People clutch mugs of mulled apple cider, both with and without rum. Their breath faintly marks the air while they listen to tales from a diverse cross-section of Vancouverites. Rain City Chronicles is an evening of storytelling that could easily be a variation on standup comedy, but it is more than an audience passively watching performances. Elianna Lev, Lizzy Karp and Karen Pinchin have created an inclusive community-building event that blends humour with touching insight.
Each of the creators told a story at the premiere in December of last year, with the fitting theme of “first times.” In an effort to keep Rain City as heterogeneous as possible, the ladies have now assumed the role of backup storytellers. “This was never started as a vanity project,” Pinchin says. “We don’t want this to be a place where comedians and performers and type-A journalists get up onstage and tell self-indulgent stories.”
Born in Etobicoke, just west of Toronto, Pinchin has resided in Vancouver for just over two years, working as a freelance writer. She and Lev met as neighbours and Karp entered the scene when she wrote Lev a fan letter asking how she could become involved with her podcast, The People’s Program Project, before moving to Vancouver from Toronto. “It’s sort of like we were the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band of writers,” laughs Pinchin. “You know those really weird moments when everything in the universe aligns to bring you together? All of a sudden we were just sitting around one day and we said we should start a storytelling night.”
The diversity in Vancouver’s residents is both its strength and flaw. What keeps the city bustling also constructs a shield. “People are sort of sick of attaching themselves to people who eventually pick up their roots and move,” says Pinchin. Rain City’s creators feel a desire to facilitate sharing among Vancouver’s guarded population. “I think there’s a hunger for that. I think people are really tired of sitting on the bus full of people wearing iPods and not having any dialogue with their neighbours,” Pinchin continues. While she has struggled with these standards, she still regards the city of Vancouver as an exciting place. “There’s a lot in this city that hasn’t been discovered, that’s still sort of really burgeoning and really coming to life and it’s what it must have been like to be in Montreal in the ’70s.”
Pinchin describes her experiences in approaching people to participate in the event: “Most hesitate insisting that they have nothing worth saying in front of a crowd but then digress into a captivating story—for example, the time they French kissed Jimmy Carter, as with Linda Solomon, who dished her experience at Rain City’s premiere. It’s such an intuitive concept that it seems redundant to say it out loud: that people are interesting and that people have interesting stories and that the only way to really build community is to communicate with one another. I don’t know why it’s so difficult for people to sometimes just let themselves open up a little bit and to tell their stories.”
The flow of Rain City’s evening speaks to the creators’ intuition. They curate the storytellers to be as varied as possible but then allow each to take control and speak about what moves them. “The most important thing is to keep it open so people can see themselves reflected in the topic. The worst thing would be to micro-manage because that would be totally egomaniacal for us to do—to say, ‘this is what your story is.’ People just need a bump in the right direction.”
At Rain City’s first event, papers were left on each seat asking for attendees to write down their stories about the next evening’s theme, “luck.” A staggering number of people wrote anonymous stories in response. “If we accomplish anything, it’s that someone is a little bit interested, that they come, that they see it’s a safe space for them to tell a story…and eventually it’ll just catch on and it’ll spread and all these apathetic, jaded, cynical people of our generation will just let a little light in.”
The creators never aspired to monetary goals. Eventually, they would like to donate the profits to local literacy charities and to host monthly installments at their dream venue, The Cultch. For now, they are happy to patiently coax Vancouver out of its shell. “We’re not doing anything remarkable—it’s the oldest form of communication in the world. All we’re doing is making a little bit of space for it. Making people stop and take a break. Just take a few hours to listen to stories, and tell stories, and share stories.”
-Rebecca Slaven for Sad Mag
The next installment of Rain City Chronicles takes place at 7:00 pm on Monday, March 29th at The Western Front. RSVP on Facebook.
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