Glint

Glint was an every-three-weekly storytelling event that I started with some friends in college, modeled closely after The Moth: true stories, told live, without notes, without interruption, around a theme. It ran for four years.

Camden was the MC up until he graduated. One of these days when we update this site this image will be half this width…

Our friend Vimbo telling a story that I’m sure I loved, though I’ve definitely forgotten.

Some of the event “posters” for Glint.

Like many things in college, I started it because I wanted it to exist, and because Jason helped me. And a university—especially a Christian one—especially one in the middle of nowhere—is a great place for starting things. There is so wonderfully little competition for entertainment.

So we all got better at storytelling. But we also learned more about each other, sometimes even through stories we had already heard before. Without interruption, and with an interested audience, people were able to go more in depth, give more detail, and share their interior world.

There were stories about travel misadventures, accidental dates, unacknowledged crushes, mountaintop helicopter rescues, train-hopping days, finding five dollars, swimming down a river in winter, and, most notably, a three-teller story about how, two nights before, we had gotten a kite stuck in a tree while flying it out of the sunroof of my car.

After that story, on a dark night, we rallied most of the crowd out to that Michigan back road for a heavily improvised recovery operation. When I think back to college, that night—with the headlights aimed and the shoe-throwing and the tree-climbing and the attempted lassoing and the hard-won, perilous kite recovery—is one of my favorite stories to tell.

I couldn’t find the original, but this was the image we used on the Facebook event page. Look at that happy crowd! So engaged and amused!

Another low-res image. This one of us, probably at the “Crushing” event.