The Moth Presents Occasional Magic
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CATHERINE McCARTHY is the manager of The Moth’s Education Program, where she helps students and educators to build community and challenge dominant narratives through personal storytelling. She is a story director for the Mainstage and is the co-editor of the Penguin Random House Teachers’ Guide for The Moth: All These Wonders. She has facilitated storytelling workshops for the US State Department, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the DreamYard Project, and at dozens of high schools around New York City. She also directed the award-winning solo show The Secret Life of Your Third-Grade Teacher at the 2016 NYC Fringe Festival. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in social work at Fordham University.
LARRY ROSEN is a master instructor with The Moth. He has been performing, teaching, directing, and producing storytelling, theater, improvisation, and sketch comedy for twenty-five years through institutions including Second City, the People’s Improv Theater, and the New York International Fringe Festival. A proud member of The Moth’s Global Community team, Larry has had the privilege of working with storytellers representing diverse communities throughout the United States and in Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa.
KATE TELLERS attended her first Moth event, fortuitously themed Beginnings, in 2007 and has never looked back. Hailed as a “storytelling guru” by the Wall Street Journal, she is the director of MothWorks at The Moth, where she has designed programs with nonprofits, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, and the Ashoka Future Forum, as well as Facebook, Ogilvy + Mather, Nike, Google, and the US State Department, and developed stories with her heroes from her Pittsburgh childhood to the present day. She is a regular host and Mainstage storyteller. Her story, “But Also Bring Cheese,” is featured in The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown (Crown Archetype), in bookstores now. She lives in Brooklyn with her loud family and dog.
SARAH HABERMAN has been The Moth’s Executive Director since 2013. Prior to The Moth, Sarah held senior management and development positions for Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Columbia Business School, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New York Public Library. Before embarking on a career in the nonprofit sector, she spent six years as an acquiring editor in Paris for Robert Laffont-Fixot, a major French publishing house. She is a member of the board of directors for the Herzfeld Foundation in Milwaukee and served on The Moth’s Board of Directors until 2013.
The Moth would like to thank:
Our Founder, George Dawes Green.
Our Board of Directors: Deborah Dugan and Ari Handel, The Moth’s Co-Chairs, Serena Altschul, Lawrence C. Burstein, Joan D. Firestone, Neil Gaiman, Adam Gopnik, Alice Gottesman, Eric Green, Tony Hendra, Courtney Holt, Anne Maffei, Dr. Alan Manevitz, Joanne Ramos, Melanie Shorin, and Roger Skelton for their extraordinary leadership and commitment to this cause.
Anyone who has ever allowed an audience to get to know them a little better by sharing a significant moment of their life on a Moth stage.
The Moth StorySLAM community, shepherded by beloved local producers in twenty-nine cities. Each week hundreds of five-minute true stories are shared around the world. Eight of the forty-seven stories in this book are from people we first met at The Moth StorySLAMs.
Our talented musicians, who light up the stage with their sound.
Our incomparable Moth hosts, who bring their nimble wit, emotional intelligence, and fiery energy to audiences night after night—you are our ultimate ambassadors.
Our audience members, listening with open hearts at live events or on headphones, or reading this page right now. You are the essential other half of the storytelling equation.
Our collaborators, friends, and partners in crime: Jay Allison, John Barth, Ann Blanchard, Meryl Cooper, Dan Green, Joanne Heyman, Kerri Hoffman, Dan Kennedy, Viki Merrick, Sean Nesbitt, Sara Rogge, Paul Ruest, Jake Shapiro, and Kathleen Unwin. And former Moth staff member Katie Sanderson, who left the world too soon.
The hundreds of public radio stations around the country who air The Moth Radio Hour, all of our national partners for both the Mainstage and StorySLAM series, and all our regional StorySLAM crews for their tireless dedication.
All our community, corporate, and high-school partners, storytellers, and instructors, who share themselves, listen with empathy, and demonstrate the power of storytelling every day.
Our incredible donors, who make it all possible with their generous support.
Our gifted agent, Daniel Greenberg—thank you for your patience, talent, and wise counsel. You convinced us years ago that The Moth could work in print, and none of these books would have existed without your vision and care.
And our extraordinary editor, Matthew Inman, who has now carried us through three story collections. Thank you for your patience, formidable talent, and grace. Team Fire and Ice 4-EVER!
The Moth staff at the time of publication:
Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Jenness, Jenifer Hixson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust, Inga Glodowski, Micaela Blei, Sarah Jane Johnson, Aldi Kaza, Maggie Albert, Larry Rosen, Catherine McCarthy, Casey Donahue, Michael La Guerra, Liam O’Brien, Michelle Jalowski, Sam Hacker, Lola Okusami, Patricia Ureña, Jessica Cepeda, Timothy Lou Ly, Jen Lue, Lawrence Fiorelli, Chloe Salmon, Jodi Powell, Lauren Gonzalez, Jazlyn Pinckney, Delia Bloom, Emily Couch, and Quinn McNeill.
The Moth is an acclaimed not-for-profit organization dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling and a recipient of a 2012 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation MacArthur Award for Creative & Effective Institutions (MACEI). It was founded in 1997 by the novelist George Dawes Green, who wanted to re-create the feeling of sultry summer evenings in his native Georgia, when moths were attracted to the light on the porch where he and his friends would gather to spin tales.
Each show features simple, old-fashioned storytelling on thoroughly modern themes by people of all walks of life who develop and shape their stories with The Moth’s directors. All storytellers share their stories—without notes—in front of a live audience.
Through its ongoing programs—The Moth Mainstage, which tours internationally; The Moth StorySLAM program, which conducts open-mic storytelling competitions in twenty-six US cities plus London, England, and Melbourne and Sydney, Australia; The Moth Community Program, which offers storytelling workshops and performance opportunities to historically marginalized communities; The Moth’s Global Community Program, which develops and elevates personal stories from extraordinary individuals in the global south; The Moth’s Education Program, which works with thousands of high-school students, college students, and educators in New York City and worldwide; and MothWorks, which uses the essential elements of Moth storytelling at work and other unexpected places. The Moth has presented more than thirty thousand stories, told live and without notes, to standing-room-only crowds worldwide.
The Moth podcast is downloaded 47 million times a year, and the Peabody Award–winning The Moth Radio Hour, produced by Jay Allison and presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, airs weekly on over 475 radio stations nationwide. The books All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown and The Moth: 50 True Stories were critically acclaimed best sellers. Learn more at themoth.org.
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