Host: Kate Tellers
Kate Tellers: [00:00:03] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Tellers.
What happens when a community comes together? For the past two years, I've been working on a book with my colleagues here at The Moth. It's called How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth. It's been a lot of late nights, epic Zoom calls, shared Google Docs and edits on edits on edits. But together, we did it. We wrote our book to share everything that we've learned over 25 years of helping people tell their stories. It's a behind the scenes look at The Moth process and this book is for everyone, not just for people who want to get on stage. Maybe you want to tell a story in a wedding toast, or a eulogy, to open up a presentation at work or be extra charming on a date, this book helps you do that.
Stories build community. And this week on the podcast, we're going to share a story about what happens when people come together. Hang on after the story to hear more from the authors about how we wrote How to Tell a Story with five authors and hundreds of contributors. It's a community in and of itself.
Kathryn Bendall told this story in 2015 at our very first StorySLAM in Sydney, where theme of the night was Firsts. Before you listen, if you're not familiar with politics down under, it might be helpful to know that Gough Whitlam was the leader of the Labor Party, a center left political party in Australia. Here's Kathryn, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Kathryn Bendall: [00:01:24] Thank you. Hi, everyone. So, it's 1977, [chuckles] some of you weren't even born then I think. But anyway, it's 1977, and I'm a 26-year-old first time mum. and I'm living in Gladesville. I make this huge decision. I'm going to join the Australian Labor Party, because Gough Whitlam is standing one more time to be the Prime Minister of Australia. [audience cheers and applause]
So, I go up to the local branch of the Labor Party in East Ryde. And there are 18 members. I go into this world that I've got no idea about. They call each other, comrade, and they talk about the great old days when Gough was running the country for that short two years and how wonderful it'll be when he gets re-elected.
They start telling war stories about the people that they'd met in the Labor Party, people whose names now are in history, Lionel Murphy, Lance Barnard, all sorts of people. And to a newbie, brand new mum with breast milk still leaking through my jumper. I am so excited to be in the company of these people.
Anyway, I'd been a member for about six weeks. I'm at home one day and the secretary of the branch calls me, Bev Sharp. She's ringing to say that the Labor Party is having its launch at the Sydney Opera House in November, just a couple of days away, and Gough Whitlam will be speaking and they're looking for people to come in and raise money. They want people to turn up with white buckets and walk around the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House to gather money for this incredible campaign in 1977.
So, I'm excited. It's being, for me, like being invited backstage for a Sting concert. I'm so excited. [audience laughter] So, I get on a bus, the 506 from East Ride into Circular Quay and the Opera House with the other 16 or 17 members of the East Ride branch. I've got my white bucket in one hand and I've got my eight-month-old baby in the other. And of course, I get there and it's just as they've described, there is hundreds and thousands of people all gathered for this extraordinary day.
And on the way in on the bus they told me all sorts of things I needed to know as a newbie. Like, the Labor Party is an egalitarian party. So, if I see anyone incredibly famous there from the Labor Party, I'm either to call them by their first name, or call them comrade or the only exception to the rule would be Bob Hawke. He was Hawke and I was to buy him a beer. [audience laughter]
So, I get in there, and I'm walking around and I'm keeping Bev Sharp, who's the secretary of the branch in sight because I don't know where I am or what I'm doing. And my bucket's filling up with money and suddenly I feel this hand on my shoulder and I turn around and there's a very serious looking man, and he explains to me that the launch is about to start, that all the luminaries of the Labor Party are assembled upstairs on stage. But for the first time, this launch will be broadcast on ABC Television. What they've realized is while they've got all the stars of the Labor Party up there, they don't have any ordinary people. And would I be one of the ordinary people and go upstage with my baby?
So, I get up there-- You can imagine the faces of the people from the Labor Party, because I'm the Newest person in the branch. And here I am sitting up on the main stage of the Sydney Opera House with all these luminaries and they're downstairs with their buckets, still gathering money. So, I'm sitting there on stage and we're waiting for Gough to arrive. Bob Hawke or Hawke is up the front, and he's warming the crowd up. And things are reaching a crescendo of excitement.
