Are you looking for a writer, collaborator, or communications professional?
Current Offerings and Interests
audio storytelling, care, change making, coalition building, community building, connecting across perceived divides, consulting, content writing, culture shifts, event design, intergenerational communications, interviews, listening, meaningful conversations, media literacy, mission-driven projects, mutual aid, oral histories, place, relationships, resiliency, resource distribution, restorative practices, skill sharing, storytelling in all forms, wealth redistribution, writing
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Content Writing
Need content for your website, blog, or print publications? I have fifteen years’ experience working in communications, development, and marketing and can help you showcase your impact, products, and mission.
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Editing
For when you've been looking at something so hard for so long you can no longer see it for what it is—proofreading, copyediting, etc. I’m a former writing teacher and have worked in the public and private sectors.
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Research
Send me down a rabbit hole. There’s no place I’d rather be. I excel in diving into research and emerging with well-organized material that is easy to digest, whatever your ultimate goals for the research may be.
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Interviews
You need someone to be interviewed. I am a good listener. It’s a great match. After the interview(s), I provide error-free transcriptions. A great offering for companies, nonprofits, or family members looking to record oral histories.
With WHERE (Walks for Historical and Ecological Recovery)
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Ensuring that care is at the heart of WHERE communications, language, documentation, educational materials, experiences, and relationships.
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Internal, external, with site partners, with participants, and the public
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Helping public history collaborators’ research shine.
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Designing and implementing strategies to increase and broaden the ripple effects of relationships, research, storytelling, education, and actions.
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In collaboration with other WHERE coordinators, devising and implementing participatory tools and strategies to ethically archive WHERE experiences.
Visit the WHERE archive here.
For Maine Audubon
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As this case study in Washington County shows, restoring habitat for endangered Atlantic Salmon ended up having myriad ecological benefits for the entire ecosystem, of which humans are a large part.
Read the story in Maine Audubon’s Habitat magazine here.
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The Forestry for Maine Birds (FFMB) program, low-impact forestry at Hidden Valley Nature Center, timber framing workshops, and a new building at Gilsland Farm, built with materials that align with Main Audubon’s values.
Read the story in Maine Audubon’s Habitat magazine here.
With Torchlight Media
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Torchlight Media offers community film screenings, discussion groups, A/V Club and more.
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Torchlight Media runs afterschool multimedia programs for youth enrolled in public schools as well as youth who are unschooled and/or homeschooled.
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The St. George Municipal School Unit recently hired Torchlight Media to run an oral history training program designed for students, supporting them with skills to interview and record stories told by elders and community members.
For One Small Step (WERU Community Radio / StoryCorps)
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In addition to recording 25 conversations (listen here), we also did a live broadcast with One Small Step participants and community members joining the conversation by phone, and discussed our experiences with the project, personal takeaways, and how the project has affected us. You can listen to the show here.
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In November 2023, we hosted a listening event at the Alamo Theatre in Bucksport to showcase our One Small Step conversations. In March 2024, we hosted a community supper and coffee hour in collaboration with the Belfast American Legion Hall, inspired by our work with One Small Step and by our friends at The Civic Standard, in Hardwick, VT, who work closely with the Hardwick American Legion. We were honored to have Tara Reese and Rose Friedman from the Civic Standard as our special guests, alongside Phil Mercier and Ashton Allen from the Hardwick Legion.
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I created a landing page on WERU’s website to showcase the One Small Step conversations we recorded, demonstrate the idiosyncracies of what it meant to be the most rural radio station participating in One Small Step in 2023, and show the vast amount of terrain we covered.
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As a facilitator for One Small Step, I matched partners and guided 50-minute conversations between strangers with differing political beliefs and values. Participants laughed, cried, disagreed, found common ground, and sometimes, exchanged contact information.
