After our triumphant return from the UK, we’re pleased to announce our next show’s theme: Perversion.

Features, Slammers, and more TBA.

We’re moving to an every-other month programming structure, in an effort to bring you the tightest shows and greatest features we can find. That said, we’ll see you in October!

Hot on the heels of our win against London in the first International Story Slam Competition, The Guardian UK profiles “The new wave of literary events,” which, naturally, includes yours truly:

For some, though, even more participation is the order of the day. Storyteller Mary J Lockwood, who is about to take her show, Mary’s Extraordinary Story Club, to Edinburgh, began the Story Slam in her home town of Lancaster a year ago, subsequently running a regular event in London. One of her first moves was to make contact with Bill Hillmann, who started Chicago’s Windy City Story Slam at the beginning of 2008 and has now seen attendances grow from an initial crowd of seven to 900. Recently, Lockwood invited Hillmann to bring a team over for an International Story Slam, in which two teams of five storytellers, one American and one British, would do battle; amusingly enough, they were playing by British rules, which demand that randomly selected members of the public rate each performer by holding up a scorecard, rather than, as in Chicago, simply going by the decibel level. In other words, the vibe is more Strictly Come Dancing than Spartacus: Blood and Sand. For those inspired by what they saw, there was the promise of an open-mic slot to finish.

Read the rest of the article here.