Welcome to the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Sarah Austin-Geness. This hour includes

six stories told by women around the world. Some from our open Mike's story slams and

some from our community program, where we craft stories with people who might not think

they have stories to tell. So get ready because we're going from a trailer park in Phoenix

to Pittsburgh, Melbourne and Seattle, then to the high mountains of Nepal and finally

an apartment building in Manhattan. We met our first storyteller, we'll call her Katie

Smith, in a Moth community workshop that explored family homelessness. She had enough

material right from the start to write a book. Katie told the story at Seattle's Fremont

Abbey, which was actually also a temporary shelter in the 1990s. Here's Katie, live

at the Moth at a night we called home lost and found.

Picture it. It's November of 1977 and my family and I are pulling into Phoenix, Arizona

in the late 1950s, maybe early 1960s, Ford or Ford Fairlane, Dark Brown, we live in it.

We've lived out here on the road for three and a half years. Sometimes it's a car, sometimes

it's a van, sometimes it's a yellow school bus, but we've lived out here for three and a

half years. And I'm sitting in the back seat and I'm cross-legged because there's so

much junk that you can't put your feet on the floor. There's so much trash in our car.

And we're pulling into Phoenix, Arizona. Now my mother's in the passenger seat. My

older sister Abbey's right next to me. She's 11 and I'm nine. And my mother's boyfriend

is in the driver's seat. His name is Lucky and he sure as hell isn't. And we're pulling

into Phoenix, Arizona and my sister and I were really excited and I'll tell you why.

Because we're going to get a house. We're going to get a trailer. We might even get to

go to school this winter, which is pretty awesome for us. Now imagine in a city, there's

...