Forest Parker Susan Rohde has a childhood memory of playing a wiffle ball game in a vacant Arlington Heights lot. Though she wasn’t very athletic, she got a hit. But she was so distracted by her success that, when the next batter smacked a fly ball, she stepped off second base to catch it for the other team.
“There’s this fight breaking out over whether that should count for one or two outs because those rules have not been written yet in baseball,” Rohde tells the audience at a Moth StorySLAM, drawing a laugh from the room in the recording of her performance.
Although Rohde didn’t win The Moth StorySLAM – a weekly event where attendees have the chance to tell a personal five-minute story related to that evening’s theme – she was asked for permission to share her story on WBEZ’s Moth Radio Hour.
“I was beside myself excited,” Rohde said.
When her story aired Dec. 7 at 5 p.m., Rohde listened live with friends at St. Bernardine, where she attends church, and they played her story over the loudspeaker.
Rohde has won four StorySLAMs and attended three GrandSLAMs, where the winners of past StorySLAMs compete against each other. And those are just her Moth successes since 2022, when she attended and won the first StorySLAM she participated in.
“I was hooked after that,” she said.
Rohde said she’s always wanted to take a storytelling class. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she finally found the time and signed up with storyteller Scott Whitehair in Chicago. There, she said she learned the practice of storytelling and how to organize a short narrative.
After Rohde attended her first Moth StorySLAM, she pitched a local storytelling event to the Forest Park Arts Alliance and discovered that the group was already talking about organizing something.
“Susan brought the idea of Tellers’ Night to the Arts Alliance and has been instrumental in helping us produce the monthly events,” said Lin Beribak, the Arts Alliance’s vice president.
In 2022, the Arts Alliance held its first Tellers’ Night. The group continues to hold Tellers’ Nights on the second Tuesday of every month, from September through May, at Robert’s Westside.
To keep flexing her storytelling muscles, and to mostly have fun, Rohde regularly attends Tellers’ Night and Moth StorySLAMs.
“I love this stuff,” she said. And it shows through her craft.
“Susan is a wonderful storyteller and has been making her mark in more than Forest Park alone,” Beribak said.
The next Tellers’ Night is Jan. 14 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $15 for the general public and $10 for Arts Alliance members.
The next Moth StorySLAMs are Jan. 13 at 7 p.m. at The Den Theatre in Chicago, then Jan. 21 at FitzGerald’s in Berwyn.
Correction, Jan. 9, 2024, 11 a.m.: An earlier version of the article gave the incorrect date for the next Tellers’ Night due to incorrect information supplied. The January Tellers’ Night will take place Jan. 14, and the February one will be Feb. 11. We apologize for the error.