Meghann Shutt owns Bridge Consulting, a small consulting firm that provides fundraising and organizational development support to nonprofit and government agencies in Maryland and DC. She is passionate about supporting people and communities in their efforts to make the world a little better than they found it.

Meghann is performing in the Women’s Storytelling Festival‘s two lunch time show producers’ storytelling shows at the Auld Shebeen on Saturday, March 14, 2020. Meghann is a regular performer with The Stoop Storytelling series, in Baltimore, MD.

The Stoop Storytelling Series is a Baltimore-based live show and podcast that features “ordinary” people sharing the extraordinary, true tales of their lives. The Stoop aims to build community through the sharing of personal stories. Stoop shows are intimate and surprising, wonderful and weird, hilarious and heartbreaking, and feature stories that are not memorized, but shared.

I asked Meghann how she got into storytelling in the first place. Meghann replied, “I grew up in Violetville, a little blue collar rowhouse neighborhood in Baltimore City, where stoop sitting with neighbors has been the core tradition of community life since the city’s founding. Baltimore, like a lot of east coast cities, is famous for its neighborhoods- each with their own personalities. My neighborhood was what I image Sesame Street would have been like if John Waters had directed it. It was kind and safe, but also gritty and bizarre. There was a richness and quirkiness to the expressions of humanity among the neighbors, and a kind of acceptance you settle into when you share living space so closely with others. I knew every single one of my neighbors in at least twenty houses on the block and they included: Big Baltimore hons, hair dressers, phlebotomists, a couple with a show dog, people in various stages of addiction and recovery, nurses, civil servants, stay at home moms, delivery truck drivers, cross-dressers, teachers, and an entire ecosystem of kids just as diverse. The social currency of the neighborhood was how well you could spin a yarn on a porch stoop, and I remember the high of capturing the attention of a group while telling a good story or the feeling of being transported somewhere else by hearing a story told by a gifted teller. Wisdom was shared there, and people connected around heartbreak, awkwardness, dreams, and outrage. That’s where I cut my teeth as a storyteller, and I am deeply honored to bring this Baltimore-style, stoop-sitting, story-sharing tradition to the Festival as a representative of Baltimore’s Stoop Storytelling Series.”

Listen to one of Meghann’s storytelling performances here.

Meghann continued, “The Stoop reminds me of a good Walt Whitman poem, teeming with America. Laura Wexler and Jessica Myles-Henkin, the show’s founders and producers, work tirelessly to curate a diverse set of stories around a theme, and though the stories are diverse, I always feel Whitman’s America in them- the doctor, the mother, the mason, the actor. Whether they are stories about holidays, travel, heartbreak, food, or parenting — a celebration of the common toil, joys, fears, and struggles that this being human comes with emerges. Even though the story details are always uber-specific to the individuals who tell them, it’s in those specifics that we see ourselves reflected. When strangers stand up in front of an audience and share their personal stories, trusting that we will hold those stories, that this sharing will be received with open hearts- how can we not feel more connected?”

Finally, she added, “This is what inspires me to participate as a storyteller and to attend as an audience member. In a world that feels increasingly divided and unable to communicate with each other across differences, I leave storytelling shows feeling more connected to my fellow humans and open to a whole range of what might be true for other people- whether or not those same things are true for me. In her poem, Small Kindnesses, Danusha Lameris writes, ‘We have so little of each other, now. So far/ from tribe and fire.’ For me, story sharing is one of the few sacred places left of tribe and fire.”

Come see Meghann perform, along with 17 other female storytellers, at the Women’s Storytelling Festival in the City of Fairfax, March 13 and 14, 2020. Details here.