015 - A Career in Storytelling from Kate Tellers of The Moth

Musing on Loss of Organic Culture & Interview with Kate Tellers of The Storytelling Platform the Moth

Sense making. It's one of the deepest human drives. We desperately want to make sense of our world and our role in it.  Host Chauncey Zalkin delves into this topic in the episode before this (Ep 14) and reads her own story as a writer using allegory to see truth and heal.

We are all makers and consumer of stories  of characters we invest deeply in. Now, in episode 15, she sits down a long time executive of the fascinating storytelling platform, The Moth,  to talk about the power of telling personal stories in order to connect more deeply.  The Moth a unique success story of universal storytelling based on the ancient oral tradition.

Chauncey says, "my first time I heard what turned into Orange is the New Black was on the Moth Radio Hour on a road trip to see a close friend with Cancer". Stories from all walks of life have been writ large through their storytelling platform.

In this episode she muses on the  loss of organic culture  before getting into the interview.

Kate Tellers co-authored the 2022 New York Times best seller, How to Tell a Story. (affiliate link)

Enjoy!

Written, directed, and executive produced by Chauncey Zalkin. Intro/Outro sound engineered by Eric Aaron. Photography by Alonza Mitchell with Design Consulting by Paper + Screen.

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Transcript

 Hey, Welcome back. We are now at Episode 15 of Actual People. Today, I am sharing an interview with Kate Tellers, one of the executives of The Moth. The Moth is a storytelling platform and an event series. 

It's a podcast. It's even a corporate program for storytelling. It's a lot of things all centered on telling human and real and universal stories. Our interview got me thinking about the consequences of disconnection in society and the subcultures that used to bubble up from the streets. What are we  really missing now? The CDC website  says one in three adults in the U.S. report feeling lonely. One in four, feel like they don't have any sort of social or emotional support. 

I think what we've gone out and done to ourselves with social media and our digital existence is that we've completely overproduced ourselves. We're so polished. We burnished ourselves into, like this shiny penny, to the point where we've lost the thread of who we are in our essence in connecting to one another.   But I'm here to say we are just as real  and messy and chaotic and fascinating as we ever were, and we need to reemerge from our shells.   

Welcome to Actual People, a podcast hosted by me, Chauncey Zalkin, dedicated to meaningful conversations about the evolving landscape of our lives and the power of our own creativity and imagination to make magic.  

We used to have this organic culture, this ever flowing, ever evolving street culture. It made its way into our entertainment and yes, our brands,  but it started out with real people on the street in society. Going about their daily lives, making connections and creating culture. Which created the Harlem Renaissance and hip hop, which created Freaknik in Atlanta and house music in Chicago In the embers of the industrial revolution and the anger over Margaret Thatcher, we had punk and new wave and goth. In collegiate America in the sixties, during the Vietnam war, we created the hippies and before that, The beatniks in Paris. That kind of organic culture created the literary movements and cafe society. I'm skipping around on purpose. There was so much energy and movement. My early career consisted of reporting on visual street culture in a stream of consciousness list that I would document. walking through the streets of New York. I sent that list out to 18,000 people, which was a lot at the time.

It was around the turn of this century that we discovered that we could all individually brand ourselves because of the internet. But it was not a completely new concept. 

David Bowie turned himself into an art piece. Boy George did, Prince,  Madonna, the nineties drag Queens, like lady bunny, come to mind. 

The club, kids of the nineties, all those hangers on during fashion week, they brought it with her outfits. They weren't the Kardashians. They didn't have a TV show.  24 hour party people was literally a movie. It was about Manchester, England which was the place where the industrial revolution began. After all the factories started closing down.  The music scene flourished there between 1976 and 1992. 

And the  best mass culture example of how  culture moves around the streets , into various contexts was desperately seeking Susan.   I don't really think it would be called accurate. But it celebrated the organic nature of   how culture moves around society. And it's that organic nature that gives us our vibrancy.

