Continuing to rise to reader Raf Stevens’ challenge to present and characterize examples of excellent storytelling ….

Yesterday, while riding in an RV across the beautiful breadth of Washington state for 10 hours, I listened to 19 podcasts from The Moth’s podcast series. As a subscriber to the free podcast, I had 24 stories in my iTunes library, though oddly, none from 2009. For some reason, my subscription hasn’t been updating. Anyway, I was listening for outstanding storytelling examples.

I love The Moth and have written about this organization several times. The Moth presents live storytelling in several venues, sometimes in a competition, or “slam” format. Storytellers don’t use notes. The storytellers are not intended to be standup comedians, although I find that the majority of stories tend to be funny and elicit laughs from the audience. Even the poignant/sad/tragic stories often have comic elements. A few of the stories I listened to were, in my opinion, too much like standup comedy.

It’s clear to me that “delivery” genres are emerging in the stories I’m selecting to meet Raf Stevens’ challenge:

• Digital/video storytelling
• Live storytelling performance, captured on video, and now:
• Live storytelling performance, captured on audio (Interestingly, a number of The Moth podcasts have visual elements that the audio audience is not privy to. For example, you can tell the teller is holding up a photo or using some sort of gesture.)

Here are my favorites from the 19 podcasts I listened to. These more than rise to the Raf Stevens Challenge:

• Matthew McGough_ My First Day With The Yankees.mp3. I’d heard this one a number of times before because I used to play it in the classroom for my students. It’s included on a CD collection of Moth Audience Favorites, and it’s easy to understand why it’s a favorite. What makes this a great story? It has its roots in childhood/teenhood, a lifelong, deep-seated love of the New York Yankees. McGough’s passion for the game and the team shine through in the story. The story is funny, yet the comic parts are delivered in a low-key, authentic way that is the antithesis of standup comedy. (Can you tell that I really don’t care for standup comedy?) The payoff of the story is a rewarding life lesson. The story is about 14 minutes long.
• 01 Garrison Keillor_ Lessons in Swimming.mp3. It’s not surprising that Keillor’s story is one of my favorites. He has probably been telling stories for far longer than any of the other tellers in these podcasts and has told far more. I love this 11-minute story — like McGough’s, rooted in childhood — because it is about storytelling itself and tells of how a tragic event set Keillor on the path of his life’s work. I love the phrase he uses: “the intimacy of stories on a page.”
• 01 Jenifer Hixson_ Where There_s Smoke.mp3. Although this story extols the loathsome practice of smoking cigarettes (Hixson has since quit), it is delivered with a kind of raw, on-the-edge emotion that draws the listener in. It is a story of sisterhood between women; I’d be interested in whether men are as deeply affected by this story as I was. The story has moments of humor, but is mostly poignant.

Honorable mention goes to 01 Faye Lane_ Green Bean Queen.mp3. I wasn’t in love with the story, but the delivery was fabulous.