The Moth is a radio hour that hosts live storytellers. A Georgia native created the series to promote and cultivate the craft of storytelling, a past-time I conceive of as distinctly southern or Irish or Black. Modern American storytelling, the finest storytelling, emerges out of the cultural residue of poverty. If you cannot purchase escape and entrancement, create it. The Moth thus originates from the summer memories of a Southerner.
The show’s stories are necessarily different from those set down formally upon a page ––though, I except Faulkner (pictured above) from this distinction; his voice lifts like a torrent and flows over. The Moth tales are recorded live which necessitates a proximity between listener and teller that is simply not paralleled on the page.
And yet… if one wishes, as a writer, to awaken a reader, they would do well to take a cue from the exigencies of the live show. The stories on the Moth are all unified in a singular quality and, indeed, it is an explicit criterion for successful submission: the narrator must have something at stake. A Moth audience converges expectantly, almost palpably over the radio wires, around a story where something is truly on the line. It is in these spaces that transformation occurs, character is distilled and the audience is released back into their seats, resolved once more into single individuals.
So when pre-writing your own story, which a true personal statement must be, start as the Moth recommends: what’s at stake? And of course and perhaps primary, as Faulkner recommends, read, read, read.
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