the NOAA Voices from the Fisheries web-based archive: http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/voicesfromthefisheries/.
The Working Waterfront Festival is a project of the Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern MA, a non-profit organization. The FREE festival, a family friendly, educational celebration of New England's commercial fishing industry, features live maritime and ethnic music, fishermen's contests, fresh seafood, vessel tours, author readings, cooking demonstrations, kid's activities and more. It all takes place in New Bedford, MA, America's #1 fishing port, on the last full weekend of September. Navigate to us at www.workingwaterfrontfestival.org.
Photo Caption: L-R Reidar Bendiksen, Hildur Bendiksen, Tove Bendiksen, Hans Bendiksen, Kirsten Bendiksen, Tor Bendiksen at the Blessing of the Fleet c. 1985. Photo provided courtesy of the Working Waterfront Festival.