 A little while back the New York Times ran an article by a writer named, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right, Mireille Silcoff. Who I looked up to and she was born. within a month of me in 1973 and is also a parent.   And she observed that where we used to have actual scenes  as in groups, communities, we now have   aesthetics with no reference point . That is the definition of a simulacrum, a copy of a copy. 

The original is lost, if you want to get all academic and talk semiotics, not to be mistaken for dark academia or light academia or romantic chaotic or art academia. Yes, those are names for aesthetics as are Art Ho, Goblincore, Appalachian Gothic, and Cartelcore. 

And you've all heard of Mob Wife. That's an aesthetic too. You probably also heard of Cottagecore and Grandmacore? No? Look it up, this is quite a rabbit hole. Aesthetics used to reference actual culture and movements that emerged from people spending time together. Now it's online cosplay. 

Is this endless fragmentation and separation the slow big bang of human connection? 

I was so happy about the Barbie movie last summer, because it was a shared experience. You know, in the distant past of 15 years ago, we loved this idea of the long tail, the niche market. But now we  miss the common experience. 

With all the power that we bestow onto the social media influencer, and I've read recently that they are not making bank the way they used to, there is a sort of futility and an irony to the social media influencer. Even if you have a hundred million followers. The algorithm might show your followers, your content. Or not.  It's up to the algorithm. 

And when people do see your content, do they even think about it one millisecond after it's gone? 

My guest for today's podcast. Kate Tellers is a department director for The Moth. And she's been part of The Moth for 18 years.  

The Moth started in small venues in New York, where people would gather to hear people tell their own stories. It was kind of like the New York city version of  sitting around the campfire, but with a little help from a director. It's based on the oral tradition of storytelling as the glue and connection of society. From  caveman to the Iliad to the dinner table. I was lucky enough to meet Kate when I was a member of the chief network. A group I joined in my own search for connection after I left New York.  

She was a co-author on a Moth book that came out in 2022 called How to Tell a Story, which became a New York Times bestseller. You know, we don't sit still for stories around the campfire, the way we used to. I do recall that a few years ago, adult summer camps became popular and people love going to retreats and finding ways to bond with other people. That are retreats for a myriad of things having to do with wellness and creativity. When I was diagnosed as BRCA positive. I was part of a group called the Breasties which had regular retreats, which I never attended because my kids were still very young and I couldn't find the time to do that with my job. . 

 People  love going on retreats, but even the retreat business has suffered. At one point I wanted to open a retreat center. But I don't go often because I have kids and I'm just too busy.  

Connection is the core thing that we are missing. 

I'd even go so far as to say it's dire that we find a way to sit around a campfire again.   Before we get to the interview, I just want to encourage you, if you haven't already, to listen to any of the other 14 episodes of actual people,  whether you're interested in tech overwhelm,  beauty standards and the influence of K beauty, or any of the monologues on grief,  getting older or changing careers.   When people ask what episode I recommend, I always say, pick the one that speaks to you. with the most immediacy and go from there.  There's something. For everyone. 

But before you do that, let's dig into this interview with Kate tellers of The Moth and learn how she found this amazing career for herself.  

How did you get started with The Moth? Have you been there since day one, or what, what's your story with them?  .  The Moth was founded in 1997 and I found The Moth  in 2006. , at the time I was an actress in New York City,  I was doing Moth adjacent things without knowing what The Moth was. I would do  solo shows or cabarets or stand up or things like that  and simultaneously at the same time my Mother was dying.  When she passed away, I realized that what we had of her were her stories.

She passed away at home. A bunch of family was there.. We sat in the living room and told stories about her.  That affected me profoundly. At the time, I was temping to support my  life doing  black box theater  in midtown, you know, and I was listening to podcasts and I heard a Moth story on This American Life and it said, we have a live event and so I went to the Nuyorican  Poets Café on the Lower East Side, waited in line with hundreds of people and went in and    there was this  synergy and connection between the people on stage and the people in the audience that I'd never felt in either side of anything I'd been doing in theatrical spaces.

