Spotlight On... Will Bellaimey ’10.5 & Bianca Giaever ’12.5

Over the course of the last few months, you may have noticed somewhat ambiguous signs for a thing titled “The Middlebury Moth.” No, those aren’t advertisements for a horror film. Inspired by the original “Moth” series, live storytelling events held in New York City regularly since the ’80s, Will Bellaimey ’10.5 and Bianca Giaever ’12.5 teamed up to stage the performances ( and record podcasts) here at the College in hopes of rejuvenating the art of storytelling. The Middlebury Campus sat down with them in the Gamut Room, site of their increasingly-popular series, to find out what started the whole thing.

MC: Can you tell me about the origins of “The Moth”? What originally inspired you to recreate it in Middlebury?

Bianca Giaever: Well, we’re big fans of the real, the big “Moth,” up in, I mean, down in New York City, the big city.

Will Bellaimey: We’re both really big fans of podcasts in general.

BG: We obsessively listen to podcasts.

WB: We’re addicted to podcasts.

BG: Addicted to podcasts. And “The Moth” actually encourages making little moths, but using the horrible name “MothUp,” which we refused to use.

WB: But basically we just thought it was such a cool event, and it’s really not that hard to put together. It doesn’t require people to do — I mean, it’s nice when they do preparation — but it doesn’t require people to do as much preparation as reading stories, reading essays or “This American Life,” for example. And we really liked the combination of the live component and the podcast.

BG: It’s a great way to bring people together. Stories are very engaging. And we’ve been able to get professors and townspeople to tell stories.

WB: I don’t even remember when we started thinking about it. I mean we’ve been talking about it forever.

MC: Well, I was going to ask, when did you first team up? When did you first meet and decide this was something you wanted to do?

WB: Bianca and I have been friends for a while. There were a couple interesting, sort-of similar events earlier this year. There was the Angsty Teen Poetry Night, and the first one was really cool and there was such good turn-out, and everyone brought their horribly emo poems and songs that they wrote when they were thirteen and there were just tons of people here, and we thought, “Wow, we could get a really big turn-out.” So I think it was after that, that we said, “We’re going to do ‘The Moth.’”

BG: Yeah. We’ve just been talking about it for what seems like forever.

MC: How do you find the people with the stories? How do you choose stories? Do you end up having more stories than possible to put on in one night?

WB: A little bit. We’re not at overload yet. We’re not at the point where we have to audition people. I mean, I would love to, but that would be tricky, but I’d love to be at the point where we had that many stories and I’d love to be at the point where we had that many stories and people would always be coming up to us so we’d have more than we’d need, but the first time we did it, we kind of just talking to each other and thought of friends, or people we sort-of know or people who were good storytellers and the hope was that after doing the first time, it would get a big enough showing that people would come to us and say, “Oh I have a good story for next time,” or “There’s this one professor you should talk to.”

BG: Yeah, we try to get as diverse a group as possible and balance it out. So, equal men and women. Usually we have five students, two professors and one townsperson. It’s been a little harder to get professors. They seem a little suspicious sometimes. You have to explain to them.

WB: It’s because of the time. Anything that happens after 10 p.m. is suspicious to them.

BG: But we like the time also because it gives it a kind-of a late-night raunchy feel. “The Moth” was originally named “The Moth” because these guys would stay up really late on the porch telling stories until the moths came to the light in the dark.

MC: So how do you choose the themes every other week?

BG: We just create them in our head.

WB: I’m just like, “Bianca, it should be this.” And she says, “No, it shouldn’t. It should be this.” And I say, “Yeah, you’re right. It should be that.

BG: And we take suggestions for themes all the time.

MC: So then, when people leave after the performances, what do you hope they take away?

WB: I don’t think we know what they’re going to take away before it happens. We want them to say, “Wow, that was a really great night of stories.” Mostly we want them to be entertained. But we also want them to learn about each other, and to be motivated themselves to try telling stories, especially people who might not otherwise.

BG: I mean, it’s a feeling, when a great story is told and everyone’s right there laughing together. Just the buzz of it all.

WB: There’s something incredibly personal about the storytelling medium, whether they are true stories, and that since you’re not reading it from notes, it’s really coming from the heart. When somebody really connects with a good storyteller, there’s a level of empathy that’s really extraordinary that you don’t see in some other form where it’s scripted.