walls and, instead, it’s everywhere. D: Which of course, goes back to its naming. But it’s also an embodiment of the idea. I think it’s a Virginia Woolf quote, but I’m not entirely sure: “The personal is political.” This idea that there’s a boundary between those two things, which is of course, specious. I feel like what I’m seeing with Open Source in the series, and everywhere else, too, is a mass tearing down of those boundaries. T: What was your one moment during your tenure as a host that struck a bell, where somebody said something or did something during a story, that just rang true? D: Probably, for me, it was in the very first night of the series, one of my storytellers was a very close friend of mine named Erica Buddington, who told this incredible story, that did speak to her life as an educator, which is a life of activism as well. In addition to the fact that it was just an incredibly powerful story, where the community listeners really rallied around, you could see the belief in that story in the listeners. T: Well, they wept. D: They wept! T: Because the student in question died. Is it okay to say that? So, there was a poem she had written, that she had performed that night, which is technically against the rules, but she told a story completely around how that affected her life as a teacher. Even though she has dedicated her life to being an educator, she couldn’t stop that death from occurring. D:Yeah, it was amazing. But you could see--it was almost like electricity, that shot between her and the audience--and there were many more moments like that during that season as well. T: It was the first one. D: And I was, like, when you asked me to tell a story, I did, and I loved it. But it was Erica’s moment where I realized what the series was about. The oral tradition is the foundation of that. I remember that in that moment, it kind of opened my eyes, and has since influenced, in many ways, my work. So that was like a laser-focused epiphany that made me realize, this is what the oral tradition is. T: And she wasn’t afraid to talk about death, in real time. And there’s an expression that I’m going to fuck up, that goes: “A person dies three times, once during the time of death, once when you bury them, and then the last time that you say their name.” And that was the story, to this very day, where, that student was alive again. She was extending their existence, because she had loved him by telling his story. By telling it without watering it down, by trusting her audience to experience that death in real time, all over again. That’s why, I felt, the audience was brought to tears. D: I was just like, “This is it.” T: The essence of How to Build a Fire, yeah.
119