I coined the term “live lit” over lunch with Keith Ecker in 2011. We were at Kopi Café in Andersonville, discussing a fix for the minor problem we shared: that the existing term “storytelling,” emphasizing as it did both “narrative” and “speech,” did not encompass what we were both attempting with the shows we’d founded. My show, Write Club, monthly at the Hideout, and his, Essay Fiesta, monthly at the Book Cellar, both emphasized writing at least as much as delivery, and featured essays, not stories. The coinage was not a huge deal—I’m not trying to engage in mythmaking, here. It was like being present for the dawn of the aglet, maybe: not a lightning-strike eureka! moment, but more like a single-nod “huh, might be helpful” type of thing.

There is the persistent “Chicago problem” afflicting all art forms here—the phenomenon of “hone your chops here, then flee to a ‘real’ city to make your money,” which has come to feel like an inevitability, almost. There’s also what I’ve come to call the “gateway drug problem,” where folks do live lit for a while, get really good at it, and then move on to some other form, either because the product of their labors is more enduring, or they can more readily monetize it, or both. Examples of this tendency include Irby, noted above (though she’d regard herself more as having started as a blogger who kind of fell backwards into performing live lit, which is partly just her tendency to underestimate her own vast gifts as a riveting performer); Shannon Cason, an early storytelling breakout who has pivoted into podcasting, primarily; and Christopher Piatt, whose show the Paper Machete (weekly at the Green Mill) has migrated away from its live-lit roots to become much more of a variety show or, as he characterizes it, a “rock and comedy showcase,” which always includes at least a music act, stand-ups, and sketch acts.

Where we do need to up our game: inclusion. We all agree—each producer I spoke to or e-mailed cited the need for greater diversity on live-it stages. It’s improved greatly over the past decade or so, for sure, but improvement does not constitute completion, so as a community of producers, we must seek out and invite performers and audiences of color and LGBTQ people (as Jeremy put it: “Queer people shouldn’t have to wait around until Pride Month to tell a story”) and people with disabilities. We need to push beyond the comparative ease of “harvesting” performers and audiences from the north side to reflect the great expressive and cultural richness south of the Loop, and as Lily asked: “Where are the poor people? This country is 30 percent poor people. And I don’t see them [at these shows.] And if they are there, they don’t feel comfortable talking about it.”