And,  I was  like, this is the thing. That, that like empty little piece that had been sort of circling around. So I wrote a terrible cover letter, like horrible but they like saw some extreme hunger in me and I was hired as the podcast intern. We'd never done a podcast. We'd been recording our stories. We kind of started a podcast on the whim and I was the intern. I added the first episodes of the podcast in GarageBand, the free software.  And we went to number one on iTunes through no skill of mine. I actually was terrible at GarageBand. I was just  inherently very enthusiastic.

Ultimately I joined the staff as a producer.  This was just when the podcast started. So we were basically New York focused. We'd done one tour. We had a series in LA, but  really you knew The Moth because you went to Moth shows.

 I was managing this chaotic office, I was  printing 1099s, , I would come in  once a week for a half hour and edit the podcast. That was my entry, you know, it was not an official internship, but it was literally, there were like four people full time in the office and then, you know, a constellation of volunteers and interns or whatever.

What were you doing other than that?  

I was teaching acting classes. I was performing, I was temping at an ad agency. I was also mourning the death of my Mother. So I was just like, seeking meaning, seeking meaning. There was a hole that needed to be filled  and so I threw myself into The Moth and simultaneously with me starting through like limited credit of myself, , the podcast hits number one on iTunes, we launched the radio hour and suddenly, we're in ears all over the country, then all over the world. And we just  start this seismic shift and  explode.  Here I am literally like I will do anything for this organization, you know, carrying backpacks of merch  to shows, organizing, we'd have these like mailing parties in the office. I'd put out a spread, I'd bring my Chihuahua and people would come.

We'd crank music, I'd write a poem to invite people. And all of these Moth volunteers would come together in this tiny, filthy office on 38th Street. That was the energy  we had back in the early aughts or late aughts?

 The first Moth story I ever heard, my best friend, she got Cancer.  I'd heard of The Moth, but I'd never heard a Moth story, except potentially, what's that little Russian bar on the Lower East Side or like the East?

It's a KGB bar. Yes. Did The Moth sometimes.. That was before my time but I believe we did. Okay, so I went to one event there, like early days, but I lived in Europe from 2007 to 2012. I never really drove in New York. My ex husband drove in Europe. It was stick shift, I couldn't drive stick shift, and I had this bad incident on the Jersey Turnpike, so I was scared. I went to see my friend. She was living in Florida at her mother's getting chemo and all that stuff. And I flew into Miami to see my own father who later died of cancer. And I drove US1 North instead of I95  the local road for four hours as I was afraid of the highway. I listened to, of all things, Orange is the New Black. It was not a show,  it was just The Moth story. That woman. Yeah, yeah. Interesting story. And then like a year or two later, it became a TV show. It wasn't even a TV show. It  got me up there.  What interests me about The Moth is it's not necessarily that these people are writers.

Right? For sure. For sure. That's the greatest part about it; it's very accessible. It’s an art form. It’s a form of communication. It's a community building glue and I love that. It allows me to have real conversations with people that I would never have a conversation with otherwise. It's not ‘what do you do’ or ‘where did you grow up?’ It's literally who are you as a human being.  

When we bring people to our main stage, we work with them one on one to help them shape their story. A story is the intentional ordering of information. So what you hear is true to their experience, true to their own voice, but there's a directorial hand behind that and a process, even the greatest storytellers in the world thrive with a director because you have someone hearing you and saying okay when you said this this was this or let me ask this question that's going to push you a little further into the truth. 

Kate now tells me a little bit about the program she works on directly as a director called MothWorks where they work with companies so we design workshops and events in The Mothworks program. We took kind of the methods that we were developing as directors and put them into this program.

 Businesses come to us for three reasons.

One, storytelling is, you know, wonderful for team building,   secondarily,  people come to us, for culture building. Why do we do what we do?  How do we communicate  that and collectively come together have a culture that reflects those values.

