Blog
Your Story Out Loud: An Interview with Micaela Blei
by Writing Workshops Staff
A month ago
After 14 years on stages across the country and a career developing The Moth's storytelling curriculum, Micaela Blei knows the secret that transforms good writers into unforgettable ones: finding your voice happens out loud first.
Blei discovered this truth the hard way. After years away from the page, performing stories in front of live audiences, she returned to her writing with something unexpected—access to her authentic narrative voice that had always eluded her on paper. The stage had taught her what the blank page couldn't: how we naturally shape stories when we speak them, how our voices carry truth when we're not overthinking every word, and how the stories we need to tell reveal themselves in conversation rather than isolation.
Now, in her Your Story Out Loud: A Personal Storytelling and Memoir 6-Week Zoom Intensive, Blei brings this revolutionary approach to writers ready to break through their own barriers. This isn't about public speaking or performance anxiety—it's about discovering the stories you actually want to tell by speaking them into existence before committing them to the page.
With her signature "Muppet Guru" teaching style—equal parts playfulness and wisdom—Blei creates a space where writers can explore their most meaningful stories through conversation and community. Participants will learn to generate material through talking rather than typing, shape narratives using the natural rhythms of spoken storytelling, and ultimately decide whether to adapt these stories for the page, the microphone, or simply let these skills enhance all their writing.
Writing Workshops: Hi, Micaela. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Micaela Blei: Hi everyone! I'm a storyteller, story editor, and memoir writer living in Portland, Maine. I've just started learning to play the piano again after a 40-year hiatus. I'm terrible at it so far, but I love it.
Writing Workshops: What made you want to teach this specific class? Is it something you are focusing on in your own writing practice? Have you noticed a need to focus on this element of craft?
Micaela Blei: I've been doing storytelling out loud for the last 14 years. I was the Director of Education at The Moth, I developed their storytelling curriculum, and I've been on stages all over in that time. And when I came back to my writing after years of telling stories out loud, that experience had given me access to my "voice" in writing in a way that I'd never had before.
So I realized that storytelling can offer us so much more than just entertaining conversation at cocktail parties. It can give us this way to find our own narrative voice and who we are on the page, and it can help us discover the stories we actually want to tell. I want to offer that space to writers in the Writing Workshops community!
Writing Workshops: Give us a breakdown of how the course is going to go. What can the students expect? What is your favorite part of this class you've dreamed up?
Micaela Blei: First off, we're going to do a lot of talking in this class. Rather than writing our stories first and then reading them aloud, we're going to generate ideas in conversation and then write things down. This might feel a little scary to share out loud before you've decided on all the right words. But we do it the way I like to get into a pool, which is VERY slowly. We'll have lots of time for reflection and figuring out which parts of our lives we feel comfortable sharing.
After we've done some brainstorming and shared ideas with each other, we'll turn to how to shape and revise this kind of out-loud story. We'll discuss structure, pacing, and detail. We'll try out our stories with one another.
And then finally, after we've learned all of that craft and we've developed our stories, we'll figure out where we want to bring them. Do we want to adapt them into writing? Do we want to find a microphone? Do we want to let these skills just bleed into our other kinds of writing?
My favorite thing about this class, honestly, is how much we'll get to find out about ourselves and each other in the course of it. It really is a way to map our own hearts and also to connect with other writers in a pretty unique way.
Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?
Micaela Blei: Oh, easy: it was Donald J. Sobol, the author of the Encyclopedia Brown books. I wrote a ton of Encyclopedia Brown fan fiction in elementary school. Then in high school, it was A.S. Byatt and Tom Stoppard. I was very into time travel love stories, research adventures, and complicated plots!
Writing Workshops: What are you currently reading?
Micaela Blei: I just finished The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner, a great book about writing and publishing, and I'm in the middle of The Other Side of Disappearing by Kate Clayborn, it is a really fun romance/mystery about a true crime podcaster. (I'm a huge romance reader.)
Writing Workshops: How do you choose what you're working on? When do you know it is the next thing you want to write all the way to THE END?
Micaela Blei: Right now, I'm working on my memoir, and I'm on deadline, and that's it. But when I was deciding what to work on next, my agent gave me an assignment that I found super helpful. She had me write her a letter about each of the projects that I was considering. In the course of describing them to her and telling her how I felt about these projects, I really clarified which one was lighting me up, which one had the most live questions that I wanted to answer. It totally worked; I got much clearer in the course of talking to her about them, rather than just mulling them over in my brain.
Writing Workshops: Where do you find inspiration?
Micaela Blei: I find inspiration in a few different places. First, obviously real life, since I write mostly non-fiction, but I am also heavily influenced by the fiction and pop culture of both my early years and the current landscape, because I think that in U.S. culture especially we are steeped in story, and we kind of can't help seeing our lives overlaid with the tropes and the conventions of the stories that we consume. So I find a lot of inspiration in the ways that fiction writers, TV writers and screenwriters structure their stories. Also, I need to be in nature regularly to feel like a person and be able to write ANYTHING.
Writing Workshops: What is the best piece of writing wisdom you've received that you can pass along to our readers? How did it impact your work? Why has this advice stuck with you?
Micaela Blei: There's two pieces of advice that I've been leaning on lately as I've been writing. The first one is that you just have to work on this paragraph, this page, this chapter. You don't actually have to write the whole book at once. I appreciate this, because I find it overwhelming to think of the entire project. Looking just at what's in front of me is so helpful for moving forward.
The second piece of advice that I really appreciate is that I am not yet the person who will write the final version of this project, and I need to get through all the messy drafts to become that writer. You've got to go through the journey. Kind of like a fairy tale. You have to collect all the tools before you get to the final boss, the final draft. That advice really helps me give myself permission to write badly, to trick my inner critic.
Writing Workshops: What is your favorite book to recommend on the craft of writing? Why this book?
Micaela Blei: I love The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr. I find myself rereading it while I'm working, so she can remind me to be honest with myself. I think she does a great job of asking you tough questions that you can reflect on while you're writing about your life, and she's also just a fun person to accompany you on a writing project.
Writing Workshops: Bonus question: What's your teaching vibe?
Micaela Blei: Muppet Guru. Equal parts goofiness & play, and wisdom & support.
Micaela's unique approach—starting with conversation rather than composition—offers writers a completely new pathway to discovering their authentic voice and most compelling stories. Whether you dream of taking the stage, strengthening your memoir, or simply want to infuse your writing with the immediacy and power of spoken storytelling, this workshop provides the tools and community to make it happen. Join Micaela for Your Story Out Loud: A Personal Storytelling and Memoir 6-Week Zoom Intensive and discover how speaking your truth can transform your writing in ways you never imagined.
