Host: Anna Roberts
Anna Roberts: [00:00:03] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Anna Roberts.
Amanda Garcia: [00:00:06] I'm Amanda Garcia. And we're your host for this week's episode.
Anna Roberts: [00:00:09] We're part of the team behind MothWorks. MothWorks develops storytelling programs for teams, leaders and communities. These programs are designed to help folks use personal stories to better communicate, connect and build culture at work.
Amanda Garcia: [00:00:24] Every week in 2022, The Moth has been celebrating its 25th Anniversary by taking a look at our history, counting down year by year. In this episode, we're bringing you back to 2002, the year MothWorks got started.
Anna Roberts: [00:00:37] The story goes an agency called The Moth line and asked for a storytelling workshop for their employees. We said, “We don't do corporate training.” And they said, “But we don't want corporate training. We want great storytelling training.” We were skeptical that what we were doing in downtown theaters would translate into a corporate space, but we're so happy that we took the leap. 20 years later, MothWorks has led hundreds of storytelling workshops and events for thousands of people all over the world.
Amanda Garcia: [00:01:06] Back in July 2021, General Motors reached out to us to explore how they can use storytelling to support their goal of becoming the most inclusive company in the world.
Anna Roberts: [00:01:15] As part of The Moth's relationship with GM, MothWorks is holding a series of personal storytelling workshops, which is where we met this week's storyteller, Katerina Lyublin.
Amanda Garcia: [00:01:24] We liked her story so much, we invited her to develop it. Katerina worked with Kate Tellers, the director of MothWorks, to transform the story she told for 20 colleagues on Zoom into a full-length Mainstage story that she shared with over 1,500 people live on stage.
Anna Roberts: [00:01:42] Here's Katerina in Champaign, Illinois.
[cheers and applause]
Katerina Lyublin: [00:01:53] I got my first real gold necklace on my 16th birthday. It was heavily weighed, rose gold, oval pendant with letter K for Katerina on it. It was 1989. I was living with my parents in Kharkiv, Ukraine. It was still part of USSR. My father is Jewish and when Gorbachev's perestroika lifted the Iron Curtain, it allowed for my family as well as thousands of other Jewish families to leave USSR.
When my parents told my sister and I that we're leaving, we were sad to leave our friends behind. But at the same time, we were excited to see the other side of the world. But first, my mom wanted to get me a new winter coat for the trip. There wasn't much in the stores, so we went to the black market and she got me this off-white fake fur foreign brand coat. It was about three sizes. Too big. You don't get exactly to pick what's there is what you get. But when I would wrap myself up in it and with my necklace on, I felt like such a fashionista ready to take on the world.
Our first stop on the way to United States was Vienna, Austria. We were placed in a little apartment just off downtown, close to the street, we call the street of Millionaires. It was this long clean street with endless rows of display windows showing the latest fashion. We would walk past St. Stephen's Cathedral, past beautifully dressed people walking there, equally groomed dogs. I've never been to a place like this before. It seems like every step we've taken was a new first for us.
And in the middle of the street, we suddenly smelled something delicious. We looked, and off to the side, there was a street vendor with an exotic sign that said hot dogs. [audience laughter] Now, we were getting ready to go to the United States, so we studied English. We knew what hot means. We knew what dog means. [audience laughter] However, my parents were not sure if we should be eating that. [audience laughter] But after some whining, they said, “Okay, we'll get one, we'll split and we'll try it.” We ate it, we liked it, we survived. [audience laughter]
In December, we finally landed in Detroit, Michigan and got a little apartment in the suburbs of Detroit Southfield. A couple days in, we started exploring our vicinity by foot. During one of these excursions, we stumbled upon a big parking lot, lot of cars and a big building in the middle.
As we started approaching it, we noticed heavy traffic of people going in and out. We did not see any signs on the building. There was no windows to look inside. And being new to the country, we were not sure if we'll get in trouble for going inside. But my little sister said, “Let me go check it out.” She came out a couple minutes later. Her eyes are shining. She's all excited, pulling my mom by the hand, “You have to see this.”
