A&M-Texarkana Dean Showcases Story in Moth StorySlam
Dean Del Doughty (second from left) takes the stage with fellow story tellers at a recent Moth event in Chicago.
Dr. Del Doughty, dean of the College of Arts, Sciences and Education at Texas A&M University-Texarkana, recently gave a live storytelling performance at a Moth StorySlam event in Chicago.
“For the past couple of years, I’ve been doing some work on improvisation, satire and live storytelling with the Second City Training Center in Chicago. In that time, I’ve been looking for an opportunity to perform at a Moth event in Dallas or New Orleans or somewhere nearby,” Dr. Doughty said. “When I found myself in Chicago for a professional meeting last month, I saw that there was an event in Hyde Park, so one evening I took the train down there and put my name in the hat – literally, that’s how you sign up for these events. It was a lot of fun.”
The StorySlam’s venue was a tony nightclub called the Promontory. It was a packed house, with a few hundred people in attendance.
“The theme of the evening was beauty, and my story was about two things: walking a labyrinth and working on my relationship with a family member who was heading into a 12-step program at the time. I was trying to process a lot of difficult, conflicting emotions related to this person’s recovery, and one day, while traveling in San Francisco, I happened to come across a labyrinth. It was a glorious, 11-circuit labyrinth, and as I slowly navigated its meandering path, time seemed to slow down. I found a sense of peace and reassurance that had been long absent. I don’t want to say that some magical woo-woo thing happened and that everything was a-OK when I emerged, but walking the path did enable me to find the time and the space within myself to do what I needed to do to take the next steps with my family.”
Since its launch in 1997, The Moth has presented thousands of stories told live and without notes.
Moth shows are renowned for the great range of human experience they showcase. Each show starts with a theme, and the storytellers explore it, often in unexpected ways. Since each story is true and every voice authentic, the shows dance between documentary and theater, creating a unique, intimate and often enlightening experience for the audience.
Through ongoing programs in more than 25 cities, The Moth has presented over 18,000 stories to standing-room-only crowds worldwide and it currently produces more than 500 live shows each year. Additionally, The Moth runs storytelling workshops for high school students and adults in underserved communities through their Education and Community Programs.
Dr. Doughty attended the University of South Florida, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1988 and a Master of Liberal Arts in 1990. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy in comparative literature from The Pennsylvania State University in 1995. Since then, he has participated in seminars offered by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Houghton Institute for the Integrative Studies, and the Council for Independent Colleges and the Center for Hellenic Studies.
As a poet, Dr. Doughty has published four collections, two of which have won awards, and he has produced scholarly editions for James Joyce’s “Dubliners” and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” He has served as a juror for the Indiana Arts Commission on several occasions since 2002. In 2012, he collaborated with student programmers at Huntington University to develop “High Marks,” a software application for grading papers. The app is for sale on iTunes.
More than a dozen of Dr. Doughty’s poems will appear in an upcoming edition of the Langdon Review, which is published at Tarleton State University, a member of The Texas A&M University System. The journal is due out this fall.
