By Kiera Butler
Even in New Orleans’s French Quarter, where one expects a certain amount of weirdness, the StoryCorps mobile booth looked out of place. Something like a cross between a gypsy wagon and a futuristic pod, it is about the size of your average RV, but its gleaming silver exterior is rounded like a capsule. The tinted windows let those inside look out but passersby can’t see in (this doesn’t seem to discourage curious people from knocking on the door all day and asking about StoryCorps). Inside, the booth has two rooms: one is a soundproof recording studio, where all kinds of people come, usually in pairs, to record interviews with loved ones; the other, a kind of business area with a table and chairs, where the booth’s facilitators can make calls and work on their laptops.
Sitting at the table and wearing a pair of wireless headphones, I listened to six interviews during my eight-hour day in the booth. Although Katrina was not everyone’s main focus, it was clear that it’s hard for New Orleanians not to think about the hurricane; it loomed at the edges of almost every conversation I heard. A woman asked her mother about retired life — and what it had been like to evacuate to Florida during the storm. A few Vietnamese-American waitresses from Café du Monde talked about their boss — and what it had been like to ready the café for reopening after the storm.
StoryCorps is difficult to describe and, on paper, it sounds like a pretty strange idea. A set of instructions for someone who wants to participate in the program but knows nothing about it might go something like, “First you choose someone — anyone — who you think has interesting things to say. Then you take them to a soundproof booth, pay ten dollars, and ask your chosen person about whatever you want for forty minutes. You will receive a recording of the interview, and so will the Library of Congress. And also, if you and your interviewee are interesting, funny, or poignant enough, there is a small chance that a portion of your interview might end up on public radio.”
With little else to go on besides his faith in stories, David Isay, a radio documentary producer, founded StoryCorps in 2003. After a decade of listening to ordinary people record extraordinary stories, Isay knew that most people had something not only worth saying, but worth preserving. “We believe that the stories of everyday people are as interesting as Donald Trump and TomKat,” Isay told me. “StoryCorps tells people they matter and they won’t be forgotten.”
A quirky concept, perhaps, but Isay was able to secure a handful of grants to support StoryCorps. Almost seven thousand people have participated in the program so far, and last year, StoryCorps expanded. In addition to the original two New York City booths (one in Grand Central Station and another at Ground Zero), two new mobile booths now travel with a crew of four facilitators, stopping for weeks at a time in cities and towns across the country. When a mobile booth pulled into New Orleans a few weeks ago, all the interview spots were filled within a week of the booth’s arrival.
In part, StoryCorps is successful because it generates its own publicity. The program is familiar to the millions of people who hear the segments from the interviews that air on the National Public Radio program Morning Edition, some of whom then sign up to participate when they find out a booth will make a stop nearby. But the fact that so many people arrive confident that their stories are worthwhile is indicative of something that has changed only in the past few years.
“People used to be surprised when you wanted to record them,” says Michael Taft, who runs the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress, where the StoryCorps recordings are archived. No more. The idea of the recorded personal narrative has settled into the public consciousness. Public Radio International’s This American Life draws more than 1.7 million listeners every week. More than fifty public radio stations nationwide have picked up WNYC’s Radio Lab, another new narrative-heavy program. And public-radio programmers keep finding ways to incorporate the stories of ordinary people into regular programs, hoping to capture an audience that craves personal stories. As a result, it has occurred to more and more people that they — or people they know — have tales to tell that are just as moving as those they hear on the radio. Taft reported that the number of requests he gets from people hoping to archive recordings they’ve made of their family members has increased tenfold in the past several years. The veteran radio producer Jay Allison, who runs the radio documentary community Web site Transom, says thousands of people each month view the part of the site that offers how-to advice on equipment and technique.
Still, the narrative renaissance has deeper roots. National Public Radio first employed the “everyday person” narrative form in the early seventies, when the network was born, and when historians in the United States were in the midst of a major paradigm shift. From the civil rights movement, student antiwar protests, and the women’s movement, the nation learned that ordinary people — not just the rich and powerful — make history. Historians like Howard Zinn and Eric Foner revolutionized the field by considering politics and culture from the point of view of the poor. In the eighties and nineties an academic backlash against bottom-up history took away some of the revolution’s momentum, but today, some historians are again finding reasons to focus on ordinary people. Roy Rosenzweig, a history professor at George Mason University, has spent the last several years collecting personal stories for the online digital history archive he created. “Some people might see bottom-up history as old-fashioned,” says Rosenzweig. “On the other hand it remains a pretty powerful strand.” Although many historians these days are mostly focused on global powers, Rosenzweig says there’s another new contingent that’s interested in “micro-history” — the study of the minutiae that get lost in the din of twenty-first-century life. Individual voices are some of the “grains of sand” that interest these micro-historians.
Intellectual and broadcasting trends aside, storytelling is such a timeless and basic human activity that it exists, in many ways, outside the world of zeitgeist. Henry Jenkins, a professor of media studies at MIT, recently pointed out to me that even as communities grow more fractured, people still seek out opportunities to hear stories — and to tell them. “The twentieth-century history of mass media should have destroyed the storytelling tradition,” says Jenkins. “But it didn’t.” He’s right. There has never been a time when people haven’t needed personal stories. We don’t want stories any less than we did ten thousand years ago. In fact, we may want them more. “We are social beings, and our lives got kind of fragmented — our media lives, our civic lives, our personal lives,” says Rob Rosenthal, director of the radio program at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. “Listening to these kinds of stories on the radio can connect us to one another.”
