I sent out emails to friends and family, encouraging them to enter their own stories into the Digital Story Quilt for Hurricane Katrina Survivors and Family or to forward the email to others affected by the storm. I also sent out press releases to several media organizations, including nola.com, the online site of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. I also inserted the site's URL into several online blogs and databases designed to aid in finding Katrina's missing. It seemed as if this first draft of history in the nation's newspapers wouldn't include my personal story and the Katrina digital story quilt site. In frustration, I finally wrote a column in my local newspaper, detailing my struggles to find my family and pointing readers to the site.

I had started quilting at first with words and the daily stories of my life in my weekly columns in the local newspaper. I pieced together first one event, then a thought, then a feeling, juxtaposing ideas and everyday stories to learn something new or to affirm and name something existing.

My columns often featured my family and our everyday struggles. But that was the beauty of my subversive plan. As the only African-American columnist at the newspaper, my stories provided a window into our lives. My goal was to have my predominantly Caucasian audience see themselves in my stories, relate to my pains, and challenge any preconceived notions of reality. The columns often sparked a dialogue, between me and my readers, that transformed both of us through the exchange.

So my writings became a way to speak into the silence of the African-American presence in my community and to give voice to my own struggles.

As bell hooks suggests, the overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance (hooks, 2481). So the task of my narratives was and continues to be to provide a space for those "shared sensibilities" that cut across gender, race, class and sexual practice.

While I'd found a space for my own voice through a patchwork-type of narrative, how could I create a similar space for others? I thought that by learning how to quilt, I could use this practice to discover tactics of resistance that would sustain my subversive narrative stitching.

Could I also translate these quilting tactics for storytelling, for challenging who gets to tell stories, to practices for everyday life? Could I develop a technology, as a tool of resistance, to provide a space for silenced voices to be heard?

I began to warm to the idea of a digital story quilt, a technology that would be formed out of the quilt metaphor and embody many of its attributes to create a space where memories could dwell. More importantly, anyone could take a stand from this place, this lieux de memoire as Nora suggests, to challenge notions of who speaks a culture's history.