Green, the author of the novel "The Juror," which was made into a movie starring Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin, founded the Moth five years ago to try to breathe life into a Southern oral storytelling tradition that seemed to be moribund if not dead altogether. When Green was growing up in the South, he heard and told stories all the time. After moving to New York, he says, he missed "sitting around in Wanda's garden -- Wanda is my crazy, wonderful, delightful friend, who weaves incredible stories."

Green remembers sitting on Wanda's front porch, "drinking pretty heavily" and telling stories all night. "There was a big tear in the screen, and the moths would get in. So, somehow or another we started calling ourselves the moths. And the moths were all wheeling around the porch light at night, and we were hanging out by the porch light, too, drinking a lot of Jack Daniel's.

"Then, when I was in New York," Green says, "it was always sad to me that you couldn't really tell a story, because at a New York cocktail party, people's patience lasts for about 18 seconds, and they get uncomfortable with anything that lasts longer than that." Still, Green suspected that people really wanted to listen to stories and decided to organize a storytelling evening for about a hundred friends. It was a smash, and soon Green and his friend Joey Xanders, who became the Moth's first executive director, were organizing shows at venues all over town, finally ending up at the Player's Club.

Why do you think people have no patience for stories in a social setting, and yet the Moth has been a huge success?

I think it's habit. I mean, who knows where the zeitgeist ever takes us, or what it's doing, or what it thinks it's doing. But right now, it thinks -- or for a while, it thought -- that everybody had a short attention span, and that everybody needed quick little blasts or they would get bored. And I don't think that's true, but the zeitgeist can easily persuade itself that what it's doing is the appropriate thing. And, at any rate, everybody did seem to have a short attention span. It seemed as though the entire nation had an attention deficit disorder. So, when we started the Moth, we didn't know if people would want to listen for so long, but actually, they do. It's just the same as when movies like "Magnolia" or "Topsy-Turvy" -- extremely long movies -- turned out to be hits. People have the same attention span that they ever did, it was all a fraud and a ruse. People were very hungry for things that they could sit down and really listen to. So this art form of storytelling that we believed to be dead, or nearly dead, was actually very much alive and vital and is actually sought after by people all over the country.

Do you think something like the Moth can change the way people interact socially?

Oh, yes. I really do. I really think that storytelling helps build communities. The hardest thing about being in New York is that there are communities there, but they are rather strange communities. It's always very strange to me when there are communities where there are very few children and very few older people. It's all people of a certain age. And that sense of a whole community with its successes and failures and people who are just hanging on and children and grandfathers -- that whole community -- is rare to find in Manhattan. The Moth does something to bring those communities together.

Are your audiences diverse?

Yes, they are. That's one of the great joys of the Moth. All sorts of people come. And they feel like they are part of a group. It's almost like a secret society. People come again and again and again, although we don't have anyone who has come to every Moth. But after the show we all go out and eat and drink all night long. Everyone comes. Which is really what we intended all along. In America, we don't have pubs. We don't have that pub culture, that's what we were really trying to revivify.

How do you come up with the different themes for the evenings?

Different curators will say, "This is what I'd like to do." And if they strike a chord with other folks, then we go ahead and do it. The curator is just a person who takes it upon himself or herself to organize a particular theme of stories. And if a curator becomes passionate about a theme, then we go ahead and let them do it. I was just talking to a curator this morning who is a psychiatrist, and he wants to do an evening of shrink stories. We'll surely let him because he is really passionate about it. Meg Bowles decided to do an evening about "homecoming." We had Frank McCourt telling a story about going back to Ireland, an astronaut talking about piloting the shuttle back home, and we had someone who had escaped a prison camp in Germany and somehow found his way back home.

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