Occasional magic refers to those moments of beauty, wonder, and clarity, often stumbled upon, where we suddenly see a piece of truth about our life. As Moth directors we spend our days helping people shape their stories. We help people identify the most important moments of their lives (as we sometimes put it, “the moments when you became you”) so the audience will understand why they mattered so much.
This is the second “The Moth Presents” collection that I've read (after All These Wonders), and although I deeply appreciate the candour and vulnerability shown by these forty-seven authors in sharing those seminal moments that represent a major shift in their lives, as with the earlier collection, there is definitely something missing when oral storytelling is translated to the page. Each of these short vignettes is interesting and worth a read, but the format does rob them of magic; what's weird is that you feel that absence. And yet, still worthwhile. A few highlights:
Theory of Change, by teenaged storyteller and community activist (whose stated focus is “holistic health for the hood”) Journey Jamison, shook me with her casual recounting of how she had put a first aid course to good use when a neighbourhood shooting victim stumbled through her front door (and how she later used that experience to fight for local change):
You hear all the time that children are the future. But I refuse to settle for being the future when I can be the right now.I was touched by the humanity in Mike Destefano's The Junkie and the Monk (about learning to live again after incredible loss):
You have to have amazing karma, they say, to have a lama actually want to do tonglen with you, which is giving and taking. When they put their head to yours, what they are doing is saying, Give me all your pain, and I'm gonna give you all my joy.I was inspired by Krista Tippett's spiritual journey in Gaggy's Blessing and appreciated the light that journey shone on her relationship with her strict Southern Baptist grandfather:
I think that Gaggy held the strength of his mind in tension with his faith – and not a creative tension. He held it off to one side of the passions and beliefs that were so important to who he was in the world. I don't believe he ever felt that his mind – and its questions – were invited into his faith.It's probably not surprising that a highlight would come from George Dawes Green, the founder of The Moth, and he tells a story that is weird, funny, and touching in The Haunted Freezer. Songwriters also tell stories that translate well to the page (Roseanne Cash's Until the Real You Shows Up is very thoughtful and Beth Neilsen Chapman's Seven Shades of Blue is a very affecting story of love and death). Comedians probably tell the best stories, and some of my favourites were: David Montgomery's Spice (about channeling your inner Spice Girl in order to take back your life); David Litt's Have You Met Him Yet? (about working in Barack Obama's White House); Jon Bennett's Curses (what it takes to push one's religious father to swear); and Mary Theresa Archbold's Our Normal (about the challenges of one-armed motherhood.)
There are many stories about families and the process of becoming parents, and I found a nice irony in comparing a gay man challenged by his mother's oft-repeated phrase, “The love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world, and people who don't have children never get to know what it is like”, in Andrew Solomon's My Post-Nuclear Family and its opposite: a woman who never wanted children but who finds herself pregnant, whose own mother warned her, “Never get married and never have kids. They'll ruin your life!” (Ophira Eisenberg's Inside Joke) Spoiler: Both end up as parents, wonderfully happy and fulfilled. And there are many stories that I found uniquely intriguing: Terrance Flynn's C'est La Vie (a close encounter with a serial killer); Ann Daniels' Living in the Extreme (a mother of triplets becomes a polar explorer); D. Parvaz's Bearing Witness (an Al Jazeera reporter is held in a Syrian prison).
There are many stories with international themes that expand understanding – from escaping South Vietnam before the country collapsed to being a Saudi Arabian student in Boston post-9/11 – but I really don't know what to think of Fatou Wurie's When the Heart is Full: about a liberal-minded woman returning to her home country of Sierra Leone and reconnecting with her roots at her grandmother's funeral. (Wurie's grandmother, as a Chief Sowie, was the one who performed FGM on the community's little girls, but she decided to leave her granddaughters intact. However, custom holds that before such a Chief's funeral, seven young girls must undergo the ceremony so that her spirit could rest in peace, and that is reported as matter-of-fact; just tinged with regret for the little girls she had watched playing before they were led out into the bush, Wurie nonetheless concludes that she comes from a place that is strong, bold, and brave. Huh.)
Lots to think about here – I'm trying to pinpoint the moment at which I became who I am today; it's not easy in the absence of some big event– and despite the feeling of something having been lost in putting these oral stories down on paper, I'm happy to have picked this up.
