LAUREN WOJTKUN: You know what a great place to cry for five days is?

In the middle of nowhere, with a hundred women who are mostly therapists.

(laughter) NIMISHA LADVA: And then he asks me out, and before I know it, we're dating.

(laughter) And I like it.

(laughter) MAX GARC ÍA CONOVER: I didn't think about it for years, not until middle school, when, disastrously, I fell in love with a girl in my class.

♪ LADVA: My name is Nimisha Ladva.

I live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

I was born in Kenya, raised in England, educated in California, and I am a mom, a storyteller, a writer, and a professor.

So can you tell me about the first time that you told a story?

I must have been about eight years old, and I was living in England, which has miserable weather, so we had a lot of indoor recess, and on one of these days, a girl decided to get up and tell a story to the class, and people laughed and enjoyed it, and I thought, "Well, I should go next."

And so, I got up, and I got up to tell my story, and the kids actually booed me.

And it was a horrible experience, actually.

(laughs) - Oh, no!

So, the fact that I'm doing exactly that, now, as a grown-up, is sort of a miracle, actually.

And I've heard that you consider the stage a sacred space.

Yeah, I was raised Hindu, and to sort of ground myself before I approach a stage, I would usually just sort of touch it and touch my heart, and it's sort of an offering, and it does calm me.

And I do consider it just a space where something more than yourself is being exchanged with the audience.

So it is the end of the first day of new professor orientation, which I am attending because of my new job.

And I'm leaving the building, and it's pouring rain, which is a problem, because I'm a transplant from California and I'm unprepared.

I have no jacket, no umbrella, flimsy open-toe shoes, and the only way I have to get home is by bus.

But then that's when I see him.

The man who sat across from me at new professor orientation.

He's got salt-and-pepper hair.

He's wearing a tweed jacket with real elbow patches.

(laughter) And he has these gold-rimmed glasses that are ugly, but not in that cool way.

(laughter) And he's walking towards me, and I think he's going to talk to me.

And he does.

"Hi, I'm David, "and I couldn't help but overhear "you were going to take the bus today.

"You know, I've got my sedan "right here on campus, and I'd be happy to give you a ride home."

And I say no thank you.

Because isn't sedan a red flag?

(laughter) And, also, my good Indian immigrant girl upbringing has kicked in, because the truth is, I know I'm not supposed to be really interacting with men until my parents find a suitable boy for me to marry.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, I'm supposed to be having a sort of slightly arranged marriage.

This means that in California, my parents are handing out my biodata sheet.

(laughter) It has my name, my height, my weight, how dark my skin is, my education level, and a photograph.

But in Philadelphia, it's still raining.

So I say, "Actually...

I'd love a ride."

So I get a ride home.

A few weeks after that, I see him with some other faculty members, then we go out with friends of his from out of town, and then he asks me out.

And before I know it, we're dating.

And I like it.

(laughter) And I realize that I should probably tell my parents.

I mean, he's amazing in ways that really surprise me.

For example, you know, he's very self-aware and willing to call himself out.

So two months into dating, he tells me that he's been lying to me.

And it turns out that...

He knows that I have been a lifelong vegetarian.

But he has kept from me the fact that he has been vegetarian for 14 years already.

You see, he wanted me to like him for him and not the convenience of his diet.

(laughter) Now, it's a small lie, it's a withholding lie, but it is manipulative, and he owns it.

And I realize that he has emotional maturity, and I like it.

But I start to get nervous, because I am going to have to tell my parents, and... Two years later, I do.

(laughter) And perhaps you can imagine their reaction, but just in case you can't... My father actually handled it pretty well.

There is just this one day, I'm back in California.

I'm driving.

We are on a mountain road at night, and he grabs the wheel.

"Oh, my God, Daddy, what are you doing?"

"Just leave me on the road to die."

(laughter) And then there's my mother's reaction, which comes every day, three times a day, on my voicemail.

Like a pill.

"Hi, it's Nimisha, leave a message.

Thanks, bye."

(imitates beep) (imitates sobbing) (imitates beep) (laughter) No words.

And so, one day, David hears one of these messages, and he says, "You know, Nimisha, your mother is choosing to react this way."

And I lose it.

"What kind of stupid thing is that to say?

"Are you crazy?

"I am killing my mother with this, with us.

You don't get it!"

And I realize he doesn't get it.

Maybe he doesn't get me, he doesn't get my Indian-ness, I don't get his whiteness.

We're not going to be able to bridge this divide.

It's driving me crazy, I am in turmoil.

I'm not sleeping, my hair is falling out.

And in all of this mess, do you know what David does?