And then three simply as a communication tool. And that's kind of a bucket from how do we use stories to elevate data to make data more memorable, how do we make more engaging presentations, how do we illustrate, essential points through story,  

Okay, so this is what you're doing now? You're directing this program now? 

And then I'm also a senior director, so in that role, I help to develop stories, so I'll have my own particular shows where I'll develop stories for the main stage. I'm a host of our podcast and radio program, and our live events. And sometimes I'll tell a story of my own.  

Yeah,  I was gonna ask you about your own stories. So, you were drawn to this, you were going through an intense healing process of your own? Did you tell your story on the stage about your Mother? 

 I look back at it and I think how bold, because I  went to my boss and was like, here's my heart.  I want to share it as part of our work, which is so high stakes  but she was wonderful. I worked with our former artistic director, Catherine Burns, , I knew I wanted to tell a story about my mom. I didn't know what the story was. I'd done a solo show about the evening that she passed and I kind of thought it might be that. That's such a tricky story to tell to avoid the and then and then    even though that means so much to me what happened, it's not going to matter to the audience if there's not something universal underneath it and so we work together and we talked through it and I shared it a few times on stage. It went on the podcast. It went on radio. The process, I always say, of working on a story with someone is to me equally, if not more valuable than the product of actually sharing it.  It's wonderful to be heard, and it's wonderful to be heard by hundreds of thousands of people, but also to be heard by one person in a dialogue that's so generous often on the director's part was really, really special. 

Do you feel like that's a foundational story for you? The passing of your Mother, probably?

Oh, for sure. It's 100 percent a foundational story. It made what I went through real. There's a record of that night that changed everything. And in talking about the story, it made me understand what I was going through in contemplating the loss of my Mother.

It had been this specter for ten years that she was gonna go  and I just have a better understanding of it. And there's a record of that experience that's changed me and I can sort of let it go because there's a record and then think of  all of the other wonderful ways that my Mother still affects my life.

But,  it's there. It exists. It was real and it matters.  

I think it's really easy to almost deny your own story because it's nebulous and it fades. When I was a child, a friend and I, we had this very real experience at the time that was very strange to me. And as I got older, I'm like, did that happen?  Even though we both experienced it  it just feels untrue. 

I think that's really important, that you have a record and  it has a shape to it.  Has that story changed because of the telling of it?   Your understanding of it over the years, how does a story change in your processing it through telling it? 

I'm going to give you a very technical answer. 

Yeah, great. 

Which is  at The Moth, when your story goes on podcast and radio, you don't tour with the story anymore so I rarely tell that story. That story is pretty fixed. Now my understanding of the experiences, the stories I've told since then around that have certainly changed. I've become a Mother since then, I've married many, many major life events have happened and that certainly changes the lens of it, but I mean, my experience of that night and my perspective is not that different than it was then. But many times our experience does change, but there's still a record of what that was for me, you know, when I told it when I was however old,  that exists.

She died when I was twenty eight.   What if you had never told the story? How do you think that would have changed your life?  Or, you know, I was gonna say your experience of it, but just your life, if you had not done this,  never told your own story. 

I just immediately had this world that was in so many ways challenging my brain in a way that, and my heart in a way that it needed to be at that time.

People don't get a lot of time to listen to each other. How do you talk  about listening?  

For sure.   It's very easy   to get in  a swirl of conversation with people and go, go, go, go, go.  So it's a great practice to just be like, it's just about this person's story and what can I do to help them be best prepared to share their story? What am I listening for? I'm listening for patterns. , I'm listening for emotion. I'm listening for what they care about. I'm listening for, you know, I have questions. Where are we going to poke and pull the thread? , and that's really fun. And it's a wonderful way to. exist with people 

 There's often high emotions and very often you hear people say, I've never thought about things this way. I've never said this.

Just being given the space to share a piece of yourself and have either an instructor, a director, A group of colleagues,  an audience say  that experience mattered and I heard it, changes the way that the storyteller experiences it.

