Host - Catherine Burns

Catherine Burns: [00:00:02] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Catherine Burns, your host for this episode. And for over 20 years, The Moth's artistic director. I stepped down last month, but I can still remember the spring night in 2000 when I attended my first Moth show. I was swept away by the mesmerizing stories and the energy of the warm crowd. I floated home. I became, in turn, a GrandSLAM contestant and a volunteer in, what was then called, The Moth Community Program. Soon after, in one of the greatest blessings of my professional life, I got the chance to work at this groundbreaking organization, which, at the time, had just two full time employees. Thank goodness for our many volunteers. 

The job has taken me to places I never thought possible when I started that first day, directing a show on the Mainstage of the Sydney Opera House, rehearsing a story at dawn in a trailer at the Bronx Zoo, sitting after hours in the Tower of London as the Ravenmaster put his beloved birds to bed, then ran his story for us in the moonlight. This job has been one of the great loves of my life and I've been blessed to be a part of growing an organization that means so much to so many. I know I'm leaving The Moth in the hands of many brilliant people as I pursue a number of personal dream projects. 

So, on this episode, as a way to say goodbye, we'll be hearing the first story I ever directed, and also the last. Let's start at the end with a story that was told by Woniya Thibeault just a few weeks ago. She shared this at our live show at the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where theme of the night was Buried. If you hear some airplane noises or crickets, well, that's because we were outside among the tombs and the stars. Here's Woniya, live at The Moth. 

[applause] 

Woniya: [00:01:44] By the way, my nostrils freeze together for an instant on every inhale. I'm guessing it's gotten down to about 20 below zero. I'm sitting on a rock looking out over a vast expanse of frozen water. As I stare at the high cliff wall across the South Bay, the helicopter crests the rise, and I can hear the noise of the rotors reverberating off all of that ice in front of me and it strikes terror into my heart. 

Now, I have been living on this remote peninsula just south of the Arctic Circle for over two months. I've had very little food, there are all kinds of wild animals all around and bitter cold temperatures. But the reality is that the only thing that really scares me out here, is that helicopter and what it might be coming to do. 

I've devoted my adult life to learning, practicing and teaching ancestral skills, the same skills that our ancestors used to live and thrive in the wild. Things like gathering and eating wild foods, skinning deer, tanning their hides and making clothing of them, harvesting willow and weaving baskets and the like. While I've spent a lot of time in the wilderness and sometimes with very limited gear, I've never done anything like this. I would never have predicted that one day, those skills would bring me here or living on my own long-term in the Arctic wilderness. 

I was a wimpy bookworm of a kid. The classic kid, always picked last for any team in high school PE. I was anti-hunting and vegan as a teenager and yet, I have been living on my own in one of the most extreme and rugged wildernesses in the world, surviving off of my hunting and trapping and loving every second of it. [chuckles] 

Now, that said, I would never have chosen to come out here to live long-term, if it hadn't been for a television show. The Alone show is a self-filmed wilderness survival challenge, where they pick 10 people, and each of those 10 people are allowed to choose 10 items and their clothing. And then, they are dropped by helicopter or boat into different areas of remote wilderness with a case full of cameras to live for as long as they can and to document the whole journey themselves. So, it's designed to be an incredibly rugged challenge. And it's a competition. The last one out wins and gets a lot of money. 

Now, when the show approached me and invited me to be a part of Season 6, at first, I wanted nothing to do with it. The idea of the challenge and going to this amazing wilderness was absolutely appealing. But frankly, I hated TV. I felt like TV was everything that I disliked about our culture, and then magnified and commercialized. The idea of it being a competition and about money felt gross to me. 

At the same time, I realized that it was important for someone like me to take on this challenge in a visible way, on this television show, because the images that we normally see of wilderness survival are someone built like Rambo, bulging biceps, usually a male, usually with some kind of military training and more often than not with a knife the size of their forearm strapped to their thigh. You do not see young and petite women. 