He asks me to marry him.

(audience murmuring and laughing) I say no.

I give him back the ring.

I quit my job.

I move back to California.

It's awkward.

We talk from time to time, but it's weird.

Um, he calls me one day, and he says he's going to be in California, and would I like to go see a film?

Whatever, I say yes.

So, we get to the movie theater, and it's packed.

It's just really crowded.

So David says, "Why don't you wait at this bench while I go to get tickets?"

And David walks away.

But I don't sit at the bench.

I get up and I walk away.

I walk away because I'm still thinking of my mother's voicemail messages.

I walk away because I'm thinking about how I'm not living up to being a good Indian daughter, and I find myself in a balcony looking down at the theater crowd below, and I can see David walking back with the tickets.

He looks like walking sunshine.

And he gets to the bench and he can see I'm not there.

I don't go back, I just watch him.

So he's taking little circles around the bench, and I guess he doesn't want to move too far away in case I come back.

He starts taking bigger circles and all that sunshine from his face, it's gone.

He just keeps looking and looking and pacing and pacing, and the movie starts.

David doesn't leave.

He just keeps looking and looking and pacing and pacing.

And I get it.

In all that crowded movie theater, the only person he's singularly and absolutely looking for is just me, and I want to walk back.

And I want to tell him that I have made some judgments about him and his appearance, about the things he could change... (in low voice): Like the jacket and those glasses.

(normally): And the things he can't change, like the color of his skin.

And I realize he makes the hard conversations easy.

So I do walk back.

I walk back to David.

And shortly after that, we do visit my parents, and we ask for their blessing.

And, to their incredible credit, they give it.

My father asked David if he would like to have a rabbi at the wedding.

David says no, it's okay, he's happy with a Hindu wedding.

He's just glad everyone is at yes.

So we have a lovely Hindu wedding.

We've been married for more than ten years.

We have three kids and one big fat mortgage.

Thank you very much.

(applause) I'm really grateful to my parents for how they reacted.

I was surprised by their reaction and I grew because of their reaction.

Because once David stopped being an outsider and became someone who was really going to be part of the family, I was really moved by the way they embraced him and they said that they loved him.

And they said if David wanted to call them "Mom and Dad" that they would be delighted.

And I realized that they had to move a lot and adjust a lot and grow a lot to give me the life that I have today.

So I'm really grateful.

I'm really grateful for them getting yes.

♪ CONOVER: My name is Max García Conover.

I'm a songwriter and a teacher, and I live up in Bath, Maine.

And can you tell me about what types of songs you like to write?

I write sort of story-driven folk songs, mostly with a guitar and vocal.

What's the process of writing a story like for you?

Since the beginning of writing song... writing and singing songs for me, telling stories in between songs has been part of it.

The process of that was just walking around before the show and mapping out the sets and knowing sort of what kind of little stories I was going to tell in between.

And then I would work the stories out on stage.

This is the first story that I've made into a story that's supposed to stand on its own, and not be an introduction to a song.

Do you feel the same sort of anticipation going up on stage?

Not really, no.

Because I've been singing songs for a long time, and I really look forward to being on stage.

And I get nervous for shows, but I, I know that when I get on stage, I'll have these things that I can count on, like my guitar, and the microphone.

And stories...

I've only told stories a few times before with just the story, without my guitar, and so it's a different kind of nervousness.

It's a much more visceral nervousness.

When I was six years old, my family moved to a small town in western New York.

Our house was just down the street from the local church.

And so every Sunday, we watched as the entire town showed up there.

And then eventually, we started going, too, which I was mostly happy about.

The only thing I didn't like about church was that, halfway through every service, all the kids had to go downstairs for Sunday school.

I didn't know any of the other kids, and this is sort of the first time I can remember where I felt like I was in a place that I didn't belong.

And so when the Sunday school teacher quit and my mom volunteered to replace her, I was thrilled.

And also surprised.

My mom is a labor lawyer from a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx, and she didn't look or behave like any of the other moms at church.

But the first week where she was the Sunday school teacher was awesome.

She was fun and cool, and I felt like the luckiest kid there.

And then the next week, she got fired.

(audience murmuring) And when she asked why, the youth pastor told her that she gave the wrong answer to a question.

A kid had asked, "Where does God live?"

And she answered, "God lives everywhere.

God's in the walls and in the air, and in you-- everywhere."

The youth pastor told her, "This is a Methodist church.

"We don't believe God lives everywhere.

You should've said that he lives in the sky."

(laughter) After we got home that day, I felt like my mom and I had both failed in some unclear but important way.