 Being heard ,, can really illuminate a lot of truths that might not happen if you never share that story.   

I mean, even in this conversation,  I'm chiming in with, Oh, I relate to what you're saying.  With the thing that happened to me, you know, you're saying like, ‘parent dying’. I'm like, oh, ‘parent died’.  A lot of my closest friends, we constantly interrupt each other and have conversations that way, 

that's the exact reason that we started is that  our founder was a poet and a novelist and he sold some books that were made into movies and he would go to parties and everyone did exactly that, that like laddering thing that, we can often do  and he was at the same time going to poetry slams and he's like, I'm more interested in the story behind the poem than the poem,   the why of anything, the story of this person is its own form.  What if we just gave people space to share their stories? 

We went  to the mountains over spring break , and we went to ride horses.   The owner of the farm was  sitting in the barn and he was very still like barely moving.

 He was older and  handsome in this very  weathered way.  He looked like he came from a different era.  He was looking at this horse that had just given birth. And he went on and told this  story about how this horse was going to be discarded.

He didn't even want the horse, thought the horse would be a liability. They didn't  know the horse was pregnant, but he ended up taking the horse.  I was just like, I don't even want to get on the horse. I just want to listen to this guy talk all day. 

And I crave that. I think the celebrity stuff  a lot of it is not that interesting, how interesting is living in Hollywood and having a billion dollars at the end of the day can be but I like these real stories. 

I think all of us owe it to ourselves to have a story that connects us to  the work that we do.  Why do you do the work that you do?  Sometimes it's an origin story, or sometimes it's  a moment that you realize  your work had value.

We should think about that as parents. We should think about that as athletes or activists , whatever these Identities are that we have.  We're living our lives every day so moments may not  seems special because we're constantly having them so  giving yourself the space to  reflect on moments that can  stand for many moments, , there's many moments of magic in parenting or a fulfilling career, your art or whatever, but  just zoom in on one and think about it and think about a story around that and see how that makes you feel and what you discover.

A lot of my interest in doing this is that I think that the creative industries are changing so much and I'm trying to get to the bottom of it and also  get closer to what I really care about in my own life.   A lot of people have been laid off and or had to compromise their creativity for their career.  I've talked to a great deal of people who  want to be able to do something that, that means more to them now, at this stage in their life,  they've, maybe achieved a lot in their career and they're  ready to move on to another phase 

I feel like you've said things with such optimism and I feel, like, more pessimism. I mean, I think , here are my thoughts. First of all, I'm incredibly fortunate to be able to do the work that I do.  And being a part of a larger organization means that I have reach in a way that I wouldn't  as one human being,   that also means I'm a part of something larger than myself, which means that not everything that I do is my own or the exact way that I would do it. There's no free lunch. You only have so much time in your life  that being said, the work I get to do for the most part is lovely and satisfying and, you know, reliable that I can have a life where I know that I will have a project after the project I'm working on, which is as someone who prior to this was a cobble it together freelancer.  But I feel like what's happening creatively., I think there is a lot more openness to out of the box thinking and a lot of this aligns with storytelling, and that's great but also people don't have money. There's not money in the way that there was when the world was kind of living on the hog. That's just not where we are.

Someone's making a lot of money. 

Someone's making a lot of money, but I would say it is, dare we say, not equitably distributed. 

What? 

Yes. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there is an inequitable distribution of wealth in our country and in the world. You know, the money in podcasting isn't where it used to be.  Live events are more expensive, so they're less accessible for people. The publishing industry is upended. A lot of the money for things goes to brand names, and not necessarily creators who are pushing the boundaries of our thinking.  And of course, I decided to start a podcast, when all these podcasts have closed down  but people listen to podcasts, they listen to podcasts, the growth is, is huge, you know, and projected into the future. So that's just one example. 

People read books. Where is that money going? I had somebody very close to me call me in tears because a project got canceled that they were really depending on and this person is hugely talented and has published 10 coffee table books and they are worried about  their next meal.

