The Moth

Preface

Who knew that what New York needed was a front porch? That the secret desire hidden in the hearts of hipsters and banksters alike was a chance to sit after dinner in a screened-in space, to escape—or maybe just enjoy—the summer heat, and there, in the dark, lit by a single lamp with its attendant insects, swap stories, tell tales? Who knew that what we really wanted was one shared place where everyone from a kid off the street to a cop just off the beat to Salman Rushdie could tell about this weird thing that happened: Did I tell you this already? No? Well, you remember that time I went round on Christmas to Uncle Norm's…

Storytelling, story-sharing, tale-bearing in the good sense, yarn-spinning—who knew that what New York (and now the nation; we'll get there) needed was… that?

Well, the men and mostly women of The Moth knew. This book relates what is itself an improbable story, a yarn spun about how The Moth sprang from a simple idea of George Green's, slowly grew, and then eventually became a national phenomenon.

But the deeper questions are: Why now? Why here? And, above all, why does it work? What is it about this improbable form that The Moth has made its own and shared with the world—the timed, short personal story, rooted in reminiscence and memoir, distinctly unprofessional even when offered by a pro—that vibrates with its era?

A lot of its success has to do, as always in life, with much preparation and calculation beneath the seeming spontaneity. For all their seeming inconsequence and improvisational air, a good Moth story is as carefully prepped and cultivated as a bonsai tree, with the same understanding that the miniature form, far more fragile than the bigger kind, needs more constant tending. You have a little stage space to waste in a two-hour play, but there's not a second that doesn't have to count in a ten-minute story. The producers and directors of Moth evenings—an astonishing array of those mostly female overseers, who somehow combine the role of effusive cheerleader and hard-headed theater critic—"run" the stories, work the stories, over and over, until that thing you hear, though never written down, is incised on the storyteller's consciousness for good, with all its inner twists and turns.

That relentless preparation may be, for the arrogant writer-type who thinks he already knows all there is to know about storytelling—i.e., me—the most difficult, and then in the end the most rewarding thing about the Moth process. A good story, we're reminded, is shaped, plotted, rehearsed. The best guy on the porch was planning his tale right through dinner. A good story needs an A plot and usually a B plot, and then, if it's to "levitate the room," to use the lovely expression the women of The Moth use themselves, it almost always needs some last rising touch, a note of pathos or self-recognition or poetic benediction, to lift the story, however briefly, into the realm of fable or symbol.

Three more C's spring to mind to encircle the mystery of The Moth. A lot of the magic of the Moth story is confessional: Everyone likes to talk about himself, to be sure, but the stories we like to hear most are the ones that you would think we would be most unwilling to tell. The human need for confession in the presence of others, left mostly untended by the churches these days, is fulfilled by the Moth occasion. An uncanny number of the best Moth stories are admissions, even apologies, frank, candid ("I spent Christmas in a transgender bar" or "When I was fourteen, I shot my friend by accident"). And the audience listening implies, by the perfect silence of their attention, that they are rapt—right there with you. Throughout even a self-humiliating Moth story, one hears the rarest thing: the sound of an audience keeping an open mind. Then often laughter—and always, applause—closes the circuit. The unspeakable or embarrassing thing admitted turns out to be… not so bad, maybe even surprisingly commonplace. We didn't all insult James Brown or get busted making hooch in Attica, but life presents relentless difficulties and complexities and humiliations even to the luckiest of us, and we applaud warmly as if to say, I know. The audience doesn't release its breath as it does at a high-tension tragedy, or applaud in culminated pleasure as at a good musical. No, the audience pauses, reflects for a bare half moment, and then erupts in the pleasure not of seeing a thing accomplished but of hearing a truth shared. Some ancient ritual of expiation seems to be taking place: that's okay, the exhalation says, what happened to you, however hair-raising, and the Moth stories that have been told about escapes from prison, accidental shootings, and near-death experiences are now part of what has happened to us all.

The second C is that of comedy. Perhaps the hardest thing those Moth story directors have to teach the storyteller is that the laughter will come only if there are no self-conscious jokes. This isn't stand-up, they say, in pleasant effect, to the guy who, with a microphone suddenly in his hands, wrongly thinks himself a second Seinfeld. (Me, again.) The laughter provoked by a Moth story has to be ethical laughter: not the laughter of a taboo transgressed, but the laughter of a truth revealed. And nothing is more helpful to a storyteller who may also be, in mufti, a pro writer than this reminder that the ethic of all storytelling is credibility, truth.

