The Brine Fly Great Salt Lake Story Slam

By Ashley Finley

Community members gather to share true, personal five-minute stories about what it means to stay (or leave) in the face of ecological collapse. By connecting local experiences to global climate grief, Stay Salty event curator Ashley Finley highlights the powerful role that storytelling plays in building the unity needed to heal Great Salt Lake.

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A cool summer sunset fell over Great Salt Lake on June 4, 2026 as community members throughout the Wasatch Front settled in to hear my opening story at The Brine Fly Great Salt Lake Story Slam.  

It went like this:

“Last year I had the amazing opportunity to travel to East Africa for a midwifery cultural exchange. While there, I had the privilege of meeting an incredible film maker who is currently making a film about the women of Uzi island, an island off the coast of Tanzania. On Uzi island, the women have a deeply personal relationship to the sea. In their tradition, the sea is a relative and an inheritance, passed down from mother to daughter through the generations. In the film, a teen girl describes what it feels like to have anxiety about climate change and how it affects the ocean, therefore affecting her people. She says ‘The sea is my heritage. A gift from my mother. And she inherited it from her grandmother. But now, things have changed. Climate change is threatening our traditions. I feel sorrow for my child. What will she inherit?’

A few months later, I was invited to speak with 7th and 8th grade students at Rowland Hall about the importance of storytelling in our liberation movements. I showed them the clip of the film about the women of Uzi Island. And in that moment, the most profound thing happened. Students started opening up about their own anxieties around climate change. They started expressing their anxieties and frustrations about what it means to be a young person, living with a vital body of water that is in crisis because of environmental abuse. They spoke about their grief around not knowing about the future of the lake, the land, and their families.”

In that moment at Rowland Hall, I saw the power of storytelling in real time. In this classroom, across an entire ocean, these students saw themselves in a young girl from an island in East Africa. 

Our stories are important because they connect us across oceans, across generations, across our perceived differences.

And if we (who love, live with, and fight for Great Salt Lake) can share our stories and see each other in them, then we can be united in our quest to heal Great Salt Lake.

From an elder recounting typhoon-scale winds flipping a sailboat, to a 12 year old lovingly detailing all she will miss about the community after moving to a new state, nine storytellers took the spotlight at The Brine Fly Great Salt Lake Story Slam. Modeled after The Moth and The Bee, storytellers chosen from the audience had 5 minutes each to tell a true story on the theme: what it means to stay (or leave) in the face of economic transition and ecological collapse at Great Salt Lake. 

We’re so grateful to the 80 attendees who spent a beautiful early summer evening with us at the Sorenson Unity Center Black Box Theatre for a chance to tell their stories, listen to others, and check out Jeri Gravlin’s Stay Salty photo gallery. Sarah May, a queer biracial Salvadoreña artist, poet, organizer, facilitator, and bruja contributed cyanotype fabrics from the Making Waves Artist Collaborative to decorate the stage as our featured artist. Catharine DeLong, CM-Th, a certified music thanatologist, hospice chaplain, end-of-life educator, and harp teacher joined as our featured storyteller with a performance about an arduous trek to Great Salt Lake water’s edge to play for the Lake. The Brine Fly Great Salt Lake Story Slam was preceded by two free community storytelling workshops. All of this was made possible with the dedication of the Stay Salty team, volunteers, and support from the Salt Lake City Arts Council and Sierra Club Foundation.Subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Instagram to stay tuned for upcoming events featuring overlooked stories about what it means to stay, who gets to stay (or leave), and how we can stay as we face ecological collapse at Great Salt Lake. 

Ashley Finley is an Event Curator with Stay Salty: Lakefacing Stories. Ashley is a lauded birth keeper, a published writer, a keynote speaker, certified yoga instructor, and an educator. She is inspired by the ancestral wisdom of her foremothers, the everlasting beauty of nature, and the vivid imagination of a liberated future for all colonized and marginalized people.