Shows | Story Club Magazine

To Survive is to Find Some Meaning in the Suffering | Neil Bhandari

March 30, 2017 by Rosamund

Listen to Neil’s story below. It was originally performed at The Arrow, a production of The Neo-Futurists. I am in tears — the ugliest crier you’ve ever seen — reading an essay by Stephanie Wittels about suffering and her daughter’s hearing loss and her brother Harris’ death and a split-second later I am doubled over in laughter because someone has put the lips from that exasperated guy meme on a picture of MLK in response to Donald Fuckface’s tweets about […]

Flawed | Susan Fee

March 22, 2017 by Rosamund

I married a male version of my mother. If you believe Murray Bowen, the father of family therapy, we choose partners to help us work through unresolved conflict with our parents. Weird. But, then again, maybe he was onto something. Here’s a snapshot of my husband, Allan: “You wanna drive to Baltimore today?” he asks me. We’re waking up on a Saturday morning with no plans. “Baltimore? Why?” “For a ballgame. The Orioles have a great park.” “Isn’t that kind […]

The Six Million Dollar Dog – or, Why we Need to Keep Fighting | Vivian Wagner

March 15, 2017 by danastoryclubclevelandcom

Listen to Vivian’s story below. It was originally performed at Story Club Columbus in front of a live audience. It seemed a fitting end to 2016. On Christmas morning, around 4 AM, my 17-year-old daughter Rose was woken by our little dog Ziggy vomiting profusely around the house. She went back to sleep, but at 6 AM she woke me up to tell me that something was wrong with Ziggy– she suspected he’d eaten a chocolate bar that she’d brought […]

Kissing Backwards | Julie Marchiano

March 9, 2017 by Rosamund

Julie’s story was told as part of Miss Spoken’s October 2015 show. The theme was Sex Ed, and she’s at the 35:03 mark. My sexual education started with my first kiss at 14. My neighbor Justin was 16, drove a Mustang with the vanity plate “JUSTANG” on the back, and kissed me while I was sitting in his lap on a sidewalk. So, like, from behind. I had braces, and he had one muscular arm and one flabby arm because of […]

The Gift | Margy Weinberg

March 2, 2017 by Rosamund

A bayonet knocked on the door. A Filipino servant answered. The Japanese soldier asked to speak with Mr. Harry N. Salet. Mr. Salet was expecting them. It was January 5, 1942. Mr. Salet was my grandfather. During the previous nights he had buried his WWI ceremonial saber and any remnants of his service in the US Marines under the house. The Philippines were under constant bombardment just 10 hours after the disastrous destruction of Pearl Harbor. My family’s house shook […]

New Family | Jenny Hatchadorian

February 22, 2017 by Rosamund

Meeting the matriarch of my husband’s family came as a bit of a shock to me. When we visited them over Christmas, a woman dressed in head-to-toe in lilac hugged me and presented me with a gift: a jewelry box made from balsa wood that she’d glued shells onto and hand-painted turquoise. I held it in my hands as she smiled at me; this was Grandma Evelyn, Aaron’s mother’s mother. She was so foreign to me, so seemingly not real […]

Bruja | Nestor Gomez

February 8, 2017 by Rosamund

I was 12 years old, playing tag with my two sisters at home in the backyard. When I talk about my sisters I am referring to my biological sister who was one year older than me, and my cousin who had been living with us for about five years, who we considered not our cousin, but our sister. Suddenly, our game of tag was interrupted by loud voices coming from inside the house. Then the noises turned to screams – […]

The Most exciting Game of Your Life//or Those Weird Wild Years You Would Rather Forget | Morgan McNaught

February 2, 2017 by Rosamund

1. The most exciting game of your life. You live in a basement apartment. They call it a garden apartment. When it comes down to it, it’s a fucking basement. It feels very Freudian// in a bad way//to be living in a basement. You don’t know this yet//About Freud. About basements. This is not your first garden apartment. Since she’s died – you’ve had three. It is the most lovely garden apartment you’ve had. It has a tub and a […]

Redux | Oliver Hoffmann

January 26, 2017 by Rosamund

I died on the day of my ordination to the ministry. I was in an operating theater, at one of the better hospitals in downtown Phoenix, during the actual ordination ceremony when my heart stopped beating. So you could say I was ordained after the fact. If there was some kind of message in that, I obviously missed it, though the irony was not lost on me. I had studied with an eye toward interfaith chaplaincy and end-of-life care, previously […]

Story Club Magazine

A magazine for nonfiction performance.

Category Archives: Shows