(left) Virginia Mae Schmidt, (above) Jennifer Liptrot, and Vincent Oliver all told their stories for the Woodlawn Stories project.
A Community of Stories
Posted April 1, 2011
THEY ALL HAD a story about Woodlawn.
The barber. The sheriff. The company safety manager. The minister. The retired hall-of-fame football coach.
On April 8th and 9th, more than a dozen Woodlawn High School students performed Woodlawn Stories, a free community storytelling production scripted from interviews with more than 50 people from varying races, ages, and socioeconomic backgrounds who all shared ties to this Birmingham, Ala., neighborhood.
There were stories about school age mischief and overcoming personal adversity and nostalgic remembrances. There were stories describing ways Woodlawn split apart, and stories citing how it came back together. There were stories about how Woodlawn changed from the 1940s to the present. It was a peek into the history of this community through the voices of people who were there, who still are there.
“Without community storytelling, there is no community,” says Woodlawn Stories Project Director Ron Pate. “A community exists through communion, a quality of knowing each other beyond status or role that is both meaningful and personal. This quality of knowing through communion can only be accessed by listening to, telling, and responding to our stories in an open setting.”
Ron, an urban planner and community developer, worked on several similar projects across the Southeast before connecting with the Desert Island Supply Co. (DISCO), the Woodlawn Stories sponsor organization.
Located in Woodlawn, DISCO operates as a non-profit creative writing program with the core mission of giving children in the Birmingham area more opportunities to write. “The act of writing and storytelling can be transformative,” says DISCO founder Chip Brantley. “We believe that the stories we tell ourselves and about ourselves help form who we are and how we live our lives. Sharing a story is the fundamental way we connect to other people.”
DISCO involved Woodlawn High School students in the project to initiate their interest in writing and storytelling. “We also hoped it sparked a deeper interest in the fate of their community,” says Chip. “On a broader level, we hoped that the project underscored how our fates are all tied together, not just in Woodlawn but also in Birmingham and beyond.”
Story Gathering
Last summer, DISCO sent out the call for stories to Woodlawn neighborhood associations, churches, charitable organizations, the library, businesses, and the high school alumni network. They conducted story-gathering days at the library and at Woodlawn United Methodist Church, they spent a day interviewing employees at CMC Steel, and they set up a booth at the festival "I Love Woodlawn Day."
Project coordinator Nancy Glaub and several other volunteers interviewed willing participants and videotaped the whole conversation. “Some people were natural-born storytellers, and all you had to do was get out of the way,” says Nancy. “Others were more closed off, but if you listened well, with sincere interest and empathy, you generally uncovered a story well worth hearing. Many times, the gold nugget, the story we were waiting for, was not shared until the last five minutes of an hour-long interview.”
DISCO volunteers, many of them professional writers, then extracted stories from the interviews and crafted a script weaving those stories together by common themes.
“Woodlawn Stories only gave us the tip of the iceberg as to the meaningfulness that has and continues to take place in Woodlawn,” says Ron. “We were beginning a process we hoped would be ongoing so meaningful life in the community with others can be not just initiated, but enlarged and sustained.”
NANCY GLAUB is a Regions customer, AND HER HUSBAND, CHRIS, works at Regions.
For more information:
www.desertislandsupplyco.com
205-201-0826
comment
Unfortunately, I do not live near the Birmingham area, because I would love to see this production. I think it's a beautiful idea, and it reminds me of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town."
Brandy B.