Suddenly, my eight-month-old baby does a shit in his nappy [audience laughter] that is beyond description. [audience laughter] For the mums in the audience, I think it's known as a number three. [audience laughter] It explodes in his nappy. And the smell of it just goes right across the stage of the Sydney Opera House. [audience laughter] People are swiveling around looking for where this shocking smell is coming from. And of course, the baby then starts to cry.
So, I quickly pick him up and the stage manager's having a seizure and he's going like, “Get off stage, change that baby and get back, because Gough’s about to arrive.” So, I'm hustled out round the back of the stage and there's a room. I'm taken into this room and there's a table. I've got this baby on the table, I've taken his nappy off and I'm scraping the poo off. [audience laughter] It's just unbelievable. Just at that moment, I hear the toilet behind me flush and I hear footsteps walking towards me and I hear, which I now understand, a very long zip on a male pair of trousers being done up. I look round, and who should be standing there, but Gough Whitlam, straight out of the toilet. [audience laughter]
Well, he takes one look at me and says, “Comrade, what's going on here?” I am so awestruck. I'm thinking of all the things the people at East Ride said to me about calling comrade. And what do I do? I genuflect. [audience laughter] I would have been down there a good two minutes. [audience laughter] The wonderful part about that story is that Gough didn't seem to have a problem having his [chuckles] [unintelligible [00:08:10] genuflecting to him.
Anyway, so we had this lovely conversation and he recognized my surname as being Hungarian and he asked me in Hungarian if I could speak Hungarian and I explained I couldn't. I'd married a Hungarian man. So, he then gave me a history lesson on the invasion of Budapest, etc., etc. It was just the most extraordinary moment, that here am I with this historical figure alone in a toilet at the back of the Sydney Opera House, when Suddenly the doors flew open and in rushed this young man with great big flappy ears and bright red hair.
Yes, it was. It was Kerry O'Brien. He was about 16 at the time. Well, probably a bit older. He was Gough’s secretary and he said to me, “Gough has to go.” And with that, Gough turned round and went onto the stage. As he walked in, 2,000 people stood up as he said, men and women of Australia. And that was the first and the last time I ever saw Gough Whitlam.
[cheers and applause]
Kate Tellers: [00:09:38] That was Kathryn Bendall. Kathryn Bendall is a part time mother, grandmother, hypochondriac, politician, comedian, tour guide, volunteer friend and wife. She is, however, a full-time storyteller. She has been since age six when she first heard the plea, oh God, just cut to the chase. She's now heard those same words daily for the last 65 years. She still sees her world and the world of others as a story and is compelled to tell the story, regardless.
If you'd like to see a photo of Kathryn and the kid in question, just go to themoth.org/extras. That story was from 2015, the very first year we put together SLAMs in Australia. In 2022, we're celebrating our 25th Anniversary by going back through every single year The Moth's Been Around. Next podcast, we'll have some stories from 2014.
Now, I'm going to take you behind the scenes of how we wrote How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth. When I say we, I mean we. So many people contributed to this book, storytellers, staff, longtime members of our community. The list goes on and on and would probably go on forever, but we had a very good editor.
But the narrative voice of the book, the one you'll follow through all of the pages that explains how to craft your story and the how we do what we do at The Moth and why we do what we do at the Moth is actually one voice written by five people. Five. I was and still am one of them, along with Meg Bowles, Catherine Burns, Sarah Austin, Jenness and Jenifer Hixson, longtime fellow members of our artistic team who I honestly feel like I've grown up with. Here's Catherine.
Catherine: [00:11:16] There were five of us writing it. All my friends who are writers look in horror. Like, I almost wish I just had the camera to take a picture of every time I tell a writer friend or a storyteller who has written books that five of us wrote this, they're just like, “It sounds like a nightmare.” But honestly, even though it was a challenge, it wasn't a nightmare. It was so beautiful.
One of the things that I think we even found funny and scary. We all have slightly different writing styles. But by the time we started really editing together what we had done, what's interesting is that one of the first comments we got from Matt Inman, our editor at Crown, is that it didn't sound like it had been written by five people. I think it's because we've all worked together so long.
Kate Tellers: [00:11:58] It's been an extraordinary opportunity to get to work alongside the minds of The Moth. So, I thought I'd take you behind the scenes to tell you what it's like to write a book with them.
