Story City MN’s latest storytelling event, Friday, October 25th at the Black Dog Coffee and Wine Bar in St. Paul, featured stories on the theme “Lost.” Photo: Story City MN

Story City’s event at the Black Dog on Friday was the 12th installment of this convivial Twin Cities live storytelling series. This iteration was held in conjunction with a “mini lit-festival,” presented in partnership with Minnesota Book Awards and Friends of the St. Paul Public Library. For the first hour the crowd settles in for the night and listens to live music: Friday’s performance featured low-key instrumental tunes, delightful covers of “Twin Peaks” songs by the jazz trio Bookhouse (a side project of the band Painted Saints). Then the storytelling begins: “five true stories about forgetting where you are, where you’re going, and how you found (or didn’t find) what you were looking for.”

Marine Corps veteran Dave Hammer starts things off with a candid story about finding your footing (or not) after the rug is pulled from under you: “I’m going to tell you why I’m alone. I was married for 42 years, and now I’m not. I’m divorced and I didn’t see it coming. Where do you go after that?” Then writer Britt Aamodt takes the mic, with a funny little story about an interview that took an unexpected turn: “As a journalist, you know one day you’re going to end up in a basement somewhere with a lunatic.”

Author John Jodzio takes the stage next, to talk about his salad days in an Uptown Minneapolis rooming house, about neurotic neighbors and aphrodisiac beets and a knife fight. “Revolver” magazine’s founding editor, Marcus Anthony Downs, takes us to Carnivale, when he was visiting relatives in Brazil, with a story about being lost and alone where he shouldn’t have been, and the mugger turned Good Samaritan who made sure he got home. Maggie Ryan Sandford rounds out the mix with a tale of her midnight bike ride in Ghana at 20 years old — about the feeling of being young and invincible and then suddenly vulnerable, not quite grown but no longer a kid, and far from home.

After the stories are told, the crowd’s enlisted to finish F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “failed novel” in a game of exquisite corpse. It’s silly and shaggy, and a sweetly inviting note on which to end the night.

Jemma Rose Brown and Lara Avery, founders of Story City MN’s “migrating live storytelling event series”. Photo: Friends of the St. Paul Public Library and Story City MN

For going on two years now, Story City (founded by “Revolver” editor/contributor and novelist Lara Avery and StoryCorps alum Jemma Rose Brown) has brought these events to a variety of venues around town. The website reads: “We promote oral tradition, self-expression, and stories of the cities we love through live memoir. Each event has a different theme, and storytellers have up to seven minutes to recount an unscripted tale inspired by the theme live on stage.” It’s like The Moth meets spoken word meets fun-but-awkward social mixer — an inviting, informal addition to the cities’ increasingly inventive assortment of literary offerings.

Keep track of future Story City MN events via their website, storycitymn.com, or Facebook page, www.facebook.com/storycitymn.