Spring 2024 Documentary Showcase Bright
Michelle Bright
Tennessee’s Mississippi: an audio documentary
Tennessee’s Mississippi: An Audio Documentary is a four-episode preview of what will later become a podcast about how Mississippi’s cultural history influenced international playwright Tennessee Williams’s work. Each episode preview is roughly eight minutes long, including an intro about the speaker I interviewed for that episode and what we discussed and an outro giving information about what listeners can expect if they tune in later for the rest of the episode.
For episode two, which is featured here, I interviewed Ralph Eubanks about the real-life stories behind the stories in Williams’s plays and about how Williams avoided writing about the black experience in Mississippi directly by writing about having non-white immigrant characters in his plays sharing similar racial violence that Black Mississippians historically faced.
Michelle Bright has wanted to be a storyteller since she was old enough to understand what a story was. Like most rural Southerners, she comes from a long line of storytellers and wants to keep the tradition alive, while experimenting with different modes of sharing stories. She’s worked as a written storyteller for almost twenty years, primarily through journalism, and taught first-year writing for the University of Mississippi for seven years. Her oral storytelling experience includes stand-up comedy, acting in theatre and film productions, collecting oral histories, and performing embodied storytelling. The oral storytelling traditions she inherited from her family remain her favorite, though.