THE SECRET TO A GOOD STORY, according to former journalist, longtime storyteller and founder of Kitsap’s Story Night Steven Gardner, is the stakes. Something has to be at stake, he says, something to win or lose.
Steven used to be in the business of telling stories. He worked in newspapers for more than 16 years. The bulk of that time he spent as a reporter and blog columnist for the Kitsap Sun. Now, he works as a Public Information Officer in the county elections department. He’s the guy that puts together all the information for the voters pamphlets which are mailed out before each election.
And while the stakes of elections are often well-circulated, debated and argued over endlessly, the stakes in the story of Story Night could very well be the existence of the event itself.
Steven almost never got into storytelling in the first place.
He got his first taste when he wrote an article for his high school newspaper, he says. Someone had talked him into writing something for the paper, and the first article he published was controversial and contentious. Due to an error in layout, the story ran without his byline. Still, he felt the buzz from people talking about it around him, and he would go on to study journalism in college.
“But it didn’t look like it was going to end up as a job,” Steve said. “So I kind of gave up on the idea.”
Years later, after working in PR for a private corporation, he cast back into the world of journalism looking for work and ended up interning for a newspaper as sort of a working interview. “They had me in the newsroom and I thought, ‘Yeah, this is it, this is for me…’” he said. “And that started a 16 year career that ended with 13 years at the Sun.”
He’d always thought that career would eventually lead to a better paying job. But, in the years leading up to his transition from the press corps to the county elections office in 2015, the world of storytelling, and Steve’s involvement in it, was changing with the advent and growing popularity of the slice-of-life journalism podcast.
In the early 2010s, he was listening to the Moth Radio Hour and the Tobolowski Files. He’d long been a listener of This American Life with Ira Glass. He and his colleagues in the newsroom were thinking: ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do something like that here?’ Taking note, inspiration and a bit of prodding from Kitsap Quiz Night, which was born from the same newsroom, they held the first Story Night in October 2014 at the Manette Saloon.
“We had 25 people,” Steve says, “And, I’d say, about a third of them were my family or friends… And I thought, ‘Ok, one was good, but do I have enough steam to do a second one?’
“Story Night could’ve ended after three events,” he adds.
Within those first few months, Steve was informed that this room wasn’t the best venue for the event, that they would have to move. At the same time, however, he was connected with Kitsap Regional Library, who picked up sponsorship of the event, and they soon found the perfect space in the back room of the Cloverleaf Sports Bar where they could host the event for free.
It’s been going ever since.
Fueled by the community that has been built up around it, the monthly gathering celebrates 10 years this month.
Steve made a podcast about it. He built a website. He started a non-profit for it. For a stretch, he tried doing the judging and ranking format at the live events, similar to the nationally-syndicated Moth Radio Hour. He would go on to be a Moth Story Slam champion himself. But eventually, he said, he stripped all that stuff away. And no one seemed to notice.
But they kept coming back.
“Because the magic is in the event itself,” Steven says. “One of the things that I’m most proud of is that this thing survived the pandemic. I believe in what this thing does. Public speaking is a challenge for a lot of people and I’ve seen a number of people say, ‘I’m gonna take that on right now.’ And they are amazing… What I get most out of it is empathy. I understand things about people in a way that I wouldn’t have.”
It’s a difficult thing to describe.
“You just have to come see what it’s all about,” says Kitsap-by-way-of-Appalachia storyteller and ardent Story Night supporter Kim Weaver. “You do kind of have to see it to believe it… It’s all about the connections you make with people. Communicating with your whole self to someone else’s whole self.”
ABOUT A DECADE AGO, Kim Weaver packed up everything, moved halfway across the country for a new job in a new town, in a place she’d never been, where she didn’t know anyone.
But she was determined to ‘find her people,’ she said.
She’s had an impressive career. She worked in civil engineering, restoring abandoned coal mines in Pennsylvania, “which is about as much fun as it sounds,” she says. Then, she joined the Peace Corps, “because I decided that was the lowest-risk way of becoming a teacher,” she laughs.
She would go on to teach high school in inner-city Philadelphia for four years before changing her career path again to work in education administration, helping create systems to better support and equip teachers, eventually landing in the Northwest. She has shaken hands and shared a moment with Michelle Obama. She’s been an artist in residence for the National Parks, writing poetry about and documenting disappearing glaciers. She’s served twice on a deep sea scientific vessel, narrating underwater ROVs, providing real-time communication about the experiments and findings from the middle of the ocean to classrooms and educators around the world.
But she’d never found that place where she’d walk into a room and everybody would know her name.
That is until she found this small gathering of people in the back room of a sports bar in East Bremerton at a monthly live story-telling event where people stood in front of the room and shared short autobiographical stories, based loosely around a theme, with no notes, often off the cuff, in a casual setting.
“And I thought, ’These are my people!’” Kim said. “
“When I first got up on the Story Night stage, I introduced myself as a life-long bullshitter, first time storyteller,” she remembers. “Storytelling is just like a part of the culture where I’m from. I’m from Appalachia, and there’s a really strong humor and storytelling component to the culture there. I just didn’t know it was a thing that people would care to listen to.”
Inadvertently, she had found her happy place.
Earlier this spring, Kim found herself in that happy place on a different stage. This time at McCaw Hall in Seattle, in front of an audience of hundreds as a featured storyteller at an event co-hosted by KUOW, Story Collider and The Wild Podcast with Chris Morgan. The event, and her story, would later be broadcast on the local NPR station.
She was there telling a story that she had first told on the Story Night stage.
It’s about her religious upbringing on a farm in that small Appalachian town, about the time in her life when she’d gone away to college and came back with radical ideas like equal rights and social justice and the idea that the science of global warming and carbon dating wasn’t just some liberal conspiracy…
Folks in that small town had begun to suspect that she’d lost her way, that she’d run afoul of the lord and her religion. One day that summer, she was sitting on the family front porch when a thunderstorm rolled in out of nowhere, lightning ripped from the sky, ricocheted around the front yard… and she was struck in the chest by its bolt.
“And any doubts,” she closed the story to a hearty laugh and massive applause at McCaw Hall. “Had been resolved.”
The secret to a good story, Kim says: ‘Make ’em laugh. And make ‘em think.’ // BILL MAN
KITSAP STORY NIGHT celebrates its 10th Anniversary this month. The group meets the first Thursday of every month at 7 p.m., free, all ages in the backroom of the Cloverleaf Sports Bar & Grill in Bremerton. More at storynight.org
AND FOR MORE LIVE STORYTELLING check out the Out Loud Story Slam Grandslam Oct. 11, all ages, $20 at Olympic Theater Arts in Sequim. More at outloudstoryslam.com