(laughter) And when she noticed how disappointed I was, she suggested that we start our own Sunday school, just the two of us down in the woods behind our house.

And so that's what we did.

The next Sunday, she woke me up early, and instead of walking toward the church, we walked in the other direction, past the barn and through the field, where the grass got taller and taller, and then turned to sumac.

And we picked our way through rose thorns and stumbled through spiderwebs until we got down to where the underbrush opened up and the trees towered.

And we kept walking softly and carefully, all the way down through to the creek.

And at the creek, we sat and we prayed, which, to my mom, meant reading Mary Oliver poems and naming the birds.

(audience chuckling) And so we did that every Sunday.

And we stopped going to that church down the street.

And I stopped thinking about that church down the street.

I didn't think about it for years, not until middle school, when, suddenly and disastrously, I fell in love with a girl in my class.

She and I had been going to school together since we were little kids, but we never really interacted there.

But I knew that she sometimes went to that church.

So every Sunday, I started walking over.

I had this idea that if we ran into each other outside of school, we might sort of strike up a conversation.

And we did run into each other, but we never, ever spoke to each other.

I was too quiet and too shy.

And this went on for weeks and weeks and weeks, until finally, I had my first little breakthrough not at church, but in English class, when I wrote a short story.

And then she sent me a message on AOL Instant Messenger to tell me that she liked it.

(audience chuckling) So I wrote another one, and then another, and then, like, 12 more, and I sent them all to her on AOL Instant Messenger.

We started talking a lot on there, and she liked to write stories, too, and poems, or she'd be drawing or painting.

She was always making things, and she seemed to understand art and beauty in a way that I had no idea anybody could.

She was teeming with her love for those things.

She was far away and right down the street.

And then, one day, miraculously, she was at my house, and it was just the two of us.

And, as always, I couldn't think of anything to say.

So I asked if she wanted to go for a walk down through the woods.

It was late spring in western New York, when everything is green and lush.

And we walked that same path that my mom and I had taken so many times, past the barn and through the woods, all the way down to the creek, and it was there, at the creek, where she turned to me and she looked at me and she told me that she always felt super-awkward around me, and she was sorry, but she only wanted to be friends.

(audience groans) And so just like that, without ever getting to date this girl that I was in love with, I got dumped.

(laughter) But if I were to call that the end of the story, I think that would be like telling you that God lives up in the sky.

(laughter) A few years later, when she and I were both juniors in high school, we got cast as husband and wife in the school play.

(laughter) We were Mr. and Mrs. Keller in the very seriously drama The Miracle Worker.

And all of a sudden, I didn't have to think of anything to say to her anymore; it was all just written out for me on a page.

(laughter) And I don't know if that's why, but in between scenes, we found we could talk really easily, and joke easily.

In the play, I was supposed to be Helen Keller's father, this stern, sad Southern man, and I really wanted to do a good job.

But at rehearsal, all I thought about was talking with her and laughing with her.

I wasn't trying to win her over anymore, and I wasn't in love with some idea I had of her.

What I loved was talking with her and laughing with her.

There was this one moment where she and I were both laughing so hard, we were crying, and then the lights came up and the scene started, and I had to slam my fist on the dining room table and shout... (in slight Irish accent): "Damn it, Katie, she can't see."

(laughter) That's the Southern accent that I prepared for the role.

(laughter) And so the play was not good.

(laughter) By the end of it, she and I were headed out on our first date.

(audience member cheers) We went to Applebee's.

(laughter) It was early winter in western New York, when everything is gray.

The slush on the ground was gray, and the strip mall was gray, and the sky was low and gray.

And to me, on that night, it all felt endless.

And it seemed entirely possible that God lives everywhere.

(cheers and applause) ♪ WOJTKUN: My name is Lauren Wojtkun.

I am the director of volunteer training and development in the M.I.T.

Alumni Association.

I really love writing, and I don't do it often enough.

And I really love public speaking, but most of the time when I'm public speaking, I'm at work doing a training about something that's not personal.

And so storytelling offers me the opportunity to write a little bit and then to tell, use... use my public speaking skills and be in front of a crowd, which, I really enjoy that energy, with something a little bit vulnerable than a work training, and I like that a lot.

And as I understand it, your story tonight is particularly personal.

Could you tell us about any kind of courage that it takes to do that?

What inside of you allows you to do that?

Do you have any concerns about sharing something like that?

I actually don't have concerns about that, and I think... We can't build real relationships with people unless we're vulnerable ourselves.

And we spend a lot of our early part of our lives trying to be fine in front of people, trying to be cool, trying to make sure that everyone knows that we're doing okay.

