Storytelling

Pip Smith knows how to spin a yarn. Take her telling of the origins of Penguin Plays Rough, the storytelling night she launched in late 2008 with then-flatmate Elly King.  She first sets the scene – “We were living in an apartment above a convenience store in King Street” – then adds a tasty morsel of mystery – “Our flatmate lived in this massive room upfront; we all knew it was huge, but she was very private, and we never got to see inside.” Then, there’s a CS Lewis-style discovery: “When she moved, we opened the door and were like, ‘Holy shit, this is amazing, we could fit a hundred people in here.’” And perhaps just for Time Out’s benefit, she adds: “It even had a bar.”

Smith, who was doing a Master’s in Creative Writing at Sydney University, got an idea: she would invite people to come in, sit down on a red velvet chair and read short works of fiction to an audience. There’d be authors, playwrights and poets, but also open spots between them for anyone who had a story to tell. “I’d been to some badly run open mic nights where open slots were shoved at the end of the evening,” says Smith. “It was like a cattle yard: when the open slots started, people took it as a cue to leave.” To get away from the “stuffiness of writerly culture”, she’d invite comics and songwriters and others to share their stories, too. The formula worked: her first few monthly nights attracted 40 or so people to that once mysterious room; today, she routinely draws a hundred to the new location in St Peters.

The success of Penguin Plays Rough (PPR) is itself quite a story – but to stretch a metaphor, it’s really just a chapter in a larger tale. For the last few years, Sydney has taken to storytelling in a big way. Open mic nights similar to PPR have emerged, like Ben Jenkins’ Story Club, a monthly storytelling night at Sydney University’s Hermann’s bar that kicked off in 2009 with about 25 people and now attracts 120. And in February, Matt Roden and AH Cayley launched the Confession Booth, where well-known writers, actors and other ‘creative types’ ask forgiveness from a boozed-up audience at the World Bar. On the more hard-edged literary end of the scale, Ivor Indyk’s Westside Writer’s Group has been promoting the voices of western Sydney writers for years. And at the more “emerging end”, Australia’s first Story Factory will open in July in Redfern, offering creative writing classes and teaching the delights of storytelling to kids.

It would be easy to describe all this as just another case of New York-to-Sydney cultural osmosis – the Story Factory is directly inspired by author David Eggers’ 826 Valencia, a kids’ writing centre that has eight venues across the US, and Tell Me a Story, a monthly storytelling afternoon at Marrickville’s Camelot Lounge, was inspired by the Moth, the New York storytelling group whose weekly podcasts have become a hit among Sydney’s hip and educated. It’s worth noting too that This American Life, everybody’s favourite podcast, has popularised the funny and pathos-flecked monologue form.

But speak to those behind Sydney’s new storytelling nights and workshops, and they’ll tell you they were reacting to a very local need. For Jenkins, who came up in stand-up comedy, Sydney needed a night that allowed people to share stories that weren’t necessarily riddled with punchlines – at unforgiving standup nights, those with longer narratives weren’t given a chance. For Kathryn Bendall, who founded Tell Me a Story, Sydney lacked venues where ordinary people, not just prominent writers, could share their personal stories. “Everything today is a status update,” says Bendall. “You say you had a ‘shit of a day’, but what made the day shit? And whom do you tell that story to? I wanted to give people a platform to share and listen to those stories.”

For Pip Smith, who’s adamant that traditional storytelling rules like ‘beginning, middle, and ending’ be broken as frequently as possible at PPR – and it’s okay if you bomb out doing so – story nights like hers bring a different, more chaotic voice to the Sydney arts. “I think it’s really important that there are corners of Sydney’s cultural community where anything goes. There are so many wonderful theatre companies, for instance, like Belvoir, that can present very tight storytelling. We need to offer the other side of that.”

A place like the kids-focused Story Factory is quite different: here, it’s teaching those very rules that counts. Former Sydney Morning Herald journalist Catherine Keenan and a group of others began putting the Story Factory together last year after watching an Eggers TED talk about 826 Valencia. (Like their American counterparts, which are set up behind proxy shops like a Pirate Supply Store because of commercial zoning, Sydney’s “factory” will open behind a Martian Embassy and gift shop that sells maps of Mars and a crop circle starter kit). As with more adult storytelling nights, the Factory was designed to fill a gap. “Initially we thought there might already be something like it,” says Keenan. “So we had a look around and couldn’t find one. We talked to teachers then and their concern was that there was less and less space in the curriculum for creative writing, and creativity in general.”

Keenan and the Factory’s staff and volunteers have been running programmes in three schools in Waterloo, Tempe and Alexandria for the past year in the lead up to opening – the day we speak, she’s delivering bound-and-illustrated books that the kids at Our Lady of Mount Carmel have produced over a term-long course. When the Factory opens, there will an after-school programme where kids work on books, newspapers and other projects; a two-hour bookmaking workshop for whole classes; and a class with the MCA where children produce a claymation video. While the project is targeted at disadvantaged, indigenous and non-English speakers, it’s open to all. “Our programmes give them something they can hold in their hands and say, ‘Look, I did this.’”

