NEW
Library Project
Volume 1, Number 2 - Fall 2002
People
and Stories Touches Readers Coast to Coast
In
Westchester, N.Y., Brenda Connor-Bey brought the men and women in a
probation group stories she thought would touch their lives. But they were
more interested in talking about the writer’s craft.
The
twelve men and three women, participants in a day program sponsored by
Yonkers Hospital, had been incarcerated in the past. Some were working on
GEDs; others were taking college courses.
When
Connor-Bey read them Langston Hughes’s story, “Thank You, M’am,” a
bout a woman who becomes a temporary mentor to a boy who tries to steal
her purse, the group was interested in why Hughes took so long to tell
readers the woman’s name.
“I
said, ‘Did it really matter?’” Connor-Bey recalled. “They said,
‘No,’ we already knew who she was. There’s always somebody like that
in the neighborhood.”
Connor-Bey’s
other group, at a day treatment program for drug and alcohol addiction,
used the stories as springboards to talk about their lives. One man in the
group asked Connor-Bey whether she had any stories containing positive
images of black men. Later he told her, “You did something really good
here. I didn’t read before, because I didn’t understand what I was
reading. Now I find myself going out to the car, turning on the radio and
reading the newspaper.”
Connor-Bey,
a fiction writer and poet who teaches in schools, senior centers and other
settings, believes People and Stories—Gente y Cuentos is “a great
program because it’s subtle. It’s non-threatening. Especially in these
facilities, it’s another link to the outside, to the world that has been
denied them.”
Robin
Osborne, adult and outreach services coordinator for the Westchester
Library System, is an emphatic supporter of the program. “What I like
about People and Stories—Gente y Cuentos is there are no assumptions
made about skills or knowledge. It’s about stories and how stories
enhance and enrich our lives,” she said.
On
the other side of the country, when Pat Steenland would walk into the
noisy drop-in center of The Friendly Place, a homeless shelter in West
Oakland, someone usually yelled out, “It’s the Story Lady,” and the
room would quiet down.
At
Pomeroy House, a residential program in San Francisco for women with
substance abuse problems, Steenland watched the women’s initial mistrust
melt to openness as they found links between their lives and the stories.
She
knows from facilitators’ anecdotes, and her own experience, that People
and Stories has made a difference in an array of Bay Area sites—the San
Francisco County Jail for Women, a senior center in El Cerrito, a group of
Head Start parents and teachers in Berkeley, a welfare-to-work program.
“Sometimes
funders want to see results,” she said. “There’s a lot of
anecdotal evidence about what goes on in People and Stories, but
it’s hard to pin it down.
“Several
times women have saved all the copies [of the stories] and said they were
saving them for their children,” said Steenland, who teaches in the
college writing program at the University of California/Berkeley. “I
don’t think you can see long-term what is going to happen. You can’t
see what the impact is going to be.”