They invade your house, fluttering silently around the lamps at night, scaring the crap out of you, making holes in your sweaters. Moths flock to the light. It’s no different at The Moth, a popular storytelling series, named by writer George Dawes Green, that began on his Georgia porch and later migrated swarm-like, to his New York City apartment.

Like winged insects, characters are drawn by a bright light, a metaphoric one featuring adventure, love and ambition. Instead of being swatted to death or poisoned by naphthalene, the protagonists are trapped, and thus forced to seek resolution. In this day of digital illiteracy, it’s a relief there’s an organization devoted to words. That’s why hundreds of us were sitting under the gorgeous domed ceilings of Capitale for the 2009 Black and White Moth Ball gala listening to Garrison Keillor, Prairie Home Companion storyteller, confessing to us from the stage, “It was on Labor Day: while lying on a massage table with a woman squeezing my glutes and talking about Jesus, when I realized that I was suffering a stroke.” Leave it to a Minnesotan to get all hot and bothered by a Bible-belting masseuse.

Co-host Jonathan Ames, a Moth regular from the beginning, regaled us with tales of the late literary icon George Plimpton, whose WASP credentials he envies, but he’s got nothing to complain about. With eight books under his belt and the renewal of his TV series Bored to Death, Ames has come a long way from New York Press—or at least his paychecks have.

The Moth—which was that night honoring goddess of the theater Anna Deavere Smith—has grown by leaps and bounds over the last 12 years. Since leaving Green’s porch, it has gone national, spreading to L.A., Chicago and Detroit, with weekly podcasts broadcast on more than 200 public radio stations. One of the best things about The Moth is its requirement that any story—which must be true and autobiographical—is over within five minutes. Let’s face it, Shakespeare himself could get boring after any more.

Which is precisely why I ducked out for an hour or so to party hop at another, funkier literary event. Me and my posse of three men, one better looking than the next, traveled a few blocks north to the Bowery Hotel, an ironically fancy location since it was where Thurston Moore was DJing a book launch party for Grunge, a book of the photography from Michael Lavine. Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo were on hand, along with assorted neo-punks and grungsters of today.

I was dressed in formal black and white for the ball, so hoped I would pass with the torn-jeans set. As the book says, “The kids were so uncool. They were beyond cool.” Losers, in fact. Like us, since we’d just missed the free drinks. After soaking up some ’90s tunes, my oh-so-pretty posse returned to The Moth Ball refreshed and ready to imbibe, posing for the free, Chaplin-esque flip books assembled on the spot. Gesticulating wildly, we became masters not of the universe but of our own narrative. Apart from losing my coat check ticket, my only mistake of the night was not bidding on lunch with the rather grouchy Salman Rushdie. After all, aren’t Satanic verses just one more storytelling device?