Riley Frambes
The first time Jen Rubin stepped up to a microphone at an official storytelling event, she talked about how, like a lot of other Jewish kids growing up in the 1960s, she obsessed about the Holocaust. Before going to sleep at night, she would test her moral courage: Would she be brave enough to hide someone trying to escape? Yes. Would she choose peace in the Middle East over making out with her crush? Yes. Would she choose to end world hunger or have Charlie’s Angels-sized breasts?
That one broke her: “I threw the hungry children under the bus and went for the cleavage,” she recalled.
Rubin’s debut performance at The Moth StorySLAM in Milwaukee three years ago was itself a personal test. Hooked on The Moth Podcast, Rubin says she worked up her courage to participate as a “mid-life challenge.”
Sharing stories among family and friends was second nature to Rubin, who grew up hearing the saga of her immigrant grandparents’ escape to America and the tale of how the family’s electronics store in New York City survived the looting during the 1977 blackout — an episode that became the opening chapter of her not-yet-published book. “I grew up thinking that’s just what people did,” says Rubin. But getting up in front of a big crowd of people was another story.
“If you listen to the podcast or The Moth Radio Hour, they pull out all the best stories, so it’s intimidating,” says Rubin. “But when you go, you see it’s people getting up and telling stories — and some are good and some are not.”
At that Milwaukee event, Rubin was among the 10 people chosen at random from among those who signed up to tell a five-minute true story. Much to her surprise, Rubin won the slam, which qualified her to compete at the next level. Her story caught the attention of The Moth producers, and she was invited to New York to participate in The Moth Mainstage, the organization’s flagship event.
Jen Rubin (left) and Alexandria Delcourt will co-produce the Madison edition of The Moth, which launches on Feb. 15 at High Noon Saloon.
Once Rubin had the ear of staffers, she suggested that Madison could support a StorySLAM. It turns out that folks at The Moth had already been thinking about launching one here; the organization runs slams in 25 cities. Now that launch is at hand. The inaugural event for The Moth in Madison is set for Feb. 15 at the High Noon Saloon. Rubin will co-produce with Alexandria Delcourt, who teaches English at UW-Whitewater, though most of the grunt work of putting on the Madison event will be handled by The Moth’s New York staff.
But The Moth doesn’t just flutter into any old market; Madison already has a sturdy infrastructure. After Rubin began slamming in Milwaukee, she auditioned and performed with Listen to Your Mother, a nationwide, multimedia affair that began in Madison and now hosts live events in about 40 cities around Mother’s Day each year. And that’s just one of Madison’s offerings: Madison Storytellers and Madison Story Slam have been hosting monthly gatherings for the last few years. The Bricks Theater runs two different story-oriented series: “Male Call” and “That’s What She Said.” And storytelling projects and workshops are always popping up at schools and community centers. With the arrival of The Moth, the Madison storytelling scene is about to get bigger, better and — if things go the way Rubin would like — more diverse and inclusive.
Humans have been telling each other stories for as long as they have had the necessary language skills to do it, even longer if you count things like cave drawings. In every early culture, stories were how elders communicated important information and values to the next generation. As written language emerged, stories became standardized, but even the great epics of ancient Greece such as The Iliad and The Odyssey were oral narratives before Homer came along and wrote them down (though not before he himself spent years traveling the countryside telling them in person). The list of cultural storytelling touchstones spans all of time, geography and technological advancement — the Indian epic The Mahabharata, in which Vyasa says, “If you listen carefully, at the end you’ll be someone else”; Scheherazade and One Thousand and One Nights in the Islamic Golden Age of the ninth century; the troubadours and minstrels of Europe in the Middle Ages; How I Met Your Mother.
The art of oral storytelling experienced a revival in United States in the 1970s, with the creation of a number of organizations and festivals devoted to storytelling, most notably the National Storytelling Festival, held in Jonesborough, Tenn., each year, which launched in 1973.
Public radio has chipped in over the last couple of decades with offerings like This American Life and StoryCorps. But it wasn’t until The Moth that somebody thought to slammify storytelling.
