The Moth’s GrandSLAM features both new talent and seasoned veterans

The Moth GrandSLAM features the best of the best. | Courtesy of The Moth

On Saturday, The Moth’s GrandSLAM Championship returns to the Kentucky Center.

Louisville’s storytelling scene is in full bloom, with an array of events popping up and gaining their own distinct followings. But the undisputed grand mammy of this storytelling boom is The Moth.

The Moth started in New York City in 1997, before spreading to a select few cities. Louisville had its own version back when only 10 other cities were running story slams. Now, dozens of cities host monthly events.

Tara Anderson is a producer for The Moth Louisville. | Courtesy of Tara Anderson

Each month, Louisville’s Moth holds a stellar slam at Headliners Music Hall, but once a year, producer Tara Anderson gathers the 10 best storytellers, all winners from the previous year’s competitions, and welcomes them to the GrandSLAM.

This year’s crop includes previous GrandSLAM winners, certainly storytellers to watch, but it also includes some newbies. One of the glories of The Moth is that everyone has a story to tell.

Insider spoke with two newcomers, both who have been telling stories less than a year, to find out how they got started and how they feel about going to the big game.

Chris Radford is a teacher and Louisville native who’s been telling live stories since February. But he’s been interested in writing for much longer.

“The first interest I had in telling stories would have been (in) middle school, high school — I just started writing little short stories here and there, and I never showed them to anyone, and they weren’t personal, just something funny,” said Radford.

His first interaction with The Moth was three years ago.

Chris Radford returns to The Moth. | Courtesy of Chris Radford

“I attended the GrandSLAM just as an audience member. And from the very beginning of that, I was fascinated,” he said. “So I started to going to the local slam on a semiregular basis.”

For monthly slams, anyone who wants to tell a story puts their name in a hat, and 10 names are drawn at random. After being a fan for several years, Radford decided to put his name in the hat last February, and he got picked the very first time.

The February slam repeats the same theme each year: Love hurts.

“I had, what I consider, an absolutely hilarious breakup that was not funny at the time, but with hindsight being 20-20, it was really remarkable,” said Radford. “And I had some time to heal, so I thought, why not talk about this experience.”

The audience agreed it was quite remarkable.

“I was shocked when I won,” he added.

Radford will square off against nine other competitors, including newbie Bridget Flaherty.

Flaherty, whom I had the pleasure of seeing perform Saturday at Double-Edged Stories, can hardly get through a sentence with out tripping over an interesting story about her life. She used to work in the high-pressure business world before she quit it all and went on the road with her 11-year-old child. She lived as a vagabond for a while before settling back down.

Unlike Radford, Flaherty did not to get tell a story immediately.

“Three different times I put my name in the hat and did not get picked,” she said.

Bridget Flaherty will share her stories on Saturday. | Courtesy of Bridget Flaherty

Flaherty actually lives in Dayton now, driving the two-and-a-half hours to Louisville for each slam. Because she’s willing to drive here, it’s not too surprising to hear she’s attended other Moths all throughout the East. She traveled, in part, because she didn’t feel like waiting to get on stage in Louisville.

“I’ve actually performed on The Moth stage in Chicago, Ann Arbor (Mich.), Pittsburgh and Louisville,” said Flaherty.

But Louisville is her first and most frequent. Her Louisville slam-winning story comes from her time as a vagabond.

“It was a story about picking up a hitchhiker in El Paso, Texas, and driving him all the way to Benson, Ariz. The topic was caution, and I told a story about throwing caution to the wind,” she said.

Every slam has a theme, and the GrandSLAM is no different, so come watch Flaherty, Radford and other Louisville luminaries spill their guts to theme of “Fuel to the fire.”

The event on Saturday, Jan. 13, starts at 8 p.m. at the Kentucky Center’s Bomhard Theater, 501 W. Main St. Tickets are $27.50. It frequently sells out, so get your tickets in advance.

Graham Shelby’s storytelling explores war and his father in ‘The Man on TV’

Graham Shelby takes on a one-man show. | Courtesy of Graham Shelby

Regulars at The Moth Story Slam are already familiar with Graham Shelby. He’s a frequent winner turned sometimes host who was invited to New York to be featured in “The Moth Radio Hour.”

On Friday, Shelby turns his talent for introspection, narrative and deep thinking toward a longer format: the one-person show. The result is “The Man on TV,” a work that springs from Shelby’s complicated relationship with his biological father, Jimmy Godwin.

