Woodlawn Stories

Woodlawn Stories is a community storytelling project of the Desert Island Supply Co.

The project is an attempt to bring together the stories of diverse neighbors, past and present, across boundaries of race, age, socio-economics and origin.

From June-October, 2010, we recorded scores of stories from Woodlawn residents, past and present. Selected stories were then woven into a script that will be the basis for for a series of spoken word performances by Woodlawn High School students. The performances will be held in the auditorium of Woodlawn High School on Friday, April 8 @ 7 p.m. and Saturday, April 9 @ 4 p.m. The performances are free and open to the public.

The goals of the project are simple: 1) to reveal and bring together into one thread the many stories of Woodlawn, 2) to create an ongoing infrastructure for public storytelling in the Woodlawn community; 3) to help advance a community identity for Woodlawn that is meaningful and good; and 4) to provide area students with more opportunities to strengthen their writing skills, intensify their intellectual habits, shape their own futures and positively affect their communities.

Woodlawn Stories is being managed by Ron Pate, PhDc, a practitioner of narrative-based community development, and Nancy Rutland Glaub, a writer and editor. Like all of DISCO’s programs and workshops, the Woodlawn Stories project is fueled mostly by volunteers.

Woodlawn Stories, which is funded primarily with a grant from the Kresge Arts in Birmingham program administered by the Cultural Alliance of Greater Birmingham, is proud to be part of Main Street Birmingham’s East End Arts initiative.

Community storytelling lures people into what appears to be a conservative event — the celebration of heritage — which is in fact, a liberalizing process that exposes people to one another and to themselves. – Pedro Sandor