The Transom Review Volume 14/Issue 1
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The Transom Review Volume 14/Issue 1 Catherine Burns January 2014 (Edited by Sydney Lewis) Moth founder, George Dawes Green on stage at The Players. Photo by Denise Ofelia Mangen The Transom Review – Vol.14/ Issue 1 Intro from Jay Allison One of the pleasures of producing The Moth Radio Hour is working with the Women of The Moth. They can take an incipient story and make it rise up. They can get the storyteller out on the high wire with just the right balance of fear and confidence. Their skill is hidden away, but it’s what makes The Moth special. Catherine Burns leads the artistic team, and in her Transom Manifesto she has generously illuminated some of her secret tricks for us. She talks about what makes a Moth story work, and, more particularly, what makes it work (or not) across different media, with fascinating examples. Catherine is a self-confessed story nerd, and she’s willing to hang out on Transom to chat with you about beats, stakes, pov, tense – whatever microelement of narrative intrigues you. You Talkin’ to Me: How Stories Work at The Moth From day one, The Moth has been about the simplest thing: a true story well told in front of a live audience. At the end of 2013, there will have been more than 10,000 stories told at The Moth since George Dawes Green started it in 1997. And tens of thousands more have been told at the storytelling events that have sprung up around the world. Storytelling is an ancient art form, but, as George likes to say, this modern movement is new in the sense that these nights of raw personal stories — dinner table stories — have for the first time come out of the kitchen and onto the stage. It’s a craft, even though our great Moth raconteurs make it look easy. Our directors spend hours working with the storytellers, helping them turn the true events of their lives into art onstage. The question we get asked most is a simple one: how do you know when you’ve heard something that can be turned into a great story? When Transom asked me to write a “Moth Manifesto” I jumped at the chance to discuss this with a forum of people who care as much about telling great stories as we do. Our team is always trying to figure out the rules (and how best to break them at times). And the rules have shifted as The Moth has moved through different media: what works in audio doesn’t always work on the page or in video or print. So let’s talk about what makes a great story, and how the delivery system can sometimes affect how you put that story together. 2 The Transom Review – Vol.14/ Issue 1 From Bar Story to Moth Story When I’m trying to figure out what story someone might tell for us, I often ask the person what story they can’t wait to tell a new friend, or what stories their friends ask to hear repeated at dinner (“the one about the time you flipped your car on the way to take the SAT” or “how everything went wrong at your rehearsal dinner,” etc.) You know what I mean; we all have them. Often these stories are anecdotal, but if you dig, there’s usually some deeper meaning, which is why they are important to you and get repeated. (You were subconsciously sabotaging your SAT score because you didn’t want to go to the fancy college your parents had picked out for you; the disastrous dinner bonded the two very different families, etc.) Ellie Lee was a friend of mine, so I knew that when she was in college, her father’s grocery store — the largest Asian market in New England — had burned to the ground. There were a lot of crazy details that made it a great cocktail party story: the city of Boston had done work in the area a week before and had forgotten to turn back on the hydrants, so there was no water to stop the fire; the fire spread to a building filled with illegally-stored fireworks that suddenly went off. Ellie Lee. Photo by James Michael Rotz But when we talked about how to make it about something more, Ellie revealed that up to that point she had seen her father as a little ridiculous (in the way our teenaged selves all think our parents are silly). Over the course of the fire, she saw what her father had built for himself, her family and his Chinatown community. The final piece, “A Kind of Wisdom” maintains the humor of the cocktail party story, but with a rich wrap around. Listen to “A Kind of Wisdom” by Ellie Lee: ( http://transom.org/wp/wp- content/uploads/2013/11/Ellie-Lee_A-Kind-of-Wisdom-.mp3 ) Another example is the writer Nathan Englander. Nathan had told me a hilarious story about being on a train in Europe, and waking up to find that the car he and his fellow American backpackers were in had been unhitched from the rest of the train at some point during the night, leaving the car just sitting there — by itself — on the track in the middle of nowhere (they didn’t even know what country they were in). But in digging through the story with Nathan, it turned out that this happened in Eastern Europe just months after the fall of the Soviet Union. Nathan had a very conservative Jewish upbringing. In his words, “I had been raised on a full-on diet of the Holocaust.” So when he finds himself in a lone train car on the wrong side of the iron curtain, he has a full-blown panic attack. 3 The Transom Review – Vol.14/ Issue 1 Says Nathan in this story, “This is a part of the world that swallows Jews. [. .] That wall came down in a day; it could go back up in a day. Half the world was trapped behind it for all those years.” What began as a funny story about backpacking became a piece about deep fears bubbling up while traveling through post-holocaust Europe. Listen to “Unhooked” by Nathan Englander: (http://transom.org/wp/wp- content/uploads/2013/11/Nathan- Englander_Unhooked.mp3 ) Nathan Englander Photo by Jason Falchook Sometimes the Greatest Triumphs Have Shaky Starts Someone who has told half a dozen A-plus Moth stories is New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik. He’s a huge crowd favorite, and we love working with him. But he likes to bring up his first Moth story, which was about disagreements among different generations of couples in his family. He was reluctant to rehearse with us, and has always been very vocally critical of his first effort. Adam Gopnik: Oh my goodness, I came to The Moth telling the worst story ever — I never heard of the Adam Gopnik . Photo by Sarah Stacke goddamned Moth, and I had no interest in the goddamned Moth, and I was lassoed into doing a Moth story by my dear friend, and I was utterly contemptuous of the process and completely uninterested in the effect, and I told a horrible story and that was that! He’s being way too harsh. The original story is very funny, but because he doesn’t hit the story’s crises hard enough, it feels more like a comic essay than a fully realized Moth story. You can hear it here: Listen to Adam Gopnik’s first attempt at “Rare Romance Well Done Marriage”: ( http://transom.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Adam-Gopnik_2002.mp3 ) 4 The Transom Review – Vol.14/ Issue 1 Many years and Moth stories later, Adam and I decided to have another go at the story. We worked it through, trying to punch up the emotional arc and bring more Adam into it. I pushed him to find a moment that demonstrated the heart of his disagreement with his wife. I asked him if there was ever an incident that brought him to a breaking point? He remembered a night when he was cooking for his wife and children, and they refused to eat what he’d made. This brought the issues of the story to a head, and gave it a real moment of crisis. Here is the new version, recorded nearly ten years later in 2011, that has appeared on both the podcast and The Moth Radio Hour ( www.prx.org/themoth ): Listen to Adam Gopnik’s Reworked “Rare Romance Well Done Marriage” ( http://transom.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Adam-Gopnik_Rare-Romance- Well-Done-Marriage.mp3 ) Another storyteller who had a second go at her story is the astrophysicist Janna Levin. In addition to studying the stars, Janna is a poet and writer. Back in 2005 she told the story of how she met, then lost, the love of her life, Warren. It was a beautiful story, but she used such poetic language that it was easy to miss some of the important beats of her story. At the end, having broken up with Warren on another continent over a year before, she improbably bumps into him again, and the language is so complicated that it’s hard to grasp the facts of what’s happening. Janna Levin. Photo by Sarah Stacke Here is a little excerpt of the moment where she bumps into Warren again: Janna Levin: And so I daydreamed this: that the universe had had a big bang and it was born and it was small.