Much has been made of the human need for narrative, but, truth be told, stories don't make us better people. But they do make us truer writers.

My own Moth experience came along, for instance, at a moment when I often felt mired in the damp, soggy marsh of the four-thousand-word essay, with its exhausting, sapient certainties and predictable drop-cap caesuras ("Edmund Burke was born in…"). The pressure of Moth storytelling made me newly aware of what propulsion can do for a paragraph. It reminded me that drama and pacing and even suspense could be wooed from the slightest materials, and that the key to good writing (one key, anyway) is that the reader should never look back. (Even Proust, for all his elaborating, is a spiraling but not a circular writer. We may move round and round, but we press ahead.) Every essay is really a story, and every story, truth be told, shares the same ethic, the same motto. The great storyteller Frank O'Connor defined it best, saying once that every good story should end, in spirit, with the exact same words: "And everything that ever happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again." (He actually got to use that ending, once.) In this book of Moth stories, that test of significance, of meaning, is met again and again. There are very few of these well-told tales that don't have those words as an invisible addition. You can mouth them to yourself as the story ends: Jesus, she could never have felt the same about anything after that…

Confession, comedy, and then one last alliterative thing—connection. Poetry and philosophy may be there to teach us, in a sudden stunning lurch of perspective, the virtues of detachment, but storytelling, large and small, is there to teach us the beauties of attachment. The sweat and worry of a Moth evening nearly always ends with the sense of membership in a private club, but one shared by speakers and listeners. We wring each other's hands, not in sweaty acknowledgment, but in shared appreciation: Every story knits together with every other. It must: A small connection, a link in a chain, is always forged.

If "I'll never feel the same" is the moral of every good story, "We're all in this together" is the moral of every Moth occasion. Of all the alchemies of human connection—sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship—the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature. No one will ever know exactly how it happens, but however it happens, it is what makes The Moth fly too.

Adam Gopnik

Foreword

Once on a porch on a Georgia island, while a troupe of moths staggered around the light, while cicadas kept time in the live oaks, Dayton Malone told us of the night he'd let 6,000 chickens escape from the shed he was supposed to be minding. I've forgotten the details (too much bourbon), but his easygoing frankness has stayed with me. He was simply unsuited for the job of chicken-minder. He'd left a door unlatched and gone to bed. In the morning, the girls were gone. He went out and searched the horizon, and saw a far-off smear of white—the last of them—receding.

I loved Dayton when he told that story. This feeling surprised me, because we'd never really gotten along—he was a true son of the South and was always needling me about my newfound Yankeeness, my "scalawaggery"—plus he was always trying to shake salt on my food (he was a pro-salt fanatic). But his saga of the lost chickens seemed so candid and clownish and human, and everything about it—the hill-country cadence, the trailing-off sweep of his hand as he muttered, "Gone—every last one of them," his sad whistle of defeat—struck me as… well, not honest exactly (he was too much of a showman for that), but utterly revealing of the man.

We heard stories like that all night. If you were looking for literal truth, you wouldn't find it, but on Wanda's porch, you got such full doses of character and loss and destiny that you'd always come away reeling (of course the bourbon heightened this effect).

Years later I was living in New York, and one night I happened to be at some particularly dull and sing-songy poetry reading in the East Village, and I started missing Wanda's porch, and wishing that the poet would lower her aesthetic screen for a moment and just tell us a story.

That was it—that was the germ. An idea fluttered through my thoughts: that I might organize a night of storytelling in New York City in honor of those nights at Wanda's. I supposed it would be fairly easy: New York must be filled with frustrated raconteurs. And so several years later, after much fussing and feinting and overthinking, that idea finally launched. I hosted an evening at my loft in Manhattan. I hired a director, the brilliant and indefatigable Joey Xanders. We rented chairs. We served hors d'oeuvres. We called it The Moth, and it was a bomb.

The stories were all overcrafted, or too prettified, or too lugubriously confessional. And way too long. I didn't tell a story, but in saying "a few words," I managed to be as long-winded as any of them. My guests were polite afterward—someone even called the evening "noble." But I wanted to crawl into a hole. However, late that night, after many drinks, my friend Sheri Holman said, "Well, yeah, it was awful. Unquestionably. But there was still something moving about it. Just the idea of it. A night of stories!"