The Moth was founded in 1997 by bestselling novelist George Dawes Green, who sought an outlet for a more homespun brand of storytelling that contrasted with the slick publishing world he inhabited. Hoping to recapture the magic of the booze-fueled front-porch story swaps of his young adulthood in his native Georgia, Dawes started hosting a series of storytelling nights for friends in his Manhattan loft. With no time limit or any other ground rules, those first meetups kind of sucked. But as he honed the format, added time limits and moved the gatherings into bars, people started flocking to the events, and they evolved into what is now The Moth Mainstage. The Moth’s name pays homage to the critters that fluttered around the porch lights back in Georgia.
Jenifer Hixson was a Moth volunteer in 2001 when founder Green approached her with the idea of doing something with storytelling akin to the poetry slams that were all the rage at the time.
“I wasn’t quite sure it would work at first...it sounded a little weird,” says Hixson, who now works full time for The Moth. “But I said okay, I’ll give it a try.” The StorySLAM soon became a fixture at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where the spoken word movement also bloomed. Now story slams and storytelling are hot — and for all the right reasons.
True stories told in front of a live crowd create the kind of performer-audience bond you rarely find in other performance contexts. A compelling story, according to Hixson, is one that appeals to universal emotions that everybody can relate to, such as loneliness, disappointment, embarrassment. Humor always plays well too. But the key is to show your vulnerability.
“With storytelling, I’m letting you in here, showing you that I’m human, I have flaws, I screw things up, I’m an idiot,” says Hixson. “That doesn’t mean you can’t be triumphant in the end, but they love your triumph so much more if you have stumbled first.”
In this age of oversharing on social media, people are more comfortable revealing details about their lives than in the past. But, as Hixson notes, there’s a big difference between relating to others through technology and connecting face-to-face.
“Come and share yourself in the flesh,” she says. “I think people want to be understood, and they want to understand other people. This is a nice place to do that.”
That personal linkage isn’t just some touchy-feely blather. It’s science. A 2006 study by Spanish researchers published in the journal NeuroImage found that your brain reacts the same way when you hear a story about an experience as it would if you were experiencing the event yourself. But the connection is even stronger than that. When you tell a story, your brain actually syncs up with the listener’s. Researchers at Princeton showed in 2011 that the same parts of the storyteller’s brain that light up in response to the emotions and senses she is describing light up in the listener’s brain as well. These studies help explain why storytelling is so universal among humans. Apparently we’re hard-wired for it; our brains are natural story processors. Of course, marketing experts and political strategists figured this out even before fancy brain imaging techniques were available.
Adam Rostad, host of Madison Story Slam, traces his affinity for storytelling to being the son of a pastor.
The arrival of The Moth — with its full-time staff, national reputation and marketing savvy — is sure to boost the storytelling scene in Madison. But what it means for our homegrown storytelling groups is less clear. Adam Rostad, who hosts Madison Story Slam, can’t help but be a little worried about the new kids in town. “It could be a huge bummer for me,” he says. “I know they aren’t coming here to harm Madison Story Slam, but there are definitely going to be some consequences for us, good or bad.” One scenario Rostad would welcome would be for aspiring storytellers to use the local slam as kind of a proving ground to test and polish their material before hitting The Moth.
Much like The Moth, Madison Story Slam uses a panel of judges selected randomly from the audience to score the stories and declare a winner. And Rostad records everything and puts out a regular podcast. But the similarities end there. Rostad has no staff and no PR agency to promote the shows. He has a full-time day job as a social worker that limits the amount of time he can spend organizing, publicizing and podcasting.
Madison Story Slam began about five years ago as JPH Story Slam — named for its original location, Johnson Public House. Founder Greg White was a big fan of The Moth and wanted something similar for Madison. Rostad took over as host/coordinator when White decided to bail in 2013. When the event outgrew its space last year, it moved into the Wil-Mar Neighborhood Center. These days, crowds at the slam range from about 80 to 150 people, with about 15 or so usually telling a story.
Zeke Witter
Dan McHugh shares a story about facing a childhood bully at the March 2015 “Childhood Memories” Madison Story Slam.
