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Photo Derek Burritt
Sarah Geis, left, facilitates an interview between Hilary Greene, of Centerville (left at the table) and Rev. Dorothy Greene, of Larchmont, NY (right at the table). |
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Photo Derek Burritt
This Airstream trailer has been refitted as a mobile recording studio. |
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Capturing the stories of a nation one at a time
Banner Daily Update posted Mon. May 28
By Derek Burritt
Banner Staff
ORLEANS—What’s your story? National Public Radio wants to know and they are in Orleans to capture it on tape now.
The oral history of our own individual families is typically passed down from one generation to the next at holiday gatherings, sometimes resulting in numerous rolling eyes when “that story” is told yet one more time. But through these individual stories, a larger picture of our collective community at a given time can be formed and preserved. For four years in the 1930s, documentary projects created under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) recorded oral history interviews with everyday Americans across the country, and to date, these recordings are highly regarded as the most important social documentary archive ever created.
It is with this spirit that StoryCorps began in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal on Oct. 23, 2003. Created by the New York City-based Sound Portraits Productions, a non-profit public radio documentary production company, StoryCorps has grown into a “national project to instruct and inspire people to record one another’s stories in sound” that has documented more than 10,000 personal stories to date. One of the project’s MobileBooths is currently operating in Depot Square across from the Chocolate Sparrow until June 2.
“Our purpose is to give people an undistracted 40 minutes to tell a story,” says Susan Lee, one of the StoryCorps facilitators currently in Orleans.
According to Lee, the Orleans stop is the second half of a one-month tour of Nantucket and Cape Cod she and fellow facilitator Sarah Geis are doing in MobileBooth East.
The project works by reservation only, and the procedure is simple: at their scheduled time, an interviewer and an interviewee—for example a daughter and mother—arrive at the MobileBooth, which is a converted, metal Airstream trailer. They meet with a facilitator, who will guide them through the experience and run the recording equipment in the sound studio. However, the facilitator doesn’t take part in the interview, which is a one-on-one conversation between the two participants. All interviews are 40 minutes long and contributors leave with a copy of their interview on CD. Another copy of the interview, along with a photograph of its creators, is sent to and filed with The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Lee says she and Geis expect to facilitate roughly 60–70 interviews during the two weeks they’re in Orleans. Excerpts from selected StoryCorps interviews are broadcast locally and nationally every Friday during “Morning Edition” on National Public Radio (NPR).
MobileBooth East’s next stop is Providence, Rhode Island.
You can make reservations to tell your story at www.StoryCorps.net or call 800-850-4406.
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May 24th, 2007