And the way she said, "A night of stories!"—it recalled Wanda's porch so vividly, so romantically, that suddenly I was hell-bent to try again. I got many friends to pitch in, and Joey scoured the city for raconteurs. We set down some guiding principles. All stories would be rehearsed, shaped. We would demand freshness and the non-jokey kind of wit that bubbles up naturally from true human predicaments. We would insist on pithiness. Pithiness above all: we brought in a saxophonist to be a timekeeper.

We began to put on Moths all over town. And to discover, one by one, true raconteurs.

Jonathan Ames was our first star. His style was frenetic and disturbing. Standing before us, composing on his feet, he'd dip into his bank of memories and drag to the surface whatever hideous artifacts he happened upon. He would not censor them. Once he told us of his first discovery of masturbation, and how he'd gone running exultantly to his mother with the news of it. If he was ashamed of that episode, he shared it anyway. With such passion would he plunge in! He'd get wilder and wilder; he'd seem out of control; I'd imagine him as some crippled storm-tossed ship bound for the rocks. Though the rudderlessness was all illusion: Jonathan was sitting calmly in the pilothouse and knew exactly where he was going. When he was ready, he would bring his story to a sudden, casual, shrugging close—and then stroll offstage while we caught our breaths.

Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes, had a sweet voice and scapegrace cheekiness. A sense of great loss accompanied him always. He laughed at that loss and held it in contempt, yet it was so present to us that all hearts were broken the moment he began to speak.

Whereas George Plimpton seemed truly buoyed by his defeats. He'd tried his hand gamely at various sports, and failed spectacularly at all of them (except court tennis—he was a master of that one lovely oddball game). His pratfalls had inspired a half dozen great memoirs, and they were the source also of his power as a raconteur. We loved best the moments in his stories when his impostures would be revealed—when all pretension would be unmasked.

They were true raconteurs. Our Moth directors made them work, made them condense and tweak and reshape and condense some more, but those gentlemen never complained—because they truly liked telling stories. They liked telling them over and over.

Of course they all knew that the key to personal storytelling is owning up to one's foolishness. They had learned Orwell's famous lesson, "Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats." But beyond that—each knew how to expose his humiliations in his own way; each had his own squint or stutter or palms-up gesture of hopelessness, and could make himself into a singular, full-body work of art up on our stage.

It was something to behold.

So much so that some of us boldly predicted that this new thing (new in the sense that these nights of raw personal stories, porch stories, were coming out at last from the kitchen to the stage) might well become the art of the twenty-first century.

To nurture that dream has been an enormous labor, and many folks have given up huge chunks of their lives (please see my thank-yous at the back of this book). In the impossible early years, I had to beg fortunes from friends just to keep us alive. And of course there have been insane fireball clashes of ego, which attend I suppose the birth of any creative enterprise. So many prima donnas! The famous acrobat who scorned direction with a volley of insults and had to be scratched. The famous French philosopher who could recount his dull successes untiringly but who could not, when pressed, recall a single thing that he had ever failed at. The comedian who would not shut up no matter how loudly the saxophone played. The self-obsessed movie star… well, I know Catherine is terrified as she reads this and I probably shouldn't tell you about the self-obsessed movie star.

But there are also nights when I'll walk to one of our slams and pass block after block of people who've been waiting in line for hours because our nights of shared stories are so compelling. Or I'll be at Cooper Union hearing Mike DeStefano's tale of giving his dying wife, Franny, one last Harley ride, and I'll look around and every man and woman within sight will be openly weeping. Or I'll be sitting in on a high school slam rehearsal in a suburb of Atlanta and a shy teenage girl will be relaying the smallest possible episode—her encounter with a buck deer on her way home from school one day—and all of us will be grinning from ear to ear because her little vignette is such an immense pleasure.

Or I'll be at the immortal Players Club in Manhattan, and the room will be dotted with my beloved friends, and one of our greats, Adam Gopnik or Juliet Hope Wayne or Joan Juliet Buck or Edgar Oliver, will be up on stage, approaching their tale's climax, and there will be not a sound in the room. Every spine in the house will be tuned to the soul standing before the microphone. Everyone awaiting the word, locked into the rhythm of the teller's breathing and waiting for whatever perfect confession of futility and foolishness and humanity is about to come rolling down upon us—and at those times that silly little notion that I had sixteen years ago will seem quite smart.

