Accent: Local A&M professor and poet has stories to tell-
Every one of us has a story to share, and if you ever find yourself on a bare stage, a nearly invisible audience huddled in front of you, you may feel compelled to speak that story to the intimate world right there.
That’s sort of the idea behind a phenomenon called The Moth, which airs our true life stories on the radio, for podcasts and in venues across the country. Everyday folks step to the microphone and then tell their story, a spot in time they must describe to others.
For Dr. Del Doughty, dean of the College of Arts, Sciences and Education at Texas A&M UniversityTexarkana, his moment came this past summer in Chicago.
While on a business trip to the Windy City, where he’s also studied storytelling and improv at the famed Second City Training Center, the published poet and longtime English professor found himself with a free evening and a chance to describe another business trip gone terribly wrong and then, purely out of the blue, terribly right.
The night’s storytelling theme was beauty, and Doughty chose to launch back through the year to a San Francisco trip where an illness was just one of his many worries.
Imagine yourself in one of the most romantic, gorgeous cities in the world with iconic places to see and experience, and you feel like trash. That’s essentially how Doughty felt in San Fran.
“My story was about a really hard week, a hard trip that I had earlier this year,” Doughty recalled. It was his first time in San Francisco, but there were many ways in which he just wasn’t feeling the magic. Sadly, a family member went to an addiction recovery facility that week—a surprise. Doughty got the flu, too. It was President Trump’s first week in office and executive orders were flying.
“Everything that could go wrong, went wrong,” Doughty said. “This trip that I had all these expectations around was just so-so, at best.”
But toward the end of the week, Doughty found himself walking past Grace Cathedral, situated on Nob Hill in San Francisco. “I remembered hearing something about it, kind of a famous church, and I thought well, I think they have a labyrinth there,” he recalled. Count him as a fan of labyrinths.
He and his wife walked in and before them stood a massive, marble labyrinth on the cathedral floor. The beauty made a priceless impression. An 11-circuit labyrinth, it took a while to walk it. Around them, the sound of music and shafts of light buoyed the mood.
“It was late afternoon. The sun’s coming through the stained glass windows. Somebody’s practicing the organ. Apart from that, it pretty much was just me in there,” Doughty said. They got to the labyrinth center and felt a sense of stillness and peace. It’s a spiritual experience, and you’re only supposed to walk out from the center when ready.
Then, stepping outside of it all, they felt in San Francisco a celebratory sense of the diversity in America.
“It was totally healing. The beauty of it was healing to me,” Doughty said. Although the feeling later wore off, he felt this “momentary stay,” as he described it, where beauty enveloped him in this labyrinth. You could call it an unexpected, transcendent moment in time.
Rather than the good wine and good food of the city—he couldn’t taste anything because of the illness and cough medicine—this is what brought him his San Francisco joy. There was also a bus ride across town that afforded the same feeling.
“It’s when your guard is down and you’re not expecting things that a lot of times something beautiful hits you,” Doughty said. There’s a lesson there, surely.
How he arrived at that Moth moment on a Chicago stage threads back in time with his longtime interest in telling stories like the one he was about to share.
“As a lit professor I did a lot of it and enjoyed it. There’s a performance element to teaching that I always liked,” Doughty said. He taught storytelling at his previous college, Huntington University in Indiana, and the class proved popular. Recently finding himself in administrative work, though, he missed storytelling.
“And then I realized that I could do storytelling in this context. They’re different kinds of stories, but that would actually be a key part of my job,” he said about an epiphany of sorts. And his Second City experience inspired him to get on a Moth stage.
“I liked the longer narrative form. I say longer, but we’re talking about five to seven minutes of stage time,” Doughty said about what he learned honing his skills at Second City. “You can accomplish a lot in that time frame if you know what you’re doing.”
