Your story is mine
Woodlawn Stories brings together a neighborhood.
 april 7, 2011 - april 14, 2011
cover story by Sam George
We all have stories. We hold them close, for
stories are the most potent form that memory
can take. We carry them around with us, care-
fully polishing and honing them in the telling and
re-telling, until they become integral parts of our
identity. How many times have you sat recount-
ing a particularly memorable experience around
a table with friends, or become exasperated at the
old man who tells you for the umpteenth time
about “that one time,” unaware that his story has
grown stale?
Before the advent of recorded media, story-
telling was also how we passed our history down,
though now we have largely supplanted traditional
storytelling with the sensationalism of Hollywood
or the cringe-inducing rubbernecking of reality
television.
Still, much as I hate to say it, reality television
has it right, in that real life is often more bizarre
and fascinating than anything that fiction could
hope to produce. Now, if only television producers
would stop reveling in human filth and misery, we
might actually get to see some interesting stories
on the boob-tube.
Still, a story is never more powerful than
when it is being told in person by the originator.
There is a visceral connection that occurs between
a storyteller and their audience when they share
community space, something the social media
generation is in danger of forgetting.
Luckily, a local nonprofit creative writing
program for kids called Desert Island Supply
Company (DISCO) is working to re-establish
storytelling as an important cultural medium.
DISCO, which is located in Birmingham’s
Woodlawn neighborhood, recently received a
Kresge Arts in Birmingham award and has wasted
no time in partnering with Woodlawn High
School to produce an ambitious project called
Woodlawn Stories.
Chip Brantley, DISCO co-founder, says that
this project fits right in with their mission to bring
Birmingham students opportunities to write. “By
writing, students think about who they are, who
they want to be, what matters to them, how their
own story will be told,” Brantley says. “While
Woodlawn Stories is a not strictly a writing proj-
ect, DISCO is based in Woodlawn and run by vol-
unteers who, at the most basic level, believe stories
and storytelling are important ends in themselves.”
So what is Woodlawn Stories? According
to Brantley, it’s a multi-faceted creative endeavor
that began when Woodlawn Stories project
director Ron Pate, who had experience with nar-
rative-based community development projects,
approached DISCO’s Cahrlotte Donlan with the
idea. “Ron had worked on and studied similar
projects across the country, including Swamp
Gravy, a community stories performance in
Colquitt, Georgia,” Brantley says. “Charlotte was
instrumental in getting DISCO off the ground,
and she’s deeply interested in community develop-
ment in Woodlawn. Charlotte told me about it,
and over a series of conversations, the basic idea
for the project took shape.”
The project was broken down into three
phases, the first of which involved an army of
volunteers armed with video cameras and audio
recorders collecting stories from Woodlawn
natives. “We really tried to give members of the
Woodlawn community—past and present—as
many opportunities to tell their stories as possible,”
Brantley says, “so in addition to putting out the
call for stories with churches, businesses, schools,
alumni organizations, libraries and neighborhood
associations, we held open storytelling days at
some of those same places.”
BIRMINGHAM WEEKLY
After the massive gathering of stories
was complete, it was time to process them into
a usable format. This task fell to five of the
Woodlawn Stories organizers—Nancy Rutland
Glaub, Tanner Latham, Ron Pate, Katy Smith
and Carla Jean Whitley—who met weekly for
months to transcribe the recorded material and
cobble together a script from the resulting stories.
“The stories are not dramatized or fictionalized,”
according to Brantley, “so the script is less of a
play—there’s no overarching narrative—and more
a collage of voices that play off of each other. The
idea was to pull these many voices of Woodlawn
into one single thread.”
The culmination of all this hard work
will occur this weekend at Woodlawn High
School when 15 students will perform the work
at two free performances. For the past month,
Woodlawn Stories Creative Director Olivia
McGhaha has been rehearsing with the students,
helping them to voice the stories of their neigh-
borhood.
“I’m very excited about the fact that
Woodlawn was selected to have this happen,”
McGaha says. “I think it’s a wonderful thing for
the community, and a wonderful thing for the
students at Woodlawn, especially the ones who
are involved. I think it’s going to at least stir con-
versation.”
McGaha also views this project as something
that will help bring solidarity to the Woodlawn
community. “When people know things about
each other, then some of the hang-ups [people
have] tend to not be so important once you realize
that everybody’s got a story,” she says. “They tend
to bring us together.”
I asked Brantley if he had learned anything
about the nature of Woodlawn after hearing
so many of its stories. “Woodlawn predates
Birmingham, and there’s a lot of pride in the com-
munity, even among those people who haven’t
lived here in a long time,” he says. “Like any com-
munity, it’s been through good and bad, and we’ve
heard a lot of both. We’ve interviewed everyone
from a 21-year-old student who spent time in
shelters to an 80-something-year-old stage actress,
and I think we’ve all been struck by the timeless-
ness of the stories. At the same time, it’s important
to remind ourselves that we interviewed only 60
people out of the I-don’t-know-how-many who
are part of the Woodlawn community. We hope
this will be a starting point, the foundation for
ongoing storytelling in Woodlawn. We’re really
thinking of this past year—the 60 stories, the
script, the performance—as the foundation for an
ongoing storytelling project in Woodlawn. I’m not
sure what form that project will take, but it will
happen.”
Brantley also found the process a personally
rewarding one. “Just the process of sitting across
from someone and listening to her stories was
its own satisfaction,” he remembers. “I’ve worked
for a while in journalism and so was used to
interviewing people. This experience felt totally
different from that kind of work. First, we usu-
ally had no prior knowledge about the person
we were listening to, so the questions we could
ask had to be general at first. Second, we had
the luxury of just listening. We tried to steer the
interview toward stories— and away from straight
bio—but we weren’t thinking about, for example,
how we were going to use this or that quote. We
heard some amazing stories, and we heard them
often. But we also heard little details that spoke
volumes. For example, Bobby Bowden, one of the
most successful football coaches of all time and a
Woodlawn High School graduate, mentioned that
 Faces of Woodlawn: A few of the folks who provided inspiration for Woodlawn Stories.
Clockwise: Bill Humphrey, Myeisha Hutchinson and Bobby Bowden.
Photos by T. Scott Carlisle.

his childhood home was next to the football field
and that extra points and field goals would often
come soaring into his yard.”
Now that the project is finally reaching its
conclusion, Brantley reflects back on the pro-
cess. “It has brought together a lot of people in
the community who might not have connected
otherwise,” he says. “Interviewing people and set-
ting up community storytelling days and getting
this performance staged: All of it has required
back-and-forth between people who care about
Woodlawn but who probably wouldn’t have
talked otherwise. That’s a good thing.”
The free performances, which will be
held in the auditorium of Woodlawn High
School on Friday, April 8, at 7 p.m. and
Saturday, April 9, at 4 p.m., has been pulled
together with help from ASFA, the Corporate
Events team at Regions, Urban Cookhouse and
Mellow Mushroom. For more info, visit www.
desertislandsupplyco.com.
Woodlawn Stories performers: Mia
Billingsly, Tyrone Blackmon, Whittni Brackett,
Charles Brooks, Sharay Brooks, Torilynn
Denney, Aaron Dixon, Markel Marshall,
Marvin Marshall, Illyshia Parker, Lauren
Parker, Derrel Rhode, Ladarius Smith, Marquis
Tucker and LaMetrious Waller.
Sam George is the managing editor of
Birmingham Weekly. Please send your com-
ments to edtore@bhamweekly.com.
april 7, 2011 - april 14, 2011 BIRMINGHAM WEEKLY