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Act 3: Ithaca & New York
Stories and the Space Between Us: A curious adventure into public and community storytelling from the little town of Ithaca to the Big Apple herself.
New York State
How New York State deals with tough topics comes down to two strong approaches. In Manhattan, it is about the "big stage" and the power of sharing stories in public. helps people turn their hardest moments into safe, hopeful stories, and gives those stories a major spotlight. But what really stands out is the raw, street-level side, like , where people stop to read handwritten stories from strangers. This approach gives a voice to "unspeakable" trauma and helps break through the city's sense of isolation.
Conversely, Ithaca feels more like a close-knit group where art and therapy are part of everyday life. It is a college town with a big heart, and people there take a hands-on, grassroots approach. Instead of a big stage, you find places like , where people use music or drama to support each other, and , which brings people together to share stories. The also supports this by training locals to look out for one another as "gatekeepers."
Journal: Ithaca
Getting to Ithaca was not glamorous — a long, ordinary bus journey, five hours, most of which I slept through. By early evening on 21 May, I opened my eyes to the beautiful, laid-back town of Ithaca in upstate New York. Small, tranquil, surprisingly radical. A left-wing democratic community sitting quietly in the heart of rural Trump country, its broad leafy streets lined with pastel wooden houses, flags of identity and social cause, where the patriotic flags had maybe never been
My home was the first floor of a pastel-yellow wooden house on Seneca Street — serene, simple, with what I can only describe as a light brush of a retro-cool 1972 Moroccan Tangiers vibe. I felt immediately at ease.
Later, I moved to a second home on Lin Street — a Tom Sawyer-style upstairs apartment with a beautiful balcony strung with fairy lights. In the Ithaca heat, I practically lived on that porch. It was there, during a thunderstorm so dramatic it felt almost supernatural — dark sky, booming thunder, tropical rain — I sat, phone switched off, drank, wrote in my journal, and found some of the clearest thinking of the entire fellowship.
were a block or two up my street. I walked there often. Sitting by water has long been a tool in my self-healing toolbox. One afternoon, I walked there with Regi Carpenter, and the stories we shared beside that waterfall made me feel at home.
I visited the CAPP Art Space and Gallery, where I had a serendipitous encounter with Thomas Vann, a community-based artist and member of . This grassroots arts collective uses community murals to reflect on and strengthen their town's life. Similar in spirit to what I had witnessed in Philadelphia — but smaller, more intimate, grown entirely from the ground up. Just people who believed that their community's stories deserved to be seen.
I did not know when I turned that corner that the collective had lost one of their own to suicide just days before. The grief was fresh and real. And yet here was Thomas, still painting, still putting story on the wall for anyone who passed to see. The serendipity of that meeting felt meaningful and profound. Sometimes the research finds you.
Story House Ithaca
It is pure grassroots. There is no clinical language, no waiting room, no referral process. It is simply a place where anyone can drop in for a coffee, attend a workshop or a performance, create a video or a podcast, or just participate in storytelling. That simplicity is radical. Story House covers everything — local history, mental health, open mic storytelling nights, radio programmes, stories told while making art or baking cakes — including Presentation Night, described on their website as a celebration of the joy of learning with short talks by non-experts, held at a local brewery. With beer. No agenda. No prescription. Just people and stories… and if you so wish, beer.
Founded by journalist Jonathan Miller and Lesley Greene as a project of the nonprofit Centre for Transformative Action, Story House has an origin story I love, and spaces where people gather not to be helped, assessed, or treated, but simply to share stories and be heard. No agenda. No prescription.
In 2025 alone, Story House presented 61 events and welcomed over 1,500 participants and audience members — all with a tiny, very part-time staff. Their projects span everything from Refugee Voices to Behind the Wall — working with incarcerated people — to Breaking Our Silence, their landmark mental health storytelling series which featured Regi Carpenter as master storyteller.
What Story House embodies sits alongside everything Maff Potts has built with back home. Sometimes people do not need therapy. They need a space with no agenda. A room where they can share if they want to, or simply listen if that is all they can manage today. For many people, it is the only form of support they will ever receive.
Regi Carpenter
Stories As Medicine
is a professional storyteller. She has produced seven award-winning CDs, published an acclaimed memoir, won first place at the Boston StorySlam, been featured on The Moth and NPR, and delivered a TEDx Talk. Her programmes — The Fifth Room: A Place of Health and Recovery, and A New Mourning: Growing Through Grief — sit at the exact intersection of storytelling and survival that this report is about. Regi is a pioneer within the growing movement of Storytelling as Narrative Medicine — using the spoken and written word, alongside deep listening techniques, as tools for healing in clinical and community settings. Her work has taken her into schools, hospitals, hospices, retreat centres, and storytelling festivals across five continents.