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We recorded 25 conversations with 50 participants from 37 towns in 15 locations/venues. In addition to recording at the WERU studio, we recorded conversations at libraries, town offices, museums, the office of a rock shop, and a vacant storefront at a mini-mall. While location scouting wasn’t necessarily something we anticipated as part of this initiative, it became a fun aspect of the process as it provided additional opportunities to get the word out and helped make participation more accessible for a wider number of participants.
For / with you community
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Recently, I was asked to record a friend’s wedding ceremony and words from their community during the reception (advice about love and relationships from the children who were present, stories from siblings and family, wishes for the future, words of love and affirmation, grasshopper choruses, hummingbirds gracing the flowers around the arbor). Imagine a future where such recordings are turned into a podcast reflecting special occasions like this—an oral history of weddings / special days.
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Clients can be businesses, organizations, schools, families, or individuals.
Projects of all sizes are welcome, even just ideas—we all have to start somewhere.
Previous Clients / Employers / Collaborators
American Merchant Marine Oral History Project/Seamen's Church Institute | Bother Studio | Holly No. 7 Birthing Center | Integrity Institute | Juniper Summer Writing Institute | Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange & Study (YES) Program | Legacy International | Maine Audubon | Maine Farmland Trust | Maine Initiatives | Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) | Maine Sea Grant | Maine Women Magazine | Niweskok | Norumbega Collective | Out in the Open | Peace Corps | Sagefox Consulting | St. George Municipal School Unit | Summer Institute for the Gifted | Sustainable Harvest International (SHI) | StoryCorps | TechGirls | Torchlight Media | University of Maine Hutchinson Center | University Of Maine Orono | University Of Massachusetts Amherst | Waterfall Arts | WERU Community RadioLanguages
My native language is English. I speak (enough) French (to have gotten by while living in northern Cameroon for two fraught years as a Peace Corps Volunteer as well as teaching a storytelling workshop in Burkina Faso), (I’ve forgotten most of the) Fulfulde (I learned in Cameroon), and (enough) Swahili (to impress some and embarrass others).
Trainings
Beginning Nonviolent Communication (Clarity Services)
Foundations in Restorative Practices (Restorative Justice Midcoast)
Diversity Leadership Training (University of Maine)
Testimonials
“Michele raised our whole communications department to the next level. She was eager to go the extra mile and to understand the stories of transformation that our fieldwork had. She was always kind, creative and hardworking. Her writing skills are superb and she also ran a series of workshops about storytelling and communications with different stakeholders, from international staff and field trainers to members of the board of trustees. She has a great sense of humor and she keeps calm and positive even in hard situations. ”
“Michele is an exceptional marketing professional who truly goes above and beyond. She thinks strategically on every project and in every task, with a strong focus on improving processes. She can be relied on to ask critical questions, facilitate communication at all levels, and strategize best practices in marketing and beyond.”
About me
Michele Christle is a writer whose work focuses on culture, ecology, and place. She grew up in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire and studied sociology and anthropology at Lewis & Clark College. After serving in the Peace Corps in Cameroon as an agroforestry volunteer, Michele earned an MFA in Creative Writing from UMass Amherst. Her writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Eater, Insider, Down East, and Cultural Survival Quarterly. Michele has 20 years’ experience working in communications, oral history, education, and journalism. In recent years, she’s worked with Maine Sea Grant, Maine Audubon, Out in the Open, Atlantic Black Box’s Walk for Historical and Ecological Recovery (WHERE), and StoryCorps’ One Small Step program through WERU Community Radio. Currently, Michele works with Torchlight Media and serves on the the Maine Community Foundation’s Waldo County Committee. The recipient of a Bodwell Fellowship, a LEF/CIFF Fellowship, and residencies at Hewnoaks and Shannaghe, Michele is working on a longform writing project and documentary (with filmmaker Eli Kao) about eels. Michele lives on a river in unceded Penobscot homelands also known as midcoast Maine.
Christle is pronounced “crystal.”
Rates are sliding scale—bartering is welcome.
I donate 10% of all my writing-related profits.