California Story Fund
Telling the Streets: True Urban Legends
San Diego Public Library
Project Director: Lynn Whitehouse
San Diego’s homeless youth to tell their urban legends
“Telling the Streets” will involve homeless youth in San Diego in telling their urban legends — stories that epitomize their experiences.
“Stories of individual personal experiences become legends when they are of value to the community,” said Project Director Lynn Whitehouse, a librarian at the San Diego Public Library. “Often these legends involve tales of survival on the streets.”
The project is a joint effort of the San Diego Public Library and the Toussaint Academy of the Arts and Sciences, a licensed group home serving homeless youth in San Diego County.
Participants will be drawn from the Toussaint Academy as well as from the Monarch School, one of the few schools allowing homeless youth to attend without a valid address.
One component of the project will be a writing workshop in which the teens will discuss interesting or strange events in their lives, the legendary narratives significant to them. Subsequently as a group they will choose the best stories and then narrate them on camera in relevant downtown locations, producing a short documentary on their urban legends.
The teen-produced mini-documentary will be screened at the San Diego Downtown Public Library, the University of San Diego and during a school assembly at a downtown high school. After each screening, Antone Minard, a visiting professor of English at the University of San Diego and the project’s humanities advisor, will give a short talk on the significance of legendary narrative.
“The project will give a voice to a largely voiceless community and will give the general population a window into the homeless teens’ world,” Whitehouse said.