Picture from site production of The Power Within Reading Series, setting up for guests
Where does your power come from?
For The Power Within project, we were to write a roughly 10 minute story that was centered around the title question and one goal: to be emotionally honest. We worked with So Say We All, a non profit organization that helps people share their stories, through several writing workshops and performance examples in order to make our stories as vulnerable and engaging as possible. Most of these stories were not happy. Like life, they had messy endings and it was hard to decipher who the good guy and bad guy were. I think the power in these stories, often describing events that seemed quite the opposite, came from the liberation of writing them and sharing them aloud. A big part of the black and brown power movements has been claiming the qualities that society has told you were bad or shouldn’t be discussed. By telling your story, your honest story, you can open up and claim all those parts of yourself that you might have previously been unashamed of. No one ever really cares to ask teenagers about their stories. Usually we are seen as too young or dumb to be a part of a conversation, or we’re immediately stereotyped as a “hoodlum” or “goodie goodie” and people assume that there is no backstory to that. A lot of people think that teenagers act the way that they do because they were born that way. That’s really not true. TPW is about changing that perspective and showing up all the adults who believed it. It’s about saying teenagers might actually have something to teach YOU. Telling your story is important because it helps you realized that the world, yourself included, deserves to be heard, and deserves to be proud. The Story of my Story:Drafts, Critique, Scripting, Audio