League of Inveterate Poets

By Mark Traphagen on June 5, 2010

From comedian and storyteller Dylan Brody:

“At one point a man that I work with a lot came to me and said, ‘Okay, I’m working on this story, and I think it’s like one of yours–it’s personally revealing–but I can’t figure out what the point is in it.’ And that was when it dawned on me that people think I’m able to look at the stories in my life and figure out what the point is in them in a way that they can’t. And that’s not what I do at all. I take the stories and begin to tell them, and then by the end, I figure out what I want the point to be.

“Once I began to treat it as craft and as art rather than as medicine, I was able to make decisions about who I’m becoming out of my experiences. I was able to shape the redefining of myself rather than thinking I’m seeking something that is innate and that has happened in that is uncontrollable. I was now saying, ‘Wait, what is the lesson I learned from this? What is the lesson I want to have learned out of this?’”

(From an interview with Marc Maron on the “WTF with Marc Maron” podcast. Listen to the entire podcast here. Bonus treat: Dylan Brody tells his funny story about being an 11-year-old Jewish boy on a vision quest at an Indian reservation. WARNING: audio contains explicit language.)

dylanbrody.com