The Moth Presents All These Wonders

by Catherine Burns

  Copyright © 2017 by The Moth. Copyrights in the individual works retained by the contributors.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781101904404

  Ebook ISBN 9781101904411

  Cover design by Jake Nicolella

  v4.1

  ep

  TO EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER MUSTERED THE COURAGE TO TELL A MOTH STORY.

  And to all who have listened with an open heart.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  The Eternal Music of the Spheres

  The Moon and Stars Talks: TARA CLANCY

  Unusual Normality: ISHMAEL BEAH

  The Quest for Chad: ARTHUR BRADFORD

  The House of Mourning: KATE BRAESTRUP

  The Girl from Beckenham: SUZI RONSON

  God, Death, and Francis Crick: CHRISTOF KOCH

  Things I’ve Seen

  Fog of Disbelief: CARL PILLITTERI

  The Two Times I Met Laurence Fishburne: CHENJERAI KUMANYIKA

  It Matters a Great Deal: KEVIN MCGEEHAN

  A Tale of Two Dinners: BLISS BROYARD

  Untitled: LOUIS C.K.

  Walking with RJ: STEPHANIE PEIROLO

  Keeping the Lid On

  Go the %&# to Sleep: ADAM MANSBACH

  Panic on the Road to Jericho: NADIA BOLZ-WEBER

  Jenny: SAMUEL JAMES

  Déjà Vu (Again): COLE KAZDIN

  Call Me Charlie: JOSH BOND

  Modern Family: SARA BARRON

  R2, Where Are You?: TIG NOTARO

  Grace Rushes In

  The Shower: TOMI REICHENTAL

  Cut: JOSH BRODER

  A Phone Call: AUBURN SANDSTROM

  Who Can You Trust?: MARY-CLAIRE KING

  A New Home: DORI SAMADZAI BONNER

  Greener Grass: JANE GREEN

  As If I Was Not There: PETER PRINGLE

  Like a Man Does

  Stumbling in the Dark: JOHN TURTURRO

  Coming of Age in a Mausoleum: GEORGE DAWES GREEN

  Downstairs Neighbors: SHANNON CASON

  Undercover in North Korea with Its Future Leaders: SUKI KIM

  My Grandfather’s Shoes: CHRISTIAN GARLAND

  Leaping Forward: CYBELE ABBETT

  To Face the Fear

  Prom: HASAN MINHAJ

  But Also Bring Cheese: KATE TELLERS

  Tired, from New York: JESSI KLEIN

  An Impossible Choice: SASHA CHANOFF

  Then You Will Know!: MOSHE SCHULMAN

  The Price of Freedom: NOREEN RIOLS

  By Every Claim of Love

  Summer Camp: MEG WOLITZER

  The Weight of a Ring: AMY BIANCOLLI

  Light and Hope: BETHANY VAN DELFT

  Kidneys and Commitments: GIL REYES

  On Approach to Pluto: CATHY OLKIN

  Forgiveness: HECTOR BLACK

  California Gothic: TAYLOR NEGRON

  Acknowledgments

  About the Moth

  I was given a list of things they wanted me to do at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York. Everything seemed straightforward except for one thing.

  “What’s the Moth?” I asked. It was April 2007.

  “The Moth’s a storytelling thing,” I was told. “You talk about real-life things that happened to you, in front of a live audience.” (There may have been other answers in human history that were as technically correct but that missed out everything important, however, offhand I cannot think what they are.)

  I knew nothing of the Moth, but I agreed to tell a story. It sounded outside my area of comfort, and as such, a wise thing to do. A Moth director, I was told, would call me.

  I talked to the Moth director on the phone a few days later, puzzled: Why was I talking about my life to someone else? And why was someone else pointing out to me what my story was about?

  I didn’t begin to understand what the Moth was about until I turned up for the run-through beforehand, and I met Edgar Oliver.

  Edgar was one of the people telling stories that night. You can read his story on the page, but from reading you do not get Edgar’s gentleness or his openness, and you do not get the remarkable accent, which is the sort of accent that a stage-struck Transylvanian vampire might adopt in order to play Shakespeare, accompanied by elegant hand movements that point and punctuate and elaborate on the nature of the things he is telling us about, whether Southern Gothic or New York personal. I watched Edgar tell his story in the run-through (he managed to cut about ten minutes when he told it on the stage, and it was as if I’d never heard it before), and I knew I wanted to be part of this thing, whatever it was.

  I told my story (in it I was fifteen and stranded alone on Liverpool Street Station, waiting for parents who would never come), and the audience listened and laughed and winced and they clapped at the end and I felt like I’d walked through fire and been embraced and loved.

  Somehow, without meaning to, I’d become part of the Moth family.

