Finding Home, in Every Sense

By UMS

Andrew Morton

A Q&A with Sofa Stories Creator Andrew Morton

This fall, UMS welcomes Every Soul Arts, a Detroit-based arts collective, to the Ypsilanti Freighthouse for two connected events exploring home, belonging, and the experiences of young people impacted by housing insecurity.

Sofa Stories: Stories on Stage and Screen
Fri Sep 18 at 7:30 pm

Stories of Home: Storytelling Workshop
Sun Sep 20 at 4 pm

Both events are pay-what-you-wish, starting at just $5.

We sat down with playwright, theater maker, and Every Soul Arts founder Andrew Morton to talk about where Sofa Stories began, how it’s grown, and what audiences can expect this September.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how this project came to be?

I’m a playwright and theater maker, originally from the UK, but I’ve lived in Michigan for more than half my life. My family moved here when I was a teenager for my dad’s engineering job, and I did some of my schooling here before heading back to the UK for university and a stint living in London. It was in London doing an MA in Community Arts at Goldsmiths College, in collaboration with the National Theatre of Great Britain, that I really refined my practice as a community-engaged artist. I worked briefly with a theater company called Streets Alive that used forum theater with young people experiencing homelessness. I loved that work, but the company lost its funding and had to close.

Fast forward to 2019: I’d recently moved to Detroit after years in Flint, and I was having a bit of a career “midlife crisis,” wondering what I really wanted to make. I thought back to that work in London and asked myself, why not try something like it here? That question became Sofa Stories, and it’s since grown into Every Soul Arts, the organization I run today.

What exactly is Sofa Stories, and how did it start?

Sofa Stories uses live theatre and digital media to amplify the stories of young people impacted by housing insecurity or homelessness who may have resorted to couch-surfing as a means to survive.

Sofa Stories began in 2019 with support from a Knight Arts Detroit Challenge grant. The idea was simple but a little unusual: bring actual sofas into public spaces — parks, sidewalks, unexpected corners of the city — and have performers share monologues about youth homelessness with one or two audience members at a time, sitting right there with them.

Working with organizations in Detroit, we developed original monologues in collaboration with young people with lived experience of homelessness and housing insecurity. It turned out that performing outdoors to an audience of one or two people was also a great fit for the strange constraints of COVID — but we realized our audience reach was limited. Since the monologues were already essentially solo performances, we adapted six of them into short films with help from friends in film and TV.

From there, the work kept evolving. A second phase focused more intentionally on LGBTQIA+ youth, who are significantly more likely to experience homelessness than their peers, as well as Black and Brown youth. We paired six young people with writers, performed the resulting pieces at Detroit Public Theatre, and took the work to events like the Sidewalk Festival, Matrix Theatre Company, and Dally in the Alley, often finding an audience by accident, as passersby noticed the sofas in the middle of everything else going on.

Now we’re in a third iteration, developing six new monologues, and continuing to adapt work for film as the project grows under the Every Soul Arts umbrella.

What can audiences expect from Stories on Stage and Screen on September 18?

The monologues we present at the Freighthouse will be a combination of young people sharing their own stories and actors performing the stories of others. When the project started, we mostly had actors performing monologues created in collaboration with the youth participants. Now, we let the youth participants decide if they want to share their stories themselves, or have an actor bring it to life.

It’s a mix of live and filmed work: three short films from the project’s second phase, interspersed with new live monologues performed from our signature sofas. The films were made in collaboration with partners like the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy (one was shot along the Dequindre Cut) so audiences will get to see the project in two forms: performed outdoors in non-traditional public spaces, and staged more traditionally, the way it’ll appear at the Freighthouse.

Those sofas, by the way, are real workhorses! Detroit-based furniture company Floyd supported the project early on with two loveseats that break apart for easy travel. They’ve been taken apart and put back together more times than I can count and thrown in the back of a truck for years, and they’re still holding up.

How do you approach telling difficult stories without reducing people to their circumstances?

We’re very intentional about it. First, we use person-first language — people with experience of homelessness or housing insecurity, not “homeless people” — because they’re not defined by that one thing. Second, participants can share whatever they want; nothing is required. We take inspiration from Ruth Ellis, namesake of the Ruth Ellis Center, who spoke often about the power of sharing your story on your own terms. If someone doesn’t want to talk about something, we don’t go there.

We also ask people to identify moments of joy, resilience, and connection, not just hardship — the person who showed up for them, or the person working inside a difficult system who genuinely cared. And importantly, everyone retains ownership of their story. If someone later decides they don’t want their piece shared anymore, that’s entirely their call.

All of the young people we work with are paid for their time, expertise, and contributions. That’s a core value of ours: treating lived experience as equal to professional experience.

Two days later, you’re hosting a companion event at the Freighthouse — the Stories of Home workshop. What should participants expect there?

It’s a bit of both something new and something we’ve been testing. We now have a core group of four young people acting as artistic collaborators and a “youth action board” — a model borrowed from other youth homelessness organizations that centers young people with lived experience in decision-making. They’ve helped lead creative engagement sessions with partners like the Ruth Ellis Center, Covenant House, and Detroit Phoenix Center, and we recently ran one with the Detroit Phoenix Center that was really powerful.

For this workshop, participants can expect gentle, collaborative group writing, followed by time for more personal individual reflection and writing. At the end, anyone who wants to can share their story with the group…the same spirit as sharing a story with someone sitting next to you on a sofa.

We’ve broadened the theme of “home” intentionally: it’s not about housing insecurity, but about “home” more universally — leaving home, creating a new one, finding home in a chosen family, or even, for someone like me, an immigrant, finding home in a new culture. Not everyone wants to speak directly about housing, and this framing gives people room to bring whatever version of that story is theirs.

What do you hope audiences take away from these events?

That homelessness and housing insecurity is fundamentally a policy issue. It can happen to almost anyone; life can change quickly, and it looks different in different places and for different people. We have the resources to house everyone if we choose to prioritize it as a community. I hope people leave thinking not just about housing, but about the broader idea of home and belonging, and how we create spaces where everyone feels they’re part of the community.

What’s next for Every Soul Arts?

We’re hoping to build a couple of core ensembles of young people who want to keep making performance and film work, and we’re exploring forming a choir, too. Music is a powerful form of expression that many young people lose access to when they’re rejected from a faith community because of who they are. Funding is still coming together, but we’re planning to move ahead either way. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the young people I work with, it’s that they’re remarkably resilient and resourceful…and that’s a lesson worth learning from.

Learn more about Every Soul Arts and the Sofa Stories project at everysoularts.org/sofastories.