Welcome to the Moth podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. Many times stories are about taking the long way.

They're about what happens when we make the difficult decision that we knew would be good for us and we made it, even though it was tough.

But what about the times when we don't exactly rise to the challenge? This week, two stories about taking shortcuts.

First up, we have Lawrence Wood live at the Moth Story Slam in Chicago,

where the theme of the night was gangs, clicks, and crowds.

Here's Lawrence.

When I was a teenager, I read only what I had to for school.

And there were rare exceptions. In ninth grade, my English teacher took me aside after class one day, and she gave me a book called The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks,

who's best remembered now as the director of the 1971 movie Shaft.

And it's a good movie, it was a good book.

And The Learning Tree is his autobiographical account of

growing up black in the Deep South in the 1930s,

and it was banned in my school because of a brief sex scene at the beginning

that was not nearly explicit enough

for my taste, but I liked the book.

But still, it didn't trigger a love of reading that my teacher hoped it would.

I still only read what I had to.

But that finally changed my senior year when I took an English class from a teacher who at first,

I really didn't like it all.

She had us read and write a book report on Jane Eyre.

And the night before the report was due, I banged out a first draft,

and I typed Jane Eyre on the title page because that's what the paper was about and handed it in. And a week later, she holds my paper up in the air and she says, this is not Jane Eyre.

...