Graham Shelby

Shelby spoke with Insider by phone, discussing the genesis of the piece, its evolution as a story, and his 25-year relationship with Godwin, a scarred and tortured survivor of the Vietnam War.

“I didn’t know him growing up; I had heard of him when I was a little kid,” said Shelby.

Shelby grew up with his mother and his adopted father.

Though he knew he had a birth dad and had seen a few pictures of him once or twice, his first big exposure to his father came in the form that Shelby describes as surreal.

“My birth father appeared on TV when I was 12,” he recalled. “He was featured on the ‘CBS Evening News’ on Memorial Day. It was a story about him and his efforts to connect with the mother of his best friend, whose body my father had found when they were in Vietnam.”

Vietnam looms large in Shelby’s relationship with Godwin, as well as in his show. He said as a child, war was very confusing to him, and adults didn’t seem to be telling the whole truth.

“This was the early ’80s, and Vietnam was still a touchy thing,” said Shelby. “My parents talked about how war is this awful, awful thing, and I believed that. People talked about it like it was cancer. There was clearly more to it than that. Because there weren’t as many books and and movies about cancer as there were about war. Little kids didn’t get together and pretend to be oncologists, they played soldier.”

After seeing “Platoon” as a teen, Shelby decided to write Godwin a letter, and a few years later they met for the first time.

“And that began a 20-year, very complicated, not always satisfying but also really important relationship between the two of us. One challenge was we had no role model. I think every adoptee and birth parent has to go through this,” said Shelby.

Shelby will talk about his brief relationship with his biological father. | Courtesy of Graham Shelby

A journalism student at the time, Shelby connected to Godwin the only way he knew how — as a journalist.

“I figured out the way to get the answers I wanted from him was to interview him. So I got a tape recorder and interviewed him, and I have, like, hours of him talking on tape. For years, that’s what our conversations were like,” he said.

During that relationship, Shelby also was becoming a grownup, with a career that relied on the written word and oratorial skills. He’s been a journalist, English teacher, storyteller and speech writer.

Just before Godwin’s death in 2007, Shelby began writing stories about their relationship. Godwin only saw one story, and he didn’t care for it.

“His quote was, ‘You’ve made me look like an illiterate, redneck puke … and I’m not illiterate.’”

Graham already had been telling stories professionally, often based around his time in Japan and the folklore of that country, but when The Moth came to Louisville, he started occasionally telling stories about his father, too, and that got him invited to New York.

It was on The Moth stage in the Big Apple that Shelby realized he wanted to tell a fuller version of the story he was sharing, the story that started with seeing Godwin on TV we he was a kid. He started working on the piece, and in addition to the writing and storytelling, Shelby decided to include multi-media elements, starting with that fateful image from childhood.

Shelby has won and even hosted The Moth in Louisville several times. | Courtesy of Graham Shelby

“I wanted to actually show the audience what I was watching in 1983, and since I have all those hours of tape of Jimmy talking, I have excerpts of that I play during the show,” he said.

Another interesting part of his relationship with Godwin makes an appearance on stage.

“Here’s another weird aspect of our relationship. Before we met, he made me mix tapes, like his own personal soundtrack, so I have some of that music in the show.”

“The Man on TV” is about more than its basic story. It takes a metafictional view of how we use stories in our societies and in our personal relationships.

“War is, at some level, largely about storytelling in that it takes a story to turn a stranger into an enemy, to turn a boy into a soldier, to turn a rice field or a cornfield into a battlefield,” said Shelby. “I’m not saying it’s a lie. It could be a true story, or a story that’s based on fact, but it’s a story.”

“The Man on TV” runs one night only, on Friday Oct. 27, so make a space in your calendar. The show also includes a performance by Shakespeare with Veterans, who will examine war and its emotional effects from a very different end of the English language — the works of William Shakespeare.

The show starts at 8 p.m. at the MeX Theater in the Kentucky Center for the Arts, 501 E. Main St. Tickets are $15, $10 for students.

National storytelling event Expressing Motherhood bolstered by local talent

Expressing Motherhood comes to Headliners on Saturday, March 25. | Courtesy of Expressing Motherhood

Fans of The Moth and storytelling in general will get a treat this weekend when Los Angeles-based storytelling event Expressing Motherhood arrives in Louisville.

Like The Moth, the show will feature local storytellers addressing a theme — motherhood — live on stage, but unlike The Moth, Expressing Motherhood is a curated show, with its stories carefully chosen from submissions and rehearsed in advance.

