Five days on the Karavali coast in full monsoon, not for the coast, but for the people the coast forgot. Fifteen travellers, five subjects, one printed book at the end of it. You don't come back with reels. You come back with something you can hold.
Most trips end with reels nobody rewatches and a camera roll you'll scroll past in a week. The Storykeepers ends with something heavier.
A small, hand bound book of stories from coastal Karnataka that did not exist before you arrived. The schoolteacher in Kumta who has been recording his village's dying Konkani dialect on cassette tapes for thirty years. The widow run fish drying co op in Tadadi that supplies half of coastal Karnataka and has no name on any map. The Yakshagana artist who is about to perform his final season after sixty years on stage.
You won't be handed their stories. You'll go and find them. Fifteen travellers, five teams of three, five stories. Listen, transcribe, lay out, print. By the morning you leave, the book exists. It is signed by everyone who made it. One copy ships to you. One stays with the person it is about.
No phone cameras inside interviews. No reels of villagers without their consent. We bring one photographer and one designer, both quiet, both invited in. You bring a notebook and a recorder. The output isn't a vlog. It is a printed book, fifteen copies, made for the people in it, and for you.
Overnight bus from Bangalore on the night of Aug 25, breakfast in Gokarna on the 26th. Each traveller is handed a sealed envelope holding one researched story lead. Pitch it to the group. Vote. Five teams of three form around the five strongest leads. The day ends with prep, a recorder check, and the first sentence of your notebook.
A translator goes with each pair. You meet your subject in their world, not a hotel lobby. A harbour at 4am. A Konkani grandmother's kitchen. A Yakshagana practice yard. You don't ask the questions you came with. You ask the ones that emerge.
A second sitting, this time with someone close to the subject. A daughter. A rival. A neighbour. Stories are stories because they have edges. You find one. Evening, the fifteen of you eat together and read aloud the rough drafts. Notes get sharper. Decisions get harder.
The monsoon helps. Roles split clean: editor, illustrator, transcriber, designer, photographer, printer. By 5pm a file goes to a small Mangalore press. By 9pm the first copies are bound. At 10pm we screen the photographs and read the stories aloud to the subjects themselves. That moment is the trip.
Tea on a verandah. The remaining copies of the book arrive. Each traveller signs every other traveller's copy. The bus leaves Gokarna on the evening of Aug 30. You're back in Bangalore by the morning of Aug 31. The book on your shelf will not look like a tourist's photograph.
Every subject signs a consent form before we begin and reviews their chapter before we print. If a chapter is pulled, it is pulled. If a name is changed, it is changed. The book serves the people in it before it serves the people who made it. That is the whole point.
A printed book, embedded translators, a designer, a photographer, and honest payouts to every subject cost more than a standard trip. So does the small group. If you'd like to soft hold a seat without paying yet, write to us and we'll keep it open for 48 hours.
You don't need to be a writer or a photographer. You need to be curious enough to listen for four hours, and quiet enough to let someone else's story matter more than yours. Journalists, designers, students, founders, first time content makers, anyone who has said "I should write a book one day" and never started. This is day one.
Fifteen seats. We read every application. Half of why a Storykeepers Drop works is who else is in the room. If you're in, we'll tell you. If you're not, we'll tell you that too, and we'll keep your name for Drop 02.