So, bravely, we followed her inside. We opened the door and stepped into this magical wonderland. There were lights, and music and decorations. People walking with colorful bags. It was a busy Christmas shopping season at a Northland mall. And here we were in the middle of the hallway taking everything in while our mom walked into one of the clothing stores off to the side.
She came out about five minutes later crying. Big tears running down her face. Of course, we got scared. “Mom, what happened? Did somebody hurt you?” And she looked at us, she looked at my coat, she looked all around and she said, “No, nobody hurt me. It's just seeing all of this made me so painfully sad for our life back in USSR. Sad for all the people who spend their whole life trying to make their ends meet and get excited when they can get a coat three sizes too big. Whereas here, you can just walk in, get whatever you need, the right size, the right color, and not even give a second thought to all of this availability.”
So, after all the travels we've done, after all the refugee hardships, it's the American mall that finally put a tear on this hardened refugee's face. [audience laughter] And so, we started getting used to our new life. I started going to high school. And upon hearing my Eastern European accent, kids would ask me where I was from. And as Ukraine was still part of USSR, not easily recognizable geographically, I would just say that I'm Russian. But in the classroom, when teachers would do icebreaker exercises like, “Tell us something we don't know about you,” I would jokingly say, “My name is Katerina and I glow in the dark.” As the radiation in Chernobyl was probably [audience laughter] most identifiably geographically.
Well, it has been over 30 years now. And on February 24th, Russian invasion of Ukraine put it on the map and on the forefront of world news. My parents live couple miles away from my house and stop by often during the first weeks and months of the invasion, when everyone was still hoping for a quick resolution. She would come by a lot, tears in her eyes, to give me updates from their friends who still live in Kharkiv.
My hometown was established in 1600s. Survived World War II, just to be nearly destroyed now after seven months of steady, nearly daily bombing and shelling. And another disturbing piece of news that's coming from that area now, is that all the fighting that is happening near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which is the largest one in Europe, is putting everyone at risk of a radiation leak in case of the power interruption to the facilities.
So, during one of these coffee visits, a memory of an old trip came to my mind. Shortly before leaving Ukraine, my parents needed to take 13-hour car drive to Kyiv, the capital, to take care of some last minute pre exit business. They took me along and riding in the backseat, I was looking outside and started noticing that the closer we were getting to Kyiv, the more beautiful and vibrant the nature outside was getting. It was this crazy Technicolor of green I did not think was possible to exist in real life. Big overgrown leaves, beautiful blooming flowers.
And from the backseat, I asked my mom, something about it. I mentioned something to that effect and she said that it's because Kyiv was less than 60 miles from Chernobyl that melted just three years prior. But to teenage me at the time, it just looked beautiful. It occurred to me now that I did not remember being afraid, perhaps, because my parents didn't look that whether trying to shield us from the realities of Soviet life or the disaster of Chernobyl. And perhaps because of that, the memory that did end up getting stuck with me is the one of the magical radioactive greenery.
So, I asked her now if she was scared back then. She said that a couple days after the meltdown, when the information came out, she was walking in the heat of the day, watching the wind blowing hot dust off the asphalt and wondering if it's radioactive and how much of it was around her right that moment.
That reminded me how she used to ask my sister and I to dust the house every single day and to keep the windows closed to prevent more dust from getting in. Because normally, on a warm late spring day, we'll have the windows open to let the fresh air in. But now, the bright blue sky and the sun were deceiving, and suddenly the beautiful greenery outside of Kyiv didn't seem as pretty and the radiation joke, perhaps not as funny. I'm thinking about all the things that I wasn't paying attention to as a child.
Now, as a parent myself, I can fully appreciate everything that our parents did for us. They were younger than I am right now, but they were brave enough to uproot the family, move across the world, start from zero, learn a new language just to give us a better chance. When I look at my 19- and 20-year-old American born sons, I know I would not hesitate and would do anything to save them and protect them from any harm.
