Buen viaje, mariposas…
When Victoria Topham asked me to tell a story for Coyote Tales, the lively southwest Utah version of The Moth that she has created, I was delighted. I love the challenge of the storyteller— maximum compression, the mandate to create a full-blown story in just a few minutes. A story with an arc and scenes and telling details. It’s a great and useful task for a writer, and it’s also incredibly gratifying to have a live audience rather than those invisible readers of our work who—as much as we treasure them—we never see.
The event would be in Ivins City Park, just west of St. George, on an autumn evening. The theme: tradition. This night of storytelling would happen in conjunction with the Ivins City Heritage Days Festival.
So what story to tell?
“Tradition” in Ivins City might lead me to family, to values, to “heritage.” I have lots of potential material from my dad’s family, from time sitting around in Adirondack chairs in my grandparents’ backyard in Washington State, telling stories from the family farm back in North Dakota. Or I could tell stories from our own nuclear family traditions, our Passover dinner, our camping rituals, the eccentric traditions we have—as all families have.
I spun through the possibilities, not quite sure where to land. But then I fully absorbed the date of the storytelling event, September 10th. Just an arbitrary day on the calendar, chosen for convenience. But the next day was not a random day at all. The day after our evening of storytelling would be September 11th. And so I knew exactly what story I would tell.
I could now give you the text of the story. But I won’t. It’s a spoken story. As The Moth puts it, this was a night of true stories, told live, without notes. So you’ll have to listen—and you can do so here (scroll to the bottom of the Coyote Tales page; I was the closer that night, so my audio link comes last).
Coyote Tales, Ivins City Park, September 10th 2022
