Writing Workshop with Samuel Love

The La Porte County Public Library is pleased to host a workshop led by local writer and documentarian Samuel Love on oral history interviewing techniques. 

This workshop will show the many ways an oral history approach has uses beyond academics. "A local business who was losing a long-time worker, you know - the ones who know everything about how the business actually runs, to retirement and was wondering how they would train a new hire... Some of that institutional wisdom can be preserved and shared through an oral history interview process." This workshop will also be of interest to genealogists, family historians, podcasters, and many more. 

Love will stress preparation at every stage of the process: before, during, and after the interview. He'll share tips from over 25 years of practice, from shaping a project, ethical considerations, thoughts on being a better listener, the impact of technology, and strategies for publishing and archiving the results. "If you don't tell your own history, someone else might."

SAMUEL LOVE is the editor of The Gary Anthology (Belt Publishing, 2020) and producer of the award-winning documentary shorts Calumet: The Region's River (2022) and Grown in Gary (2024) for Indiana Humanities.