The BBC digital storytelling program has been exploring themed workshops (or at least thematic collections of digital stories) for a while – mostly pretty “big” stuff like family history, and there are some truly epiphanic experiences shared in those stories: revelations that recover lost histories, therapeutic moments of catharsis, and so on. It seems that these are the stories that people who come to digital storytelling workshops for the first time are often burning to tell – stories of recovery, of loss, of joy, of finding or losing one’s place in the world.

But I am really much more excited by the idea of Shoebox Stories: “A collection of digital stories about favourite objects made by visitors to the BBC Wales Community Studios”. I love the idea of stories extracted from personal objects, because they allow for a more subtle and multilayered style of storytelling, one which can come sideways at the themes of memory, loss, nostalgia, longing, and belonging. I think there is a special elegance that comes from unravelling the threads of meaning, the powerful whispers of memory that come packed into very small things, but it’s important for me that this elegance can emerge organically from everyday experience, without being overdetermined by an explicitly artworld aesthetic.