TUPPER LAKE — Dwight Stevenson was all set and ready to go to work one morning, but the drunk man passed out in the back of his Subaru still hadn’t gotten the sleep out of his eyes.

“Excuse me,” Stevenson said to the stranger. “Can you please get out so I can go to work?”

The drunk man kinda moaned, which translated to, “Yeah, just give me a second.”

Stevenson was glad to find no puke in the backseat.

“Oh no, I’m a good drunk,” the man said.

“Good drunks don’t pass out in strangers’ cars,” Stevenson recounted to a few dozen audience members. “And that is why you should always lock your doors even in the North Country.”

The Adirondack Center for Writing and North Country Public Radio hosted a Howl Story Slam event at Raquette River Brewing in Tupper Lake Friday night.

The Howl Story Slam is a storytelling series held throughout the Adirondacks. Contestants get five minutes to tell any true story of their choosing and are judged on adherence to time, adherence to theme and story quality. The winners of each event are invited back for the Grand Slam competition in December.

Jessica Lawrence, the underwriting director for NCPR, co-hosted the event. She said the Story Slams give people a chance to be creative and entertaining in a public space filled with their friends and neighbors.

“I think when we have a coverage area bigger than the state of Vermont, it’s really challenging for us to be a presence in all the small communities,” she said. “The Howl Story Slam is a way for us to get in front of people and give them a chance to tell their stories. We want to give people a voice and be a group they can trust.”

The theme for this series of Story Slams is “hot mess.” It’s a pretty ambiguous theme, so stories ranged from a veterinarian thawing a dead cat with the help of a microwave to a man officiating a motorcycle race in a thong to a substitute teacher cursing out one of his students and immediately regretting it.

“It can be taken so many ways,” Lawrence said. “You can take ‘hot mess’ literally and figuratively. Everyone can find something that resonates with it, like, peeing your pants, which was the winner at an event in Canton, or like tonight — hopped up on cold medicine and getting into a car accident.”

Rob Carr of Saranac Lake won first place Friday night. He’s also a previous Grand Slam winner. Carr told a story about how he shifted from childhood to adult. It wasn’t a special ceremony like a bar mitzvah, but an embarrassing series of events that caused him to reevaluate his life. No spoilers here, but it involved squirrels, car crashes and class clowns.

Carr said he attends and participates in the Story Slams often for their artistic value.

“Storytelling goes back to the dawn of modern human civilization, and it still continues to bring people together and form communities, and entertain and educate,” he said. “You hear about people going to school to get formal education on science or teaching, but there’s a science to storytelling, as well. Listening to a really well-crafted and well-told story, to me, is just like looking at a beautiful painting or sculpture.”

Carr went over the time limit by a few seconds, which he said is nothing to get nervous about when telling a story.

“As long as you’re not going on for, like, 10 or 15 minutes, it should be fine,” he said. “I always tell people who are new to storytelling not to worry about the time. Tell your story. Worry about your arc, worry about how it comes together, and then worry about the clock later.”

The concept for the Story Slam can be compared to “The Moth” series on National Public Radio. However, the Moth features professionals who often participate in public storytelling. Howl encourages amateurs to compete.

“I think it’s a lot more rewarding,” said Baylee Annis from the Adirondack Center for Writing. “You get to see someone go on stage and really start to shine. It’s visually beautiful. It’s also so much more community focused because we don’t really present it as a performance. It’s more like people hanging around the bonfire and sharing. We also don’t know who’s going to show up to these events. That spontaneity makes it really magical.”