Hear two experts in the art of personal storytelling consider how telling and listening to our stories may be healing.

With a live audience at the #HealMeToo Festival, Founder and Artistic Director Hope Singsen interviewed: 

• Sarah Austin Jenness, Executive Producer of The Moth -- a 21 year old arts organization and home of The Moth Radio Hour, The Moth Podcast, and over 600 live storytelling events worldwide each year, and
• Playwright Katie Cappiello, whose plays about teen sexuality, based on their own first-hand accounts, have been widely toured and praised.

Together, Jenness and Cappiello have decades of experience working with people to tell brave personal stories, often for the first time. They share examples and observations about the process of expressing, crafting, and telling deeply personal stories, whether about sexual and gendered violence or other forms of trauma. As theater artists, Cappiello and host Singsen also share first-hand observations of the ways such stories can sometimes be transformative for artists and audiences alike.

A few of the topics they discuss:

• What makes Moth stories successful for teller and audience alike?
• Challenges that can arise when telling stories of past traumas.
• How the vulnerability of "telling on yourself" and "speaking from the scar, not the wound" can open doors to healing.
• What it's like to help teens get empowered and activated, finding their voice.
• Ways that survivors also find healing by letting others perform their stories.
• And much more. 

The #HealMeToo Podcast is hosted by Hope Singsen--the artist, creativity researcher and survivor-activist who founded the #HealMeToo Festival in NYC this Spring.

Subscribe now. Let's talk about how we can #HealMeToo.

Find the #HealMeToo Podcast on Apple Podcasts at bit.ly/hm2pod. Or visit healmetoopodcast.com to find links to other platforms.

On the episode details page for this interview, you'll find Sarah and Katie's biographies, plus video of Katie Cappiello's teen actors discussing rape culture, masculinity, and what feminism means to them as young men and people of color.

You'll also find a page with videos of many performances at the Festival, and can join our email list to hear about future pop-up #HealMeToo Festival events.

Interview recorded & prepped by Delaney Hafener
Edited by Hope Singsen
Music performed by Micah Burgess:
If I Can by Hope Singsen & Dillon Kondor
Rockabye by Hope Singsen, Dillon Kondor & Micah Burgess
Gorgeous Fire by Hope Singsen & Dillon Kondor

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