In 2019, Shelley Davis and two fellow storytellers founded SOL Collective, a Chicago-based storytelling group dedicated to uplifting and showcasing the diverse and nuanced experiences of women of color.
Born out of a desire to create a safe, supportive, and highly polished platform, SOL Collective has grown into a vibrant community where personal stories become tools for connection, healing, and empowerment.
Earlier this month, Davis and the collective produced “Last Night, a DJ Saved My Life,” an event that explored “the transformative power of music through deeply personal narratives
that celebrate how rhythm and melody shape lives, build community and inspire resilience.”
We caught up with Davis to discuss the collective’s origins, its mission, and why storytelling is important for women of color.
The interview was edited lightly for clarity and space.
Q. Who is Shelley Davis?
I’m from Chicago. I’m a South-Sider, and have lived here most of my life. I really grew up singing in choirs, including the Chicago Children’s choir and finished my music studies and music career after college. I was really looking for a new creative outlet, so I started studying storytelling as an art form in 2017. I was trained by the Revival theater that was based in Hyde Park and now is in the South Loop. I was also trained by Second City theater from 2017 to 2022. I was in several shows attached to those theaters and really didn’t have as much of a fun audience connection as I thought I should be having.
Q. What inspired you to create SOL Collective?
At the beginning of 2019, I was invited to participate in a show that happened to have only women-of-color-storytellers in it. And it was one of the most powerful experiences I had ever had as a storyteller. Two of those women and I got together afterwards and I proposed to them to recreate that experience as much as we could, so we found SOL collective in 2019, basically, around my kitchen table. We came up with this idea of creating a storytelling group to really recenter and lift up voices of women of color, because there was no other place in Chicago that does this work the way we wanted to do it. There are lots of storytelling efforts out there, some are open mics, some of them are competition, story slams, some of them focus on writing and reading stories out loud, but nothing was really singing to my heart in a way that I thought could show all of the complexities of women of colors lives from anything from “how do I get to the grocery store before it closes” to “Oh my God, I’m dealing with this mad combination of racism, sexism, classism at work!” You know, anything.
Q.I want to go back to these two women that you met. I wanted to know what inspired you in their stories?
I think both of them told very unique stories that clearly were reaching back into their own family history, and bringing it to present in terms of whatever challenge they were dealing with today, or whatever they were learning and building on from that history. I also loved that they were very sensitive to other people in the show in terms of how we provided peer feedback and peer support, and with that we became friends and that’s how we gelled as a group.
Q. Where did the idea for SOL collective’s name came from?
Sol is Spanish for sun, and since we were women of color, we are women of the sun. It’s also a play on words, so we are telling the stories of our lives and we are also speaking from our souls. You know, so that’s why that word had meaning for all of us.
Q. How do you select your speakers?
There are lots of us that carry over from session to session and they have come to us in a variety of ways. Some of them have been in the audience at a previous show and have approached us and said: “I want to do that.” Some of them have come through our own personal and professional networks, or they have been in another storytelling event or process that we met along the way.
Q. How crucial is it to have a safe place for women of color, and women in general to express themselves and explore what these topics?
I think it’s absolutely critical for our self-protection, for our healing, for our surviving and our thriving. And especially considering the political moment that we see ourselves walking into in the future, I think they’ll still even be more critical.
Q. What is this event bringing to the community?
I think it’s bringing joy, it is bringing celebration, and it’s bringing people together in a way that has been very isolating because of this moments of uncertainty. Isolating because we are still actively recovering from all of the trauma and loss that we’ve experienced during the pandemic and post-pandemic. It is giving us an opportunity to feel unified and to celebrate each other in a way that we probably don’t get enough times to celebrate each other.
Q. Are there any events coming to the west side in the future?
It just depends, you know, our relationships. One of my roles as the co-founder is to build partnerships and we continue to seek out partnerships that make sense for us, so who knows what the future brings? We do two shows a year as a collective and then, all of us individual storytellers do other things, so it just depends on where the opportunity is.
More info:
SOL Collective website: https://chisolcollective.com/
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/p/SOL-Collective-Storytelling-by-Women-of-Color-100075819836151/