Well, you know almost  it's not been that much better for myself.  I interviewed somebody else. They said that  people that used to make 2,000 a day freelancing haven't had a project in 18 months.

That was the quote. And she said she just gave up and now she's a fine artist because she could afford to do that right now  for whatever reason,  is it going to be like, are we going to have a creative homeless population? What is going to happen? I mean, you do need to make money. So yeah, I'm not that optimistic. I'm just wondering what, from your purview, what you see  Or, you know, happening and what you think might happen in the future because it doesn't really add up people are watching things they're listening to things  it's not all in Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk's pocket  people  want to be entertained  so I don't really get the math of it. 

I'm not going to pretend I wholly get the math, but I will say that  speaking to podcasts specifically,   it was a bubble. People  over invested and didn't get the money on their return. And now we're investing less, there's less money in it. I would say in terms of other industries. 

I don't know that podcasting would necessarily fall under this, but there are a lot of things that you can do more cheaply than you used to be able to do. You don't have to pay people to do them. And then people don't consume print media in the way that they used to consume print media. People are reading books, but what books are they reading?

You know, again, I don't have the full answer to this, but I think it's just that the landscape is changing.   Also, we have a generation of people coming into the workforce who are   saddled with student debt. The cost of living is so expensive. Wages are not commensurate with the cost of living. It is nearly impossible to build equity.  All of these forces are coming together. People don't have the luxury of creating for four hours a day if they also have to make sure that they have a reliable income to keep a roof over their head or their family's heads or whatever else.

I mean, it's a perplexing state. I guess generally I feel  I have to feel optimistic.  Do you know what I mean? Like, I, I think, yeah, me too. I want to believe that I can help make a better world for the generations after us. And that, you know, what is truly important in this world   will win, but it feels like there are many more things, but many less options, if that makes sense. 

Many more things and many less options. It doesn’t make sense but that is what I see. I agree that that is what is happening. And I don't understand the math on it. 

You were saying that you find that people care more about what consumers say. That was my job, like what consumers feel and think, right, I would disagree. I was a brand strategist. I came into agencies talking to people on the street and writing about what people were feeling and thinking and culture. And then I went into marketing and more and more it became about performance marketing, which is another word for sales.

It was just, hard sales kind of marketing and not the like, get to know the people and the company and the why that brand documentary stuff was the why like the making of beyond meat and why the future of plant protein and why Timex, those are the kind of stories that I would tell. And then  it became like, that's great and everything, but we need to sell and I don't belong in that world of sales. That's just not at all what I want to do or can do. I don't even know how to do that. I'm not a salesperson. All the people that I've spoken to who were in brand, meaning talking about the consumer and more of the creative part of it, they're the ones out of work because of this  data driven performance marketing,  they're also realizing that it doesn't really work without a brand. But if you notice, if you look around, there's fewer brands than there used to be that have a real connection to people. It’s very splintered because people aren't investing in brand, a.k.a. story,  a.k.a. meaning, consumer stuff, which I think is problematic anyway, because it's manipulation but they're not investing in that. And so I think it's really cool that companies are hiring you to come in, because I kind of did that de facto the same sort of thing where I would have these workshops and  get  all levels of the company talking about why they work there and the meaning of what they do and finding that little nugget but  companies are  running scared and they don't want to invest in that anymore but you're saying they are investing in that from The Moth so what is the value to them  in that kind of storytelling for the bottom line, because it is all about capitalism. And I mean, that's, that's cynical, but they need to make money. So if they didn't think that the storytelling was going to make them money, they wouldn't invest in that.  I mean, I think the value is that people want authentic connections with what they consume and storytelling helps with that.  I've been  working on this program for over a decade. I've gone through a Economic cycles and everything. And it has always been the people that hire us saying we want to listen to our audience. We want to see  what our stakeholders  care about and how we can be more human. I've worked  across industries  and that's the way that they're speaking.  And now even with this economic crisis very much now, yes, very much now…