New York Public Library Podcast: The Moth on the Power of Storytelling

http://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/08/11/podcast-moth-storytelling

by Tracy O'Neill, Social Media Curator
August 11, 2015

In 1997, The Moth began hosting storytelling events around the country, and in 2013, we were lucky enough to share in The Moth experience at LIVE from the NYPL. On that night, The Moth founder George Dawes Green (Ravens, The Juror), writer Andrew Solomon (Far from the Tree, The Noonday Demon), and The Moth's long-time Artistic Director Catherine Burns joined us. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present The Moth on Storytelling.

George Dawes Green, Andrew Solomon, Catherine Burns,  and Carly Johnstone.

Most of us are used to experiencing narrative primarily on the page, but Catherine Burns discussed the way in which oral storytelling offers different rewards: the rewards of connecting through listening:

"I do think that as a culture we have sort of forgotten how to listen. Since we’re talking about mamas, I’ll talk about my mama. One of my first memories as a child, when I was four years old, this nice lady novelist mama said had come to do research in my hometown and so mama, one of my first memories is being four years old sitting down for pimento cheese sandwiches with my mother and Harper Lee. Which at the time I was four, like fine. So cut to ten years later, I’m fourteen, I’m reading To Kill a Mockingbird in school and all of a sudden I realize that Harper Lee was at our house, and I was completely freaked out by my mother, like, by her kindness, yes, but also by her audacity. I was like, 'Mama, you just invited Harper Lee over for lunch? She had just won the Pulitzer Prize.' Mama was like, 'Well, I don’t know about that, but she was new in town, and you got to get to know your neighbors, because you never know what’s been going on with the person in the line behind you at the supermarket.' And there’s something about that that I think is fundamental to what we’re trying to do with the Moth."