Dave Isay, Founder of StoryCorps, Speaks at St. Bernard’s

We had the privilege of welcoming Dave Isay to St. Bernard’s for the Speakers Bureau event on January 26, at which he addressed a crowd of over one hundred St. Bernard’s parents.  Dave is an American radio producer, founder of Sound Portraits Productions, and founder of StoryCorps, an ongoing oral history project.  He is the recipient of numerous broadcasting honors, including six Peabody Awards, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the TED prize, two Hillman prizes, a Rockefeller fellowship, and two Robert F. Kennedy journalism awards.

 

Dave told the story of how StoryCorps was founded with a single recording booth in Grand Central Station, and then grew to be a juggernaut.  StoryCorps invites friends, loved ones, and strangers to conduct forty-minute interviews at such intimate recording booths in Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, and other major cities, as well as in mobile studios nationwide.  These hundreds of thousands of recordings are mostly of previously unheard or ignored voices, all speaking in their own words.  Offering moving and surprising glimpses into the hearts of often marginalized and forgotten subjects, the interviews are a familiar feature of NPR’s Morning Edition.  They’re archived in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.  In 2010 StoryCorps began animating a selection of their interviews with the Rauch Brothers, thus making the leap from radio broadcast to television on shows such as PBS’s POV.

On the 26th, Dave played a number of stories and animations for us:  the man who, dying of cancer, gave a sort of hymn of love to his wife; the African-American woman who went to visit in prison the man who had murdered her son, ultimately befriending him; the gay kid in rural Washington in the 1950s whose father saw how he was and gave him permission to be himself; and many others as well.  The audience escalated into laughter and sank into tears repeatedly.

Dave’s s larger project has been a complete revision of how we understand information in our information age.  At a time when polls and statistics dominate the news, he is a champion of narrative and storytelling.  There are great truths to be found in polls—at least in accurate polls—but there is also great truth in the way people encapsulate their lives and experiences, and those in the future who would wish to know our time will learn from the StoryCorps archive things they would never understand from more conventional historical sources.  In fact, those of us who are bewildered by our own time, as so many of us are at present, stand to learn from these stories.  They are billed as the voices of ordinary people, but stand as their own corrective by demonstrating that no one is ordinary, and that every voice is worth hearing.

At a time when the ability of citizens to hear each other across divides of culture, class, and politics seems to be strained to the breaking point, he gave a message of hope about how stories engender intimacy, teach forgiveness, and surface joy.

He received an ovation at the end of his talk.