When I asked John Ogden (‘20) to sum up the story he had just told to a room full of strangers, he grinned. “My story was about this one time when a drunk driver got in a fight with some students on campus, and I jumped in,” he said. “The whole thing was just kind of … awkward and chaotic, and it was the closest thing to a fight I’ve ever been in.”
It was the first time I’d met Ogden — and the first time I’d heard him tell a story. I was one of those aforementioned strangers at the “Bar Stories Live on Stage” storytelling open mic monthly event. At a “Bar Stories Live on Stage” event, there’s no list of performers or prepared scripts — just a microphone and a room full of people ready to listen. Anyone can share a story, whether it’s something they’ve rehearsed or something that comes to them while listening to another’s story. After each story, the host opens it up for questions from the audience.
“Bar Stories” began in Seattle and has since hosted monthly shows in Tacoma, Ravenna and South Seattle. It is one of a handful of storytelling events in the greater Seattle area; on any given week, there is at least one storytelling event offering for someone brave enough to step up to the mic.
One of these frequent storytellers is alum Lucy Gruidl (‘24). She first discovered Seattle’s storytelling scene while she was still at the University of Puget Sound, searching for a sense of connection she wasn’t finding on campus. When she realized that her favorite podcast, “The Moth Radio Hour,” hosted live shows in Seattle twice a month, she went — and kept going. “Inherently, storytelling is such a vulnerable thing; I felt like I was kind of getting what I most craved on the college campus I was at, and not getting it, so I kept going, and it pulled me in really fast.”
The more she went, the more she noticed familiar faces. “It almost becomes its own little campus in that sense,” Gruidl explains. “You may not be close with everyone, but you know and see familiar faces and familiar names, and then you know people by their stories, too.” What began as an escape from college life became something special: “It became this magical little thing, and it was my little secret; I would go twice a month, and I haven’t stopped doing it.”
Gruidl became connected with “Bar Stories” after meeting Rebecca Lambert and Nick Vega as familiar faces and frequent storytellers at the Moth in Seattle. Couple Lambert and Vega were inspired to create their own storytelling nonprofit “Bar Stories” through a trivia night gone off-script. During the pandemic, Lambert and Vega began hosting trivia in senior living centers, but quickly realized the value of the stories people shared in response to trivia questions.
“We’d ask a question like, ‘What was the last Apollo mission that landed on the moon?’” Lambert recalled, “and suddenly a woman would raise her hand and share that she’d actually worked with one of the astronauts. We stopped the trivia game for five minutes just to listen to her story.”
Recognizing the power and value of these personal stories, they were inspired to create a special space for seniors to share and preserve their memories. The Legacy Project takes “Bar Stories Live on Stage” into senior communities, recording residents’ stories and gifting the recordings to them and their families as treasured keepsakes — shared privately to honor and protect these vulnerable and important voices. “The public shows are really the outward-facing thing that supports the bigger mission,” Lambert explained, “which really is seniors.”
Recently, “Bar Stories” hosted a Legacy Project show at the Ballard Senior Center in Tacoma in partnership with Sea Mar, which provided Spanish translation. The event featured stories told in both English and Spanish, creating an atmosphere of inclusion and connection. “We were able to do Spanish-language storytelling for a crowd that spoke both English and Spanish, and it worked really well.” Lambert said, “It meant a lot, both to the Spanish-speaking storytellers and to the people who got to hear stories they might not have heard otherwise.”
But the live shows are just one part of what “Bar Stories” is trying to do. Behind the laughter, nerves and impromptu storytelling is a mission rooted in accessibility and connection. Lambert sees their events as a way to make art participatory, not performative. “So much of anything that’s in the arts, you have to be at a certain level to participate,” Lambert says. “This is so much about the idea of participating in art and not just consuming it.”
Looking ahead, “Bar Stories” is continuing to grow. Lambert says the team hopes to bring live shows to new cities like Spokane, Bellingham and Yakima, and eventually expand beyond Washington as their grant funding grows. The goal, she explains, is to build community through local ownership. “We host and produce Ravenna because we live in Ravenna — that’s our place,” Lambert says. “The idea is to expand into Oregon and California, finding local people and creating arts jobs in other places. That’s a really big goal for us.” Additionally, they have goals to create a podcast featuring the stories told at their public events, and they just received a grant to develop programming specifically for veterans.
For both Lambert and Gruidl, storytelling is more than performance — it’s a form of connection. “It allows understanding to be built between people,” Gruidl says. “It helps people express themselves in a way that’s deeper than just saying who they are or how they feel … it builds curiosity, empathy and reminds us to listen.”
For both Gruidl and Lambert, two women who often step up to the mic to tell a story, they agree that the best way to get involved in storytelling is to just start. “People want to begin with the part of the story that’s profound,” Lambert says, “but if you just start telling it, the profound moment will reveal itself.” Gruidl adds that the key is practice, “It doesn’t feel like this huge thing anymore,” she says. “You get feedback from others who are just as excited to tell stories.”
Bar Stories hosts its “Bar Stories Workshop” at the Tacoma Public Library on the second Saturday of every month and “Bar Stories Live on Stage” at E9 Brewery on Fawcett Avenue on the third Wednesday, offering regular spaces for storytellers to connect and grow.
