Fishbowl is a storytelling club which hosts a weekly open-mic event where students, faculty, and community members come and tell true stories based on a topic.
That’s what it’s always been when I started the club in 2017, and who knows if it’s what it’ll continue to be.
This project is a collection of zines, posters, events and a film that attempts to unravel the dynamic, fun community of Fishbowl during its open-mic season of Fall 2018.
Community is one of the guiding principles of the entire project, and so carry that idea forward as you see how all these individual pieces come together into something larger and more beautiful.
Fishbowl, as I’d like to think, is driven accidentally by agonist pluralism. At the very least, this capstone project was. The volume of voices I’ve had the opportunity to experience because of this organization has built a network of symbiotic relationships in an unforgettable community. A community which strangers can weave in and out of as they please, a community which shifts as time in university moves on.
Administering a public speaking space is about the easiest thing to accomplish, but about the most complex thing to get right.
For example, if you would like to create your own public speaking space, all you must do is find a public space, gather some people, and speak. It’s that simple, and most (non-fascist) institutions will actually protect your right to do all of those things.
But what does this platform mean for the greater community? What can people say? Can they say anything?
Harder still, what can’t people say? How do you decide what is and isn’t allowed?
Through profiles, through content, through our bubbles of friends, we grow up forming our reality in a way that hurts us the least. How else could one reconcile the innumerable crises this country is under right now?
Breaking out of our shells and diversifying our realities is something very difficult in today’s world. Fishbowl offers a free, in-person platform to do just that.
As a friend told me, Fishbowl is a free class on empathy that no one knew they needed. It’s a place where people of all walks of life can listen to each other. It’s a place where social outcasts can speak their minds, where people can find support for what they’re going through, and where we can learn about all the different ways the world works for each other.
Fishbowl has been a community I can confide in, laugh at, and cry with. Fishbowl has been a family, and I’ll never forget them.
Yet, my part in Fishbowl’s tale is ending. Stories usually end with a resolve, sometimes death, sometimes even a beautifully worded conclusion. But mine will end in true, Fishbowl fashion.
So, uh, yeah. That’s my story. Thank you.