ANNIVERSARY
WHEN I WAS FIRST asked to be a storyteller at the Moth, a U.S.-based nonprofit that sends people out in front of audiences to tell their true stories, I was a little leery. The word storyteller made me uneasy; I pictured myself sitting somberly with a group of people in a circle, wearing a special storyteller robe and holding a rain stick. But, of course, telling a story at the Moth is nothing like that.
It wasn’t that I was afraid of standing before an audience. I’m a novelist, so reading aloud to a roomful of people (or even a handful of people and a loud bookstore cappuccino machine) is something I know how to do. But at the Moth, you can’t hold notes. While the artistic director had been working with me on my piece, helping me turn it from an anecdote into a fully realized story, I was still hung up on the memorization part.