What’s Your Story?

When she was 5 years old, Beverly Boone Meek, her brothers and cousins would walk to Sunday school through the woods instead of on a public road, fearful of slurs or retaliation fueled by racism.

While growing up in rural Georgia in the 1950s and 1960s, Meek said she and her family saw a burning cross and had a relative run out of town by the Ku Klux Klan. Despite that, Meek’s mother taught her the importance of strength and love, a life lesson Meek will share this week in front of a Duke audience.

Meek, now 65 and the arts outreach and communications assistant at Duke, will be among five Duke students and employees participating March 23 in the second annual “What’s Your Story?” project around the theme of “Teachers and Mentors.”

“Telling my story is one way I can speak and take emotion and put it into words,” Meek said.

The storytelling event, which is free and open to the public, is from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., at the Doris Duke Center. Duke’s Language, Arts and Media Program (LAMP) and The Monti, a storytelling organization in the Triangle, are collaborating on the program. Duke storytellers have worked over the past few weeks to workshop their stories, including attended a February session led by Jeff Polish, The Monti’s executive director, to learn effective storytelling techniques.

Jennifer Ahern-Dodson, LAMP’s associate director, said the “What’s Your Story?” project started in 2015 as a way to provide small moments for Duke community members to authentically connect with each other. Last year’s theme was “Uncertainty.”

“When we share stories about who we are, like this is what I care about, this is my human experience, and we do that in a public forum, it makes Duke a little bit smaller,” Ahern-Dodson said. “We not only get a sense of our work but a sense of who we are as human beings.”

For Hannah Jacobs, the event will be her first live storytelling experience. A multimedia analyst in the Wired! Lab at Duke, Jacobs helps students create 3D modeling and mapping projects. In her free time, she makes pottery mugs, bowls and plates. Her story will be about how she first learned to make different types of pottery, dating back to when she was a student at Warren Wilson College near Asheville.

“I’m really wanting to push myself to be a better speaker, so doing something like this will help me develop my speaking skills a little bit,” Jacobs said. “It’s good to be extemporaneous and make sense and be able to use your voice in a way that captures attention rather than just reading a paper.”