Gathering Conifer's Stories Project

WINNER OF THE HISTORY COLORADO BANCROFT AWARD FOR 2012!! Gathering Conifer's Stories Project is inspired by the boldness of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The story gatherers, growing up in southwest Jefferson County, Colorado, are young and are bold themselves. They perpetuate a loyalty within their community by capturing their own fragile, oral tradition. Student writers interview famliar, local figures: Beery, Long, Alderfer, Meyer, West, Ludwig, Burrows, Dix, and McKean. Students perpetuate stories about old practices that contemporary readers would deem questionable, revive memories of property and buildings that have changed over time and remind us of universal, human themes that have not. These are the "facts" as interpreted by the creative young.