What the adults get out of sharing and hearing their stories in Newtown apartments and Kings Cross bars is somewhat different. For writers and raconteurs facing a shrinking publishing landscape, it’s another venue to air their wares. And for listeners, it’s pure fun. Matt Roden, who runs Confession Booth, says, “When you get the right mix of people it becomes less a performance and more a night of casual sharing. If you’re watching a band or a comedian or even a strict reading of a published work, there isn’t that sense of interaction between the entertainer and the audience. But someone gets up to confess something personal or tell a personal story, and you see them show relief when the crowd laughs and warms to them, it’s a very different vibe.”

Perhaps the biggest event on any Sydney story calendar, the Sydney Writers’ Festival, gets more personal than usual this year with a theme focused on the public versus the private and a slew of memoirists and authors who’ll share on stage – novelist Hisham Matar, whose father was kidnapped by the Gaddafi regime in 1990, will open the festival with a very personal address. The success of the Festival – attendance has grown more than 80 per cent since its inception in 1998 – is testimony to our increased hunger for stories, the stories behind stories, and their various tellers.

And while there’s a world of difference between seeing, say, Jeffrey Eugenides discuss the literary influences on The Marriage Plot at the SWF and Rhys Muldoon talking about naughty adventures at Confession Booth, there’s a similar appeal to both, says Festival artistic director Chip Rolley. “What drives these events and what makes them really interesting is the need for us to be in the same room with the person and hear the human voice tell the story – it’s physical in a way, hearing it in the air rather than in our heads. I think that’s why we all gather in these rooms and listen to these writers, ideas makers and people who’ve got a point of view. I guess it goes back to the cave when we were all sitting around and telling each other stories.”

For Pip Smith, storytelling is more than entertainment or even connection. Naturally, she’s got another doozy of a story to show why: Smith grew up dyslexic, and remembers one day “throwing a tantrum” at home trying to write a year ten English essay. “Mum said to me, ‘Just tell this thing to me as if it’s a story – just tell me the story of the essay.’ It unlocked everything for me. It sounds a bit overwrought, but after that, school became a lot easier. I’d never had a mind for facts and details; knowledge didn’t make sense to me when you thought about it in those ways. But there is something that happens when you join dots in that way that gives meaning.”

She confesses the story is a little grandiose, but we reckon it’d go down a treat on the red velvet chair.

Where to hear and tell stories in Sydney:

Confession Booth
24 Bayswater Rd, Kings Cross	Ace compere AH Cayley steers a night of unburdening as actors (Rhys Muldoon's done it), musicians (Brendan Maclean too) and ordinary folk (you can get up there!) tell embarrassing, hilarious stories – with some free booze on arrival. Forgive them, father... World Bar. Next date: Wed Jul 4
Late Night Library
405 Crown St, Surry Hills	It's the free adults-only debate, Q&A, music and storytelling event that proved so popular as a series of one-offs that the fine folk at City of Sydney decided to make it a fixture. You'll be glad they did. The next one centres on horror films, but stay tuned for something more story focused. Surry Hills Library.
Penguin Plays Rough
4 Lackey St, St Peters	So successful they’ve even released a book, PPR happens monthly with five writers reading their prose, scripts and poetry. Sydney’s number one night for the unpublished and aspiring. Next date: Fri May 4.
Story Club
Cnr City Rd & Butlin Ave, Darlington	Each month, a mix of writers and other creative types gather in the beautifully seedy Hermann’s Bar at Sydney Uni to tell stories. One rule: while you can embellish, no “Masterchef-style emotional manipulation” says host and founder Ben Jenkins. Hermann’s Bar.
Sydney Story Factory
176 Redfern St, Redfern 2016	Inspired by Dave Eggers’ Valencia 826, this not-for-profit creative writing hub for the young’uns will open in July behind a Martian Embassy and Gift Shop that sells invasion kits and invasion sunscreen (because the Martians are moving one planet closer to the sun).
Tell Me A Story
103 Railway Pd (entrance 19 Marrickville Rd), Marrickville	This themed Sunday arvo story sesh – this month’s theme is ‘Love will always find a way” – features eight storytellers from all walks of life in a room that looks like (an eccentric) nanna’s lounge.  The Camelot Lounge. Next date: Sun May 6.
All the Best
	Not a physical night or workshop, All the Best is FBi’s answer to storytelling podcast behemoth This American Life, featuring Sydney storytellers weaving tales in monologues: they can be fact, fiction, or like the best stories, somewhere in between. Podcasts available monthly.
Campfire Collective
8-10 Brown St, Newtown 2042.	A nuts and bolts regular workshop for aspiring storytellers. Newtown Library. Next date: Tue May 22.