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“The Moth brought storytelling into mainstream culture. We’re just one of many little boats following it,” said Norah Dooley, professional storyteller, executive director, and cofounder of Massmouth.

Massmouth is by no means a small operation. From October through April, the four-year-old nonprofit hosts four or five slams a month at venues throughout Boston, culminating in a final competition that routinely draws more than 400 people. Massmouth teaches storytelling in a handful of area public schools and provides workshops for adults interested in honing their craft. Its website has video documenting most of its events; it even has its own social-network page where members can post a photo and a bio and contact one another, a sort of Facebook for storytellers.

Dooley has been active in the Boston storytelling community for more than 20 years. She first became acquainted with the practice in the late 1980s when she started listening to a public radio program called “The Spider’s Web,” on which WGBH alumnus Lee-Ellen Marvin would recruit local storytellers to read from children’s books.

“It was like a thunderbolt,” Dooley said. She took a storytelling class and became involved with the League for the Advancement of New England Storytelling, a still-active group that, according to its mission statement, is “dedicated to the appreciation and promotion of the art of storytelling in all its aspects: traditional, creative, educational, cultural, personal, and therapeutic.”

But in the last decade, Dooley became aware of something brewing in other cities. Story slams, with their emphasis on personal revelation and competition, seemed quite different from the milieu to which she had grown accustomed. What’s more, they were bringing in a new crowd, one younger and larger than that at the Around the Fire annual storytelling conference. At the center of this narrative explosion: The Moth.

“For once in my life, I was in the right place at the right time to catch a cultural wave,” Dooley said. She started hosting story slams modeled after The Moth’s, scoring the tellers and charging admission.

“Story slams were our first decisive action,” she said. “There had always been open mike and poetry slams, but never a story competition.” Storytellers at Massmouth and The Moth nominally compete for a chance at the finals and free tickets to subsequent events, but scoring the tellers has less to do with prizes than it does with raising the stakes of getting onstage.

“[Story slams are] for the audience,” Dooley said. “That’s the difference between us and an open mike and many places where people gather to support one another, which are all about supporting the teller. When people are paying $10 to come in, you’re there to give them something.”

To attract a younger crowd, Dooley created a MySpace page — and it worked. Those in the traditional storytelling community, Dooley said, had been resistant to getting online and initially were less than pleased by the cover charge and competitive atmosphere. But over time, she said, they’ve come around — some even turning up to compete at slams.

In September, Massmouth faced some competition of its own when The Moth launched its monthly slam on the same night as the regular Massmouth event at Club Passim in Harvard Square. Dooley was nervous at first, especially because each Moth performance has sold out.

But ultimately, “it’s great for us,” Dooley said. “We go down there [to Oberon] and leaflet the people in line.”

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Even though he didn’t get a chance to tell his story at The Moth contest, La Perle left the event inspired enough to attend a Massmouth storytelling workshop the following weekend. While there, he jettisoned his Bronx story for one about a car crash that happened when he first moved to Massachusetts. The instructor helped him build its arc.

Days later, he attended a Massmouth session at the Rosebud Diner in Somerville. The atmosphere was decidedly more low-key. A man in a sweater and jeans aimed a lone video camera at the microphone stand looming in the center of the stage. By the time the event started, around 40 people had filled the tables in front of the stage, spilling over into an adjacent room.