 Well everyone has a story and last night Headwaters Music and Arts invited the community to share theirs with their first-ever story slam. Reporter Cheryl Moore tells us about the spoken word event in this week's in focus. I was around people with courage, resilience and I found inside of them something that I had not seen in a lot of folks. Since the beginning of time humans have used their voices to connect with each other. The first-ever Headwaters Music and Arts story slam explored the art form of spoken word. The best storytellers I've ever seen are people who are really connected with their audience. They know that what they're doing is about playing with the audience and creating an experience where the audience feels connected to them and to the story. Six people share five minute long stories at the slam. The theme of the night was speak. The theme is speak because it is so vitally important these days that we think about using our voice as well. How do we speak out? This project was originally funded in part to tell to work on me too stories to people an opportunity to tell me two stories but what it has evolved to is a much larger vision of how do we use our voices. At the end of the event the audience voted to determine the first second and third place story slam winners. The dancing, the drumming, the stage-making it was the right place to be. Tom Schmidt took home the top honor with a story about the time he protested the line three pipeline in the streets of downtown Bemidji this past august. It was powerful. I was I was actually I'm surprised that I won because the stories were so powerful and so it's coming from so deep. It's a powerful event and I'm honored just to be listening to stories. If you want a chance to step up to the microphone or to just be a listener in the audience there's a chance the future story slam may be in the works for headwaters. We hope to have more so this might be a nice spark for more story slams more storytelling. Other communities have storytelling groups storytelling clubs so we'll see what see what comes of it. Reporting of Bemidji with This Week's End Focus, Shremor, Lakeland News. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.