Hosts Takeyla Benton, left, and Jen Rubin, center, interview storyteller Ann Imig, founder of the national Listen To Your Mother events.
Episode two of Madison’s new meta podcast, Inside Stories, begins with Brendon Panke’s June 2016 Moth StorySlam performance at the High Noon Saloon. The theme was “Father’s Day.”
As Panke tells the audience, he arrived with his parents and sister at his grandparents’ house on Thanksgiving eve in 1999. He and his dad snacked on milk and Hydrox cookies, “the original, cheaper version of Oreos,” Panke quips. Then everybody went to bed.
“The next time I saw my dad was as he was wheeled out on a gurney. But he was gone already. He had had an aneurysm. That began a relationship of absence for me with my dad,” Panke says.
Until a few weeks ago, when Inside Stories began to interview local storytellers, most stories like Panke’s could only be heard at live events. A limited amount of stories make it to radio broadcasts on The Moth Radio Hour or Wisconsin Public Radio’s Wisconsin Life.
“I hear all the time from people, ‘How do I hear this story?’ There’s all this audio, and you only hear it if you’re in the room,” says Jen Rubin, co-producer of the Moth StorySlam in Madison.
Inside Stories is co-hosted by Rubin and Takeyla Benton, a local writer and founder of We Write Too, a writing club for black women, and We Read Too, a book club for black boys. Benton, Rubin and Panke lead workshops for Madison Storytellers.
Panke later talks in his story about becoming a father after years of thinking that his life would be perfect if only his dad were still alive. As the story continues, Panke and his 3-year-old-son read a book in which a zoo bear dies. The young boy had many questions about death.
“I wasn’t scared and I wasn’t frustrated — I was excited to be there,” Panke tells the audience. “Because, together, he and I were gonna work on this, and we were gonna find some way for him to be a little better prepared [for death] than I was.”
Following the five-minute story, Rubin asks Panke about his decision to place that moment in the narrative. Then Benton asks if reading the book with his son gave him some perspective on fatherhood, much like his father expressed in some old notes Panke had found.
“Takeyla and Jen are a really great tag team,” Panke says. “Takeyla is very conscious of the emotional content of the story, and Jen is all about the mechanics. Together, the two of them get the whole story.”
In addition to hearing the stories themselves, podcast listeners learn how to construct stories that connect. “Anyone who has the need to tell a story, no matter how small it is, could benefit from hearing this — even if it’s just techniques — as well as people who are interested in public speaking,” says Benton.
Panke says the podcast helps storytellers reflect after sharing a story in public. “Storytelling is a process, for me, of self-discovery, and I discovered more about myself and the story by going on the podcast,” Panke says. “[Inside Stories] is a way for the listeners to hear those stories and to see them more explicitly.”
The podcast’s audio vaults include recordings from the Moth, Madison Story Slam, Listen to Your Mother — a national series of live readings founded by Madison’s Ann Imig that ran in 33 cities from 2012-2017 — and the UW Odyssey Project, a program that offers UW-Madison humanities classes to adult students facing economic barriers to college.
“I love stories all around, and I think it’s the biggest way we connect as humans, so if I can break it down and dissect it, I feel like I’m doing a service to help other people,” Benton says. “As people are listening to the podcast, hopefully they are down to learn with us and grow with us as we do it.”
Inside Stories is available on podcasting platforms.
