The Moth | Blog

Dispatches from the Moth · Posted On: May 11, 2015

The Method Behind the Magic: Storytelling with High School Students

by Jessica Altounian

As a special education teacher, I understand my role in the lives of young people as one of a storyteller. I craft so many stories with and about my students, and I try to constantly be aware of the ways that the stories created about students shape how people interact with them. Stories are powerful beyond belief. My current (and favorite) experience with storytelling includes facilitating The Moth High School StorySLAM program at my school in the Bronx. I’m lucky to be the faculty...

Dispatches from the Moth · Posted On: Mar 17, 2015

Nica Williams: The High School Slam

by Nica Williams

RISK! If I had to think of one word to describe how I felt when signing my name on the paper to join the after school moth program, it would be risk. The thought of telling a story in front my schoolmates who I’ll be seeing the next day was risky. I wasn’t too sure if I was going to be judged or people would even listen. But I took a risk and signed away because this was a chance to unfold a different side of me. First two weeks was very exciting and fun. Our Moth instructors, Catherine and...

Dispatches from the Moth · Posted On: Mar 12, 2015

United Nations International School Storytelling Evening

by Gina Voskov

Each December for the past five years, the 7th grade English teachers at our middle school have organized our Storytelling Evening, the big event for the roughly 120 7th grade students in our English and ESL classes. The evening, and indeed our entire unit, is based on the Moth’s tagline: “true stories told live.” It helps that our parent community at our school is engaged and artistic. One of our parents, Josh Blau, is a Moth storyteller, so we are lucky to be able to have him come...

Dispatches from the Moth · Posted On: Mar 05, 2015

Encore: David Carr at The Moth StorySLAM, May 9, 2006

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

I met David Carr when he came to D.C. in the mid-1990s to edit Washington City Paper. He always struck me—a journalist 15 years younger—as part mentor and part co-conspirator. He had an earnest edge—D.C. was all about earnest—but with that slight turn of the lip that let you know he was a rascal. At lunch one day Carr told me his ambitions to be a staff writer at a big-time outfit. “I want to be talent,” he said. And that he motherfucking...

Dispatches from the Moth · Posted On: Aug 05, 2014

Collaborators

by Dan Kennedy

I’ve sat around for twenty years or so waiting for my match, waiting for the person or people I’m supposed to be creating things with. They’ve probably been with me all along, wondering why I keep talking about how I’m sitting around waiting for them to show up. I’ve read so many of those thick hardcover biographies, entranced and happy to be out of my head, but sooner or later I’m tortured by the text when I realize that nobody is here collaborating with me; not a brother who gets it like...