I am 5’4”, I am small framed, going out into the wilderness with the idea of going to somewhere that they knew they belonged, and coming from a place of connection and respect and reciprocity, rather than going out to wrestle the wilderness into submission. So, while parts of me were a little reluctant, there were parts of me that knew it was right. And so, here I am on this barren, rocky peninsula, watching the helicopter settle onto the rocks. So, I do what I do during these medical checks. I'm pretty nervous about it, because the last couple medical checks, I just barely squeaked by. 

I strip down to my long underwear in the bitter cold, and I step onto the scale, and I'm poked and prodded and my vitals are checked. I'm sitting nervously watching the camera crew. The producers and the medical team confer. The cameraman who accompanies these medical journeys, the only time where we are not self-filming everything is during these medical checks. He points the camera at me and he says, “Woniya, why don't you talk to the camera about how hard this is, about how it's the hardest thing you've ever done?” I look at him and I think, the hardest thing I've ever done? 

Now, it's incredibly challenging. It is physically grueling. There is so much deprivation, near starvation, bitter cold temperatures, everything I've got just to live here every day. And yet, it's also so magical and beautiful. 

Now, I've been through some hard times in my life, emotionally devastating times. My parents splitting when I was a young girl. My mom getting cancer not long after. Two very painful divorces and countless other griefs. When I was experiencing those, I didn't have northern lights dancing overhead just for me or the ice sparkling in the water just before the lake freezes over, a million beautiful things that I would never have seen in any other circumstances. So, while this is hard, there is no way that is the hardest thing I've ever done. I look at him and I say, no. No, it isn't. And in fact, those hard things I've been through are part of what makes me strong out here. 

Amazingly, I make it past the medical check. But the producer looks at me and tells me in his sternest voice that it was by a very narrow margin, and I absolutely have got to start bringing in more food, which I already know. And so, I am relieved. And yet, that question leaves me unsettled. All of those griefs are stirred, and yet there's one grief that hasn't healed, that isn't something that I've just moved past. And that is the knowledge that I've never had the opportunity to become a mother. 

I was never one of those people that questioned whether or not I wanted children. I always knew I did. It was always one of my most important life's goals. And yet, when I got pregnant at 22 in an unstable phase of the relationship with the man I would later marry, we both knew that it really wasn't a good time for us, and we decided not to keep the baby. And I figured, I am young, I've got so much time, I've got the rest of my life, it's not an issue. And yet, the years dwindled quickly, and by my mid-30s, I found myself increasingly desperate to have a child, that tic-ticking of that proverbial clock so strong in my ears that it drove my decision making. I made some really poor choices. 

Anything I would say yes to if it meant there was potential for a child in there, and those poor choices just pushed motherhood further away. Until at age 39, I was living in a broken-down school bus on a steep slope on a mountainside with a partner with whom my relationship was becoming increasingly volatile. I was just preparing to tell him that I was pretty sure I was pregnant as he was preparing to tell me that he had changed his mind about wanting children. As you can imagine, it didn't go well. Just a few months before my 40th birthday, I miscarried. 

Now, I understood that it wasn't a good situation to be in. So, there was a sense of rightness in the miscarriage, and yet the knowledge that it may very well have been my last chance was so debilitating. [chuckles] The next couple of years had me absolutely crippled with grief and angst and longing and mourning. The fact that while I am someone who has devoted my life to ancestral skills, I will never be anyone's ancestor. And yet, when I think about that in my beautiful Arctic home right now, I find that I can think about it without that stabbing pain that's always been present with those thoughts before. And I asked myself, what's going on? When did that shift? That's when I remember the doe. 

The Alone team had reached out to me late in their casting process. While they were inviting me to participate potentially, I still needed to go through all of the normal hoops in order to be selected. And that meant submitting footage of myself doing a variety of survival related tasks. And because it was so late in their timeline, they needed that footage within a week. 

