The Queens Night Market Vendor Stories Oral History Project in 2020: Pandemic Pivots, Media Moments, and Narrator Care Questions

Storm Garner

In 2019, I cowrote a mass market cookbook-with-oral-histories in hopes of drawing public attention to the greater Queens Night Market Vendor Stories Oral History Project, via the press and publicity it would garner. But when the release date finally came, in May 2020, at the height of the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic, with Queens as the epicenter, the media landscape had changed drastically. Sharing my own challenges navigating a multifaceted oral history project through this strange time, I argue that future advocate oral historians collecting and disseminating stories in times of crisis might better support their narrators by making a mass media strategy as intrinsic a part of their project design as an archiving strategy, and that said archiving strategy should be as flexible and versatile as possible, to be able to meet the changing needs of narrators recovering from personal trauma and/or caught up in a zeitgeist.

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Born in Washington D.C. but raised in Paris among equal parts artists and international NGO folk, Storm Garner has been based in a New York City since 2006, when she moved from Poland where she’d interned at the OSCE’s Human Rights Implementation Meeting to work on a theatrical production at La Mama Experimental Theatre Company as both actor and composer. Since then she has worked in dozens of New York theatre, film, and Artworld productions as an actor, writer, filmmaker, designer, musician, and curator. Read more here.