George Dawes Green: The Moth on the move

There's a nice story behind the New York storytelling organisation founded by novelist George Dawes Green. It’s named after the insects that came clattering around the light while he and his friends were sitting on someone’s porch at home in Georgia, drinking whiskey and telling stories through the evening.

But New York lacks porches, and the city's “terrible jumpiness” means that people there don’t slow down enough for storytelling. So in 1997 Green brought The Moth inside, inviting friends to his apartment for evenings of anecdotes.

Since then, The Moth has become an institution. Many of its raconteurs are celebrities, while demand to perform at the Moth Slams—open mic nights, where anybody can go and put their name in a hat for the chance of ten minutes onstage—is huge, not least because careers as novelists or performers have been made on the back of a story told there. Talent-spotters sit in the crowd. The group’s podcast has become the second most downloaded on the web, with half a million listeners every month.

In light of this extraordinary success, you might think The Moth is merely hip – something for New York scenesters. Or you could fix on the air of nostalgia in the story of how it got its name, and accuse it of folksiness. So it’s a surprise to hear how passionately George Dawes Green tells me about the political side of his project.

The Moth is one antidote to what he calls our “addiction to distraction” – the fragmentation of consciousness brought on by incessant text messages, meaningless news stories, and inane internet chatter, all of which have drastically reduced our attention spans. “Twittering is the right word”, he muses. “It’s like birds chirping in your ears till you can’t think.”

When I meet Green the morning after his arrival from New York, jetlag has further confused a body-clock already out of whack. He has hypernychthemeral syndrome, which means his sleep cycle lasts a little longer than the usual 24 hours. He moves slowly in and out of phase with the rest of society. But “jetlag messes things up," he complains, so that now he can’t remember where he is in the cycle; only that he should be asleep.

He orders a muffin to go with his coffee, along with orange juice and a tumbler of ice. Despite the care he puts into decanting juice into ice, he makes a mess. “This is not working as well as I had wished,” he says, sounding very tired. His voice is quiet and laconic; he often pauses for a few seconds, finding the right word. Occasionally he fastidiously carves off a segment of muffin.

His family moved around through his childhood, ending up living near Brunswick, Georgia, when he was 12. His dad was an “itinerant writer”, who wrote sci-fi stories and paid the bills writing for newspapers and ghost-writing memoirs. Green dropped out of education early, partly because school was never going to fit his idiosyncratic schedule. “I effectively started checking out around the fourth grade.”

In his twenties he began writing poetry, publishing one chapbook which won some praise. But he sensed that the life of a poet—“a beautiful approach to living, but one that doesn’t impinge much on the rest of reality"—would be frustrating in an age when people don’t read poetry, and the only poets who can make a living are academics too. So he gave up. Even now, when he has time and money to spare, he doesn’t write poetry. “It’s not something you can do in a dilettantish way”.

Moving to New York, he started a small clothing company, specialising in high-end women’s sportswear which he designed. He was “enmeshed in cash-flow,” until one day a news story about cave-dwellers in New York's Inwood Park gave him the idea for a thriller about a detective who is not only a troglodyte but a paranoid schizophrenic as well. By now in his late thirties, he sold his company and the next day started writing The Caveman’s Valentine, which was published in 1992.

I suggest to him that this character must have been difficult to write. He answers coolly, telling me that he already knew many schizophrenics himself from hanging around New York’s “tent cities”, temporary communities of the homeless which spring up in the city’s parks.

His next book, The Juror, did even better and was made into a successful film. But commercial success, or the “thriller” label, shouldn’t obscure Green’s seriousness. True, his stories are tightly-plotted and suspenseful – but there’s something deeply powerful about the “skeins of contingency” that make a plot. “A story can empty a reader’s brain and make them open and receptive to ideas that they would otherwise not be; able to see their way towards forgivenesses that otherwise they wouldn’t.”

He laughs when critics describe his work as 'noir'. “It’s the opposite of noir. Noir is filled with formal rules, studied coolness. My characters are all absolutely passionate, wrapped up in passion, which is what most people really are… No aloofness.” Green doesn’t care for noir, or any postmodernism (which amuses him “in the way a pop-up book amuses”), because he thinks it lacks the power to move people.

In any case, The Juror did well, and its success allowed Green to take extended leave from work. The brief picture he paints of the period between The Juror and Ravens is unapologetically blissful. “I travelled a lot, watched a lot of sunsets. Did a lot of diving. Started The Moth”.

More recently he’s been back in Savannah, where he’s been researching a new thriller by hanging out with a new set of vagrants – on Chippewa Square, in the woods by the railroad tracks. He's spent the occasional night in a bush. He says he will “use a lot of their banter” in the new novel; but his interest wasn’t just professional, it seems almost spiritual. He explains how he envies them. “Money doesn’t seem to bring us much happiness. But these people out on the square… the rain sort of annoys them, they drink too much, but some of them have lives that are quite comfortable. Reduced lives.”

This apparent simplicity is at odds with the frustrating busyness of society in general. His research also saw Green accompany a cop around the city on patrol, an experience which left him saddened. Little bookshops and cafés are closing; just as importantly, people no longer build porches – essential, of course, for telling stories on.

“A porch is where you should do most of your living. Nowadays people get in from the work, or from the mall, and start blogging strange things about Obama’s birth certificate.”

He sounds like a bit of a Luddite. The computer screen is “this little oblong we all worship” (although he doesn’t claim immunity from its charms). But he doesn’t think he’s simply nostalgic – he’s just ahead of the curve. “It’s possible that all this will change. There’s communities springing up all over America where kids are throwing away their cellphones, getting involved with organic gardening – building communities by harshly cutting back on electronics.”

People have a “real hunger” for this kind of cultural authenticity, which explains the phenomenal success of The Moth, he says. The Moth’s young audience is “utterly tired of the manipulative culture we’re living in”. They aren’t the kind of people to watch “movies that were created by corporate vice presidents."

Green puts The Moth in opposition to all kinds of phoniness. A good raconteur, he says, walks a tightrope. They must invent a persona for the stage while still revealing something true about his or her character. Vulnerability is key. Storytellers fail, he says, when they aren’t willing to expose themselves. A “prominent American novelist” told a story of how he triumphed at a wine tasting, recalling the name of an impossibly tricky vintage. An impressive feat, but “he lost the Moth audience – they didn’t want to hear about his glories.”

Perhaps Green is wrong about his crowd. Maybe they actually all watch summer blockbusters, and tweet about their evening at The Moth as soon as they’re out. But a good story holds people captive as long as it goes on, and those listening demand honesty from the storyteller. Green is persuasive when he talks about our “addiction to distraction”, convincing when he says our need for stories isn’t being met. The Moth isn’t a cure for the addiction, but it seems to meet that need.