Now, I had a busy life. I had a bunch of things going on. I was about to tell them, “No way, call me another time.” And then, not long after, a friend of mine called me and said, “Woniya, you've got to help me. A deer was hit crossing the road in front of my house, and she wandered into my yard to die. I have no idea what to do with her. This is your thing. Will you please come and get her?” I was already in my housemate's truck on the way to pick her up when I realized, oh, my God, this is the footage that I need for my casting footage. 

So, I filmed myself cutting her up and packing her meat into the freezer, skinning her and tanning her hide and making tools out of the bones and the sinew in her forelegs. That doe had allowed me to apply to Alone. She's the reason why I'm here. But that wasn't the most magical gift that she brought me. I was elbows deep inside her body cavity, gutting her, when I felt something hard in there. What in the world could a deer have been eating that would be hard? I asked. And then, it hit me just as her uterus slid out into my arms. She had been pregnant, when she was hit on the road that day with two beautiful fawns that looked so close to birth that it was as if I could feel them breathing. 

My housemate was also ancestral skills practitioner. He looked over my shoulder and he said, “Oh, my God, those are going to make amazing pelts.” I almost elbowed him in the ribs, “No way. These were so sacred and beautiful. They needed ceremony, not skinning.” So, I laid them into a salad bowl, and I finished cutting up the meat and packing it all away. And hours later, when my housemates were long since asleep, I went back to that salad bowl and I carried into the kitchen and I washed each of them in the sink, got all of the amniotic fluid off until their little white spots just shone bright. 

And then, I carried them into the living room and pulled a rocking chair up to the wood stove and just sat with them in my arms. I pet their beautiful soft fur, and looked at how they had exquisitely formed little eyelashes. Every part of them was perfect and ready for the world, except for their hooves, which were still soft in my fingers and translucent. So, I rocked them, and I sang to them, and I kissed their wee little black noses and I cried over them. And then, I laid them in a basket and covered them in wildflowers. And as the sun rose, I buried them under a wild rose bush in my yard. 

Thinking about it now, I realized that that was the moment that my grief shifted. Something about holding those two babies in my arms, feeling their weight, and getting to give that ceremony and shower with love. These two babies that had never had the opportunity to take their first breath, just like the two babies that I had carried in my body had never had the opportunity to be born. And that in giving them the proper send off and really mourning them properly, the weight of that terrible grief had been lifted from me. 

And now that I think of it, had I had that family that I had always dreamed of, I wouldn't be here now living the life of my dreams, going off into the wilderness to live off of it using only meager resources and the skill of my own two hands, that was the fulfillment of all of my life's purpose. It has been incredible to learn how to trap animals, taught by those animals themselves and to turn their beautiful pelts into clothing to keep me warm in the Arctic cold, to build the muscles and bones of my body from the plants and animals of this place. It was a dream come true. 

If I had been given the opportunity to trade this experience for the family I had always wanted, I honestly don't know that I would make that trade. That's amazing to think about. But I was getting skinnier and skinnier. I was clearly digesting my muscles, and my organs were likely to be next. Just let me stay a little bit longer, I would pray. And then, all of a sudden, it hit me like a lightning bolt in my head and dropped me to my knees, because I realized, I can't do that. One day, there are going to be people all around the world watching it and I would be demonstrating to them that it's okay to sacrifice your long-term health for the idea of winning and money and competition. And that is exactly counter to everything that I believe in and stand for. 

A lot of those young people watching would be children. The one moment that more eyes were on me than any other time in my life, was I going to be an example of everything that's the anti-thesis of what I feel to be right? No way. There was no way I could do that. And maybe I wouldn't ever have the opportunity to mother children of my own, but I could mother those young people right now by setting a good example for them. 

And so, before the next medical check, I used my GPS device and I dialed up the production team for the alone show and I said, don't bother packing up the scale and bringing the doctors. You're not doing a medical check for me today. You're picking me up and you're taking me home. I knew that making the right choice and leaving with my sovereignty intact instead of being dragged out of there by a team of doctors or being carried out in a stretcher, being that example in that moment, choosing myself, that was the real victory. Thank you. 

[cheers and applause] 

Catherine Burns: [00:18:50] That was Woniya Thibeault. Woniya is a naturalist, craftsperson and ancestral skills instructor whose passion is inspiring and empowering people to live their wildest, freest, most abundant lives. Through her writing, teaching, speaking and videos, she offers skills and practices which help people feel connected to and part of the natural world. 

Her debut memoir called Never Alone was released in June, and I highly recommend it. I couldn't put it down. In the book, she writes, “It's time to let go of the story of needing children to feel complete and whole. Maybe the key to future happiness isn't using reproductive science to give me a baby. Maybe it's birthing myself and the life I was meant to live.” 

After Woniya left her Arctic camp, she learned that she was the runner up on Season 6 of Alone. The guy who won had managed to shoot a moose. And then, in 2021, she was invited back for an All-Star season. I don't want to give a spoiler, so you'll have to watch it to find out what happened. If you'd like to see photos of Woniya in the wild, check out our website, themoth.org/extras. 

Up next is the very first story I ever directed. Back in 2003, we were producing two storytelling shows at the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado. Directing 10 stories over a few days is a lot of work, so our then artistic and executive director asked me if I might take one of the storytellers. He was a 24-year-old comedian who was just starting out. And his name was Mike Birbiglia. It turns out he'd never told a standalone story on stage before, and I certainly wasn't going to worry him by telling him this was also my first story. Years later, this story blossomed into his one man show, My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, which you can watch on Netflix, but this is where it all began. Here's Mike Birbiglia, live at The Moth.

[cheers and applause]  

Mike: [00:20:41] When I was a senior in high school, I had my first girlfriend. I went to boarding school. This is a girl that I fell in love with for the first time. It was really like, that first time where you're like, “It's it. This is the person I found her.” She was great. She was just so beautiful and she played tennis, she wrote for the newspaper. She was kind of a bad girl and I was kind of like a dorky, nerdy kid, and so I was like, “Yeah, this is my bad girl phase.” [audience laughter] So, I was really excited. She had just transferred into the school. 

I find that when you fall in love, you overlook certain red flags about people. One of them was that she was a liar. [audience laughter] I don't mean that in an offensive way. In boarding school, lying is kind of a way of life. There was this one guy in my class, he was legendary liar. His name was Jeff Ziggler. He would lie about things that weren't important at all. So, what were you going to say? One time, he said, “My uncle Zig Ziglar, the motivational speaker.” I don't know who that is, but he lied about everything. 

The other thing is, she used to say really mean stuff to me and then she'd say, “Only kidding,” [audience laughter] as though that was okay. She'd be like, “You're not good at anything. Only kidding.” Another thing was that she would go home on the weekends, and we'd talk on the phone and she'd ask me to call her right back every time or she'd say she'd call me right back every time. One time I asked why, and she said that her father worked AT&T. One time, she was at his office and stole a list of people's phone cards and that she would use each one until they would be suspicious, and then she'd throw it away. So, well, what are you going to do? [audience laughter] She doesn't like paying for phone calls. 

Oh, and the other thing is that she had a questionable past. She was expelled from her previous school for dealing acid. [audience laughter] The one final red flag was that she told me not to tell anyone that she was my girlfriend, [audience laughter] because she had a boyfriend that at home that she was breaking up with. “It was over, but if it got back to him, it'd be bad.” She would go home every weekend and she would visit him and said that at one point that his parents were sick, so they had-- She had to console him in that. And I thought, well, the guy's parents are dying, so it's all right. So, I saw her during the week, and that was great, so it didn't matter. I was like, “All right.” 

We'd been going out about two months and we went to Christmas break. She invited me over Christmas break to visit her house in Rhode Island. I thought this was my great moment. It was going to vindicate me. It was going to be my moment where I was like, “It's legit.” So I go. I drive my mom's Volvo station wagon from Cape Cod to Rhode Island. I'm thrilled. I remember the song, Glycerine, by Bush was on the radio. [audience laughter] It was very popular at the time. It was like my love anthem. I was like, “This is my song. They know.”

