New York City is one of the most culturally diverse cities on earth, but remains highly segregated: inhabitants keep to their usual neighborhoods and routes, rarely striking up conversations with strangers across lines of ethnic, linguistic, generational and socio-economic difference, in part because there have been precious few truly public spaces that feel welcoming to all.
Since 2015, the Queens Night Market had been countering that trend, celebrating the cultural diversity of New York City by feeding over a million visitors carefully curated affordable traditional street foods and home cooking originating from almost 100 countries in a fun, open-air, family-friendly festival-like setting, every Saturday night from April through October. It had helped start over 300 small businesses, and attracted an average of 15 000 visitors a night…
…Until the 2020 pandemic stopped it in its tracks.
Storm Garner’s Queens Night Market Vendor Stories Oral History Project, started in 2018 and containing 70 interviews so far, aims to document the Queens Night Market as a site of multicultural exchange and productive friction in the rapidly changing international food scene of New York City since 2015, and the impact of the pandemic on its many small food businesses since 2020. The collection will be archived in full at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, and the 2020 pandemic-focused follow-up interviews will be additionally archived with The Queens Library’s COVID-19 Queens Memory Project. Collaborative derivative projects so far include a cookbook with personal narratives called The World Eats Here: Amazing Food and the Inspiring People Who Make It at New York’s Queens Night Market, published Spring 2020 by The Experiment, a podcast episode by The Sporkful, a series of edited audio clips from the project published by Culinary Backstreets, and an online cooking show!
In this event, Storm will discuss the ins and outs, boons and pitfalls of her collaborations with editors, producers, narrators and journalists on public-facing, mass-media works derived from recent oral histories, hoping to encourage more oral historians to dare to play to a larger audience, while remaining wary of likely constraints. Participants will have an opportunity to try some writing and editing exercises from Storm’s projects and compare notes as a group.
DC-born, Paris-raised, and based in New York City since working on her first La Mama, ETC theater production in 2006, Storm Garner is a multi-disciplined artist—writer, filmmaker, designer, actor, musician— currently working towards an MA in Oral History at Columbia.
She co-wrote The World Eats Here, a narrative cookbook published in 2020, with her husband John Wang, founder of the Queens Night Market, and in collaboration with 50 of the Queens Night Market food vendors whose oral histories she’d collected for her Queens Night Market Vendor Stories Oral History Project.
BLOG REFLECTIONS:
What Does Comfort Look Like? by Rattana Bounsouaysana
WATCH NOW
These events are open to all. For more information or if we can make any of these events more accessible to you please contact Rebecca McGilveray at rlm2203@columbia.edu.
This event will be recorded. As with our oral history interviews, we will wait until after the event to determine with the guest(s) whether or not they want to share the recording more publicly. You can follow our social media channels/mailing list for updates on if/when recordings are made available!