STORIES!!!!
DIRECTED BY JASON ZIMMERMAN, BASED ON STORIES!!!! BY MRS. VOSS’ 1991 8TH GRADE CLASS, STARING THE SPRING 2010 HISTORY OF SOCIALLY ENGAGED ART CLASS

The book STORIES!!!!—written, titled, bound and published by Portland Public School’s 1991 eighth grade class, under the guidance of their teacher Ms. Voss—addresses the sadness of a lonely man beaten down by society, the presumably fictional accounts of homicidal clowns (there are several stories of this kind in the volume), and equal amounts earnest and angst-full retellings of significant events in students’ lives (e.g., a young girl’s attempt at meeting the then heartthrob Luke Perry, or how Lisa met her best friend Stacey in sixth grade). These are only a few of the topics available for consideration in the over thirty-five, mostly handwritten, narratives.

The physical book was in great shape when it was found, considering its rather unceremonious treatment in the bins of Portland’s Goodwill Outlet store know as “the bins”—a huge thrift-store-warehouse facility like none other, where items that can’t seem to be sold in their normal retail locations find a last-minute reprieve before heading to the landfill. On a particular bins outing—unique in that I was dragging half of my MFA cohort, as well as a few faculty members, along with me, ostensibly to introduce them to the facility—I found the item that would spark this project. It would seem rather serendipitous that, in that context, with my grown-up class of graduate-level art students, I would find an anthology of creative writing exercises written by a not-so-grown-up class of eighth graders, and that a project would also be found there.

The environment of the classroom began extending itself into every aspect of the project, from it’s original creation almost twenty years ago by Ms. Voss and her students, to the outing with my classmates, to its ultimate conclusion and the purpose of this statement: a screen adaptation, written, directed, produced, and edited by me, a Portland State University (PSU) student and beginning filmmaker; with the contributions and collaborations of the PSU History of Socially Engaged Art class forming the bulk of the talent (interesting to the concept, and thankfully for me, they were compelled by their professor, Jennifer Delos Reyes, to act in STORIES!!!!); and, other students having gone on to participate in additional ways as well, with Vanessa Robertson-Rojas assisting at almost every level of the project and Stefan Ransom writing an original score for the film! Further, the PSU campus has served exclusively as the production site. It will also be where the work is exhibited and screened throughout the Spring of 2010.

Illustration from STORIES!!!!