As a storyteller, he learned to dose
It’s when your guard is down and you’re not expecting things that a lot of times something beautiful hits you.” —Dr. Del Doughty
the information in a particular way, an important skill to the art, just as it is with short story writing. It helps convey an experience to others through oral presentation, something without a script. He wanted to be a Homeric bard, as he put it with a wry laugh. He had stories lodged in his head, ready to get out.
“I liked the idea of walking onto a stage and performing them,” Doughty said. The best thing he learned? “Show up as yourself. It saves a lot of time and pretension.” Also, show up to give people something.
In his new position as a dean, he says, he’s been able to enmesh the storytelling into his job. When people retire, visit the campus, win an award, or when the university’s story needs to be told, such are the occasions where stories may be summoned.
“Also I should say, people are sick to death of PowerPoints,” Doughty said. “When someone stands up and tells a story, they look so relieved.”
Texarkana doesn’t have Moth events nearby, but sometimes in Dallas, Austin and New Orleans they happen, Doughty said. So he was on the lookout for an opportunity, and he found it in Chicago. He travels a fair amount, so he could see himself doing it elsewhere.
“They give you the theme,” Doughty explained. And the stylish venue was a hip Hyde Park bar, restaurant and performance space complex called The Promontory.
The way it works is that you put your name in the hat, literally a hat, and if your name is picked you get to go up on stage to tell your story. “They pick 10 people and they vote on stories,” Doughty said. It’s a Moth
StorySlam, much like a poetry slam.
Doughty was lucky to get picked, but he came last, following a man who told a touching tale about developing a stutter in response to abuse. The storyteller overcame that stutter, but it was only when someone told him he was beautiful. Prior to that, he always felt ugly. Someone helped turn that around. Doughty was touched by the story and impressed with the telling.
“The last name out of the hat was mine,” Doughty recalled, noting his first thought was, “Probably I said, this is it, which is ambiguous. Like, ‘gulp.’ And, ‘OK, this is really going to happen!’”
He couldn’t see his audience clearly from the stage. He cleared his throat and then got to it.
On a different end of the creative spectrum, Doughty’s written poetry through the years, three distinct forms: haiku, lighthearted traditional verse and more conceptual, experimental poems. He’s published four collections of his poetry. This fall, he’s slated to have more than a dozen poems appear in the Langdon Review.
“I thought I’d be a great novelist growing up. That was the plan,” recalled Doughty with a chuckle. But he didn’t have the talent for it, although he’s written them for fun, meaning only for himself to see. That was heartbreaking. He has the knack for writing poetry and storytelling, however. Storytelling is similar to writing a novel, but only part of that larger sort of work, he explains.
“I think the oral form suits me,” said Doughty, who gave an A&M-Texarkana lecture on the Lucretius poem “On the Nature of Things” about a month ago. Of course, an aptitude for oral stories also connects to poetry and reading them aloud. It’s how poetry got its start.
Haiku is the poetic form he first fell in love with. He became known as the “Haiku Guy,” he admits.
“My theory with haiku is that they’re so short that if you read somebody a haiku and it’s awful, they’ve only lost two seconds of their lives,” he says. A little different than “Paradise Lost.”
“The best ones are as good as ‘Paradise Lost,’ I think. They’re just moving and they slow you down,” Doughty said of haiku’s powers.
Like storytelling, haiku can center our thoughts around these small moments in time, images and actions that mean something.
Unsurprisingly, Doughty has an interest in Epicurean philosophy, too, which focuses on simple pleasures in life. It’s not hedonism, but does celebrate fine conversation, simple meals, the good life. Think of it as “low-impact simple living,” the dean said.
“My wife says there’s a string that runs through everything I do. I can’t say what it is. I have no idea. But she said, ‘It’s there, you don’t know what it is,” Doughty said.
(To learn more about The Moth, visit TheMoth.org. The Moth Radio Hour airs locally on radio station KTXK-FM 91.5, at 2 p.m. Sundays and 3 a.m. Mondays.)