Boulder storytellers say ‘Listen to your mother’

This is ancient entertainment: storytelling in front of a group. Yet it’s a new megaphone to previously silent stories.

“There are moments of relating, hearing someone speak about what you’ve experienced or thought as a mother, or feeling the gratitude that I’ve never experienced that,” says Katie Wise, of Boulder. “It’s about the heroic journeys that every mother is making every single day that she gets up and takes care of her children. It’s seeing her. And hearing her sharing publicly. There is nothing like it.”

Wise is one of the three new directors for Boulder’s annual “Listen To Your Mother Show,” a collection of 13 different short stories about motherhood, whether being one or having one.

The show runs every spring, in honor of Mother’s Day, and is part of a national Listen To Your Mother movement; the shows run in 41 different locations around the country and follow a similar format. Real, local women — not necessarily actors or writers — take the stage and bear their souls as they talk about the pain of letting go, the daily hilarities of parenting, postpartum depression, embarrassing confessions and everything in between.

Stories change every year and are selected from a pool of auditions.

This year, stories range from mothering a biracial child to international airplane travel adventures in WWII to a local woman’s heart-wrenching experience of becoming blind, due to a car accident in her teens. Her mother was the driver.

Each story is about five minutes long. Some are letters or poems. Others are monologues.

“Listen To Your Mother” has been dubbed “The Vagina Monologues meets The Moth,” but with a mother focus and only performed once a year. It started in Wisconsin in 2011, as a way to celebrate Mother’s Day more meaningfully, Wise says.

“She felt like Mother’s Day itself was lacking,” Wise says. “Let’s give motherhood a microphone, and share the struggles and the triumphs and the sameness of what we’re all trying to do by being mothers and having mothers, all together in one space.”

Wise says last year’s “Mother” shows sold out the Dairy Arts Center, so this year they had to move into a bigger venue, the Unity Spiritual Center. The show runs only once, on April 30.

“It’s not just a performance. It’s almost a process. These women are healing through these stories. They’re processing their stories publicly, and we are giving a voice to motherhood,” Wise says.

So much of modern mothering happens in secret, behind closed doors in our houses, not in a village as a community, Wise says. She says she hopes the show cracks open these doors, so people can struggle and delight together.

The other local producers are Ellen Nordberg and Stephanie Sprenger.

Nordberg says the popularity of “Mother” has increased, alongside other storytelling shows, such as NPR’s “The Moth,” Denver’s Narrators, Boulder’s Stories on Stage and Boulder’s story slam, Truth Be Told.

“There’s a renaissance of storytelling that’s happening around the country,” Nordberg says. “We have so much technology and we are so removed from the ancient times when it was just oral storytelling.”

People are craving that kind of communication and connection again, she says.

“I feel so honored to try to give a voice to the stories that don’t always get heard,” Nordberg says. “It is such an honor to reveal that level of vulnerability and personal detail, and that’s how you feel when you sit in the audience of the show, too.”

A portion of the proceeds from the show will benefit Boulder’s Emergency Family Assistance Association.

Aimee Heckel: 303-473-1359, heckela@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/aimeemay