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A line of New Yorkers throttles a Greenwich Village block. It's hard to tell where the queue ends, but it's clear that anyone who arrived less than an hour early won't be among the 250 who fit in The Bitter End. The bar once provided a stage for Bill Cosby and Bob Dylan, but now settles for run-of-the-mill singer-songwriters and bands. Occasionally, however, the bar's old magnetism is revived, like with tonight's appearance of "The Moth." There's no celebrity name on the marquee, no up-and-coming band on showcase. Instead, a few names will be drawn from a hat and the winners will come forward to tell true first-person stories.

In an age of flashy technologies and star-studded stages, The Moth—real people telling real stories to a live audience—has not only revived the old tradition of raconteuring, but turned it into a cosmopolitan pleasure. While similar storytelling organizations are launching throughout New York in numbers that seem to rival the city's stand-up comedy scene, the nonprofit organization has developed a national following, with storytelling events in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and Detroit, and has plans to open in five more U.S. cities and possibly even in Europe within the next year. About 21,750 people attended a Moth storytelling event last year, including 11,250 at New York's 48 shows. Meanwhile, the organization has launched MothUP, a satellite program encouraging fans to start mini-Moths in their own living rooms—85 of these groups launched in 2010, from Britain to South Korea. The Moth's online audience is even larger: an average of 1 million recordings from its shows are downloaded each month, putting it consistently at the top of the iTunes most-popular podcasts. The Moth Radio Hour, which debuted in 2009, is now on more than 200 stations in its third brief season, making it one of the most successful public radio show launches in years.

But New York remains Moth's center, if only in how carefully the events have been designed to combat the phoniness, flash, and isolation endemic to the city. When poet and novelist George Dawes Green (The Caveman's Valentine, The Juror) moved from St. Simon's Island, Georgia, to New York City in 1997, he pined for the authenticity of his friend Wanda Bullard's porch, where he spent many muggy summers listening to his friends' tales.

"You go out to cocktail parties and New York is filled with these giant egos so you try to tell a story with any subtlety and you have about ten seconds before you're interrupted," Green told Christianity Today. "There was a certain shallowness at these parties, even parties with really interesting people. I wanted to get more from them. I wanted a sense of depth and sharing." Green invited some friends over one evening for a night of stories, and the first Moth meeting convened in his living room. As rumors of Green's mesmerizing story nights spread, The Moth quickly outgrew Green's apartment and filled larger and larger venues. Now it hosts three kinds of events: its open-mic Story Slams, Grand Slams (in which audience favorites from the Story Slams compete against each other), and The Moth Mainstage, curated nights in which novelists, actors, scientists, and others are preselected to tell their stories. The rules stay the same: No notes are allowed, it must be a story with a beginning and an end (no standup routines or rants), it must relate to the night's chosen theme, and (most importantly) it must be true.

The Moth's success has resulted in dozens of spin-offs invading New York City. "A critical mass was reached," observed Ben Lillie, the founder of The Story Collider, which gathers people to tell their true stories involving science. "There's so many people running their own shows that a community has grown up around it and it's just taken off."

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January (Web-Only) 2011, Vol. 55

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