In the interests of providing my students (don't you love how I can own them with a single pronoun?) with a nudge into the wide world of the inter-webs where stories dwell upon dwell upon dwell, I've put some alternative "readings" on the syllabus. These begin with The Moth website.
(I'm also assigning The Onion, a TED talk, and a bevy of websites devoted to click-baiting college students. After all, we're studying creative writing, and I want to emphasize the creative part of the writing. Who knows, that is, what and where and how we'll be writing in 10, 20, 30 years? I never imagined, when I was a college senior, that I'd be tapping out a form of personal narrative into a book-sized computer and then, with a few clicks of buttons, pushing it out into cyberspace for you and other potential strangers and friends to read and even respond. Back then, we typed our workshop materials onto ditto forms, put them on a ditto machine, and cranked out 15 purple wet copies for the group.)
As I'm a fan of doing my own homework, I made sure to listen to the latest episode of Moth stories -- these are live events where storytellers (famous and not so) stand up in front of audiences without notes or scripts and tell a story. The Moth organizers, of course, first get you to pitch a potential story to them and then, if they decide to go with it, coach you into this live delivery.
And that's my way of telling you that, yes, you can't just get up there and wing it. The piece has been drafted, crafted, cut, rearranged, critiqued, and so on before it ever reaches the stage. The episode I found is titled "Facing the Dark," includes three stories. John Turtturo talks about his brother's mental illness, Daniela Schiller speaks about her father's memories of the Holocaust and her own work with psychological research on memory, and Kate Braestrup describes the importance of facing death -- in person -- in her piece, "The House of Mourning." I have to confess that this last piece is the one that most touched me, perhaps because of my own baggage with dead fathers.
Often when I'm listening to The Moth Radio Hour (it's a podcast) or StoryCorps (another podcast) or Snap Judgement (ditto), I'm struck by the immediacy of a story told in its human voice, as well as by the intimacy of the form. Instead of reading the words on the page in my own voice, at top speed, invisibly in my head, I'm using my ears to hear them, in a narrator's voice, with sound effects and pauses and (sometimes) mutual tears.
These experiences remind me that story is vital to us. It organizes the chaos of experience into sense. It makes the intangible tangible. It creates a light in the darkness. It populates the emptiness with friends.
And these oral stories also remind me where the heart of story resides: in the impulse to share our experience with others. All you need, The Moth producers remind us, is a person, a place and a problem. Then -- boom. Story happens, transforming teller and audience alike.
It's a powerful communion. And (in this case) it's free.
I listened to John Turturro's story too and it was a powerful story about family and sacrifice. It reminded me of my aunt (on my mother's side) who also has mental illness, and when I was a younger, I don't think I appreciated how difficult it has been on my mother and the rest of her siblings. But growing up and watching how much they've cared for my aunt taught me a lot about how important the relationships you have with your siblings are.
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