  I subscribed to the Moth podcast, and every week somebody would tell me a true story that had happened to them that would, even if only slightly, change my life.

  A few years later, I found myself on an ancient school bus, driving through the American South, with a handful of storytellers, telling our stories in bars and art museums and veterans halls and theaters. I told them about how I found a dog by the side of the road who rescued me, about my father and my son, about getting into trouble at school as an eight-year-old for telling a very rude joke I’d heard from the big boys. I watched the other storytellers telling pieces of themselves night after night: no notes, nothing memorized, always similar, always true and always, somehow, fresh.

  I’ve visited some of the Moth “StorySLAMs,” as people who are randomly picked come up and compete for audience love and respect. I’ve watched the stories they tell, and told my own stories there (out of competition, before or after it’s all over). I’ve watched people trying to tell stories fail, and I’ve watched them break the hearts of everyone in the room even as they inspired them.

  The strange thing about Moth stories is that none of the tricks we use to make ourselves loved or respected by others work in the ways you would imagine they ought to. The tales of how clever we were, how wise, how we won, they mostly fail. The practiced jokes and the witty one-liners all crash and burn up on a Moth stage.

  Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything.

  Having a place the story starts and a place it’s going: that’s important.

  Telling your story, as honestly as you can, and leaving out the things you don’t need, that’s vital.

  The Moth connects us, as humans. Because we all have stories. Or perhaps, because we are, as humans, already an assemblage of stories. And the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin color, gender, race, or attitudes, but we don’t see, we can’t see, the stories. And once we hear each other’s stories we realize that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery.

  The Moth teaches us not to
judge by appearances. It teaches us to listen. It reminds us to empathize.

  And now, with these wonderful stories, it teaches us to read.

  —Neil Gaiman

  I first started hearing about the Moth in the late 1990s. Word came that a gentleman named George Dawes Green and his friends were fluttering about New York City, telling stories onstage in front of packed crowds. It was described to me as a moveable feast—a floating nightclub of sorts—devoted to first-person storytelling. The shows took place in bars and restaurants, museums, parks, speakeasies. It was a completely different group of storytellers every time, with legends like George Plimpton, Mira Nair, Vernon Reid, Andre Gregory, and Candace Bushnell sharing the stage with firefighters and accountants, dog walkers and trapeze artists.

  George always had a keen ear for fabulous raconteurs, and the charm to get them to sign up to be on stage. He surrounded himself with friends and collaborators who knew how to make things happen. Soon a community of talented curators, producers, and directors sprang up.

  It’s hard to overstate how low-tech it all was. If you were lucky enough to manage to get on their mailing list, you’d receive a gorgeously designed (but inexpensively produced) postcard in the mail, often just days before the event. There were no advance sales, so you had to show up early, stand in a massive line, and claw your way in.

  It was always worth it. (This was your only chance to hear the stories—there was no podcast to download afterward.)

  The first Moth I attended in person took place on the deck of an old boat parked on the Hudson River. I was mesmerized. What a thrill to hear a story directly from the person who lived it. The tellers were so vulnerable and funny and brave. They spoke without notes in front of a single microphone on a stand, simply lit by a spotlight.

  I had never seen anything like it. It was the complete opposite of the film world that I’d been a part of for a decade, where even on an “indie” film the stories would unfold on sets surrounded by dozens of crew. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who was worn out by stories that could only be told with the help of thousands.

  George and his merry band of friends and collaborators were pushing for just the opposite, and in doing so brought on what can only be described as a modern storytelling movement, where “dinner party stories” were moved to the stage and recognized as art. This renaissance has inspired tens of thousands of shows worldwide in places as diverse as Tajikistan, Antarctica, and Birmingham, Alabama.

  We go to print on the cusp of our twentieth anniversary. The stories in this book were all originally told live at Moth events around the world, then transcribed and lightly edited for the page. Each story was crafted with the help of one of the Moth’s directors (many of whom have been with the Moth since nearly day one, starting out as volunteer story coaches and curators when there was no budget to pay them).

  The title of the book, All These Wonders, comes from Cathy Olkin’s story in the last section, which puts us in the room at the moment she and her fellow NASA scientists first gazed at the surface of Pluto, a huge payoff that had, as is often the case, come only with great risk. And while most of us aren’t rocket scientists, we all have moments in life when we are forced off the map. Sometimes it’s by choice, metaphorically stepping into uncharted waters (“Here Be Dragons” as the sixteenth-century globes claimed). Other times we get shoved there against our will by another person or by the Fates. But the stories in this book show us that when we dare to face the unknown, we usually discover that we have more grit and tenacity than we thought. And we often land in a place that we couldn’t even have imagined when we started out.

  The number-one quality of all great storytellers is their willingness to be vulnerable, to tell on themselves in front of thousands. Each story told is a gift to the listeners.

