We recently connected with Jasmine Davila and have shared our conversation below.

Jasmine, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I became a live lit performer and storyteller by attending shows in Chicago. A good friend of mine, who had been performing in shows around town in 2010 or 2011, asked me to perform in the very first show of a live lit series she co-founded in 2012.

The show, called “Solo in the 2nd City”, was devoted to dating and hooking up. Though I had done very little dating myself, I managed to put a story together and read it in a crowded bar. I had done a little theater in high school, but that was the limit of my experience in front of an audience.

I knew that I could do this because I could always make my friends laugh (whether they wanted to or not). Also the rule for most live lit shows is that the stories that tellers perform have to be true, and so I was spared the labor of having to invent something from my own imagination. By the time I had performed in this first show, I had spent a lot of time in crowds much like one I faced. I listened to people respond to jokes, saw their bodies shift and facial expressions evolve over the course of a story that was going well or not so well.

Listening to others was, and remains critical. It helps me find the story that I think needs to be told at that time, to those people. Finding the strongest, most compelling narrative is also important.

The show that I host, Miss Spoken, changes theme every month. We’ve had everything from “Boobs” to “Democracy” to “Swimsuit Season”. The temptation to get up and just spit out everything you think about bathing suits, say, or books, for five to ten minutes, may be tempting for a novice performer but that’s not telling a proper story. It’s a recitation that will send people running to the bathroom or to the bar or, even worse, out the door.

As performers, we can work on our stories for a long time before we ever tell them to another person. From the writing to the practicing at home, we nurse stories like we nurse crushes or grudges. Once we share them with others, we have to accept that maybe not everybody will think these stories are as good as we believe they are. If we aren’t open to critiques from fellow performers or our audiences, we may find it difficult to improve. Granted, we don’t have to listen to any old ding dong who wanders in off the street. But it is worth seeking out feedback from people we trust to tell us the truth.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My creative career, which has always been a part-time pursuit, began in the late 2000’s when I wrote a few freelance pieces for Time Out Chicago. From there, I joined the staff of the late, great Chicago-centric blog Gapers Block. Writing for GB was a great way to learn how to write pithy, brisk descriptions of local events for the site’s newsfeed and event calendar. I also got to know a lot of other people like myself — full-time professionals who were part-time creatives with side hustles like photography, knitting, sewing, painting, improvising and, like me, writing. Because I’m an extrovert (or more accurately an introvert who can turn it on for a crowd if I need no), I found that live lit was a natural fit for what I liked to do (get on a mic and tell an original story) with people I have grown to adore.

I joined the producing staff of Miss Spoken, a “lady-centric” live lit show, in November 2016. I also hosted the show with it’s co-founder, Rosamund Lannin, after the other founder, Carly Oishi, departed to spend more time with her growing family. As a producer, I do everything from promoting the show to booking readers to reading spec story ideas and watching videos of performers who would like to read for us at a future show. I could not and would not do this alone, so since 2022 my partner in crime and producing has been veteran actor, director, producer and teacher Amy Eaton.

We work hard to produce a vibrant, thoughtful show that allows us to feature the city’s best female identifying, femme, and non-binary storytellers. We never ask performers to do anything we ourselves wouldn’t do, which is why Amy and I perform in every show. We never charge for admission, but do solicit donations from our generous audience. We believe in compensating our readers for their labor, and we’re grateful that our followers feel the same way. We have also been fortunate in the venues who have hosted us.

Over the years, Miss Spoken has also been able to produce special editions of our show for clients as diverse as Pitchfork Music Festival and the U.S. Pizza Museum.

The Gallery Cabaret in Bucktown was our first home, hosting shows from 2014 until the pandemic in 2020, and then again starting in 2022. We recently moved to Cole’s Bar in Logan Square, mainly for reasons of accessibility. Rest assured, however, the Tamale Man still comes through whenever our show comes on — usually during intermission or right after the show ends — for people’s snacking needs.

(And if you don’t know who the Tamale Man is, just ask me, as I’m pretty sure I’m his most devoted customer.)

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

For me personally, as a writer, I try to ask myself the following questions, which I once heard posed by the Scottish comedian and actor Craig Ferguson:

Does this need to be said?

Does this need to be said by me?

Does this sneed to be said by me now?

The answer isn’t always yes all of the time, but these questions keep me accountable or at least honest about the intentions of the story I am trying to tell.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Pay us for our time! Pay us for our talent! Pay us for our labor! And pay us what we tell you we are worth.

A lot of us creatives went to school and paid for education and training. A lot of us work extra jobs or entire careers to support the creative work we do. If society is entertained, edified, or otherwise engaged by what we do as artists, why shouldn’t they compensate us for that?

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jasmined.medium.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jasmined/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yourfriendjasmine/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasminedavila/