Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, founder and director of The Future of StoryTelling. And I'd like to welcome you back to the FoST Podcast. Joining me today is Catherine Burns, multi-talented artistic director of The Moth in New York City. Since its founding in 1997, The Moth has become one of the most widely recognized nonprofits dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling.

Catherine joined the organization back in 2003, and under her leadership, The Moth expanded to produce the Peabody Award-winning Moth Radio Hour, which Catherine frequently hosts, as well as The Moth Podcast. Between these two programs and their daily storytelling events held around the world, The Moth reaches millions of people every week, spreading the value and catharsis of great storytelling far and wide.

My conversation with Catherine was recorded before the tragic police killing of George Floyd. And as such, has a tone that is more lighthearted than it might have been, had we recorded it after May 25th. However, the fundamental ideas that Catherine shares, are as relevant now as ever. That there is profound value in sharing our stories with one another, and that in doing so, we discover our common humanity and are brought together like people holding hands in the dark. I'm so pleased to welcome Catherine Burns to The Future of StoryTelling Podcast.

Catherine Burns, I'm so excited to have you on the FoST Podcast. Thank you for being here with me today.

Catherine Burns:

I'm so thrilled to be here. I feel like I'm a hardcore FoST alum. I'm honored to be here.

Charlie Melcher:

You are. I mean, I think we have to acknowledge here, start with the fact that you were one of the first people to really believe in The Future of StoryTelling. You so came out and supported us when we got started back in 2012. So let me just say a heartfelt, thank you again, for your generosity and your collaboration.

Catherine Burns:

Well, you're most welcome. It was real joy and it was so much fun, and so, yeah. And it's just been so exciting to see how far you guys have gone with it, and keep going.

Charlie Melcher:

Thank you. Thank you all the same at The Moth, my God. But first, before we get into what's going on today with The Moth, I did double check. And in fact, you guys opened the very first FoST Summit at 8:00 AM in the morning.

Catherine Burns:

Yay. It's so funny, I was thinking about that this morning, because I was like, I think it was 8:00, and you were like, "No, it was 10." And I was like, I've turned it into like one of those uphill, both ways in the snow barefoot. So it was at 8:00 AM and we were on the boat at 6:00 AM. See, it's a treasured memory.

Charlie Melcher:

I remember so clearly. First you brought two amazing storytellers who came and just killed it; they did such a great job. But then also Ophira Eisenberg, who was our host. And I didn't realize at the time, but that she was going to come out and do kind of a comedy set opening up. And that at 8:00 AM, that's a tough project.

Catherine Burns:

Hey, but you had us caffeinated, there were bagels, people were ready to go. That was so much fun. I have such happy memories of that morning.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, first of all, where was The Moth back in 2012?

Catherine Burns:

So back in 2012, we were in the beginning stages where we had built up quite a decent podcast following, but it wasn't nearly where it is now. And the radio show was starting to pick up, but it was all very fresh. And I think it felt at the time, a little fragile and like we didn't quite know where it was going. We were also in the middle of editing our very first book, which hadn't even come out yet.

So it's funny, right when we met you, we were at this very vulnerable phase, where things were about to take off in a different way, but we didn't know that, and it really could have gone either way.

Charlie Melcher:

I remember. I remember you feeling sort of the pressure of both the book and the podcast and it was a lot to handle. And wasn't it right around then when you guys kind of won the MacArthur?

Catherine Burns:

Yeah. So we actually won the MacArthur. We won the corporate version, I guess, of the MacArthur Genius Award. And we also won the Peabody; both in 2011. And it was like the MacArthur Award, part of what that award went to for us, is a pretty big cash award. And it allowed us to pay to produce enough episodes to get us to where we had enough to go weekly.

Charlie Melcher:

And so, in case there's anyone who's just really been living under a rock and missed this, can you just quickly tell us what The Moth is?

Catherine Burns:

Absolutely. So The Moth is true stories told live. And so, I mean, you we're of course talking in the middle of the COVID pandemic, but we produce about 600 live storytelling shows a year, where it's people coming and telling true stories onstage in front of a live audience. I mean, it happens all over the world. We record these stories, and then the best stories we put out over our podcast and our radio show, and now also our books, and to some degree, video and YouTube, but it's mostly right now, still audio.

Charlie Melcher:

What I've always been so blown away by, is how incredible you are with working with the storytellers. I've seen you work with anyone from like an Adam Gopnik to an ex cop from Queens, Arianna Huffington, or some stay at home mom from Georgia. You can find these incredible stories and help bring them out of the people that you work with. I refer to you as the story whisperer.

Catherine Burns:

Aw, thank you. That's really kind of you; it's a real joy. I mean, part of what drew me to The Moth, when I first started attending The Moth, and I moved to New York City in 2000, and came to The Moth within the first couple of months of coming to the city, when it was like very underground and you had to kind of hear about it.

And so, but even then, it was one of those things where you would go and you would maybe buy the ticket, because you're a favorite writer who writes for The New Yorker, or somebody wrote a screenplay that you love, will be telling a story and you'd be so excited by the ticket to come hear them. They would be great, but you would go home talking about the housewife who told a story about how she lives off of her husband and refuses to get a job. And you're like, "What?" Or the dental hygienist, that often the most amazing stories were told by people who, in many cases, never been on stage before. And that still is our desire.

I mean, we spend a lot of time still going out. We now have a curator on our staff, Suzanne Rust, who's amazing, trying to find people who have amazing stories. And often the people with the most amazing stories either don't think that they have a story to tell or would be too nervous to tell them. So a lot of what we do, a lot of our job is to just help people build up their confidence.

Charlie Melcher:

It's a scary thing to do. I mean, you're asking somebody to get on a stage, to be up there, to speak from the heart. It's almost a kind of being naked in front of a group of people. You've got no props, no notes. It's just you and a mic and a room full of people. You really have to build people's confidence up to get them up there to do that.

Catherine Burns:

You really do. One of the stories that we like to tell, because we were like, "What?" Mike Massimino, who's one of our great storytellers that we adore, he's an astronaut. And he says that The Moth is the scariest thing he's ever done.

Charlie Melcher:

Space was nothing compared to being on the stage.

Catherine Burns:

I know. And one of his Moth stories is about being an astronaut who's afraid of heights.

Mike Massimino:

That Friday came, and out on the Gulf of Mexico on a platform ship, getting ready to be hooked up to a cable, to be taken parasailing for this final exam. And my classmate right in front of me is Stephanie Wilson. Stephanie Wilson is about five foot two and weighs about 100 pounds. Stephanie Wilson is about the size of one of my legs. Stephanie starts marching in place. She gets a little tug from the boat, takes about a step, and off she goes like Peter Pan. Then he hooked me up to the boat, to the line. And I'm really, really nervous, because not only am I scared of the water, I am also afraid of heights. Yeah, I know, let it out. An astronaut who's afraid of heights.

Catherine Burns:

But anyway, but yeah, he's still claims and we're like, "How many times have you been to space, Mike? Wow." But yeah, it is, it's terrifying; it's like a high wire act, is how we sometimes describe it. You're up there, you have no notes. The thing we find the storytellers are most scared of, is that they're going to forget, and they're going to leave something out. But we find that, that moment that you stumble, the thing you fear the most, and you're like, "Oh my God, I forgot to tell you about blah, blah, blah," and you skip back. That is often the most magical moment of the show. Because for the audience, you get up there and stumble, that's authentic; that's real.

Catherine Burns:

Honestly, just about the only way you can mess up at The Moth, is to come up there and be too slick. We occasionally have people who are seasoned performers, and they kind of come up and they're going to give a performance, quote, unquote, they're often the ones who will actually stumble because they come up and they're a little too slick, they're a little too memorized, and the audience shuts down.

Because if you get up there and you're sort of quote, unquote, giving a performance again, the audience will suddenly turn, because now they're treating you like a performer. As opposed to if you just get up there as yourself, they're just treating you like another human being, and there, but for the grace of God could be them on stage with no notes talking to everybody.

Charlie Melcher:

And some of your performances, there was a pulling a name out of a hat, right? I mean, there is a sense of the audience does get to get up on stage.

Catherine Burns:

They absolutely do. So. Yeah. Back in 2000, The Moth had been around for like three and a half years. And there were so many people suddenly who wanted to tell stories that they couldn't really accommodate all of them. And so they started our Open Mic Story SLAM competitions. The Moth's original series is our main stage, where we invite each month, five people to come tell a 10 minute story on stage. But with the SLAMs, it's a little bit different. We announced the theme in advance and anyone who wants to tell a story can show up, they put their name in a, it used to literally be a hat, it's usually now a logo tote. But they put their name in the thing. And the names are picked out one at a time, 10 names, and those 10 people get to tell a five minute story. And the stories are judged by the audience. Of course they're lovingly judged. And then there's a winner declared at the end of the night.

And these shows have become really the backbone of our organization. I mean, some of our greatest storytellers are people who just walked into an Open Mic Night one night and put their name in the hat. So many of our hosts, Ophira, you mentioned at the beginning, she's was somebody who just came, put her name in the hat. And we're like, "Who's that girl? She's amazing." And now she's one of our regular hosts, both on the main stage and the SLAM. She went on to tell many, many main stage stories herself. The SLAMs are in 30 cities, and so the reason we've expanded those to the degree we have, is just trying to figure out ... to reach people that we couldn't otherwise reach.

Charlie Melcher:

Tell me the origin of the name, The Moth.

Catherine Burns:

Okay. So The Moth was founded by George Dawes Green. He grew up on an island off the coast of Georgia, called St. Simon's Island. And when he was growing up, he and his friends would sit around on their friend Wanda's porch and they would play poker, they would drink Jack Daniels, and they would tell stories sort of deep into the night. It was before the time of cable TV, even. They were on this little island, and they would just tell these long, beautiful stories. Oh, and there was a whole in the screen. This sounds like something we made up, but I swear, George swears there was a hole on the screen. And so the moths would flutter about, and they started calling themselves the moths. They're like, the moths will meet tonight for poker and stories and bourbon.

So yeah, George moves to New York City and it was the height of the dot-com boom and all that craziness. And he would just talks about how he would be at parties, and you felt like nobody was really listening to each other, that it was just like anecdotal people popping back and forth; who was the most clever. There was no time to sit and to tell an in depth story and to really listen to each other in a deep way. He missed those nights on that Southern porch.

And so he founded The Moth as a way to try to bring back that idea, to bring this idea of tales told on a Southern porch to New York City. And so the very first Moth happened actually in his living room, and the rest is history.

Charlie Melcher:

I love that metaphor of the moth dancing around the light. It also reminds me of that image of early humans sitting around a campfire, right? Coming together to share stories of their day, adventures, to understand the chaotic world. It's just that power that story has so innately in us as human beings, as the way, the original way that we communicate, that we connect to each other.

Catherine Burns:

Absolutely. And sometimes if I'm being interviewed in the press and it's a two second soundbite and people ask me about the name, we'll say people are drawn to stories like moths to a flame. And that's also true.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah. And I've often wondered and you know I've even asked you, how do you keep coming up with all these stories? There's so many that you find and put on the air or on the stage. And yet when you think about it, we all are storytellers. So everybody actually has a whole book full of stories or more. You just have to get the people ready to share them and understand that they have something that's so valuable.

Catherine Burns:

100%. We're always trying to find the story that is new to us, that is fresh to us. We don't want to be bored. And part of how we've all done this so long, is it stays interesting to us. We're always out, like where's the fresh take on that? There's a lot of types of stories that you think you've heard them all, but there's always a fresh way to tell about a story, about a wedding and a story about coming out, a story about being bullied as a child. Unfortunately, these are some of the stories that we hear again and again.

But every time we're like, I think we've heard every way to tell that. The next week, here comes a story in the Detroit StorySLAM, Louisville, Kentucky. It's like the freshest take on it, and I think that's really thrilling.

Charlie Melcher:

Do you find that the type of stories or the way they're told has changed over the 18 years?

Catherine Burns:

Yeah. It's funny, I definitely feel we go through periods where we'll have waves of people coming to us, where they're trying to copy what they've heard on the radio. They try to tell us the stories that they think we want to hear. And even we, I think I've gotten into ruts. I mean, I've been the artistic director since 2003. And we went through this period under my direction, where the stories got a little too pat. They were a little too wrapped up in a bow. Things started to feel a little afterschool special, and we had to lighten up. And when we did lighten up, everything kind of expanded and bloomed and we were able to grow again.

And I don't know what you would say about this, but I think that there's just no surprise at this idea of, storytelling is just in pure raw form; grew up hand in hand with the rise of the digital age. That even as we were kind of being married to our little devices in which we love, myself included, I'm talking to you on one right now, thank God for them. But there also was a very deep desire to bring storytelling back to its essence. And which for us is, tell me a story about how you became you. It's just two of us talking, even if it's you telling your story into a microphone and then I'm listening to it in earbuds later.

Charlie Melcher:

I couldn't agree with you more Catherine. And it's a big part of what we think about and explore at The Future of StoryTelling. We're in an age where there is too much information, right? We're overwhelmed, we're at this fire hose of data that's coming at us. And we're also, despite being in certain ways, more connected than ever, more isolated. And so the combination of those two things, isolation and information overload, have us hungering for authentic human stories.

A story is the original mechanism to connect. I mean, short of touch and hugs, it's how we get from one isolated brain to understand what's going on in another isolated brain. It is naturally the way we feel community and connection. And again, these stories ultimately are mirrors back into our own existence. They're reminding us of something about ourselves, something that's universal, something that we're all sharing. The more specific it is about that person, the better. It still becomes that gateway into the universal for each of us.

Catherine Burns:

There's always pieces of any story that have a universal message. I'm talking about Mike a lot, but one of the examples I often use, is with, again, back to our friend, buddy, Mike, the astronaut. He has so many stories where he was really a hero and truly risked his life to help mankind. I mean, how many people can say that?

But his first Moth story was about him spending two years and NASA spent millions of dollars prepping him and a fellow astronaut, to go to outer space and fix the Hubble Space Telescope. I don't know if you've ever heard this one, but when he gets there, he's also on camera, this is being broadcast around the world. And when he gets there, he realizes he can't get the back of the telescope off because of a stripped screw.

And it's this whole awkward thing where this whole million dollar mission is going to go out the window, because of a stripped screw. And now we say very few of us will probably be sent to outer space by NASA to solve a major problem for humanity, but who can't relate to spending years prepping for something very important to you, to almost be undermined by something as stupid as a stripped screw?

And I think that's why people love him as a storyteller, because he's willing to go there. He's willing to be just the human being, even though in his story, he's in a spacesuit.

Charlie Melcher:

So given how much the live component is a factor in bringing out the power of those stories, how have you been responding to this COVID-19 crisis and our isolation? What's The Moth been doing?

Catherine Burns:

We've hit it in two ways primarily. I mean, the first thing is, is we have moved our shows to the virtual and we've learned a lot. I mean, we spent the first few weeks just trying to watch everything in the world that we could on Zoom and stuff, and just try to figure out what were the best practices. And so what we're finding is, we've done two main stage shows and we're finding that they're working pretty well. I mean, surprisingly, we desperately miss the audience, because you can't hear the audience, but we're making it work.

Charlie Melcher:

By the way, let me just break in for one second, because this idea of the audience, right, it's not just a feedback loop between the person giving the talk and the audience. Because clearly there's a conversation that's going on, through laughter, through body gestures, through silence, whatever; there's feedback. But one thing that I found so fascinating from one of our past FoST speakers, Kevin Slavin and Kenyatta Cheese, they gave a talk at FoST called, The Audience Has an Audience.

And it was about the need for the audience to feel each other. And that, that was part of what made the experience of being in front of something being performed, so much more profound. And they looked at the history of laugh tracks and realized the creation of that laugh track was even that, even canned, even a fake one, was sort of necessary to make people feel comfortable watching sitcoms.

Catherine Burns:

Yeah. We spend a lot of time, even with our lighting, it took us a long time to figure out exactly how to light the audience. Because if it's too bright, people won't laugh. We just have found this again and again. But you don't want it too dark, because at least at The Moth, you want to feel that there's people around you, experiencing this with you.

One of our many times storytellers has described The Moth audiences, that it feels as if the whole audience is holding hands under the tables. You know back when, which is really beautiful.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah, it's really beautiful.

Catherine Burns:

And also, one of the things that we're going to be start doing with the SLAMs, which I think tonight is they're starting it. Is that we are going to play a little bit of an applause track. We're going to play the applause track from that city. When they do it tonight, you're going to hear the Atlanta audience clapping at an Atlanta SLAM two months ago in real life. We've just found that even though everyone knows that we're just pressing a button, that there's something that really lifts you up at the end of each story to hear that.

