News & Views of Phillips Since 1976
Thursday November 13th 2025
Stories Unraveled
“Tell me a story,” says a child. An elder tells a story. Books and newspapers are stories.
The alley is a newspaper. Everyone knows stories. You know stories. You may share your story in the alley by poetry, prose, lyric, sketch, recipe, photograph, or news about a garden or favorite place in Phillips.
If you are ready, send to: Alley Communications, P.O. Box 7006 Mpls., MN 55407 or copydesk@alleynews.org. You can also submit through the Submit! tab above.
If inspiration will help you, there are tips by Grace Lee Boggs, Maya Angelou, Martha Graham, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie below.
Julie Klamm eases worry of accuracy-
“Your most cherished family stories are, I hate to break it to you, almost certainly at least somewhat false. I’m not calling anyone a liar, this is simply how it goes—stories degrade (or improve, depending on your perspective), details are lost, tweaked, censored, sensationalized. I don’t mean to disillusion you; I say this in the spirit of encouragement. The story only really gets going once it begins to unravel.”
Suleika Jaouad tells prompts for stories from her experiences and from several friends in “The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life.”
Loren Niemi, local storyteller and Elizabeth Ellis discuss, instruct, and give story samples in “Inviting the “Wolf In: Thinking About Difficult Stories.”… Read the rest “Stories Unraveled”
Every Life is a Unique Story Worth Telling
239th in the series Tales from Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery
By ALEX WESTON
Fleeting glimpses of a vanished world
Over 22,000 people are buried in Minneapolis’ Pioneer & Soldiers Memorial Cemetery, but there are only 1,820 grave markers.
The privileged are more likely to have
their stories preserved.
This works as a metaphor for history itself. History is not “what happened in the past,” but rather a web of stories we tell about the past. Like the grave markers at Pioneer & Soldiers Memorial Cemetery—which represent only around 8% of the individuals buried there—the evidence from which we construct these stories is fragmentary. We get only fleeting glimpses of a vanished world.
Some stories get passed on, while most are forgotten. Generally, the privileged are more likely to have their stories preserved, while the marginalized tend to be forgotten. The Cemetery has so few headstones partly because it was a burial ground for common people, not the rich and powerful. But even here there are disparities. Some paupers’ graves were never marked. Others once had cheap wooden markers that rotted away.… Read the rest “Every Life is a Unique Story Worth Telling”
Keep citizen journalism alive!
Mosaic or Melting Pot?
Dominant Theologies Denied Marginalized People
from the series Peace House Community Journal…
By MARTI MALTBY
I recently read The Cross and Lynching Tree by James Cone. Cone was one of the first and most respected Black Liberation Theologians who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, arguing that the dominant Christian theology denied the experiences of minorities and had nothing to offer marginalized peoples.
The Cross and the Lynching Tree was Cone’s final book before his death. He pointed out the similarities between Jesus’ crucifixion and the experiences of Black Americans who were lynched in this country. He also expressed shock that so few theologians, Black or White, could see the similarities. When he laid out the parallels, I was shocked, too, that I had never seen them, nor heard about them in my fifty plus years of attending church.
Individual, cultures, and groups can have blind spots
The experience was a little surreal, and it reminded me that cultures and groups can have blind spots in the same way that individuals can have them. We simply cannot see everything from other people’s perspectives. We end up assuming that we are right, or that there is one proper way of doing things, without seeing the harm we do to others.… Read the rest “Mosaic or Melting Pot?”