That Rain City

Karen Pinchin talks to Sad Mag. Photo by Tina Kulic

Peo­ple clutch mugs of mulled apple cider, both with and with­out rum. Their breath faintly marks the air while they lis­ten to tales from a diverse cross-section of Van­cou­verites. Rain City Chron­i­cles is an evening of sto­ry­telling that could eas­ily be a vari­a­tion on standup com­edy, but it is more than an audi­ence pas­sively watch­ing per­for­mances. Elianna Lev, Lizzy Karp and Karen Pinchin have cre­ated an inclu­sive community-building event that blends humour with touch­ing insight.

Each of the cre­ators told a story at the pre­miere in Decem­ber of last year, with the fit­ting theme of “first times.” In an effort to keep Rain City as het­ero­ge­neous as pos­si­ble, the ladies have now assumed the role of backup sto­ry­tellers. “This was never started as a van­ity project,” Pinchin says. “We don’t want this to be a place where come­di­ans and per­form­ers and type-A jour­nal­ists get up onstage and tell self-indulgent stories.”

Born in Eto­bi­coke, just west of Toronto, Pinchin has resided in Van­cou­ver for just over two years, work­ing as a free­lance writer. She and Lev met as neigh­bours and Karp entered the scene when she wrote Lev a fan let­ter ask­ing how she could become involved with her pod­cast, The People’s Pro­gram Project, before mov­ing to Van­cou­ver from Toronto. “It’s sort of like we were the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band of writ­ers,” laughs Pinchin. “You know those really weird moments when every­thing in the uni­verse aligns to bring you together? All of a sud­den we were just sit­ting around one day and we said we should start a sto­ry­telling night.”

The diver­sity in Vancouver’s res­i­dents is both its strength and flaw. What keeps the city bustling also con­structs a shield. “Peo­ple are sort of sick of attach­ing them­selves to peo­ple who even­tu­ally pick up their roots and move,” says Pinchin. Rain City’s cre­ators feel a desire to facil­i­tate shar­ing among Vancouver’s guarded pop­u­la­tion. “I think there’s a hunger for that. I think peo­ple are really tired of sit­ting on the bus full of peo­ple wear­ing iPods and not hav­ing any dia­logue with their neigh­bours,” Pinchin con­tin­ues. While she has strug­gled with these stan­dards, she still regards the city of Van­cou­ver as an excit­ing place. “There’s a lot in this city that hasn’t been dis­cov­ered, that’s still sort of really bur­geon­ing and really com­ing to life and it’s what it must have been like to be in Mon­treal in the ’70s.”

Pinchin describes her expe­ri­ences in approach­ing peo­ple to par­tic­i­pate in the event: “Most hes­i­tate insist­ing that they have noth­ing worth say­ing in front of a crowd but then digress into a cap­ti­vat­ing story—for exam­ple, the time they French kissed Jimmy Carter, as with Linda Solomon, who dished her expe­ri­ence at Rain City’s pre­miere. It’s such an intu­itive con­cept that it seems redun­dant to say it out loud: that peo­ple are inter­est­ing and that peo­ple have inter­est­ing sto­ries and that the only way to really build com­mu­nity is to com­mu­ni­cate with one another. I don’t know why it’s so dif­fi­cult for peo­ple to some­times just let them­selves open up a lit­tle bit and to tell their stories.”

The flow of Rain City’s evening speaks to the cre­ators’ intu­ition. They curate the sto­ry­tellers to be as var­ied as pos­si­ble but then allow each to take con­trol and speak about what moves them. “The most impor­tant thing is to keep it open so peo­ple can see them­selves reflected in the topic. The worst thing would be to micro-manage because that would be totally ego­ma­ni­a­cal for us to do—to say, ‘this is what your story is.’ Peo­ple just need a bump in the right direction.”

At Rain City’s first event, papers were left on each seat ask­ing for atten­dees to write down their sto­ries about the next evening’s theme, “luck.” A stag­ger­ing num­ber of peo­ple wrote anony­mous sto­ries in response. “If we accom­plish any­thing, it’s that some­one is a lit­tle bit inter­ested, that they come, that they see it’s a safe space for them to tell a story…and even­tu­ally it’ll just catch on and it’ll spread and all these apa­thetic, jaded, cyn­i­cal peo­ple of our gen­er­a­tion will just let a lit­tle light in.”

The cre­ators never aspired to mon­e­tary goals. Even­tu­ally, they would like to donate the prof­its to local lit­er­acy char­i­ties and to host monthly install­ments at their dream venue, The Cultch. For now, they are happy to patiently coax Van­cou­ver out of its shell. “We’re not doing any­thing remarkable—it’s the old­est form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the world. All we’re doing is mak­ing a lit­tle bit of space for it. Mak­ing peo­ple stop and take a break. Just take a few hours to lis­ten to sto­ries, and tell sto­ries, and share stories.”

–Rebecca Slaven for Sad Mag

The next install­ment of Rain City Chron­i­cles takes place at 7:00 pm on Mon­day, March 29th at The West­ern Front. RSVP on Face­book.

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