LISTENING TO A PLACE
Story Circles, public health, and the work of building narrative infrastructure in rural North Carolina
Eastern North Carolina
Our health is bound to one another. We depend on systems that work, and we all have a role in building the future we want to share.
To understand how public systems show up in people’s lives, we began by listening to the experts: the people who live here.
Eastern North Carolina stretches from the Virginia line to South Carolina and from the Atlantic coast roughly 200 miles inland. It includes some of the state’s most rural counties, along with cities like Greenville and Wilmington.
Between them are small towns, unincorporated communities, farms, forests, and crossroads. This is sweet potato country. Hog country. Peanut country. Fishing country. Shrimp boats work the sounds and rivers. Farms sit beside new subdivisions. Some families have lived on the same land for generations. Newcomers have arrived from Mexico and Central America, from cities farther north, and from around the world.
Rural and urban are not separate worlds here. People move between them for work, school, doctors, family, groceries, and care.
Young people leave. Some come home. New people arrive. Industries disappear and others take their place.
The region holds tremendous wealth in land, culture, history, knowledge, and relationships, alongside long histories of disinvestment and inequality. Storms, flooding, changing economies, fragile infrastructure, and uneven public systems shape daily life differently depending on where people live.
Describing eastern North Carolina only through what it lacks gets the place wrong.
People here have built ways of taking care of one another.
This is where we began.
We wanted to understand what public health looked like in people’s everyday lives.
Where did people experience care? What helped them stay safe and well? Who did they trust? Where had trust been strained? What happened when public systems worked, and what happened when they didn’t?
We weren’t interested in arriving with a definition of public health. We wanted to hear how people understood it from where they stood.
And we wanted to know what might happen if those stories could travel back into communities, into public conversations, and toward the people and institutions making decisions.
So we started calling people.
TRUST COMES BEFORE THE STORY
We didn’t start by putting out a call for participants.
In some places, Narrative Arts had relationships that went back years. In others, we began by calling people who knew the community better than we did: community health workers, artists, advocates, organizers, and neighbors.
We asked them what was happening.
What conversations were people already having? What felt urgent? Who was being heard? Who wasn’t? What would make it possible for people to sit together and speak openly?
Trust isn’t something a public institution can simply ask for. It is built through experience.
It grows when people show up consistently, listen, keep commitments, and come back.
And trust is connected to power.
Listening matters when people can see that what they share has somewhere to go, that their knowledge can influence priorities, decisions, resources, and the systems that shape everyday life.
From those conversations, we identified Community Connectors, people in each county who had put in the time.
They knew the history of the place. They understood relationships we couldn’t see. They knew who people trusted, where trust had been strained, and who needed to be in the room.
They weren’t there simply to recruit people for a Narrative Arts project.
We built the work together.
Together, we talked about the questions we would ask, where people would gather, who should be invited, and what kind of space would allow people to tell something true.
THE WORK MOVES AT THE SPEED OF RELATIONSHIPS.
The work begins by listening.
WE HAD TO FIND THE QUESTION
The question mattered.
We didn’t want to decide in advance what people should talk about. We wanted enough room for people to tell us what mattered from where they stood.
So we kept talking.
We asked what people were carrying.
What was hard to talk about.
What people were tired of being asked.
What they wished someone would ask.
What they were seeing that wasn’t showing up in reports or meetings.
Out of those conversations, a question began to take shape.
Not a survey question. Not a message test.
A question people could enter from their own lives.
We Organized Story Circles
That’s where the rooms, microphones, voices, pauses, laughter, long silences, and stories begin.
Narrative Arts has used Story Circles for more than twenty years.
The form is simple. People sit together. A question is offered. One person tells a story from their own life. The rest of the circle listens.
Then the next person tells.
There is no rush to respond. No requirement to agree. No expert at the front of the room explaining what the stories mean.
Everyone gets time.
That changes things.
A conversation about public health can quickly become a conversation about hospitals, insurance, programs, statistics, or what isn’t working.
A story starts somewhere else.
A mother remembers what happened after a storm. Someone remembers the neighbor who checked in during COVID. Another person talks about being alone. Someone talks about a doctor they trust—or one they don’t.
We record portions of the circles, with permission. Not everything gets recorded. Not every story needs to travel beyond the room.
But some do.
THE STORIES STARTED TO ACCUMULATE
One story rarely tells you what is happening in a place.
But stories begin to gather around one another.
Across the circles, people talked about isolation. About who showed up after storms. About neighbors who checked in. About leaving home and coming back. About institutions that had disappeared, the ones that still worked, and the informal networks people relied on when there was nowhere else to turn.
The same concerns surfaced differently from county to county.
Trust was rarely abstract. It had a person’s name attached to it.
So did care.
So did disappointment.
We began listening across the stories for patterns, tensions, and questions that kept returning.
Some stories pointed toward public systems. Others toward family, faith, friendship, neighbors, and local organizations.
Often they pointed toward both.
THE STORIES WERE BEGINNING TO SHOW US THE LANDSCAPE.
THE STORIES CAME HOME
The Stories Came Home
After the Story Circles, we went back through the recordings.
We made small edits. We shortened stories. We cleaned up the audio. But we were careful with what people had given us. Before anything went further, the storytellers listened. If we had gotten something wrong, we changed it.
Then we packed up the stories and took them back.
In Burgaw, people gathered at the public library. In Whiteville, at a diner. In Hertford County, a community theater. In Bertie County, around a country-cooking buffet.
We brought wireless headphones.
People put them on and listened to people they knew, or people who lived a few roads over whom they had never met.
There was food. People talked. People laughed. They took the headphones off and handed them to somebody else.
Sometimes more than a hundred people sat together in a room, listening to stories that had begun with a handful of people sitting in a circle.
A person tells a story in a small room. Weeks later, they can look across a crowded public space and see other people listening to their voice.
Community members came. Public health officials came. Some brought information and resources to share. Then they put on the same headphones as everyone else and listened.
For a little while, the usual relationships shifted.
The person whose experience might ordinarily become a data point, a case study, or a response on a community health assessment was the person speaking.
The professional was listening.
We wanted these gatherings to feel less like presentations and more like places people might want to stay awhile.
A library can become one of those places. So can a diner, a theater, or a buffet.
Something happens when a community hears itself this way.
People hear what is difficult, but also the knowledge that lives in a place. The people who show up. The ways neighbors take care of one another. The humor. The disagreements. The things that have been lost. The things people are trying to hold onto.
We came to think of this as positive community mirroring.
But the return also does something else.
It begins to close a narrative feedback loop.
Too often, people are asked to tell their stories and never know what happened to them. Information leaves the community. Someone analyzes it. A report gets written. Decisions may be made somewhere else.
We wanted to interrupt that pattern.
Listen. Record. Edit. Return. Listen again.
The story moves outward, but it also comes back.
When it comes back, other people can respond. Public officials can hear it. Neighbors can recognize themselves or disagree. What we learn can shape the next question, the next gathering, and the conversations these stories enter.
None of this changes a system overnight.
A hundred people wearing headphones does not transform a public health system. A health official listening beside a resident does not erase years of mistrust.
But something has changed.
A different kind of public space has been made. Someone who is usually spoken about is speaking. Someone accustomed to speaking is listening. People who might not otherwise be in conversation are sharing a room.
The community wasn’t an audience for stories we had produced about them.
They were the storytellers. They were part of the production. And when the stories came home, they became listeners to one another.
That cycle of relationship, listening, storytelling, return, response, and listening again is part of what we mean by building narrative infrastructure.
It gives stories somewhere to go.
And it gives them a way to come home.
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