She identified something at the heart of everything wrong with how we currently approach mental health. We ask the most vulnerable people to open up — while the systems around them remain opaque, hierarchical, and guarded. True healing requires reciprocity. It requires the willingness of those in power to be as human as those they seek to help.
"We often ask people to share their stories while we keep ours -professionally secret."
…Regi Carpenter
Regi describes her work simply: stories are powerful medicine, capable of bringing solace and strength to those in physical, mental, and spiritual need (). When she speaks — even about ordinary things, even walking beside a waterfall on a warm afternoon — her words roll like smooth light bouncing on the wings of a dragonfly. Soft. Colourful. Warm. And yet quietly, unmistakably powerful.
Journal: New York
I arrived in New York City by bus on 28 May 2024. The skyline rose like towering megaliths. I walked rather than took a cab — I needed to feel the city under my feet.
Manhattan reminded me, unexpectedly, of home. Part grand, part gloriously tacky. Times Square turned out to be smaller than imagined. I almost missed it.
The following evening, everything got better. Victoria had flown over to join me. After a long period of solo travel, after writing in my journal that travel is much better when you experience something with another soul, I turned a corner in New York City and found her standing there waiting.
Some things need no more words than that.
We walked the art trail — one of New York's great gifts to the world, an elevated railway transformed into a public garden and art space running above the streets of Manhattan. That same evening, late-night ambient jazz at the Rum House in Hell's Kitchen.
The Strangers Project
100,000 Stories and Counting.
Brandon Doman sets up in public spaces with a simple invitation — write your story, anonymously, by hand. No prompts. No guidelines. Just whatever you need to say. Since 2009, he has collected over 100,000 handwritten, anonymous stories (). The project now lives permanently inside the World Trade Centre Oculus — a place already carrying the weight of collective grief. And inside it, 100,000 handwritten notes from strangers saying: this is who I am, this is what I carry, this is my truth. Someone reads one at 2 a.m. and thinks — for the first time — I am not the only one who feels this way. That moment of recognition is not a small thing. For some people, it is what keeps them here.
"I believe that what starts as a simple act of listening can be a profoundly transformative experience. Exploring the lives of the people we share space with every day shows us how wonderfully human we all are."
Brandon Domain
Journal: Reflections
On 2 June, we visited the Empire State Building and the King Kong exhibition — and I discovered a connection I had not expected. The man who wrote the original King Kong script had roots in the UK, and the original story has connections to Blackpool. My town. Following me to the top of New York.
On 3 June, Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a painting I had been wanting to see in person for years — off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai. A Japanese artist from hundreds of years ago, wandering and sketching the world in his journal during a time when Japan was largely isolated from the rest of the world. A traveller. An observer. A man who captured everything he saw with honesty and craft.
I thought about journals. About the act of recording what you see and feel as you move through the world. About how Hokusai's observations, made centuries ago in a sketchbook, ended up on a wall in New York City for me to stand in front of in 2024. The magic really is in the stories of the people. The lost. The ordinarily extraordinary everyday folk like you and me. The big often look past the small.
Stories travel further than we can imagine. Further than we will ever know.
The Journey Home
My fellowship ended, as the best adventures probably should, in a cockroach-infested motel on the grim urban overspill of JFK Airport. Air Lingus cancelled at 2 a.m., a coach dropped us — bewildered, exhausted — past the gleaming swanky airport hotels where sensible people were sleeping soundly, to the very last stop—Bate's motel. The security guard on reception informed us, with magnificent matter-of-factness, that the establishment was usually reserved for guests arriving from bail hostels.
The bed vibrated. The cockroaches did not.
I had gone to America to find out how stories save lives. I found answers in murals six storeys high, in handwritten notes pinned to walls, in conversations beside waterfalls, in cafés and radio studios and on street corners in the rain. And I came home — via an authentic Bukowski American road trip — more certain than I have ever been that the answer to all our problems is each other.
"It has been a wonderful experience, but also soberingly lonely. Travel is much better when you experience something with another soul. It's the sharing of stories and experiences that makes us feel visible, less alone in the world."
Some journeys end exactly as they should.
Kane Dodgson
Copyright © 2026 Kane Dodgson. The moral right of the author has been asserted. The views and opinions expressed in this report are those of the author and not of the Churchill Fellowship or its partners.
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