Tuscaloosa News (Tuscaloosa, AL), November 14, 2013
Summary:
Tin Can Tales, a new series of intimate storytelling events featuring community members including University of Alabama students, faculty members, writers and others, begins at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in the Bama Theatre’s Greensboro Room.
Each tale-teller will share experiences in first-person narrative, with each installment of the planned series to follow a particular theme. This first Tin Can Tales night will be centered around, appropriately, “Firsts.”
Among those telling stories will be UA students Noah Cannon and William Mason, UA professors Billy Field and Betty Florey, NPR Music critic and correspondent Ann Powers, and architect and community arts activist Rebecca Rothman.
Field, a professor in telecommunication and film, worked in Hollywood for 14 years, writing for the TV show “Fame,” and feature films for Warner Bros., Disney and 20th Century Fox.
“Storytelling helps us understand who we are and where we came from, and the struggles we went through to get here,” Field said. “Understanding this is a basic human need. That is why people want and need to hear stories.”
Tin Can Tales has been created by UA’s Creative Campus, a collaborative system of students, faculty and community housed in the Office of Academic Affairs. Creative Campus intern Katharine Buckley said she hopes the event fosters a sense of communication and community.
“Telling stories is such an inherently human act that we wanted to create an event where people of Tuscaloosa can have a voice to share their own stories and possibly through the process tell a broader story of what it’s like to live in Tuscaloosa,” she said.
Subjects Covered: diversity, personal storytelling