And then I think over time, we just realize that everyone has had similar struggles, everyone's experienced loss, everyone's been vulnerable, everyone's gone through grief, and if... it's a shared human experience, and it's okay to say those things out loud.

I've found that to be very true myself, and I have to ask, have you ever regretted telling a story?

I have not ever regretted telling a story, but maybe I should have more interesting life experiences, to have some stories I would regret saying out loud.

♪ In July of 2016 I was at a weeklong intensive training with an author I'd long admired.

She took us deep into our own psyches and histories using ancient fairy tales to illustrate women's growth and development.

These were the deep, dark, gory tales of old.

The kind where someone dies, or at least loses a limb while they're learning their lesson.

There were no princesses in these fairy tales, no true love's kiss.

But by the end of the week, I had found a few fairy godmothers.

The training, which was attended by about 100 other people-- mostly women, mostly therapists-- that's who goes to this kind of thing.

(laughter) Was held on the grounds of a hippie commune in rural Colorado.

There was no cellphone reception on the grounds, so in order to call home, or to talk to someone that you loved, you first had to message them on the spotty Wi-Fi and give them the number for the landline.

Then you'd go downstairs to the closet under the stairs where the landline was.

It was a big, brown rotary thing that your grandparents used to have, and you'd close the door and wait for them to call you.

These are the steps that I had taken on a Wednesday evening in order to talk to my husband.

And when he called me on the brown rotary phone with the loud ring, he asked me for a divorce.

To be fair, he beat me to the punch.

I was the one in therapy, working up the courage to say what needed to be said, for reasons that are too sad and too personal to talk about here.

But I couldn't do it.

It was too final.

It was too terrifying.

And not to mention, we loved each other.

The good times were still really good, and our shared, intertwined lives were so impossible to imagine separate, I couldn't do it.

But that night, my husband, fortified by a few beers, with me far enough away that he could see clearly, secure at the end of a phone line, could, and he did.

And through the shock and the grief and the "Are you kidding me?"

that popped out of my mouth, there was this gut-level certainty.

He was doing this-- we were doing this-- because we loved each other.

But still, I was shocked.

And then I started crying, and I didn't stop for 24 hours or five days or six months, depending on how you define "stop."

(laughter) You know what a great place to cry for five days is?

In the middle of nowhere, rural Colorado, with a hundred women who are mostly therapists.

(laughter) If you have to get asked for a divorce on the phone, like, there is no better location on the planet.

(laughter) Every morning, for the duration of the training, I would get up before sunrise and hike up the hill behind where we were staying.

I took a picture of myself every day in that golden light, and my eyes were so swollen with crying that I didn't recognize my own face.

I'd come back down, and throughout the days, I would sob, and it would give way to a few leaking tears, would give way to a few blessed moments of calm before the cycle would start over again.

And the whole time, I was held and loved and supported by these hundred women in the middle of nowhere.

I was approached by women of all ages to tell me their stories of divorce specifically, and loss more generally.

To tell me about the time that they had risen from the ashes of their own lives.

Not to hurry me along, but to say that they saw me, that they'd been there.

There had a been a time that they had not recognized their own face, either, but in that moment, they recognized mine.

My seventh wedding anniversary was two days after I moved out of my house, and my husband and I went to a bar, and we cried through it together.

My birthday was a month later, and 17 amazing women showed up and toasted me with oysters and champagne and told me I was not going to survive, I was going to thrive.

I had called my mom from that cupboard under the stairs, and when I told her the news, she pulled over to the side of the highway to tell me I was going to be okay.

And I was, but I would not have been the same and would not have made it so far if it hadn't been for those hundred women in Colorado.

The truth is, nobody gets a fairy tale ending.

Real life is messy, and can be dark and full of twists and turns that leave you spent and exhausted and living with two roommates and a cat in Somerville at the age of 37.

(laughter) We are all going to have to rise from the ashes of our own lives eventually.

But we are going to rise out of them.

And when that happens, and when you're safely on the other side, keep an eye out, because you never know who might need you to be their fairy godmother.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) HAZARD: Lauren Wojtkun, make some noise.

(cheers and applause) When I was in Colorado, I remember walking out of the phone booth in complete...

I don't think I'd ever felt such strong emotion.

And a woman that I'd connected with noticed me right away and took me by the arm and took me outside and sat me on a bench and asked me what was going on.

And we talked about it, and over the ten minutes, she and I both cried really hard, and then laughed so hard that we were crying from laughing.

The women out there really understood kind of the joy and the grief that goes together with making a new life change, and the humor that you can find in your lowest moments, and I really appreciated that from them.

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