The Center for Folklore Studies received a grant from the Public Narrative Collaborative and the Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme to commission Molly Rideout for the Portsmouth Public Writing Art Collaboration. 

The Center for Folklore Studies (CFS) will commission Ohio writer Molly Rideout to research, write and install an original work of creative fiction or nonfiction inspired by public narratives of Portsmouth, OH on the theme of “growing/making food.” Rideout will collaborate with the 14^th St. Community Center in Portsmouth’s North End, a historically underserved neighborhood of the area with a predominately African-American population, and will directly augment CFS’s ongoing work in Scioto County.

Rideout will conduct fieldwork in Portsmouth’s North End to collect community members’ narratives on the theme of food and then translate these narratives into a work of creative writing in the form of original works of micro-fiction or micro-nonfiction. The story will then be cut into vinyl film to be installed in windows at or near the North End’s 14^th St. Community Center, turning windows into the pages of a book.

All collected material will be placed in the Center for Folklore Studies’ Folklore Archive and be made available on the Digital Commons@Shawnee web platform. A portion of the grant will be put toward a community partner stipend.

Molly Rideout is a recent graduate of OSU with an MFA in Creative Writing. In 2018 she participated in CFS’s Ohio Field School in Portsmouth and continues to volunteer in support of ongoing creative projects Scioto County. “Public Writing” is an innovative form of public narrative Rideout developed in 2013 that uses the lessons of public art and creative writing to present local narrative. Other “Public Writing” vinyl installations she has done include Wormfarm Institute’s Farm/Art DTour (Wisconsin) and Grin City Collective’s “Public Writing/Public Libraries” (Iowa), which was featured by the American Library Association and in Poets & Writers. View examples of the work at: http://www.mollyrideout.com/publicwriting