On Feb. 16, my unsuspecting atrium procrastination session was interrupted by an invitation dropped over my head and into my lap. Brianna Mortimer ’27 had delivered a note with my name in cursive script. The gist: “Love HURTS. Let’s talk about it… Brandi Recital Hall, Thursday night, 10:15 pm. … You will not know many of the people in this room well, and some you will know VERY well.” Mortimer returned to where Charlotte Burton ’29 had been watching the delivery. Their mission was accomplished. What kind of pawn were they trying to make of me?
My theories were wild and sinister. Thinking of everyone I’ve ever scorned on this campus, and the various ways they could really make me squirm, I suddenly became very ill and did not leave my house for the next three days. But by the time Thursday night rolled around, my pity parties had run their course and I needed some community. So, I sat down in the middle row in Brandi Recital Hall surrounded by people I didn’t know and people I knew too well, and it began. And I was enlivened by Moth Club (not yet registered as an official student organization).
The Moth is a global organization best known for hosting communal storytelling events.
According to their website, the Moth was founded in 1997 by novelist George Dawes Green “who wanted to recreate in New York 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 spellbinding tales.” This is exactly what it felt like as Burton explained to her confused audience what we were doing there.
Kenyon’s Moth-style story slam began with a theme: Love Hurts. Burton went first and recounted a five-minute, three-part narrative about some poor boy from her past. She showed us how it worked, captivated us with her tale and then turned to see who from the audience wanted to go next. Mortimer assisted Burton throughout the showcase and at this point approached the audience for volunteers to be entered into the selection pool. “[Kenyon’s] culture sometimes kind of makes you paranoid and withdrawn and afraid to be seen doing anything, and it’s scary to break out of your shell,” Mortimer said in an interview with the Collegian. “Initially, when we asked who wanted to put their names in the hat, we got kind of no volunteers. To do something cool and awesome, I think, also requires you to do something kind of scary, but it feels really good.”
Eventually, the audience’s blank stares turned to whispered colluding and then to names written on slips, placed in Mortimer’s cupped hands, tossed up and down for good measure and pulled out with an authoritative summons. As far as the specific stories being told, what happens at Moth Club stays at Moth Club. In total, five students told stories that ranged from funny first loves to recent “for the plot” endeavors to blowing off some steam. As the stories went on, you could feel the walls of the eclectic group come down. After co-hosting last semester’s game of Spoon Assassin, Burton and Mortimer have done it again.
“It’s a really interesting thing to come to an event where you don’t know what the purpose is, and then be told, ‘Oh, you have to share a snippet of something that’s very vulnerable to you and very personal to this room full of people,’ and that people actually do it. I don’t know. I really appreciated that. I felt like everybody kind of brought equal stories to the table, a little bit embarrassing, a little bit entertaining,” said Kaitlyn Ingersoll ’27, who went third. “I was trying to think about stories I had that involved love, and I found it hard to think about something that was concise enough and witty enough that I could tell it and have people be entertained by it. And then I also had to consider my audience. … I was trying to think about things that didn’t involve people on this campus.”
Madeline Regnier ’27 was one of the first people to put her name down, and just her luck, she was the final person to share her story about how love hurts. “I initially chose to perform just because I love to talk. And I think that oftentimes, if you’re the first person to be vulnerable, other people will step up to the plate. A little bit sacrificial lamb-style,” Regnier said. “I think [Burton] is doing something really amazing with this group. I think that it’s going to turn into something really cool. There’s a lot of great storytellers at this school, but I don’t think a lot of people have enough courage to seek out a platform for it, or they think it’s going to be too big of an obstacle to join something formal. It’s an oral story. It’s ephemeral, it’s gonna disappear. I think that there’s something so fun about something being shared only with the people that are in that room.” Regnier’s story was deemed the winner of this showcase after Burton scored each of the performances.
Burton has been involved with the Moth since high school; she took an oral storytelling workshop with the group before participating in events that led to more selective events. Now, as an intern for the Moth’s Youth Advisory Council, she has been trying to bring the Moth to Kenyon College. She hopes to officially register the club with the larger organization, which would mean she could record each of the stories and submit them to the Moth database.
“Last semester, I tried to start Moth Club. And this is kind of what made me a bit pessimistic about people’s desire to do things at Kenyon,” Burton recalled. “Eventually it just became like me and my friends just hanging out until it stopped, and I don’t want that to happen again. So I thought that hosting an event like this that’s sensational, that gets people talking… hopefully garnered some interest, and Moth Club could start back again and be stronger.”
As I interviewed Burton and Mortimer after the event, I mentioned that I had just spent dinner listening to David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon Commencement speech “This is Water.” Burton responded with enthusiasm: “I feel like every Kenyon student needs to be, like, shaken and told, ‘This is water. Yeah, this. Water. This is your life right now. You’re living it right now. Do things! Go out!’”
Burton and Mortimer are dedicated to bringing radical fun to Kenyon. “I was at my friend’s apartment and she was sitting on the couch, and she was bringing up these talking points, like: ‘I feel like things are so stagnant here;’ ‘I feel bored;’ ‘I feel disconnected from other people,’” Mortimer explained. “So then it was this question of, like, ‘what can we do?’ Because I believe that this desire to do exciting, scary, rambunctious things is in all of us.”
“I feel like people are more inclined to show up if they don’t know what it is. Especially here, people are very inclined to follow their curiosity,” Ingersoll said. She then went on to share how the mystery, as well as the event itself, reignited some “Kenyon magic” she’d thought was gone.
Regnier shared a similar sentiment. “I think people are excited to be invited to care,” she said. “People at this school want to lift each other up. They want an outlet in order to support each other in a casual way. People are looking for community. I think Moth Club can play a really important role in that. I think that it comes down to how much people are willing to put into it, but I definitely see a really exciting future for Moth Club on this campus.” (This exciting future is right around the corner, as the next Moth-style slam will be held on Thursday in Brandi Recital Hall at 10:10 p.m.)
“Why we go to a college that’s this small is that there’s kind of this expectation that we facilitate our own fun,” Burton concluded. “There’s definitely a market for it.”