Share Your 9/11 Story

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
WNYC Studios is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing.
Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at odoo.com.
That's odoo.com.

**Brian Lehrer** (0:40)
Brian Lehrer on WNYC. And for our last few minutes, and speaking of American history, we're going to spend these minutes with our friends from The Moth, the storytelling organization, who want to invite you to a project with the National September 11th Memorial and Museum. That will include storytellers for a performance in September, as we all observe the 25th anniversary of that day, September 11th in 2001
So, to tell us more about this project and how you might get involved, and to play an excerpt or two of some possible examples, Christina Norman, The Moth's Chief Creative Officer, and Juan Rodriguez, their Senior Manager of Community Engagement. Hey, Christina, who used to work here. Good to hear your voice again, and Juan, welcome to WNYC.

**Christina Norman** (1:31)
Hey, good morning, Brian. Thank you so much for having us.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:34)
All right, Christina, how would this work for participants? Who do you want to show up for you?

**Christina Norman** (1:39)
Well, I mean, as you mentioned, Brian, 9-11 is such a meaningful day for so many people in this country, but for so many New Yorkers.
We all remember where we were, what we were doing, and I especially remember the role of WNYC on that day, of keeping us informed and sane in a lot of insanity. So it was really important for us to find a way to commemorate this. We feel that storytelling is such an important way for us to preserve memories, for us to build connection and build empathy. And we're creating a special event. It's going to be our season opener.
It's going to be on September 18th. But as we get to that, we want to make sure that we're giving ordinary New Yorkers a chance to tell their stories. So we're offering a series of workshops in partnership with the 9-11 Museum. And Juan can speak more about the workshops.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:27)
Juan, take it away.

**Juan Rodriguez** (2:29)
Yes. So we are putting together these workshops. We have an info session on June 10th, from 7 to 8 p.m. We're going to share that link with you, which is themoff.org/event/9-11.
And the idea of this info session is to demystify the art of storytelling, for people to come in, get together and just talk through their shared experiences. Some of them may be traumatic, some of them may be positive and memories of resiliency in the time of 9-11. And we will spend about an hour just kind of learning from each other and talking and sharing and building stories through community. And then hopefully people will feel inspired to sign up for the longer workshop which starts on June 16th.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:13)
It's such a wonderful invitation, Juan, to people to attend a storytelling workshop, people whose, you know, memories and in many cases, intense personal experiences of 9-11 and the period around 9-11. They may have been sitting on or, you know, talked about with friends and family, but still feel maybe is kind of bottled up inside them for anything in a more public way. And you want to give people the tools, right?

**Juan Rodriguez** (3:43)
Yeah, we want to give them the tools. There's also this, you know, whenever there's a huge tragic event such as 9-11, there's so much burden around talking about it. And in the workshop, since you're there with a community and people with shared experience, you get to share that burden, which is really important to the process of capturing this event, not just in its full impact, but in the little moments.
Those shared experiences of seeing the American flag on stores or people coming to send the breathing mask during 9-11. All those things are just these powerful memories that we don't even get to talk about because of the tragedy being so big.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:25)
Here is maybe a good example of somebody telling a personal 9-11 experience story in the context of The Moth. We're going to play a one-minute excerpt from firefighter Kevin Young, who was not on duty that day, but felt called to head to the site after the attack and how it changed him. And I believe this was recorded way back then, just later in 2001