Moth stories have the power to bring you into a world that is often not your own and leave you wishing that you could live in that world

Just a little bit longer since 1997 the moth has shared more than 50,000 stories with audiences around the world through shows,

workshops and on the moth podcast and the moth radio hour once the curtains have closed the rooms emptied and the voice is

Quieted it's the stories still ringing in our ears that whisper over and over we are all of us more alike than we are different

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From PRX this is the moth radio hour and I'm George Dawes Green the founder of the moth.

I have friends who think nostalgically of their boyhoods. They remember a time of rapture.

My boyhood felt like a horror movie. Everything was alien. Everything scared me. I was never comfortable.

I mean first I had no idea what I was doing on this bizarre planet, but also I kept morphing all the time and everybody around me kept morphing all the time

And there were these huge terrifying lumbering creatures who told me they were going to catch me and then I'd become one of them. I'd become an adult.

And finally I thought all right, that's okay, that's fine. Good. I'll be an adult. Good. At least then I won't feel like such an alien. Right.

In this hour we have four stories about the terrors and the putative delights of boyhood.

A few years ago my friend Neil Gaiman the novelist came with me on the unchained tour. We filled up an old 1972 Bluebird school bus with rock on tours and musicians.

And we went all around the American South looking for towns where there were still independent bookstores. And in those towns we told stories.

Here's Neil Gaiman on the unchained tour in Asheville, North Carolina.

I didn't actually expect to be in Asheville for the first time in my life until three weeks from now.

When my son is getting married here.

Thank you. He's marrying an Asheville girl.

And it was because of my son, his name is Mike or Michael or Mikey depending on what time period we're talking about.

It was because of him that I discovered what an incredible disappointment I had been to my father.

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