  But the audience brings a gift of their own. We live in a world where bearing witness to a stranger’s unfiltered story is an act of tremendous compassion. To listen with an open heart and an open mind and try to understand what it’s like to be them—why they think like that, dress like that, made the choices they did—takes real courage.

  Some of the stories are lighthearted and fun, but others are more challenging—a boy soldier trying to recover what’s left of his childhood, a humanitarian worker deciding who will live and who will die in a refugee camp, the Holocaust seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old.

  But we look away at our own peril. For what wonders await us when we don’t turn away. Sometimes it is easier to try to make sense of the world one story at a time.

  And when we dare to listen, we remember that there is no “other,” there is only us, and what we have in common will always be greater than what separates us.

  Catherine Burns

  Artistic Director

  I am a fifth-generation native New Yorker. And while there is certainly something cool about that, there is also actually a downside. There was a moment when it occurred to me that while many other American families also first landed in New York, for the most part, at some point, they kept going—pioneering their way west with little more than the rags on their backs and all of that.

  Meanwhile, it’s like my own family got off a boat, took two steps, and were like, “Good enough for me. Forever.”

  All of that is to say I come from people to whom “discovering the great unknown” means…New Jersey.

  But seriously, it didn’t take me too long to realize that the reason for that was mostly fear, and that that fear pervades everything: where you live, what you do for a living. You find the first solid thing, and you don’t risk going any further.

  But as it would wind up, my mother was something of a pioneer herself, although not without her share of false starts. At twenty years old, she had hardly been outside of Brooklyn, and when she did finally leave a year later, it was only because she married a cop from Queens, which she then called “the country.”

  They had a baby—me—but by the time I was two, they had divorced. So to make a little extra money afterwards, she had to take on a weekend job cleaning apartments.

  The very first was this duplex with Manhattan-skyline views, filled with antiques and artwork. But as it winds up, it would be her last. Because over the course of a year, she would go from being the cleaning lady to the secretary to the girlfriend of the multimillionaire who owned it named Mark.

  They never wound up living together full-time. They were both divorced, so it was sort of been there, done that. But also my mom had this philosophy, which was if you take someone’s money, you have to take their advice.

  “When it came to raising you,” she said, “I wanted to do it my way, which had to mean on my dime.”

  So she would go on to spend every weekend with him, and then every weekday back home in Queens, living this dual life…for the next twenty-two years. On the weekends when I wasn’t with my dad, I was right there with her. Together, Mom and I became like superwomen: able to jump social strata in a single bound!

  Because of my mom’s plan, my life was never very different from anybody else around me. I wasn’t sent to some elite private school or moved to a penthouse. So I grew into your typical Queens teenager. I smoked blunts, and I drank 40s, and one of my best friends had a baby in high school.

  I was a walking cliché in every way, except for the fact that I still spent every odd weekend talking with this art-collecting, croquet-playing, brilliant (if pretty intimidating) man at his mansion in the Hamptons.

  When I say “talking,” I actually really mean it. I don’t just mean we made a little chitchat. I mean that after dinner every odd Saturday night for twenty years, he would ask me some enormous question.

  He would say, “If I told you that the universe was infinite—that it had no end—how would that make you feel?” (And for that one I was like five years old.)

  But I lived for it, really. We would go on for hours and hours. My mother would just kind of leave us to it.

  Eventually she’d come back in, and she�
�d be like, “Are you two gonna talk about the moon and the stars all night?”

  That’s actually what she came to call them, our moon and stars talks.

  At sixteen, like all teenagers, I didn’t want to be away from my friends for five minutes, let alone a whole weekend. So I called Mark, and I asked if I could bring them to the Hamptons.

  Ring. “Mark speaking.”

  “Hi, it’s Tara. Could I bring some of my friends next weekend?”

  “That would be fine.” Click.

  He wasn’t one for small talk.

  But there was a problem. What the problem was, was that some of my friends had no idea about any of this. Now, that’s not because I was trying to hide it. It’s really because the details weren’t exactly easy to slip into conversation.

  They’d be like, “Hey, Tara, you want to go smoke and drink on the corner?”

  “Well, I had been thinking of discussing the Hudson River School painters over dinner in Bridgehampton, but what the hell!”

  Truly, I was nervous about telling them. The only thing I can kind of compare it to is like coming out: “I have to tell you something, and I hope you find it in your heart to accept me…but I know a rich guy!”

  But truly, it was awkward, because I really wanted them to come, but I also didn’t want them to be embarrassed, so I had to explain.

  So literally, here we’d be in the schoolyard, and on one side kids would be beatin’ the crap out of each other—that’s how we do recess in Queens—and then on the other side I’d be huddled up with my friend Lynette, trying to explain antiquing.