Brett Stepanik
Rachel Deterding, right, listens to Jivonte Davis tell his story at the Central Library during a Real Life Library gathering.
“Wake up! Wake up! Pack your stuff,” Jivonte Davis says through gritted teeth as he pretends to shake himself awake. Davis is sitting at a table in a room on the third floor of Central Library, but he’s describing an early morning in Chicago years earlier.
“Where are we going?” Davis’ 8-year-old self asks his mom after being woken. “Grandma says we have to get out,” Davis says, imitating his mother’s voice, before continuing the narrative: “It’s 6 a.m. and we walk to the bus. There was a bathroom on the bus — I had never seen that before. It was a long ride. I remember falling asleep and when I woke up we were in front of a Capitol building.”
“As we stood on the street, I asked my mom ‘What now?’” Davis remembers. “With tears in her eyes she said, ‘I honestly don’t know.’”
Davis, now 21, is one of 13 people sharing a story at the library on this Saturday morning in mid-September. Other people tell stories of surviving cancer, depression and brain disease or of losing loved ones to murder or heroin overdose.
The Real Life Library event is put on by local nonprofit WHOA! (We Help One Another) and Madison Public Library.
Storytelling events like the Moth have become popular in recent years. But the Real Life Library — where each story is about 20 minutes long and the audiences are small — is geared to be less about performance and entertainment and more about community building, says Garrett Lee, an organizer of the event. “To me it’s more about the personal connection,” says Lee. “This is an opportunity to engage in a deeper connection with relative strangers.”
Co-organizer Jennifer Smith agrees. “I am constantly blown away by the idea that every single person in the world has a story to tell, and has something they can teach me,” Smith says.
In addition to the live events, WHOA! is recording people’s stories to build a video library for public “check out.” All of the stories will soon be available on the group’s website. The group is also working on a mobile app, where the stories will be available and people will be able to offer feedback on them.
Davis participated in order to show how his mentor, Will Green, “saved his life.”
When his family arrived in Madison, they stayed at a shelter. Davis would sleep on the floor so his four younger siblings would have more room on the two, twin-sized beds. During the day, he’d look out for his siblings while his mom worked.
The shelter felt like a prison to Davis and school wasn’t much better. “I went to four elementary schools in two months,” Davis says. “It was hard to make friends.”
He started skipping school and hanging out with older kids. “I didn’t have time to be a kid and under the pressure, I cracked,” Davis says.
But then he met Green while playing basketball at the gym. Another Real Life Library storyteller, Green founded Mentoring Positives with his wife in 2004 in Madison’s Darbo-Worthington neighborhood. The organization connects children throughout Dane County with positive role models. Davis is now a mentor with the group and hopes to one day start his own nonprofit, saying “If I could save as many lives as possible, I could help our community.”
Green gave Davis the tools he needed to face his fears. “I don’t want to let him down,” Davis says. “Will is a father figure to me.”
Rachel Deterding, a community learning center director at Nuestro Mundo Elementary School, was one of the people who watched Davis tell his aptly named story, “Mentoring Changed My Life.” Deterding says she would love to see the Real Life Library concept incorporated into the schools. “Youth often feel that they don’t have a voice,” Deterding says. “Everyone has a story and that story matters. We just need people who are willing to listen.”
Real Life Library inspiration: The Human Library, an international organization started in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2000
Countries with active human libraries: more than 60
26: People who have contributed books to the Real Life Library so far.
188: People who have “checked out” those stories.
