Several days are set aside each year by various organizations to celebrate storytelling. Some of these special days are relatively new, having been marked for just the past few years. The recent vernal equinox World Storytelling Day began in Sweden in the early 1990s and became a worldwide celebration in 2003. The day lauds the oral tradition and seems to always carry a nature theme; this year was water, and I recently learned that 2012’s theme will be trees.

Another relatively new observance is International Day for Sharing Life Stories, marking its fourth year on May 16. That preceding link is a Facebook community page. Both storytelling days I’ve mentioned seem to have difficulties with maintaining a consistent and informative Web presence. If you search for International Day for Sharing Life Stories, you’ll find a site dedicated to the 2009 event.

This year, the Center for Digital Storytelling and the Museu da Pessoa (museum of the person) are sponsoring a video production challenge for the weekend prior to the Fourth International Day for Sharing Life Stories. The goal is to gain broad recognition of May 16 as an annual day for sharing, listening to, and gathering the stories of people’s lives.

From the page describing the challenge:

BLINK is an online festival dedicated to an intimate form of spontaneous, reflective filmmaking that is growing out of our reliance on/acceptance of pocket sized mobile media. Our smart cellular devices have still and video cameras, ways to record audio, ways to edit and mix, and output to the world.

To participate we are asking you to create a 2-minute digital story on the weekend of May 14-15, 2011. The idea is to choose a moment to capture images/events, and then write and record a narration, and edit the movie on your mobile device. The idea could be as simple as a single image with a voiceover narration, or as complicated as a fully made video with moving image, still image, illustration, even animation.

Participants can upload their story to the International Day for Sharing Life Stories Facebook Community page anytime during the weekend of May 14-15.

Organizers will randomly select two stories from those submitted to win a special prize — a full scholarship to a any standard workshop produced by the Center for Digital Storytelling in 2011-12.