I got there and there she was. Her parents were there too. And this other guy was there. His name was Paul. We were all hanging out. And slowly, it dawns on me that I'm hanging out with my girlfriend's boyfriend. [audience laughter] There was some consolation, because every time he would go to the bathroom and go in the other room, she'd be very affectionate to me. But then, there was a moment where I was in the bathroom and I thought, what's happening in the other room? 

So, the story took a strange turn when they suggested that we go hang out at his house. So, we go and I met his parents. [audience laughter] It's a very nerve-wracking thing meeting your girlfriend's boyfriend's parents for the first time. [audience laughter] You don't want to make a bad impression. [audience laughter] So, we all hung out. As a side note, they seemed in perfect health. [audience laughter] So, the weekend ended and I drove home defeated, sort of knew that this was her life and I was like her secret life, like on Oprah, when they have a secret family. 

It was tough-- I had to listen to that Glycerine song with new connotations on the way home. And so, anyway, I was like, “This is it. I got to stick up for myself. It's either him or me.” I realized that. So, when we got back to school, I called her and I said, we need to talk, so let's meet at the hockey game. My school had a hockey rink as a side note, So, she says, “Okay.” I go to the hockey game. Hockey game's going on, she's not there yet. Hockey game ends, still no sign. I have that pit in my stomach, like, is going to be my moment? I was going to tell her that she had to pick me or that's it. 

I start walking around the school, to the library, to the places she might be and I ask people where she is. And someone says, “I saw her with Jeff Ziggler.” I remembered that earlier that day, Jeff had said to me, “I'm sleeping with your girlfriend. [audience laughter] You know that, right?” And I thought, since he's a liar, [audience laughter] I go, “Yeah, I know.” It dawned on me that Jeff was her new second boyfriend and then I was out of the picture. It was that horrible, lonely feeling where you're walking around someplace, there's people all around and there's only one person that you want to be with, at that moment no matter how mean of things that she would say, I wanted to hear that only kidding. 

So, I was broken hearted and I mended. As the year went on, I graduated. In the aftermath, Jeff was expelled for making fake IDs in his room. He had a life size license from Arkansas that people put their face in. [audience laughter] Megan was expelled the next year for dealing Ritalin. [audience laughter] At boarding school, you can't go to the graduation if you're expelled. It's very important that you don't go. It's real strict. Megan showed up, I found out, in a disguise, in a wig and sunglasses. I just thought that was so interesting, the idea that you could want to be in a place so bad that you have to be in disguise. And then, I thought, for the three months that we were together, I was in the wig and sunglasses. Thank you. 

[cheers and applause] 

Catherine: [00:29:28] That was Mike Birbiglia. Mike is a comedian, storyteller, director and actor who has performed in front of audiences worldwide from the Sydney Opera House to Broadway. His shows, My Girlfriend's Boyfriend and Thank God for Jokes were both filmed for Netflix. His most recent shows, The New One and The Old Man in the Pool, spit months on Broadway. And The Old Man in the Pool will be playing at the Edinburgh Festival in August and the West End of London starting in September. 

That's it for this episode. I think back with love and gratitude for the over 500 storytellers who have trusted me to midwife their stories over the years. I'm also thankful for the hundreds of staff, volunteers and board members, who've shared their talent with us. And of course, you, our cherished listeners, who tune in every week to hear stories told live and over the air. I started out as a Moth fan and I go out as one too. So, if you need me, know I'll be out there once again with you, our beloved audience listening. 

Marc: [00:30:30] Catherine Burns is a Peabody Award winning director, storytelling doula, consultant and public speaker. She was the Artistic Director of The Moth from 2003 to 2023, where she was a host and producer of The Moth Radio Hour. She is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, How to Tell a Story, and the editor of The Moth's best-selling and critically acclaimed books, The Moth 50 True Stories, All These Wonders and Occasional Magic. All the stories in this episode were directed by Cahterine Burns. 

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 Sarah Haberman, Jenifer Hixson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Lee Ann Gullie 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.