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Finding Meaning From Moments That Linger

Matthew Dicks says there are many reasons to become a storyteller.

People love hearing and telling stories, and the intimate experience of swapping stories face to face. That’s one great reason. Dicks, a professional storyteller, says there are benefits beyond that.

“When you are able to find the story in your life, you start to understand your life better, and the positive direction you’re headed and, perhaps, the directions you need to alter to keep heading in a positive direction,” he says. The process of gathering, organizing, and telling stories also “gives people a sense of how they are important in other people’s lives.”

Dicks, with his wife Elysha, created an organization called Speak Up that promotes storytelling and supports a community of storytellers in Connecticut.

One day, Dicks says, he received a phone call from a woman who had taken a storytelling workshop with him six months earlier. “She said she had never felt like an important person before. Now she wakes up and realizes that every day is an important day. She feels like she’s part of a bigger story,” he says. “She’s able to find meaning from moments that linger with her.”

Dicks, who will be the featured speaker at a meeting of the Happiness Club in Madison on Wednesday, Feb. 24 at 7 p.m. at the Scranton Memorial Library, comes by his storytelling and teaching credentials with an impressive record of success in his wake. He is a 20-time champion of StorySLAMs, and a three-time GrandSLAM champion of competitive storytelling events sponsored by the Moth “True Stories Told Live,” a New York City-based non-profit organization “dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling.” Dicks' stories have been featured on the Moth’s weekly podcast, and the Moth Radio Hour, which is nationally syndicated. His stories also have been featured on This American Life, TED talks, The Colin McEnroe Show on public radio, The Story Collider, The Liar Show, and The MOuTH, and he’s been a regular guest on several Slate podcasts, where he has taught storytelling. He also teaches storytelling and public speaking to individuals, corporations, school districts, and others. He’s also an author and has been a teacher for 17 years, currently in the West Hartford school system.

He hated it, until he loved it

Dicks' friends encouraged him to enter his first story slam. They said his difficult, at times horrific, childhood could provide lots of material. So Dicks traveled to New York City, to the Nuyorican on the Lower East Side, where many of the Moth StorySLAMs are held. With his story ready to go, he put his name in a hat, and waited to see if his name would be pulled. If so, he’d be one of that evening’s 10 competitors. Nine names were called. His was called 10th. Dicks reluctantly climbed up on stage and found himself facing “300 disaffected NYC hipsters prepared to judge my performance and assign a numerical score. I was scared out of my wits...” he says

And then he stepped up to the mic.

“When I spoke into the microphone, I realized I could make people laugh, I could make people cry, all within five minutes,” he says. Those five minutes on the stage in front of the microphone, “changed my life.”

Dicks says it’s true he had a difficult childhood, in fact he says his friends pointed out that his life “seems to blow up every five years or so.” But as Dicks told his stories, he found that, while some of the big tragedies did provide fodder for his stories, that it was the small, sometimes ephemeral, moments that made his stories resonate. “The best stories tend to be the smaller moments in life,” he said. “The moments that other people can recognize and relate to. It’s the smaller moments that matter.”

After his first story slam, Dicks realized his goal was to keep telling stories. So every day he asked himself, “if I had to tell a story about today, what would that story be?” He knew he would not be able to find enough time every day to write the whole story down, so he started an Excel spreadsheet, and in a separate field each day, he would write two or three sentences about that moment. As he did this, over the course of several months, he realized the exercise of paying attention during the day, thinking about it at night, and writing those few sentences were having a profound effect on his life.

Just five minutes

It was this process that he developed into his trademark Homework for Life, which teaches people more about how to use those five minutes at the end of the day. He said he’ll be talking about this more at the Happiness Club meeting later this month, which is free and open to the public.

“Over time, if you actually commit to it, you develop the ability to see these moments and the potential they have for storytelling,” he said. “It makes you understand what is important in your life. And, the best thing is, it slows your life down. Life goes by very slowly for me, because every day I am looking for that story. That’s incredibly valuable.”

Dicks says he’s taught thousands of people how to do this, during his talks and teaching sessions. He said maybe hundreds of people are doing it. He said it makes him crazy when people learn about it and don’t do it. He said the biggest time commitment, other than paying attention during the day, is the five minutes or so at night it takes to think about it and write the sentences down.

“People will commit an hour to watching Law & Order, or Law & Order: SVU, but they won’t commit five minutes to this. It makes me insane,” he said.

Also at the Happiness Club meeting, Dicks will be talking about the importance of decision-making in life and the power of “yes.” Dicks says he learned this lesson after being the victim of a terrible armed robbery when he was a young man. “I was sure I was going to die,” during the robbery when one of the perpetrators put a gun to Dicks' head and pulled the trigger. The chamber was empty. Dicks survived, with considerable emotional trauma, but also with a renewed sense of what was important.

“When I’m 100…”

“The result is that when I make a decision now, I understand what it’s like to be on my deathbed,” he said. “I remember how terrible regret is. So when I make a decision, large or small, I don’t look at this moment, I look ahead to me as an 100 year-old person and I ask that person.

“That person will say, ‘Pick up your kid even if she is seven, and even if she is big, and even if it is a pain to carry her in the mall. One day you will not be able to. Even if it seems ridiculous, pick up your kid,’” he says. “That 100 year-old guy tells me, ‘If it’s a Thursday night and you’re thinking about going to a Patriot’s football game, and that you’re going to be home at 3 a.m., don’t think about tomorrow and how tired you’ll be. Think about when you’re 100 and wishing you could go to a football game on a Thursday night.’”

Dicks says he hopes he gets a good crowd at the Happiness Club event. And there are other events coming up as well that storytellers might be interested in, he said. Events sponsored by his organization, Speak Up, include one on Saturday, Feb. 20 at the Noah Webster House in West Hartford; on Saturday, March 5 at the Kingswood Oxford School in West Hartford, on Saturday April 2 at Real Art Ways in Hartford; and on April 30 at the Unitarian Universalist Society in Manchester. In addition there are several storytelling workshops coming up, including one for beginners on Saturday, Feb. 27 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and another for advanced storytellers from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, April 9.

To find out more about the Happiness Club meeting featuring Matthew Dicks on Wednesday, Feb. 24 at 7 p.m. at the Scranton Memorial Library at 801 Boston Post Road in Madison, email Tina Garrity at Ting45@aol.com. The event is free and open to the public. To find out more about Speak Up and Matthew Dicks, visit speakupstorytelling.com/.