The host reached into the bag, unfolded a slip of paper and squinted at the handwriting.
“I can’t really read this because there are a lot of squiggles,” he said to the crowd gathered at Domino Square in Brooklyn, NYC. “I think it’s Linda.”
Sitting beside the East River in Williamsburg, Linda Soriton could see hundreds of people spread across the open-air plaza. Behind them stood the preserved remains of the old Domino Sugar Refinery. Across the water, Manhattan formed the backdrop; overhead, residents of the new Brooklyn waterfront towers listened from their balconies.
The free Moth Community StorySLAM had also attracted people who happened to be walking through Domino Park that warm July evening. Some stopped at the edges to listen. Linda had come with friends intending to do exactly the same.
Now her name had been drawn from the hat.
“Shit,” she thought. “What have I done?”
This was not how she expected her holiday evening to play out.
Linda had brought her friends to an outdoor Moth storytelling event because she wanted to listen. At registration, someone asked if she would like to tell a story. Her answer was an immediate no.
Her friends kept nudging. Linda kept resisting. “This is New York,” she told them. “This is not Zurich. This is crazy.”
Then she heard the first few stories. During the break, The Moth host announced there were still a few spaces for more storytellers. Linda reconsidered. With so many names going into the bag, what were the odds hers would actually be drawn?
Long enough, apparently.
She walked onto the stage and told “If Women Don’t Lower Their Standards ,” the story she had developed at a Zurich Storytellers workshop. The crowd laughed at her encounters with the dating pool in Zurich, and the special horrors of middle-age dating. Her use of a French accent when recalling a Frenchman’s foibles travelled particularly well.
Six months earlier, Linda was not a storyteller. At least, she didn’t think she was.
Her colleague Emilija Arsabaite had heard Linda entertaining coworkers with stories about re-entering the dating world after her 16 year relationship ended. She suggested Linda come to a Zurich Storytellers show.
As it happened, Linda’s first StorySLAM fell on a particularly difficult day. She had scheduled a counselling session with her former partner to explore whether they could remain friends. Knowing she might leave the session carrying emotions she didn’t want to take home, Linda put the StorySLAM in her calendar immediately afterwards and brought a friend along.
One story that night stopped the churn in her head. That was a story by Laura Badertscher, a veteran storyteller and Board member of Zurich Storytellers Association, our non-profit organisation. She told about waiting for the day someone might knock on her door and say, “Hi, I think you’re my biological mother.” Linda couldn’t forget it. “It took me away from everything bad in my own life. I thought: what a vulnerable, authentic story.”
Linda was comfortable speaking publicly; she had lectured at university. But personal live storytelling asks for something different. “I had never had to be vulnerable and talk about myself in front of total strangers. I just didn’t do that.”
When ZST advertised a workshop, she hesitated, then registered. What was the worst that could happen? She might learn how to tell a story—or not.
The workshop began gently: say something about your name. The prompts became more personal before anyone had time to summon their usual defences. Within half an hour, strangers were sharing experiences that truly mattered.
“Suddenly, we had revealed something we had kept hidden,” Linda remembers, “and it didn’t seem so hard.”
During the workshop, she shaped “If Women Don’t Lower Their Standards ..” into a fledgling 5-minute StorySLAM. Afterwards she practised it in an unlikely circuit of informal venues: whenever conversation stalled at a meetup, Linda told people about Zurich Storytellers—and then demonstrated with her story.
Her first ZST stage appearance in April was another accident. The show needed an additional storyteller, and Emilija mentioned to the co-hosts that Linda had one ready. It was nerve-racking, but Linda found familiar faces in the front row and told the story to them. That hack would later follow her to Brooklyn.
Then in May, Linda stepped onto the ZST stage again. This time she told a very different story: the friendship with her friend Kat, who chose to end her life with Dignitas.
Linda had never written the story down. It had simply lived in her heart for a long time. She feared she might cry, but also felt the story was important to tell.
Even here, at its emotional centre, life made room for humour. When Kat said she planned to end her life, Linda cried and asked, “Does that mean I’m not going to see you again?” Kat replied, matter-of-factly, “Linda, Dignitas is closed on the weekend.” It was Friday. Kat knew Linda was coming back on Sunday.
The audience laughed—and stayed with her through what followed. Linda’s honesty and control earned her ZST’s Best Storyteller of the Month.
The dating stories and Kat’s story may seem worlds apart, but Linda had discovered what connects them: “In the midst of pain, there is always a moment that can break it.” A story can hold grief and laughter at the same time. Most lives do.
Back in Brooklyn, Linda looked past the size of the huge crowd and found her friends in the front row. She kept her eyes mainly on them and told the story from her heart. The park began to feel quieter. Heads nodded as New Yorkers recognised the universal indignities of dating. The audience was with her.
What changed between the woman who came to listen in January and the woman standing before hundreds of strangers six months later? Linda’s answer is refreshingly free of jargon: “I got braver.”
She also learned a few things about the craft. A hook gives people a reason to follow. Structure makes a story recognizable and memorable. Descriptive words let an audience see the person you see. And stories written for speaking should sound spoken—not like literary journal essays.
Her advice for the person sitting in a ZST audience with a story but fearful of putting their name in the hat? “Go to one of their storytelling workshops. If that isn’t possible, go to a StorySLAM show and speak to a storyteller you admire. Ask how they assembled the pieces. Listen for how a strong ending often returns to the beginning.”
Most importantly she said, “Feel the fear and do it anyway. So what if you get it wrong? Getting it wrong is practice, and you can always tell the story again.”
Linda travelled to New York expecting to remain safely anonymous in the audience. Instead, a few stories, some persistent friends and one improbably selected piece of cursive handwriting placed her in front of hundreds of strangers. When she left the stage, she felt amazed—not because everything had gone perfectly, but because she had faced her fear, allowed herself to be vulnerable and discovered that her story could connect with people far from home.
To conclude our interview, I asked Linda to complete this sentence: “Six months ago, I never imagined …”
Without hesitation, she replied, “That I would be a storyteller.”
Six months earlier, she could not have imagined saying those words. Now she knew they were true.
Zurich Storytellers is more than a stage. It’s a community where people come to listen, experiment, find their voice and sometimes surprise themselves with where a story can take them.
By becoming a member of the Zurich Storytellers Association, you help us keep creating spaces for stories like Linda’s — while becoming a closer part of the community yourself.
Membership is CHF 50 per year.