What's the story
An unexpected entry into live storytelling
A couple of weeks ago, out of the blue, I was contacted by The Moth, the storytelling organization that in 1997 launched the proliferation of live, on-stage storytelling events in the US. A producer somehow found me via my website, I believe, and forwarded my information to the founder, Larry Rosen. Together they sent me an email inviting me to be one of five storytellers at the Somerville Theater MainStage event on June 8. So if you're in the Boston area, here's your chance at seeing me make a fool of myself tell a story, just little ole' me on the stage.
I was both thrilled and daunted to be contacted by The Moth. This is an excellent reminder of why it's important to have a decent web presence if you'd like to be discoverable. (I made my site myself some years ago using Squarespace, and while it’s not fancy it seems to do the trick. This reminds me I ought to update it!) You just never know who will discover you, and what opportunity they might drop in your lap. Despite my efforts to train myself to say "no" more, of course I said yes, after which I promptly began freaking out. Suddenly I feared that, despite having written two novels, I had no idea how to tell a story. At least not a short one, about something that happened to me, to be delivered sans notes, alone on a stage. In fact, my mind suddenly went completely blank as to what story to tell. Story? I don't have a story! I didn't have a miserable childhood. I haven't survived the unthinkable. What could people possibly find interesting about me? I've written and delivered eulogies (more than I would have liked), and celebratory speeches for weddings, but those have always been about the lives of other people, never myself.
Then I took a step back. Wait a minute. If I don't have any interesting stories to tell, why did I start a Substack? What IS a story, anyway? Isn't half of a good story in the telling? Maybe even more than half? And then I realized just that morning I'd stumbled on a story. I was at Spring Visiting Day at my youngest's school, a day when students get to invite their grandparents or adults predisposed to kindness to visit the school, watch some performances, and spend some time in the classroom. We have no family nearby, so we parents played that role, along with the older sibling. The teachers had organized a few activities to facilitate conversation in the classroom, and so my youngest turned to me and asked a question from the list: do you have anything to tell me that you've never told me before? Well! Plenty, kid! But... what do I WANT to share? What would be appropriate? What would my kids be surprised to learn? And in a flash something came to me. A story from the summer after college. I mentioned the subject to my children, and they both turned to me with big eyes. Really? they asked.
You don't think I'm going to tell you right now what it was, do you?
But here are some other great stories:
Check out Robin Shoenthaler, friend and amazing writer and cancer doctor, who won a Moth Boston GrandSLAM a few years ago with this story.
My friends Grace Talusan (Filipina writer and author of The Body Papers) and U-Meleni Mlaba Adebo (Zimbabwean poet, writer, athlete, and entrepreneur) tell their stories of arriving in America in this episode of Suitcase Stories.
It will be a challenge for me to stick to the mic on the stage. My years of kathak dance have trained me to use the space when telling a story. I'd much rather have a lav mic hooked up to me than have to speak into a stationary one. I can still make gestures with my arms and hands, but even those have to be in addition to the story, not an intrinsic part of it, as The Moth turns many of their live stories into podcast episodes, which are audio only. I've been listening to a bunch of Moth stories over the past couple of weeks, paying attention to how people frame their stories, the cadence of their speech, the way in which they bring the story back to the beginning, or not. I've had a couple of chats with The Moth master storyteller in which we've discussed how to go deeper with my story, and what differentiates a written story from an oral one. I welcome this opportunity to think about these things, and to learn. No matter how much time one has spent crafting stories, trying to elicit an emotional response from an audience, expressing the universal through the specific, it's always good and important and humbling to return to the basics.
Here are some resources for those of you thinking about how to tell an effective story. And maybe you'll catch mine (hopefully an effective one) in Somerville, MA on June 8th, or on the podcast if I make it onto that.
Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story book, which uses brain science to help understand how people respond to stories, and therefore has some great insights for writers.
Michelle Hoover’s latest 7amnovelist podcast series, Passages of Summer, this time featuring authors discussing what went into crafting their book’s opening pages. The first featured author was Elizabeth Graver with the absolutely gorgeous first pages of Kantika.
The author George Saunders runs a pretty extensive Substack on storytelling technique.
And for those in the Boston area, there’s an upcoming storytelling class at Grub Street Writers, beginning in July.
Cheers,
Anjali
Got my tickets! Can't wait to hear what you're going to tell us!