This is a sponsored interview in partnership with Tecovas.
Amparo Garcia-Crow loves stories. Garcia-Crow, a writer, director, actress, and professor, founded The Living Room - Story Time for Grownups, a monthly event where people tell true life stories, in 2009. Since then, Garcia-Crow has found a community of listeners.
We caught up with her this month.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is The Living Room and what inspired you to start it?
“I’ve always been a storyteller with all the things. Whether I’m giving a lecture, whether I’m putting a workshop together, writing a play, a screenplay, a story, a memoir, whatever, at the heart of it, it’s making connections with a community of listeners.
What I really love is, scientifically it’s been proven that our brains (are on) when we’re listening as an audience. That’s why I’ve always loved doing theater. There’s an unmistakable communion that occurs. It’s energetic, and even if you don’t like everything you’re hearing, it’s still a feeling of surrendering and becoming a child, curious again to hear somebody else’s life story.”
Are the stories people tell true?
“They’re all true. That’s the criteria. As the organizer and in some ways, the director of it, I try to have a beginning, a middle, and end for the night itself. What I’m listening for is stories (about) love, sex, death, health, and spiritual transformation, and that at least one story represents, at the heart of it, any of those possibilities.”
What should Austinites know about your son, musician Shakey Graves?
“I love that he still trusts the unknown. That takes a lot of love for what you’d like to create more than whether it’s gonna be successful or not. It takes a lot of courage to trust the impulse and to let yourself still have lots of fun without knowing where it’s gonna go.”