George Dawes Green
Founder

Introduction

In the early 1970s, my Mama heard that "a nice young woman novelist" was staying in a cabin down the lake from our house and called her up (having never met her before) and invited her over for lunch. One of my first memories is four-year-old me sitting down at our kitchen table to dine on mini pimento-cheese sandwiches and deviled eggs, and Mama introducing me to our guest, "Miss Harper Lee." She had come to my tiny hometown in Alabama to do research for what she thought might be her second book.

When I thought back on this as a teenager, I was kind of blown away by my Mama's kindness, but also her audacity. I said, "Mama, you just CALLED HER UP and invited her to lunch?!? She'd just won the Pulitzer Prize!"

But Mama just shrugged and said, "Well, I didn't know about that, but she was new in town, and living down the street, and I wanted to be neighborly. You gotta get to know your neighbors. You never know who is in line in front of you at the grocery store, and what's been going on with 'em."

Thirty years later I'm in New York City at The Moth, meeting and getting to know people with astoundingly diverse backgrounds. Whether it's a grossly underprepared matador, a press secretary who overslept and missed Air Force One, or a grandmother of five who got up the guts to call our pitchline, our first conversation is always the same: "Tell me about yourself, tell me the story of how you became you."

We ask people to share the biggest moments of their lives—the moments that changed them for the better (or worse). And while many of our favorite stories are about moments of triumph, stories about our mistakes can often be even more revelatory. The number one quality of great storytellers is their willingness to be vulnerable, their ability to tell on themselves.

Few of us will go into outer space like Michael Massimino, but who can't relate to spending months preparing for a big event only to get there and be undermined by something as tiny as a stripped screw? We understand Alan Rabinowitz's need to save jaguars on a deeper level after we hear about his debilitating childhood stutter. It's hard for most of us to relate to their almost superhuman strengths, but their flaws help us slip into their shoes.

They share their stories; they don't read or perform them. We help them shape their stories, but when they take that stage, it's just them up there. That high-wire act is what makes The Moth so magical when it works. The audience's faith in the storytellers becomes a safety net that allows them to explore the most intense moments of their lives onstage in front of a room full of strangers.

We strive to make every Moth night feel like an intimate dinner party, each storyteller a guest holding the attention of the table for a moment while they relay a spellbinding tale.

Trying to capture that feeling on the page was, frankly, daunting. But as we began transcribing and reading sixteen years' worth of stories, we were astonished by their power in print. We considered more than three thousand stories, finally boiling down the list to these fifty.

As I sat down to edit them, there was not a story in the book that I hadn't heard at least a dozen times in audio. I was worried they would lose something on the page, but it was just the opposite. Even if you're a Moth fan who has heard many of these, we hope you'll find new things to love as you read them for the first time.

You will also find brand-new stories that you would never have encountered otherwise, like the one told by the beautiful Anoid Rakhmatyllaeva. Her story—of finding the courage to stand down a room full of machine gun–carrying soldiers who were destroying the pianos in her music school during a civil war—was told at a show we produced in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. The only surviving audio was captured in our rehearsal at the U.S. Embassy on a little handheld recorder that was set up in front of our interpreter, Anya, as she translated Anoid's story into English from her native Russian. But the audio is so muddy that it would never have made it onto our radio show or podcast.

(It's important to note that while these stories are among our all-time favorites, they should not be considered a definitive list—this isn't "Billboard's Top Fifty Moth Stories." The idea of the book was that it would feature lightly edited transcripts of stories from the live recordings. Here we've chosen fifty that we felt worked best on the page.)

The world is becoming increasingly digitized: we sit in our little boxes, staring at other boxes, communicating through our fingers on a keyboard. Human beings weren't meant to live this way. All our little devices and programs are supposed to connect us, but they really don't. They kind of connect us, but there's always a block there—an electronic wall that keeps us from really experiencing each other in a human way.

As a society, we have forgotten how to listen deeply. Each Moth evening is a chance to practice listening.

At The Moth, people tell intimate stories, stories that are sometimes so private you could have known a person for five years without hearing them. Your neighbor who you think you have nothing in common with gets onstage, and you discover that you actually share a great deal. When you see them on the street the next day, your perspective of them is changed because you know something important about them.

