When I was a little girl in Berkeley County, West Virginia, one of the biggest thrills for me was to go with my mother down to Peg’s store to sell our eggs. Peg’s was a wondrous place filled with things I never saw at home - little bags of potato chips, big rolls of bologna, squishy loaves of cellophaned white bread, chocolate pop, and a glass case twice as tall as me filled with penny candy. If you bought bologna at Peg’s, it would get wrapped in white butcher paper and tied shut with string that came down from a roll hung close to the ceiling — like fishing line from heaven. Penny candy was put in a small brown paper sack just the right size for little hands to twist shut and swing back and forth while eavesdropping on grown-up conversations. There was a time across America, in rural and urban communities alike, when people gathered daily to trade and talk at their local store. The neighborhood store, unlike its successor the convenience store, had no drive-through windows or pay at the pump gasoline because buying what you needed, as quickly as you could, with as little talk as possible, wasn’t the idea. Instead, you traded for what you needed then sat on the porch in the summer or by the heat in the winter and told your latest tall tale or joke, caught up on what was going on in the community, and philosophized and argued about politics — local, state, federal, and world. You celebrated and commiserated with your neighbors. The country store, the stoop, the market, the front porch are representative of what some believe must exist in order for communities to develop and thrive: free social spaces — settings that allow us to arrange our private and civic lives in a non-coercive manner. Roadside Theater creates its plays and helps other communities create their plays from local life. In order to tap into this local life with its rich array of stories, oral histories and music, we saw that communities needed to re-invent free social spaces. We developed the community story circle as a partial answer to this need. Participating in a story circle is as much about listening as about telling. Food is important! Story circles often occur after pot-luck suppers or dessert receptions. Over the past 15 years, these story circles have evolved from a playmaking tool to a way to help communities identify and address a variety of local social, educational, health, environmental, and cultural issues. Story circles have been a part of all the work you will read about in this issue of Partnerships.
		Story circles aren’t rocket science, you know. If people listen to each other, they learn. Joy Smith-Briggs