By Arielle Stevenson, University Communications and Marketing
When Heather O’Leary began asking community members to tell stories about their relationships with Tampa Bay and Gulf waters, some weren’t sure they had a story to tell. Then they started to remember.
“They were like, ‘I don’t have a water story. Oh wait, how about that one time that water transformed my life?’” O’Leary recalled.
The memories were emotional.
“And then all of us in this workshop were like tearing up,” she said.
O’Leary, an associate professor of anthropology at USF St. Petersburg, wants to help people recognize the stories they already have about water. Through the Watershed Stories initiative, she and the Suncoast Storytellers Guild are helping the community reflect on their experiences and shape those memories to share with others.
Those stories will take center stage at the Watershed Stories Showcase, a free public event on Friday, October 23, from 6 to 8 p.m., at USF St. Petersburg’s Lynn Pippenger Hall. Selected oral histories from the event will be preserved in a repository through the Nelson Poynter Memorial Library.
Community members will share the stage with students in the USF Gulf Scholars Program, who crafted micro-stories inspired by water-related artifacts. The program engages undergraduate students in interdisciplinary learning about the Gulf Coast, encouraging them to explore the region’s environmental challenges and community connections.
The Watershed Stories project grew out of a workshop O’Leary led at the 2025 Suncoast Storytelling Festival. There, she demonstrated how research data about Tampa Bay’s waters could be translated into a more immersive experience through sound, images and storytelling.
“They were like, ‘I don’t have a water story. Oh wait, how about that one time that
water transformed my life? Heather O'Leary
Jim Kissane of the Suncoast Storytellers Guild said the presentation showed that storytelling could make complex data more immediate and engaging for the general public.
With support from Florida Humanities, the project grew into an organized series of workshops at five environmental science centers across Pinellas. Participants reflected on their experiences with local waters, collected and shared oral histories, and worked with members of the Suncoast Storytellers Guild to develop their stories for an audience.
For Kissane, a story’s power lies in the details. Storytellers were asked to draw upon what the water felt like, sounded like, smelled or tasted like, and explore the impact of those moments.
“And good stories should change us, right?” Kissane said.
Each storyteller brings a different piece of our local water puzzle to the showcase, building a larger picture of the region’s relationship with water.
For O’Leary, these accounts offer a way for her to understand the human dimensions of water that numbers cannot capture alone. Research data can show what’s happening in an ecosystem, but people’s stories can reveal what those changes mean for people in everyday life.
She sees qualitative knowledge as an important complement to quantitative, one that can compel people and cities to act.
“Stopping and really imbibing what it means to be a human in these waterscapes is a step that can’t be skipped,” O’Leary said.
Her hope is to reveal the often-invisible connections between people, the water and the place we call home.