City streets come alive to the sound of spinning yarns
THERE are a lot of stories knocking around Dublin — the good, the bad, the drunken. More than 70 of the better ones — and counting — are captured on Storymap, an ingenious website cooked up by two young Dublin filmmakers, Tom Rowley and Andy Flaherty. The pair launched Storymap in February 2011. They’ve been adding a story a week since inception, filming storytellers on location around Dublin.
“Part of the idea behind Storymap,” says Rowley, “was that there were a few open-mike storytelling nights starting in Dublin that were getting big crowds — Milk and Cookies in The Exchange, Temple Bar, which regularly draws in crowds of over 200 each month; and Yarn Spinners at the Teachers’ Club in Parnell Square. We were interested in seeing how we could bring it somewhere new and came up with the idea of mapping personal and historical stories to locations around the city.”
