Stories to go

I've been back in Britain for a month. What do I hold onto from the Sedona Festival? The power of objects - the power to revive memories. In our storycircles we use objects to provoke stories at random. Passing a bag of objects around the circle each participant blindly removes one item. They are invited to write for ten minutes about some memory that the item provokes. Often the story they write at stage becomes the basis for their digital story script.
I want to explore this power further - for myself and for others.
I was inspired by the shoebox project introduced to the festival by Huw Davies from BBC Wales (I had travelled 5,500 miles to hear about something created less than two hundred miles from where I live!)
Second hand stories and My whole life for sale by John Freyer also draw heavily on objects as stories. In a different way so did Megan Hayward's Of day of night project use the power of objects. The central character created the fictional histories of objects to reawaken dreams. Those histories and her response to them are the content of a non linear on a CD-ROM . The line I remember was "the unexpected associations created by the collison of memories and dreams".
Perhaps by exploring the unexpected associations between events and memories our digital stories will reveal more not only to ourselves but our audiences too.