A quarter of a century ago, a poet and novelist named George Dawes Green founded a not-for-profit organization in New York City dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. He named it after the Moths, a group of friends who got together regularly to spin yarns, inspired by the moths that used to gather around the porch light of Green’s Georgia home. The “StorySlams” that The Moth sponsored became increasingly popular along with the art of spoken-word performance, and by 2009, National Public Radio had picked up The Moth Radio Hour. It won a Peabody Award the following year, and is now carried by 575 stations nationwide, with a million listeners. There’s a regular Moth podcast as well, and the organization now runs more than 600 storytelling events a year nationwide.
The Moth’s ascendancy was part of a larger wave of interest in spoken-word media in recent decades, usually carried on radio or via podcasts, ranging from TED Talks to NPR’s This American Life and Selected Shorts and WNYC’s Radiolab. Some of the content is journalism, some opinion, some essays, some memoir, some fiction; what they all have in common is an audio format that pairs well with other tasks like driving or housework, in a society where multitasking has taken over our lives. And unlike the Golden Age of Radio, we now get to push the Start button to listen at whatever time suits our schedules.
What makes The Moth unique is its focus on short-format (five to six minutes) first-person narratives, usually true and always performed without notes. Sometimes these memoirs are delivered by famous names, but for the most part, the storytellers are ordinary folks like you and me. People who think they have a tale worth sharing can record it and submit the tape for consideration. They may be invited to participate in a StorySlam — a competitive event where the stories have a common assigned theme. The winners eventually converge for a regional or national contest called a GrandSlam. The whole idea is to encourage people to practice storytelling as a social art and do it often enough to lose their stage fright, thereby reclaiming one of humankind’s more ancient forms of entertainment.
Up until now, Hudson Valley residents who wanted to hear a StorySlam in person needed to head down to New York City, or content themselves with listening to the podcast or The Moth Radio Hour. That state of affairs is about to change: This weekend, the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck will play host to a series of events it’s calling “The Moth X Omega.” On Friday evening, July 22 at 7:30 p.m., seasoned storytellers Kate Tellers, Bonnie Levison, Tim Lopez, Tiq Milan, Melle Powers and Theresa Thames will take the stage at Omega to perform stories under the thematic heading “There’s a Place for Us.” You can attend in person for $100 ($90 for Omega members), which includes dinner; or you can watch it livestreamed for a very affordable $15.
Want the full-immersion experience, possibly including trying out telling your own story live in front of a group? For $385 ($345 members), you can attend a three-day workshop at Omega from July 22 to 24, working directly with instructors from The Moth and using customized prompts and exercises to prepare your own brief memoir. Ten willing students will be selected to share their tales without a net at a StorySlam on Saturday evening. On Sunday, the workshop wraps up with a panel discussion featuring Omega co-founder Elizabeth Lesser and Kate Tellers, director of MothWorks, The Moth’s traveling workshop program. Tellers is also the author of the recent best-seller How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth.
Offering a live one-night performance that’s open to the general public is “a rarity” for Omega, says programmer Moira Cleary, a longtime fan of The Moth who lobbied heavily to get a partnership going. Noting that Omega progenitor Lesser has a background as a professional storyteller, Cleary says, “It’s a natural fit for us to collaborate.” It has taken her more than two years to make this series of events happen, working through the delays caused by the pandemic. “I started this in 2019 with the intention of having it in 2021,” she explains. “I proposed the entire three-part package for them…. We’re creating a new hybrid sort of programming so we can do this together.”
Cleary praises the staff of The Moth as being easy to work with, and has high hopes of the collaboration becoming an annual phenomenon. “Ideally, we would love to have this be an ongoing relationship. My intention is to have them year after year.” She sees this first event as “a great celebration of people telling their stories” after the traumatic experience of social isolation during COVID. “They’re funny; they’re sad. They’re everything we’ve been feeling the last two years — people celebrating a strange return together.”
More broadly, this new partnership approach to Omega programming aligns well with a part of the Institute’s mission that especially resonates for Cleary: to serve as a “gateway” for “that spark of creativity. It doesn’t have to be storytelling; it can be whatever inspires them to bring their own art into the world. That’s my dream: to take these ideas and pollinate the world with creativity. I don’t know of anything else that connects us that way.”
Ready to sample “the unique power of personal storytelling to build a community where entertainment and enlightenment merge,” as The Moth puts it? Space is still available in both the three-day workshop and the live performance, and of course the number of livestream viewers is unlimited. To reserve your tickets or learn more, visit www.eomega.org/workshops/the-moth-x-omega. The Omega Institute is located at 150 Lake Drive in Rhinebeck.
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