by Leslie Layton
posted March 29
This is ChicoSol’s third monthly profile in our Changemaker series that features people whose work benefits or brings together the community.
Bonnie Pipkin has resurrected the spirit of what some people call “old Chico”: During a couple of recent decades, Chico, to many of us, felt like a city that was big enough to value artistic freedom and small enough to feel like a friendly rural town.
Pipkin accomplishes this every other month when she stages her multi-generational storytelling program “Bonfire” at the Chico Women’s Club. For a couple of hours, an audience of 180 people sits spellbound listening to a 10-minute story from each of six story-tellers that will somehow relate to the evening’s theme.
Think NPR’s The Moth storytelling hour in a Sacramento Valley college town, and you’ll picture Bonfire.
At next week’s show, six storytellers will each tell a personal story related to the theme “Lost and Found in Translation.” ChicoSol senior reporter Yucheng Tang will tell a story in his native Mandarin that will be translated. (No spoiler alerts here — Tang won’t tell this reporter what the story is about.)
The storytellers, coming as they do from the community, will each have their unique style; they may be soft-spoken or shy, boisterous or funny as they tell a story about a life experience. But Pipkin will set the mood on stage, her poised presence made more striking by her blunt bangs, red lipstick and an outfit that will be quirky, fun, arty, elegant, or all of that.
In addition to running Bonfire, Pipkin, 45, chairs the City’s Arts Commission, teaches at Butte College, works on her second novel and is mother to two young children. (While Pipkin is clearly at home on the Bonfire stage, she admitted that her “heart was pounding” the evening before when she addressed the Chico City Council on behalf of the Arts Commission.)
“I think Bonnie is the most exciting theatre producer in Chico,” said Denver Latimer, a frequent member of the Bonfire audience who has founded and led theatre projects of his own, including Chico’s Slow Theatre and the Blue Room.
“She’s relentlessly optimistic and extremely dedicated to having a diversity of storytelling perspectives.”
Diversity is a hallmark of Bonfire events and at the heart of what Pipkin does. “My more cheeky rule is, no more than one straight white guy per show,” Pipkin told ChicoSol in a recent interview at her downtown office. This is not because she has something against straight white guys – she likes them and notes that she’s married to one.
“I’m just excited by having space for people of diverse backgrounds,” she said, noting that in every show, she tries to ensure that there will be people of color and members of the LGBTQ community presenting. “I’m excited by having a space for people of all different backgrounds and for people who haven’t always had the stage.”
Pipkin encourages a warm reception for her storytellers, and she encourages audience members to connect through participation. It’s not unusual for listeners to hiss at the bullies in a story and hoot when there’s an uplifting turn of events.
“There’s something about sharing a story that is so simple but so deep,” Pipkin said. “The possibility for connection is profound. There’s something about storytelling that breaks down biases. It’s powerful.”
The storytellers each represent an age decade; in the case of the coming show, Tang will represent the generation of young people in their 20s. Retired Chico State English Professor Ellen Walker, 85, has participated in several Bonfire events for the age decade of the 80s.
After her first Bonfire event, Walker said strangers who had attended approached her in town to tell her they had enjoyed her story. “People I didn’t know were stopping me in the street,” Walker said. “[Bonfire] knits a community of associations and personal connections. There’s a certain hunger for that.”
Pipkin grew up in a Chico home with a father who listened to a lot of conservative talk radio. As a child, she began producing shows in their basement, and as a teen, she was involved with Blue Room Theatre. At 18, she said she “hightailed it out of Chico,” moving to San Francisco and New York where she got several degrees.
Her trajectory in Chico would be influenced by a New York multi-generational story-telling event called Generation Women.
After moving to Chico with her husband and first child, she confided to her friend Ama Posey that she wanted to try a storytelling event in Chico. She named it after both herself and the concept of sharing around a campfire. The first two Bonfires were in Posey’s downtown Chico studio in 2023, and their success surprised Pipkin.
“It was soon enough after the pandemic,” Pipkin said, “that it hit right in the moment that people were needing connection. There was a collective feeling of that in 2023.”
Soon Bonfire tickets for events at the Women’s Club were selling out. “I didn’t know it would snowball to the extent that it did,” Pipkin said.
Pipkin carefully plans the storyteller lineup for each event, and once story-tellers are selected, a five-week process begins that involves shaping the story’s arc, providing coaching assistance and rehearsals. The multi-generational feature is part of what makes Bonfire unusual.
“It’s cool to have a stage that has a 20-year-old and an 80-year-old,” she said.
One of her favorite shows was developed around the theme, “If the Shoe Fits.” It was inspired by a young man in Chico who had lived unsheltered in Bakersfield.
The man told Pipkin he once traded his shoes for drugs. Later, he was walking down an alley shoeless when he spotted a woman with a shopping cart piled with her belongings. He asked if she had extra shoes. She “dug through” and came up with a pair of flip flops that were a perfect fit.
Pipkin became teary when she discussed the June 2024 show that featured storyteller Dylan Latimer, Denver’s brother, also a Blue Room co-founder who served as a coach to Bonfire storytellers until recently. Dylan Latimer told of a hilarious incident from his boyhood; in the story, university police chased one of his friends into his parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night.
At that show, 79-year-old Mary Ann Latimer, the mother of Denver and Dylan and daughter Elizabeth Latimer, was present, “laughing throughout the performance,” according to her obituary. She passed away the next morning from cancer after getting to see her son on stage one last time.
Pipkin finds satisfaction in the diversity of a typical Bonfire audience. Even her 84-year-old conservative father has “been out in the audience and heard stories from an array of people who may challenge his ideologies. But he has left feeling good.”
“We’re living at a time when there’s so much division, so much uncertainty,” Pipkin observed. “We’re all human and we all kind of want the same thing. There’s something about sharing stories that reminds people of that.”
Walker, the English professor, believes Bonfire taps into a general longing for communication and connection. “People are hungry for authenticity,” she said.
“Piece by piece, the sense we had of our relationship to our fellows, the way people have lived together, is being shredded. Bonnie brings it back for this brief time. She’s inclusive, she’s warm, she’s flashy.”
Pipkin says Bonfire is “all about diversity, equity and inclusion” at a time when DEI is being “villainized.”
“That’s the magic of sharing a story — a person becomes more than a stereoptype,” Pipkin said. “My role is just to continue to share stories to create a fuller picture of human existence.”
A few tickets to the next Bonfire are still available ($18 for adults; $15 for students) on Eventbrite and at Four Leaf Clothing Co. Next week’s show will present April 1, 3, and 4, and include several stories in Spanish, one in Mandarin, one in ASL and one which will be told by a speaker using a medical device. Translations will be available.
Follow Bonfire on Instagram here.
Leslie Layton is editor of ChicoSol.