Lindsay Kavet | Courtesy of Expressing Motherhood

Insider talked to Lindsay Kavet, who started Expressing Motherhood in L.A. 10 years ago, and also caught up with the show’s local producer, Randi Skaggs.

“It was born out of this desire to be creative,” says Kavet. “We were stay-at-home moms, and prior to that we’d been in the entertainment industry.”

Kavet and co-founder Jessica Cribbs produced the first event, and it was so successful, within a year the show had moved to New York. Since then it’s visited cities all over the United States, always featuring local, curated stories.

At first, Kavet produced all the shows from L.A. Hopeful storytellers would submit written versions of their story, and the best stories would be selected. Producing from afar presented plenty of challenges, and Kavet started using locally based co-producers.

Louisville producer Skaggs should be familiar to storytelling fans. She’s been a fixture at the Louisville Moth since it began, performing in the monthly slams and has even won the grand slam.

Randi Skaggs

Skaggs got her start in storytelling in New York City, where she moved after growing up in Hardin County and attending Centre College. She had moved to New York to pursue theater, but soon switched tracks.

“I moved into teaching once I realized the theater wasn’t right for me,” she says. “I became a New York City school teacher.”

Despite the change in careers, Skaggs still had plenty of creative instincts, and she got involved in the growing New York storytelling scene.

“I started hearing about The Moth, and it seemed perfect for me,” she explains. “I had a pretty kooky childhood and pretty kooky life, and I have a lot of stories.”

As she was feeding her creative side with storytelling, Skaggs and her husband welcomed their first child into the world.

“About a year after my daughter was born, I heard about Expressing Motherhood and I submitted a piece and I got in,” she says.

But before too long, public school teacher Skaggs and her husband, journalist David Serchuk, realized that raising kids in New York City was a costly endeavor. The couple moved to Louisville.

“And not even six months later, The Moth came to Louisville, and I thought, ‘Now Louisville is perfect for me,” recalls Skaggs.

The storytelling scene here has continued to grow, and eventually Skaggs started thinking about her performance with Expressing Motherhood, realizing the event might be a good fit for Louisville. She emailed Kavet and pitched the idea of bringing the show to Derby City.

“I was expecting her to shoot me down, and instead she got back to me right away and said, ‘This is crazy, we were already planning to come to Louisville,’” says Skaggs.

When Kavet uses local producers, she tries to find people who have had some connection to the show, and producers in cities like Chicago are former performers — just like Skaggs.

Shannon Noel

Originally, Kavet had planned on producing the Louisville show from afar with the help of Louisville native Shannon Noel, an L.A.-based musician who has performed with Expressing Motherhood on the West Coast. But when Skaggs contacted Kavet, she was asked to join the team.

To drum up submissions from Louisville, Skaggs reached out to the local storytelling community, including local Moth producer Tara Anderson, who made frequent announcements at the monthly event.

Skaggs says they received an incredible array of submissions, enough that it made the process of picking the best very difficult.

“It’s a good problem to have,” she says. “We wanted to keep, like, 18 pieces, and that’s not gonna work for the show.” The pool eventually was narrowed down to 13.

The stories they chose might not be exactly what you’re expecting, Skaggs warns. “People hear about the show and they think, ‘This is gonna be a bunch of people telling their birth stories, and talking about breastfeeding.’”

While there are some more traditional mom-based yarns, many of these stories approach motherhood from a variety of angles.

“We do have men in the show, and they talk about their mothers,” says Skaggs. “And we have one person in the show talking about how she doesn’t want to be a mother, and she’s often told, ‘Oh, but you’d be such a great mother,’ and she’s, like, ‘I don’t care, it’s not my calling in life.’”

Skaggs will be telling a story herself. Having seen her perform multiple times, this writer can say if the rest of the storytellers are half as good as she is, it will be an excellent evening of entertainment.

Expressing Motherhood hits the stage for one night only on Saturday, March 25, at Headliners Music Hall at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased online. Headliners is located at 1386 Lexington Road.

Moth producer Tara Anderson can teach you how to tell a good story

Tara Anderson is a producer for The Moth Louisville | Photo by Chris Witzke

If you’ve ever been jealous of great storytellers and raconteurs, you have a chance to get a free storytelling session with local expert Tara Anderson. The Moth producer will present “Fast Class: How to Tell a Story” at the Louisville Free Public Library on Tuesday, Sept. 13.

