The Enormous Radio is John Cheever's lyrical short story about a woman who mysteriously picks up her neighbors' intimate conversations over her radio; their laughter, fights, loneliness, daily struggles, and triumphs.

An enormous radio of sorts has been picking up frequencies all over Dayton for the past two years. It's called the Dayton Stories Project, an ambitious, community-wide effort that is bringing Daytonians together, recording their stories, turning their everyday lives into the stuff of history, the stuff of theater.

While preparing to begin the project, Phyllis Brzozowska (executive director of CityFolk, a Dayton area presenter of traditional arts and culture) visited with two theater companies CityFolk had worked with in the past, Roadside Theater from Whitesburg, Kentucky, and Junebug Productions from New Orleans, and invited them to become a part of the work.

"It's a unique project in its scope, and the way it's been set up, directed, and run through the communities that have been involved," says Tommy Bledsoe of Roadside. "Roadside and Junebug have worked with similar projects, but this is the first time a project like this has involved so many different people, with an attempt to include those people in the telling of their own stories."

The Artist and Community Connection's Theresa Holden worked with Brzozowska to build the residency which created an impressive community partnership, including the Montgomery County Historical Society, the city of Dayton Cultural Arts Program, the Human Race Theatre Company, Our Common Heritage, and Kente Theatre Company. Holden, Brzozowska, and the partnership worked with Roadside and Junebug in a Story Circle process to engage community members in telling their own stories.

Here's how a Story Circle works: Bring together a group of people with a common interest, a common heritage. Maybe they grew up in the same neighborhood, attended the same school, worked in the same office for decades. Sit them in a circle and let each speak, one at a time, their memories sparking others like a brush fire.

At first, the refrain is nearly almost always the same: "I don't have a story to tell. Nothing ever happens to me." Stay in the magic circle long enough, however, and something different begins to happen. Folks come to understand that their stories are history of the most important kind: history that illuminates the listeners' own past; history that documents the day-to-day life of a community or a generation.

Marilyn Shannon knows. As director of the Dayton Stories Project, she has sat in on most of the 180 Story Circles that have been held throughout the city since January 1994. "History is ordinary, everyday stuff you don't think is important," Shannon says. Brzozowska concurs: "We're so programmed that stories come from Hollywood and television, and we've undervalued our own stories for so long. Even though I know it in my head, it still seems new to me when these amazing stories come out."

Some of these stories include Phyllis Delong's tales of her mother's sacrifice during her childhood in the '40s: "When we'd have chicken, Mommy always said she liked the back better . . . but since I've gotten grown, I figured out, you know, she ate it because she gave us kids the better pieces."

And, Ozell Bradford's memories: "When I was growing up, my grandmother was a friend of Mrs. Dunbar, and we would go to the Dunbar house and talk to Mrs. Dunbar . . . she would tell us about her slave days and her work in the church, and trying to get educated. And she said, 'My son, Paul Laurence Dunbar, his work will go down in history. It may not be in my lifetime, but it will happen.' "

And Helen Mann Behnken's reflection of her Kentucky childhood: "One afternoon, I was sittin' on the porch at my aunt's house, rockin' the baby, when she saw these two men in suits, way off, walkin' through the holler. "Honey," she said, "those must be revenuers. Go hide the whiskey.' "

The stories all will be brought to life in a series of community performances as well as an original play, And That's My Story, that kicks off the Human Race season in September. Eventually, the tapes and transcripts will be housed in a permanent archive at the Montgomery County Historical Society.

"We (and CityFolk) are interested in preserving the legacy of the project," says Sarah Sessions of the Historical Society. "In the course of the Story Circles themselves, there's a heck of a lot of history in the form of people's memories and stories. I can't begin to tell you what I've learned about downtown Dayton."