Quick timeline. In 2017, Catherine, our artistic director, wrote us an email. The title was Want to Write a Book with Me? Smiley face emoticon. And we said Yes. We started to do free writes. These were really broad at first, favorite Moth moments, illustrative stories and then narrowed to basic tenets of storytelling, stakes, scenes, etc. Here's how Jenifer very aptly describes it.
Jenifer: [00:12:29] You know, we did the whole big download. Everybody agreed on an outline and then everybody just went and went bleh and spat out everything. Many stories, thoughts, ideas about storytelling and then hobbled it together.
Kate Tellers: [00:12:47] We started meeting weekly to discuss the writing, where we overlapped, if we liked the way one author said something, things we disagreed on. There were never fundamental disagreements, like, “Stories should all be about parrots.” But there were, throughout the course of writing this book, highly nerdy disagreements, like, “Should a story feel honest or be honest? What is truth?” I'm sure Plato would be delighted to know that the debate rages on. Here's Catherine
Catherine: [00:13:13] Over the Christmas break of 2020 in her empty office, trying to put together the first let's rope put everything in order. Like, everything that Meg said about stakes, everything Sarah said about stakes, everything, you etc. And it was like this massive thing that then we all began rewriting and editing down.
Kate Tellers: [00:13:32] By January of 2020, we had a draft, a Franken-draft in Google Docs. In March of 2020, some stuff pulled our focus. The book team had always collaborated virtually. Meg is in Sweden, Jenifer's in New Jersey, and all of us pre-COVID traveled pretty regularly. So, there was never any doubt that we would be able to write the book online. There were just doubts in those early pandemic days about literally everything else. It was terrifying and awful, and I feel tremendous gratitude that all of us listening right now made it through. Okay, back to book.
We shaped the Franken-draft, sometimes taking chapters and working in pairs and then reconvening with the whole team on Zoom to walk through notes we'd put in via comments in Google Docs. Here's Sarah.
Sarah: [00:14:14] I didn't think that it was possible to break Google Docs, but we many, many, many times had to start a new document, had to save the document and rename it because we were out of possible changes. We had hit our comment limit. So, as directors, we say, “That was great. Just some tiny notes.” And all of those tiny notes that we were making in the manuscript really added up to a breakage of this digital platform in a great way.
Kate Tellers: [00:14:46] And we didn't always agree. My first memory of having something I wrote cut was when I described the power of storytelling to “grow invisible tendrils” between people. I admit it was not my best work, but it was my words cut and it had a little sting. It happened to all of us. The joke was that we were all keeping a diary, remembering all of our lines that were cut. I think mine started and stopped at invisible tendrils. We were constantly hacking away. It was impossible to keep track. We often tag teamed the edits, which can be a little tender. Here's Jenifer.
Jenifer: [00:15:17] I was assigned Xu Xing quite a lot after we put it down. I had some of my things zhuzhed. I zhuzhed others and others zhuzhed me. Sometimes it was enjoyable to be zhuzhed. Other times, it's painful. I don't want to be zhuzhed. What do you mean? That was why we fixing that. Nothing was wrong with it. What are you saying?
Kate Tellers: [00:15:39] Meg lives in Sweden, where she's five hours ahead.
Meg: [00:15:42] I'd often spend hours just reordering things and chapters like, “This chapter, maybe this chapter goes here.” I think my colleagues got a little annoyed with me when they would wake up every morning to an email. “I've reordered this section, or I've reordered a few things or I moved this chapter over here.” But ultimately, it was like a big puzzle. And so, it was a lot of fun to figure that part out.
Kate Tellers: [00:16:09] Here's Jenifer.
Jenifer: [00:16:11] Something about being locked in with everybody was really good for me, because we had to stay on track. I had to just be in it right then. I think Meg discovered that it was good when we were reading through it, if I read through it, because I engage with it more deeply when I was reading it, doing the read through part. And also, I feel that some writing happens, maybe in my mouth instead of my head. Reading something out loud, I can feel hear into it, what's wrong with it, why it sounds wonky.
Kate Tellers: [00:16:52] We were constantly debating how and who would illustrate the ideas were presenting. We're an organization that was built by many hands and we've developed tens of thousands of stories. Sometimes it felt impossible to decide who to include or cut. There are so many stop you in your tracks first lines and gorgeous descriptive details. Here is Catherine.
