From private pages to a public voice

For years, I carried stories in a small notebook: the neighbour who repaired radios, my family’s chaotic Sunday lunches, the stranger who shared half a sandwich with me on a crowded tram. They were vivid, funny and useful only as private company. I rarely repeated them because I worried they would sound ordinary, too self-indulgent or impossible to make sense of from a stage.

That hesitation changed at an open-mic night in a narrow Melbourne laneway. I read one true story about a missed train, an overdue library book and the unexpected kindness of a stranger. When I finished, nobody offered notes on my delivery. They simply recognised the experience. The experience answered how I found my voice through storytelling: I stopped trying to sound impressive and learned to sound honest.

When the story left the notebook

My first attempt at speaking publicly felt like handing over a piece of my life without knowing what would happen to it. I had signed up for the open mic because a friend had entered me while I was making a coffee. The venue was upstairs, reached by a stairwell that shook whenever a tram passed outside. I practised the story twice in the bathroom mirror and tried to flatten every nervous gesture.

I chose a story with a modest scale, partly because I felt safer with it. It involved waiting for a late suburban train after work and watching a pair of teenagers teach an older man how to use a messaging app. There was no grand revelation. The moment arrived when the man sent his family a photograph of the evening sky, and the teenagers cheered as though they had accomplished something enormous.

The response was warm but unsentimental. People laughed in the right places and remained quiet elsewhere. Afterwards, the host asked what I had planned to do with the microphone next. I had assumed the performance was the risky part; talking to him made me realise that keeping the story inside had carried its own risk. Once spoken, it could travel beyond my notebook.

Finding an honest speaking voice

Finding my voice did not mean discovering a polished stage persona. It meant accepting the voice I already had, including its accent, its rhythm and its tendency to pause while searching for the precise word. As a child, I had been embarrassed by my family’s English because it did not always fit the formal expectations of school or work. On stage, that background became part of the story instead of something to conceal.

I began working differently. Instead of memorising a script word for word, I learned the sequence of the narrative: the place, the people, the problem, the turn and the feeling that remained. I allowed myself to leave out a detail if it did not matter. I stopped trying to control every laugh, especially when nervous laughter threatened to interrupt an emotional moment.

Australian audiences helped me understand that honesty does not require solemnity. Their familiarity with footy banter, pub trivia and the playful arguments that follow a close AFL match taught me that a story can hold ordinary chat and genuine feeling together. I used the cadence of those conversations without turning my performance into a string of sporting references. The aim was connection, not a checklist of local customs.

Using humour to cross the fear

Humour became my way through the first level of fear. I could joke about my mother’s habit of answering questions nobody asked, my questionable talent for assembling flat-pack furniture and the eternal search for my keys. These observations gave the audience an easy entrance into the story. More importantly, they gave me permission to keep going when my throat tightened.

At the Sunday market in Footscray, I once watched my aunt bargain with a fruit seller while several generations of my family debated which stall had the best coffee. She won the argument, bought six tiny pastries and handed one to me without looking up. On stage, I built the scene around her seriousness and used the family’s voices for the surrounding chatter. The laughter let me reach the part I had been protecting: my fear that people might see tenderness as weakness.

Laughter did not cancel the vulnerability. It made the vulnerable moment more bearable. A room can hold jokes and grief at the same time, and audiences often signal trust through a small shift in attention. They stop shifting drinks, settle into their chairs and listen. Learning to trust that shift changed how I used pauses. I stopped filling every silence as though silence meant I had failed.

A Montreal room full of strangers

My approach to live storytelling eventually led me to Confabulation, the monthly Montreal series founded around true, unscripted stories from people with varied backgrounds. I attended a themed evening at MainLine Theatre, where actor and comedian Matt Goldberg hosted performers exploring personal experience, humour, relationships, change and the city’s cultural life. The format confirmed what I had begun to understand in Melbourne: a good story does not need to invent a dramatic life. It needs to pay close attention to the life already happening.

The pay-what-you-can admission felt especially meaningful. It removed the familiar pressure to judge the price by the supposed value of the performance. People arrived with different budgets and for different reasons, yet they shared the same task of listening. That sense of access connected the Montreal room to community events and neighbourhood gatherings in Australia, where the cost of a ticket can determine whether someone feels welcome before a single word is spoken.

I noticed how quickly specific local details became invitations rather than barriers. Montreal references, including the city’s weather and its mix of neighbourhoods, gave the Canadian stories texture. I recognised the same instinct in Melbourne stories about a sudden burst of summer rain, a delayed train or the ritual of settling in at a pub with friends. The details changed, but the need behind them did not: people wanted to feel accurately represented.

Making the voice part of daily life

Finding my voice through storytelling gave me more than confidence on stage. It changed how I paid attention elsewhere. I became less interested in delivering a punchline and more interested in noticing what people meant beneath their words. At work, in friendships and during ordinary conversations in Melbourne or on a visit to Sydney, I listened for the detail that might carry a story if I ever returned to it.

The goal is not to make every private moment into material. Consent, context and kindness still matter, especially when humour draws on relationships. I now ask myself whether a story reveals something true, whether I have earned the right to tell it and whether the audience receives more than I do from sharing it. Those questions have made my storytelling more careful, not less spontaneous.

My notebook now contains fewer polished paragraphs and more observed moments. I record phrases, gestures and changes in atmosphere before they disappear. At the next gathering, I may tell the market story again, but I will listen for what the room adds to it. I will also try a new story from the train, testing whether its ending still feels honest without me forcing it.

On Thursday, I will email the open-mic venue to reserve a five-minute slot for my next story.