Us@250 Dispatch: Denver, Colorado

In the green room of the historic Holiday Theater in Denver, Colorado, George Sumner shows me his silver storyteller’s bracelet. It is about an inch wide and wraps closely around his wrist, depicting the story of his life in small, etched images. The bracelet is a Navajo art form, a gift from the Diné artist Rosabelle Shepherd, though Sumner is not Native himself. From left to right, it traces his journey from childhood in a Utah farm valley, to the helicopters he flew over Vietnam, to the return home, to a nation at odds about the war and his service. How the gift came to be is beautiful in its own right, but tonight we are here for the story it holds.

Sumner is one of three storytellers to be featured in an event hosted by The Moth in partnership with New America’s Us@250 initiative. The Moth, an organization that’s synonymous with live storytelling, invites speakers to stand alone on stage—no notes allowed—in order to share something deeply personal and true and affecting with total strangers. I’ve listened to The Moth on public radio for years, but this is my first time in the room.

The theater is an intimate space, the stage right on top of the seats. Iron-trimmed lanterns hang in the rafters, and chipped-away masonry reveals the red brick of the structure beneath. It has lived many lives over the last century—a cinema, a restaurant, a church—but today it is a long-term hub for the arts and community events. It is the sort of place where history feels alive.

As it does in the home of featured storyteller Amena Brown’s grandmother, where her family bonded over meals and shared secrets, too, both comical and not. As a storyteller, Amena is nervous until the moment she’s at the microphone, but, “Once I get there and take that first breath, it feels like home. The stage is one of the few places where I’m not stuck in my head. I’m in my body. I’m as present as I can be.” And we are with her now, seeing in her kitchen how generational acts of love can be born out of exceptionally cruel and unjust times, how these acts become shared traditions passed down through the years, as we aspire for a better future.

Storyteller Alistair Bane is shy in most aspects of his life, yet he finds comfort and safety on stage. “I kind of picture just speaking to a friend,” he explains. That is where his story begins, too: a conversation with a friend that leads, eventually, to the friend’s grandmother coercing him into attending church. Alistair grew up between Shawnee and Irish-Catholic cultures, but was woefully unprepared for the embarrassing situation that followed, when he’s put on the spot in front of an entire congregation. We all laugh at the same moments during Alistair’s story and, I imagine, reflect on times when we, too, have had to stand tall in uncomfortable situations—or remain true to ourselves while simultaneously honoring the values of another.

George Sumner, 79, says he’s always been “an adrenaline junkie.” He flew helicopters, became a career firefighter, and skied “recklessly and dangerously.” Today, live storytelling is a way for him to still feel that rush—an experience, he theorizes, that allows one to “own” the things that have happened to him. But, as George and his colleagues were quick to point out, stories have another higher purpose as well. The alchemy, the magic, is not within either the teller or the audience alone, but somewhere in between. “The Moth,” Sumner says, “is in the business of increasing the total amount of empathy that exists in the world.”

Kate Tellers—a director at The Moth’s program and the evening’s show producer—says that she hopes The Moth audience “feels in community with the others in the room, that they feel like they’ve uncovered a new piece of the human experience, and that when they leave, they feel more inspired to connect with people they don’t already know.”

In a politically polarized United States, it can sometimes feel like we live amidst nothing but accelerating chaos and dread and terror. We see it on our phone screens and our news channels, and we hear it from elected officials, when those in power use those tensions to increase our fear of one another and leverage our despair for political expedience.

Good stories are not cures for all of that, but the nature of a story allows us to feel our way through contradiction and complexity, the sorts of paradoxes that are inherent to the human and American experiences. Stories do not ignore difficult or regrettable realities, but instead provide pathways for connection across those challenges. Stories require vulnerability, for both the storyteller and the audience, and in their thrills, they can be invitations to healing.

George is the night’s final storyteller, and his voice is no less strong as the evening’s eldest. His story is about service and commitment and confusion and purpose. We learn how the phrase “welcome home” can cut in multiple directions. We listen to his reckoning with the ways that opposing ideas coexist within us, how life is not and can never be simple, and how it is beautiful nonetheless. By the time George finishes his tale—a warrior’s peace depicted at the end of his storyteller’s bracelet—audience members are wiping their eyes.

To conclude, the show’s host Angelica Lindsey-Ali asks the audience to remain for a few moments and to speak with someone else sitting near them, someone they don’t know. To ask questions. To reflect on tonight’s stories. As the house lights come up, conversation fills the room.

On my way out of the theater—before I walk back to my hotel across a bustling Friday night where people laugh outside bars and restaurants and walk the sidewalks arm in arm—I spy a friend of mine, Elizabeth, who now lives in Denver and who’d brought her aunt to the show. Elizabeth used to attend Moth events in New York, all of the StorySLAM variety (essentially name-out-of-a-hat story competitions). Tonight was a little different than that, she says, how the purpose of the show, though always present at the Moth, was more explicitly distilled.

“I felt like,” my friend says, “I had permission to just be a human being for an hour. I don’t think I’ve been able to take a breath like that in a long time.”