The thought that's been in the back of my mind these past months, is that it is my former Ukrainian classmates are the ones who are fighting this war. And it is their kids, the ones who are, instead of applying and going to colleges, are being drafted or volunteering to go fight in this war to kill or be killed, just because they stayed.
Recently, my son asked me about family heirlooms. I thought about my necklace. Back then, it was a very special birthday present from my parents. But not only that, my parents also purchased it, because it was a way for them to invest some of their hard-earned money, because refugees were not allowed to take more than $400 per family upon leaving the country.
And so, now, not only does it carry the sentimental happiness of a very special birthday present, but it's also a reminder of the roads that we have traveled from the vivid gardens outside of Kyiv through Europe, and now here to champagne and all the stories it would tell if it could talk. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Anna Roberts: [00:15:25] That was Katerina Lyublin. Katerina was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Her family left the USSR as refugees and settled in Michigan in 1989. After graduating from high school, she got her bachelor's degree in Information Systems Management at Wayne State University. Now, Katerina works for General Motors as a mobility solutions architect. In her spare time, she loves to travel, paint, read and spend a lot of time with her family and friends.
Amanda Garcia: [00:15:55] I got the chance to catch up with Katerina at our New Haven Mainstage. We chatted in the green room about the importance of telling stories at work.
Katerina Lyublin: [00:16:04] Well, I feel like at work, you don't usually know people. You know them at the work level, but that's about it. And then, you go to this workshop and you see these people and you get to see this intimate glimpse of them, it makes you emphasize with other people more so than before. Right before, it might be just like some person. They might come across angry or whatever. But once you get to hear their story, you realize that you have something--
Everybody has different experience, but there's something common, underlying emotions, and it makes you feel closer to that person. Like, how can I yell at this person now when I heard this intimate detail about their life?
Amanda Garcia: [00:16:54] After I sat down with Katerina face to face and we were talking about this work and her work and the facilitation of these personal storytelling workshops, I was so thankful that the work that we put a lot of intention into delivering is being received by the participants in our workshops.
Anna Roberts: [00:17:14] Yeah, absolutely. Companies will come to us with a whole host of reasons for wanting to hold a storytelling workshop. Their leadership team needs to inspire their teams a little bit more, or their marketing or advertising teams need to have a common vocabulary for what makes a compelling story, or they're using so much data that they're drowning in it and they need to make it more engaging, more interesting.
Of course, we can teach that. All of these MothWorks workshops that we hold, you learn all of these things. But ultimately, the real impact that we start to feel when we talk to all these folks who are in it, is that they're reflecting on their life. They're going through these memories that actually mean something to them. They're sharing a piece of themselves with their colleagues. They're making connections with their coworkers, people that they see maybe every single day and they're learning things about them that they might otherwise never have known. It really feels like a great honor and privilege to be able to facilitate that kind of work in these spaces.
Amanda Garcia: [00:18:13] That's all for this episode.
Anna Roberts: [00:18:15] From all of us here at The Moth, have a story worthy week.
Marc Sollinger: [00:18:19] Anna Roberts is the manager of MothWorks at The Moth. She has designed and led storytelling workshops for Cisco, Lululemon, AstraZeneca, Daughters of the Movement and more. With a background in personal brand strategy and curriculum design, Anna has coached professionals and leaders to unearth the stories that define them and develop their expertise into content and live events. Raised by artists and educators, she is driven by progressive action, equity and amplifying the perspectives of women and people of color.
Amanda Garcia is the associate producer at MothWorks. Born and raised in Warwick, New York, Amanda's favorite part of growing up was the sleepaway camp she attends every summer in Connecticut. She first discovered The Moth Radio Hour while doing laundry, and it incentivized her to make the chore a weekly routine. One of her favorite things about the New York experience is overhearing strangers share their stories with one another on the subway.
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 include Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jenifer Hixson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Lee Ann Gullie, Inga Glodowski and Aldi Kaza. All Moth stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers. Special thanks to Freda King and Lyndi Hirsch.
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.