Catherine: [00:17:11] I think the biggest challenge was just the number of storytellers we wanted to write about, and there was just only so much space. I have personally directed over 500 Moth stories. And if I could have written about all 500 of them, I would have. So, choosing who to use as the examples and include was just so hard at times. The cutting room floor is just a space of heartbreak. I know, for all of us. So, if you are listening to this and you're a storyteller, you weren't included in the book.
We're so sorry. There was just we couldn't fit everyone in. I think there have been more than 50,000 Moth stories told at this point, and there are only about 200 people in the book. So, you can just do the math. But I wish we could have included even more beautiful story examples.
Kate Tellers: [00:17:55] We rode in this intensive way for months. I Zoomed in from my in laws basement, a child's bedroom and an Airbnb in the Catskills, airports and hotel rooms. We watched the sun rise over Joshua Tree with Sarah, and set in Sweden with Meg. Catherine bought a house, and we watched bookshelves go up around her. And Jen, well, here's Catherine.
Catherine: [00:18:16] One day, we were taking a short break, which is rare for us. We did not take a lot of breaks, but we were taking a quick break to run out and get lunch. We came back, there was this meowing sound, and Jen holds up this kitten. It turned out that during the break, she'd gone out in her front yard in New Jersey, and this guy was driving by saying, “Kittens for sale,” and there was this box of kittens in the back of his car. And Jen, such animal lover, worried about the kittens. But Jen, concerned about the kittens, just said, “How much?” And he's like, “$20 for all of them.” And she just pulls $20 out of her purse, hands it to him and comes back to our meeting 10 minutes later with this box full of kittens. And they're all meowing and crawling all over the place. She insisted she was going to give them all away.
Kate Tellers: [00:19:04] We turned in the first draft and all of the subsequent drafts. And every time we thought it was done, we would do one more edit, one more nip and a tuck. This is what it sounds like when five people write a book.
Or, could it be a loving thing that still resonates in your life years later.
Sarah: [00:19:20] What about an act of love?
Kate Tellers Or, an act of love that still resonates years later. [crosstalk] an act of love-- [crosstalk]
Sarah: [00:19:25] Because we just had a heartbreak, active--[crosstalk]
Jenifer: [00:19:26] Kindness that's good-- [crosstalk]
Kate Tellers: [00:19:30] And change relevant to resonates or an act of kindness that still resonates.
Jenifer: [00:19:36] In your life years later.
Kate Tellers: [00:19:37] Yes.
Jenifer: [00:19:38] How lovely is that?
Kate Teller: [00:19:38] Beautiful.
We live and we breathe and we tell stories every day in our life, and listening to people is equally valuable. So, often when I work with a storyteller, they think they have to tell their definitive story, that they only have one story that defines them, and it's just not the case. We have a million stories, a million experiences. Some of them are fun romps and some of them are deeply moving and profound.
Catherine: [00:20:09] One of my greatest dreams, is that there will be people who pick up the book thinking they do not have a story and we will finish the book realizing they have more stories than they could have ever imagined.
Sarah: [00:20:19] I hope when readers get to the end of this book, they notice when a story is being shared in an unexpected place and maybe they'll listen more deeply. Because stories are everywhere, stories are magic. Stories are out in our everyday lives. You just have to pay attention and listen to hear them.
Kate Tellers: [00:20:42] How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from the Moth is on sale now. Order your copy online or at a bookstore near you. Spread the word far and wide. We hope you'll tell and continue to tell your own stories. I'll host a few episodes of this podcast in the rest of the year with more behind the scenes from this book. Looking forward to it.
That's all for this week. We hope you'll come with us as we continue to take a look back at some of our favorite stories from The Moth's 25-year history. From all of us here at The Moth, have a story worthy week.
Marc: [00:21:17] Kate Tellers is a storyteller, host, director of Moth, works at The Moth and coauthor of their fourth book, How to Tell a Story, which is available for pre order now. Her story, But Also Bring Cheese is featured in The Moth's All These Wonders: True Stories about Facing the Unknown, and her writing has appeared on McSweeney’s and the New Yorker.
This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin Jenness, Sarah Jane Johnson and me, Marc Sollinger. The rest of The Moth’s leadership team includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jenifer Hixson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Glodowski and Aldi Kaza. All Moth stories are true as remembered by the storytellers.
For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.