Also, when you're waiting to go into the show on Zoom, we actually put up pictures of past Moths and we have the sound of an audience recorded as they're coming in. And we've gotten a lot of feedback from people that they love it, because it puts them back in that feeling of walking into the room at The Moth and all these people being there and it being packed, and it being really exciting. When we hear that sound, we kind of sink in and it's like, "Okay, we're now in our magical space, and we're about to do this thing." Even though that sound isn't really real right now.

Charlie Melcher:

It's like hearing the overture before the show starts. It gets you in the mood, it gets you into that right place. That's that's really smart. So, how is storytelling important, do you think, for people at this moment?

Catherine Burns:

Yeah, I think it's more important than ever. I think people are just trying to find ways to connect. For years, I've said we all sit around in our little boxes talking to boxes, but now, oh my goodness; it's like true to a whole other level.

One of the things that actually helps me in this, is to just find ways to connect with other people. I find that I'm listening to a lot of podcasts myself that aren't The Moth. Krista Tippett, I'm a big fan of On Being, and just every single week wanting to connect in with who is her guest and what are they talking about? Because I know it's going to sort of take me out of the present moment and up into kind of my highest values as a human being.

I know you've listened to The Memory Palace. Beautiful podcast, it takes all these little moments in history; they're like little 15 minute bits, and I've been listening to that a lot. I wanted to be able to say I've listened to all of them, so I've been trying to use this time to get through them, because I find it really helpful to hear right now about difficult moments in history and that they made it through and we're going to somehow make it through too. I mean, I think that people need hope right now.

Charlie Melcher:

One of our guests a few weeks ago, Brian McDonald, talks about the role of stories as providing survival information. We as a species evolved to share stories because that's how we figured out to avoid that cave with the animal in it or other kinds of scary things. And so stories, particularly in a time of crisis, are there to help us figure out how to get through it.

Catherine Burns:

And it's also easy to remember things through story, right? If you can put something in a story, you won't forget it; the lesson versus just memorizing a series of facts about something.

Charlie Melcher:

Right. But I do think that there's a tremendous value that The Moth provides for people who are isolated, anxious, maybe fearful. And so, I do think you should have some sense of being an essential worker. That the role that you're playing is perhaps medicinal, or calming or still an essential role for people today.

Catherine Burns:

Well, thank you very much. We do feel there's definitely a need for artists right now, right? I mean, I think we've talked about this, where there's people who are just being crushed by this crisis, both with their health and also financially. Then there's the people who are directly serving them, who are just like the heroes of this age.

But then, I think there's also a lot of people at home bored and anxious. You have a lot of free time, and that free time is just fueling anxiety. And so that leaves a fourth group of us, who our role is to provide hopeful stories and ways for human connection, to help elevate people in this time. Because it's important for all of us who aren't the ones who are directly suffering or who aren't directly helping that group, to also keep our heads together, right? And to be ready to provide as much support as we can to the first two groups, and also to take us into the future once this lifts.

Charlie Melcher:

Well certainly, when I sit and listen to a Moth story or watch one on YouTube, I feel like I am there with a group of people holding hands in the dark, so thank you for that.

Catherine Burns:

Aw, thank you.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, it's been such a pleasure to have you on, Catherine, and I send you a big virtual hug and I can't wait till we can see each other in person again, very soon.

Catherine Burns:

Thank you so much. It's so great to talk to you, Charlie; it's been a while. It's so good to see you, even if on my computer. I look forward to coffee in the near future, in real life.

Charlie Melcher:

You got it. Great to see you. Thank you again.

I hope you enjoyed today's conversation as much as I did. If you'd like to learn more about storytelling and The Moth, I recommend you download Catherine's personal storytelling manifesto. You can find it and more by visiting the episode page on the FoST website, F-O-S-T.org, or in the links in this episode's description.

Thank you for being a part of The Future of StoryTelling family. Please be sure to subscribe to our podcast, give us a review and share it with others.

A heartfelt thank you to Catherine Burns, and to our thoughtful production partner, Charts & Leisure. I hope you'll join us next week for another conversation. Until then, please be safe, be strong and story on.