Rostad traces his affinity for storytelling to being the son of a pastor, who was constantly telling stories on a stage. He finds that storytelling creates a straight-line connection not just with the audience as a sea of humanity, but with each individual audience member.
“We open up that opportunity for connection to everybody,” Rostad says. “There are open mics all over the place for musicians and poets. Not everybody is a musician or poet. But everybody’s got a story to tell, and everybody can have that cool, unique feeling of connection.”
Brendon Panke, who coordinates Madison Storytellers, remembers his first moment connecting with an audience, albeit a private one. “I was like a sophomore in high school, and I was telling my best friend’s relatives about getting shot in the eye with a BB gun, and I just nailed it, and they were falling off the furniture,” says Panke. “And I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is it!’”
Panke began participating early on after Madison Storytellers was founded in 2012 by Anna Zeide and Kevin Gibbons. His background in improv and standup made him a natural candidate for the emcee role.
Amanda Windsor joined Panke as co-coordinator a few months ago. She had never tried her hand at live storytelling before she began doing it at Madison Storytellers events last year, but she had long enjoyed listening to storytelling podcasts, including The Moth.
“I went to an event and I told a micro-story, and then just kept coming,” Windsor says.
“I had been looking for somebody to co-coordinate for a while, and the main qualifications are that you know how to do a story and you’re not a creep,” says Panke. “Amanda seemed like she wasn’t a creep, and obviously she knows how to tell a story.”
He’s right. Windsor’s story at the November Madison Storytellers event at the Central Library — a wrenchingly personal piece touching on the isolation of marriage, the strains of moving to a new town where you don’t know anybody, and lasagna soup — was a highlight of the evening. For Windsor, like Rubin, part of the appeal of storytelling is rooted in her upbringing.
“In my family, the person with the best story was the one who got to talk,” Windsor says. “So I learned quickly that I needed to have a good thing to say and a funny thing to say to be heard, and that translated in adulthood into really enjoying stories.”
Jessica King
Madison Storytellers hosts non-competitive events at various venues. Daiquiri Jones performs at Arboretum Cohousing, March 2014.
But for Windsor, it also meets a need for community. “Moving to Madison from this town that I lived in for quite a long time in South Carolina, I didn’t have a community that was satisfying my need for connection,” she says. “Storytelling at its root is about community, so that felt really good. If nothing else, I meet new people in a way that’s really sincere. A lot of other social settings don’t offer that kind of sincerity.”
Unlike The Moth and Madison Story Slam, Madison Storytellers is not a competition. It’s a supportive environment in which all stories are received enthusiastically, and the feedback comes in the form of casual conversations afterward. Turnout has ebbed and flowed over the years. These days, about 30 to 40 people usually show up for events, but only a handful actually tell stories, and even fewer are regulars. Panke would like to see turnout become more stable as storytelling grows in Madison. For that reason, he’s not too worried about any negative impact from The Moth. He believes there will still be a place for people who want to tell and hear stories outside of a “slam” context.
For Rubin, the key to success for the Madison Moth will be getting every part of the community involved, particularly groups whose voices and stories often go unheard.
As she embraced her midlife challenge, the amount of time she spent on her own writing and storytelling started to feel narcissistic.
“Seeing if there was a way I could take this skill and help other people figure out how they can tell their stories became much more interesting to me than telling my own stories,” she says.
To that end, Rubin has already been reaching out to diverse communities, including people who are homeless or incarcerated. Along with Panke and poets Areceli Esparza and Fabu, she volunteers to lead a three-week storytelling workshop through UW’s Odyssey Project. These poets and storytellers plan to continue offering free monthly workshops to help people get comfortable telling their own stories once the Madison Moth launches.
“There are lots of people gathering in all corners of Madison to listen to other people talk, tell stories, recite poetry,” Rubin says. “I would like The Moth to complement all of the creative events and gatherings happening throughout Madison. I would like to see a broad diversity of people come and check out the storytelling scene.”
Hixson of The Moth applauds those efforts. “We’re interested in involving as much of Madison as possible in the StorySLAM, and that’s always good stuff for people who don’t usually get to talk about their lives,” she says. “It’s really beautiful and important work that changes hearts and minds.”
