My name is Tara Lokke and I want to listen.

In 2014 my grandfather passed away before I could learn that he was a veteran. This sparked an interest in the untold stories of military members, all of which make up a portion of the fabric of American history. Beat Your Gums and The Story Front were created to preserve the individual’s story and the historical context for family and community members to learn from and remember.

My grandfather, Karl Seemann, and I sharing a dance.

My Story

I am a recent graduate from the University of Connecticut with a Bachelors in History and a minor in Communication. I am not a veteran, but I am infatuated with hearing their stories. I was born in Nevada and split my growing up between Rhode Island and Texas. I have a big family and a few wonderful friends. Go to My Profile to see my answers to my own interview questions.

I am passionate about preserving history. I hope to encourage more individuals to take the time to get to know their friends and family. By getting to know each other through these stories, we can not only learn from each other, but understand each other (and humanity!) on a greater level. 

What is The Story Front?

The Story Front is a project of stories. Tim O'Brien writes of the importance of stories for understanding ones self and the experiences one has and the potential therapeutic effects of telling one's story. As a lover of history, I saw the opportunity to not only hear history from a first person perspective, but also to give our veterans a means of release in telling their stories. The Story Front is a collection of projects in process working to dissect how history is made and told. The collection begins with Beat Your Gums the stories from the sources, telling the history of their lives that they wish to be preserved: how they want to be remembered. The next step in The Story Front is the stories of veterans as told by the people around them. This will be done by interviewing family, friends, colleagues, nurses, etc. that spent significant amounts of time with a veteran. These stories will be combined to tell the story of an individual as they are actually remembered. The last step in the collection is looking at these individual's stories in association with each other, making up a larger history of combined stories of specific events that, when put together, explains a piece of history. This last piece reaches out to an individual's role in the making of history and how each of our unique stories and perspectives can explain monumental moments in history.   

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