Storytime began as a simple but revolutionary idea: Community matters, and staff, students, and faculty deserve a dedicated space outside of work and study to sit down and get to know each other. Since 2007, when Pei-Ku Ro ’09 founded Storytime, the club has hosted over 200 storytelling events on Sunday evenings. These “Storytimes,” as they are known, have featured two decades of stories from students, professors, staff, and members of the wider Williamstown community. Members of the community submit nominations, and Storyboard — the organizing board for Storytime — randomly selects from these nominations. Lasting an hour or so, Storytime offers community members a chance to share about their life with the community.
This tradition has contributed to a proliferation of storytelling across campus — evidenced by its practice at alum events and the Williams-Exeter Programme at Oxford. Unfortunately, Storytime is no longer receiving the same amount of excitement that it once generated. Despite numerous attempts at recruiting, our 15-person board from 2021 has shrunk to four by this past fall, and now stands only two strong.
Since we are both seniors in our second semesters and it is infeasible to continue to run the club without more support, we write this article as a tribute to the power of storytelling, an appeal for new members, and a record for any students in the future who may wish to restart Storytime should it go on hiatus when we graduate.
During his Storytime last November, Associate Director of the Outing Club Scott Lewis quoted former Chaplain to the College Rick Spalding, who said of Storytime, “The most radical thing we can do is introduce people to each other.” At the College, Storytime has served the critical purpose of bringing very different people together to share their stories and get to know each other. In the past, Storytime has played an active role as part of programming for Previews and EphVentures. Prior members of the organizing board of Storytime have thought very intentionally about programming, going on sabbatical to ensure that Storytime was aligning with the priorities and needs of minoritized communities on campus and working with Special Collections to archive a diversity of stories about what it means to belong to the College community. Some of these stories have already been made available to the public; some will be released by Special Collections in 20, 50, or 100 years; and some were only shared with those who decided to take a break from work and study to spend a Sunday evening listening to friends, professors, staff members, or strangers share their stories.
Only two years ago, Sunday Storytimes used to regularly draw 40 to 60 students, and was even featured in the supplemental essay prompts for the College’s application. However, despite having gone through the board recruiting process six times in the past two years, we haven’t received a single application, and it has become infeasible for our two-person board to handle the logistics of regular events, recruiting storytellers, and baking the signature Storytime cookies. More importantly, it feels unreasonable to ask storytellers to prepare stories when the listenership we can offer them range from three to sixty.
Storytime is still needed on campus. A liberal arts education emphasizes diversity of curricular exposure, but too often that remains limited to academic settings. Storytime complements academic spaces by emphasizing personal experience, giving community members a chance to engage productively with others who have different perspectives and lived experiences. We believe everyone has a unique story to share, but people are busy and rarely take time to sit down together and listen to each other, instead limiting their conversations to homework, work life, and exam schedules. Perhaps the shift away from Storyboard membership and Storytime attendance is part of a positive broader cultural shift away from overscheduling and overcommitting. If so, we are faced with a challenge: How do we create a civically engaged community while also respecting and prioritizing the fact that students, faculty, and staff need time and resources to take care of themselves? As of now, we don’t have an answer, but we pose this as an open question to the community as other organizations also begin to think about how they can remain relevant with reduced student interest, enthusiasm, and involvement.
Though we don’t have the board members or consistent audience interest to continue with our usual weekly Storytimes, we intend to host a minimum of two more events before we graduate: Earth Week Storytime in April and Senior Week Storytime in May. Our prior boards have archived some of our organizational materials with Special Collections, and we intend to do the same, so that future boards can easily bring back this organization and its radical mission. We also encourage other organizations around campus to continue cultivating the values Storytime fosters — those of intentional listening, personal reflection, and dialogue among people with varying backgrounds and experiences. We know that several student organizations and athletics teams have hosted their own Storytime events in the past, and we hope that they will continue to do so in the future.
We hope that, in one form or another, the radical mission of Storytime — introducing people with diverse lived experiences to each other — will persist.
Hikaru Wakeel Hayakawa ʼ24 is a history major and global and environmental studies concentrator from Maplewood, NJ.
Jacob Lehmann Duke ʼ24 is a mathematics major and Jewish studies Concentrator from Berkeley, CA.