As we go to press, I'm working with an eighty-eight-year-old man named Hector Black. His story is about being consumed with hatred for the stranger who murdered his daughter, and deciding to find out more about "the monster" (as Hector thought of him) who had taken his child's life. He learned that the man was born in a mental hospital, and that when he was eleven years old, his mother took him and his brother and sister to a swimming pool and said that God was ordering her to destroy them. He and his brother escaped, but watched while his mother drowned his little sister.

Hector said to me, "I wondered what I would be like if this had happened to me—if the woman who had brought me into the world had tried to destroy me. He became human to me again in that moment. I was able to forgive him, and felt as though a tremendous weight had been lifted from me."

Hector's story speaks to how essential it is to open ourselves to others, even in the most extreme circumstances. And while that intimacy can feel terrifying at times, it's vital. It's what will save us.

Catherine Burns
Artistic Director

JANNA LEVIN

Life on a Möbius Strip

Einstein famously said, "Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity." Then he added, "And I'm not so sure about the universe."

And it's true, there's a realistic possibility that the entire universe is finite; it's mathematically and physically possible. There was a period of time in my research when I was obsessed with this idea. I was fixated on the implication that you could leave the Earth and travel in a straight line to a planet in a distant galaxy on the edge of the observable universe and realize the galaxy was the Milky Way that you had left behind you, and the planet you had landed on was the Earth. There were also weirder possibilities that the Earth was reconnected like a Möbius strip—if you took a left-handed glove on that same trip, it would come back right-handed.

The hazard for a scientist working on something so esoteric is the possibility that it just might not be true or it might not be answerable. I felt myself kind of navigating this precipice between discovery on the one side and obscurity on the other side. At the time I was working at Berkeley, living in San Francisco. I would spend a lot of time in the coffee shop across the street from my apartment. I was trying to find some kind of tangible connection to a more earthbound reality. And it was there that I met this guy named Warren.

Warren came charging past me the first day I saw him and pinned me with his blue eyes and said, "You're the astrophysicist." Which I knew. And then he had so much momentum after having built up the nerve to say this to me that he kept walking; he didn't wait for my response. He went right out of the coffee shop and down the street.

And so it begins.

Warren is just everything I would never want in a man. He can't drive, he's never had his name on a lease, he's by his own confession completely uneducated, he's a self-professed obsessive-compulsive. He comes from a really tough part of working-class Manchester. He writes songs like

You get the idea. It's not good. So naturally I'm completely smitten. And he is mesmerizing. He has all this intensity, all this energy. He's full of opinions. He was going to start his own music station called Shut the Folk Up.

I said, "The gag is going to be that nobody's going to understand his accent. Nobody will understand a word he says! He'll just rant." It was a Manchester accent, but it did seem even more tangled than one would expect. It was quite a brogue. He would talk so fast that the words would just slam together—it was really undecipherable. But when he sang, this big, beautiful, warm tone just lifted out of him; it was like this old-timey crooner, this rare crisp and clear sound. So I used to tell him, "If there's anything that's really urgent that you need me to understand, just, like, sing it to me, OK?"

So, Warren and I started seeing each other, and he never asked me about my work, which was quite a relief from my own sort of mental world. And it's like we were both in exile. Warren was in exile from his actual country, and I was in a kind of mental exile. And he would obsess all day about music and melody, and I would obsess all day about mathematics and numbers. And it was like we were pulling so hard in such opposite directions that the tension kept both of us from floating away.

After a few weeks of seeing each other, Warren decides we should live together, and he's going to convince me that I should let him move in. So he gives me this argument—some fairly inventive logic, which I'm a little suspicious of, and laden with all kinds of Manchester slang I don't really follow. But Warren can convince me of anything, just anything, so I relent, and he says, "I'll be right back!" He's so excited; he comes back in less than an hour, and he's moved in. He's carrying his guitar and whatever he can carry on his back, because he has this philosophy, "If you can't carry it, you can't own it." Right? So he moves in with me.

And my parents are thrilled. Their recently Ph.D.-confirmed daughter—I have a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from MIT—is living with an illegal immigrant who can't spell words like "nonviable," "unfeasible." Even our friends are full of doubt. Our good friend, the musician Sean Hayes, is writing lyrics like