Storytelling Night Bridges New Haven Gaps

A night of storytelling and live music offered a point of creative connection among Yale students and New Haveners at Koffee?.

The event, ​“Chasing My Tale: A Night of Storytelling,” took place Friday night at the Audubon Street coffee shop. It featured a set of 10 artistic performances that spanned original songs, poems, comedy, and short stories. Presenters included a high schooler, an SCSU masters student, Yalies, and a New Haven Independent reporter (that’s me).

The program was assembled by Istoria, an author-first platform for emerging writers to write, connect, and grow their readerships. This event marked the fourth in-person writing showcase that Istoria has hosted at Koffee? since September.

Audience members began filling up the coffee shop’s couches and chairs half an hour before the 6 p.m. start. By the time the event began, the space was so packed that several attendees opted to sit on the floor in front of the podium, while others stood at the back and craned their heads to get glimpses of the speaker.

Beckett Morris, event coordinator at Koffee?, kicked off the event with a warm thank you, a Covid protocol reminder, and an encouragement to support the coffeeshop. As an Istoria contributor and longtime Koffee? employee, Morris was the perfect representative to bring these two communities together. 

Istoria founder Elijah Maletz, an MBA candidate at Yale School of Management (SOM), co-hosted the event alongside Pranav Daryanani, another Yale SOM collaborator. Their classmates and fellow organizers Candace Huang and Rachel Chan worked with Morris to help plan the event. Since the foundation of Istoria back in 2020, the team has worked to expand the community beyond their circle of Yale SOM peers.

The two hosts shared excitement over the amount of new faces in both the crowd and the lineup at Friday’s event. ​“Most of the people who read weren’t from Yale at all, which is great,” said Maletz.

Among the performers was Alec Pedersen, a 10th grader at New Haven Academy and ECA, whose songwriting has been lauded as a heartfelt ode to New Haven County. Pedersen read two poems that offered a nostalgic perspective on the experience of growing up in Connecticut. His poetry’s mature wisdom became that much more impressive after it was revealed he was half the age of some other presenters.

Pedersen has become a regular on Istoria’s storytelling lineup, along with SCSU masters student Layla Hansen. Hansen, who grew up nearby, first read her work for an Istoria event back in November.

She said it was the first time she had shared her poetry in two years: ​“It’s invigorating to be surrounded by artists again. I missed this life so much.” At Friday’s show, Hansen read a piece entitled ​“Acadia, ME:”

Languished clouds lower their bellies to rest upon the trees
cradling evergreen needles with hanging drips
trickling between trunks, drifting amongst bark
a phenomenon the loon croons about, a two note song
composed to punctuate through the swelling air
a crescendo of gray that sinks to meet the marsh
where the bird wails
and the mist continues
rolling outward

Among the emotive poets were comedians, including Peter Bransden, who told a Seuss-like critique of late-stage capitalism as it unfolds over a Zoom interview:

“Perhaps you can tell me about something you regret?”
(This question is one I had prepared heavily with my school’s consulting club, so I felt confident in my response)
It’s a bit late to ruminate on the state of my misgivings!
It’s not like I’m proud of this world in which we’re living.
I regret that the 1% charges rent, and the rest are just cogs spinning,
I regret that whites wield their might to ensure the right keeps winning,
I wish the talking heads would stop pandering.
That people cared about gerrymandering.
And yet Trump walks free while people like me just watch as ice caps become the sea. 

James Steward said his first piece was short and everybody had told him to never share it. Then he read out digits that sounded like his social security number. (Unclear whether Steward was bold enough to use his actual SSN.)

Interspersed musical acts added further artistic dimension to the lineup. Daisy Bourne sang an impressive acoustic version of Adele’s ​“Chasing Pavements,” accompanied by Maletz. And Aster Rhys performed her original song ​“Mnemosyne,” which appeared on her EP Mæta, which came out in May 2021, accompanied by Nico Zuvia on the guitar. 

The song ​“speaks to timelessness and reconnecting with primordial origins — here, the ocean as a threshold of the Goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne,” said Rhys.

Former ESPN reporter Mihir Bhagat told stories about his journalism days and the challenge of capturing someone’s story in a short television segment. Isabel Moore took to the podium to let audience members know her collages were on display and for sale along the walls. And I shared a short fiction piece from the perspective of middle schoolers navigating a mask mandate on the school bus. The sizable crowd intimidated me at first — I’ve never read my work in front of so many people. But after I took the podium, audience members eased my nerves with encouraging nods and snapping.

In light of the ongoing situation in Ukraine, the hosts added a last-minute storyteller, Polina Bochenkova, a Russian masters student at Yale. She shared a distinctly anti-war poem that she wrote just minutes before the event began. Bochenkova said she was nervous to be sharing her writing for the first time, and her perspective was a sobering reminder of the world happening outside the coffeeshop walls.

In a formal statement before the program, Daryanani said: ​“These events are a jarring reminder that violence, instability, and oppression exist and pull at the social fabric that holds us together. No matter how difficult things get, we continue to encourage creativity, courage, and inclusion, no matter where we are and where we go from New Haven.”

Maletz created Istoria as a digital publishing platform with his longtime friend, software developer Eliot Woodrich, seeking an online space to share and workshop his writing. Daryanani joined the team in March 2021, and afterward, Istoria began hosting Zoom events in which writers would share and workshop stories together.

With just a little bit of online visibility, the Istoria community quickly grew in the early months of the pandemic: ​“People used to dial in. We had one person who found us on Eventbrite and just clicked in.”

Daryanani said the virtual events attracted people from all across America, as well as India and South Africa; writers from all around the world use Istoria as a place to workshop and distribute their stories.

When the group began hosting events in-person, they made it a goal to branch out and engage with the New Haven community. ​“I see relationships starting to form because of the events and the writing that comes with it,” Daryanani said.

Istoria will partner with Yale SOM’s Women in Management Club for its next writing showcase on April 1 in celebration of March being Women’s History Month. The prompt, which is subject to change, will be ​“House of Glass.” Writers who wish to contribute can sign up for writing circles and submit their work online at istoria.io.