The Moth is a successful public radio program based around storytelling, with live performances and programs in 25 cities. At Moth events, people volunteer to tell a story, generally about five minutes long, based around a predetermined theme. The program started in 1997, and since then it has helped tell more than 18,000 stories.

Anderson spoke with Insider to discuss how she got involved with The Moth, what kinds of things she’ll cover in the class, and the importance of telling stories in various parts of our life.

“Even if you never tell it to anyone besides yourself, I think it’s helpful to think about the stories you’re telling,” says Anderson.

The Lexington native spent her teens in Louisville and moved to New York after college at University of Kentucky, where she double majored in music and journalism. She laughs when she refers to journalism as her “safety” major.

While working for WFUV, the public radio station at Fordham University, Anderson did a feature story on The Moth.

“(It was), like, ‘Hey, there’s this thing with an open mic story competition.’” After the initial story, Anderson kept in touch with Jenifer Hixson, a senior producer for the national organization.

“They had some volunteer opportunities where they did storytelling workshops at different places around the city,” says Anderson, who decided to donate some of her time. “I was a volunteer facilitator at a storytelling workshop at a shelter for homeless men on the Bowery, and that was a really interesting experience, helping these people find a story to tell.”

She moved back to Louisville in 2009 and expected her involvement with The Moth to end there.

“Then ‘The Moth Radio Hour’ was doing well on WFPL, and Jenifer Hixson reached out and said, ‘Hey, I think we’re gonna start doing story slams in Louisville. Do you have any ideas about venues?”

Anderson sent back three pages detailing possible venues and the pros and cons of using them.

“I guess I showed my hand,” laughs Anderson. Her fervor led to Hixson asking her to come on board the Louisville Moth as producer.

Local Moths started in 2011 and have frequently sold out Headliners, the venue Hixson and Anderson chose. “It has been a total honor to get to listen to these stories month after month and watch people come up on stage and just rip open their hearts,” says Anderson, who believes the main part of her job is to create the right environment for these stories. “I feel like my job is to create a safe container for that, and to hold the space as they get up on stage and share extremely personal things.”

The Moth storytelling competition takes place once a month at Headliners. | Courtesy of The Moth

Anderson was invited to share her storytelling tips and tricks at the Louisville Free Public Library.

“The library has historically offered a variety of classes,” says Paul Burns, LFPL’s director of communications. “About two years ago, we started branding them as ‘Fast Classes,’ and they’re taught by university professors and local experts.”

LFPL offers several types of classes, including learning opportunities that meet multiple times, but the “Fast Classes” hone in on one very specific idea and hope to open up learning to people who may not have six weeks to commit to a class.

“Fast Classes” are offered free of charge. “Everything at the library is free,” says Burns. “We like to say, ‘It’s in our name, Louisville Free Public Library.’”

While Tuesday’s class will focus on telling Moth-style stories, Anderson believes storytelling skills are important for everyone. “I think to pay attention to the stories we are telling ourselves is the first step to understanding your life, and to understand the story you are telling to other people, and not just in an emotional sense,” she says.

Anderson mentions more business-oriented reasons to practice your story. “More and more I see this as something used in career counseling. When you apply for a job, you need to be able to tell your story. You need to be able to share with the person you want to hire you.”

One of the reasons she is eager to share her expertise is her wish to diversify the pool of storytellers in Louisville. “I want to see a range of life experiences and backgrounds,” she says. “Sometimes people, if they’re not a natural performer or they don’t think of themselves as a writer, then they may need a little help in how to figure out how to put together a story.”

“How to Tell a Story” takes place Tuesday, Sept. 13, from 6-8 p.m.

Anderson says this class will feature clips of some of her favorite Moth stories and also include some discussion. “We’re gonna talk about the structure of a good story, what elements you wanna look for, a little check list, like, ‘OK, this thing happened to me, would this make a good Moth-style story?”

Her goal is to make sure everyone in the class comes out with material.

“I’d like to make sure everybody leaves with a good start at least — they know where to go or feel encouraged to work on a story of their own, whether it’s something they’ll ever share publicly or not,” she says.

Check out “Fast Class: How to Tell a Story with Tara Anderson,” on Tuesday, Sept. 13, from 6-8 p.m. at the main branch of the Louisville Free Public Library, 301 York St. The class is free, but call ahead to register (574-1623) and save your spot.