If you ask radio-savvy people why there are so many personal narratives on the air these days, many will respond with just one word: Ira. And in some ways, they’re right. Ira Glass, host of This American Life, has single-handedly brought personal narrative radio — and public radio in general — to a level of hip no one ever thought possible. Among a certain set a kind of Ira-mania has taken hold. “The Sex Pistols were to punk rock as This American Life,” says Rosenthal.
Ira Glass didn’t invent the personal narrative radio form (one could credit the oral historian Studs Terkel with that). But since the early nineties, largely because of a core group of freelance radio documentarians, the genre has gathered momentum. In 1993, long before he started StoryCorps, David Isay gave tape recorders to two kids on Chicago’s South Side. They documented their experiences growing up in the projects, and the result was the widely aired documentary, Ghetto Life 101, one of many pieces Isay made with his production company, Sound Portraits. For the past decade, Joe Richman, a freelance radio documentarian, has been producing pieces that let people like residents of a retirement home, prison inmates, and a teenager with AIDS in South Africa tell their stories in their own voices. And Dan Collison, who in 1994 founded his documentary company, now called Long Haul Productions, has followed his “everyday” subjects (a woman trying to adopt, a senior citizen moving on to a retirement community, a profoundly terrible high school football team) for months, sometimes years. During the nineties, the work of these documentarians and others like them quietly amassed, airing here and there on public radio. But after This American Life gained popularity the others became more visible as well. In fact, Ira Glass says that people have a way of giving him credit for every radio narrative they hear. Recently, a woman came up to him and told him how much she loved his piece about people living on the Bowery. A nice compliment, but it was Isay’s story.
There’s something to the Cult of Ira, but his skills are not what make personal narratives compelling. Glass himself agrees, and not just because he is famously self-effacing. The actual subject matter of his shows, he told me, is “very basic human drama”: relationships between parents and children, say, or husbands and wives; expectations set too high, expectations set too low. “It’s kind of hard to turn away from that stuff,” says Glass. “I feel the same way about that that I do about the first time you see The Jerry Springer Show. Snobby people will say, ‘How can you be interested in that?’ And it’s like, if you can’t be interested in that, who are you? Some guy’s cheating on his girl and they force them to encounter each other on stage? That’s the stuff of life, man.”
Perhaps I am a snobby person, but I wasn’t sure I bought it. The lurid spectacle of Jerry Springer seemed a far cry from the subtle, respectful This American Life. It was only after I spent a day in the StoryCorps mobile booth in New Orleans that I began to understand what Glass meant.
About halfway through that day, Cynthia Scott, a local artist, interviewed her fifty-eight-year-old fiancé, Les Colonello, a jazz musician. Colonello had remained in the couple’s house during the storm, and he described both the harrowing few hours when his house literally began to fall apart around him and the days immediately following the storm, when he and a few neighbors banded together to survive.
It was clear from the beginning of the interview that Colonello knew how to tell a story — his memory for details was impressive, and his language was specific and descriptive. He described, for example, how he and a neighbor, in a boat they had grabbed as it floated down their street, took food for the neighborhood from a pitch-black, flooded Winn Dixie.
But as I listened, I realized that Colonello’s story was most compelling during the moments when some small detail struck a chord in a way that made the disaster understandable on a human scale. One of those moments came when Colonello described climbing up into the rafters of his house to repair the roof. From the rafters, he saw that the wind had destroyed the local horse-racing track, and trees littered the streets. “All the neat property lines the neighbors worked so hard on were gone,” he said. “There was no ‘this is my territory, that’s your territory’ anymore.” In a few sentences, Colonello had made me understand the chaos after the storm in a way that I hadn’t before.
At the end of my day in the booth, I visited the StoryCorps Web site and listened to clips of interviews that had aired on Morning Edition. I wanted to get a sense of which kinds of interviews made it onto the radio, and what made them work. On first listen, the clips didn’t seem to have much in common. A twelve-year-old boy with Asperger’s Syndrome interviewed his mother. Two cousins remembered their neighbor and Sunday school teacher. A woman told her husband about what it had been like to beat cancer. But as I listened, I realized that part of the appeal of the clips was that in less than five minutes, each of the interviews gave a real sense of someone else’s experience. We are storytellers and listeners by nature, but we are also, by nature, curious about other people.
And just as Glass suggested with his Jerry Springer comparison, we go to great lengths to satisfy that curiosity. Later that same evening, the concierge at my hotel in New Orleans told me that guests often sheepishly ask her where they can go to see hurricane damage. Most of the tour companies in New Orleans, she said, had started to offer Katrina packages: tours through some of the city’s hardest-hit areas. Understandably, the tours disgust more than a few locals who suspect that a little schadenfreude is what’s motivating the gawkers. But while it’s unlikely that a few hours of cruising through the wreckage in an air-conditioned bus will substantially enlighten anyone, it’s possible that the basic urge that compels tourists to see the damage for themselves is related to what made me want to keep listening to Colonello’s hurricane survival story.
In the days following Katrina, we learned what it meant for a levee to break, saw maps of flooding, and heard about the extent of the damage. But after a news event of that magnitude the sheer volume of print, broadcast, and Internet coverage can be hard to digest. Stories like Colonello’s help make sense of the information overload by making us feel closer to the people who are affected.
Whether or not Colonello’s story makes it onto the radio is up to the programmers at the New Orleans public radio station, WWNO. StoryCorps partners with public radio stations near each of the mobile booths’ stops, and the facilitators provide transcripts and tape for the station to edit into short segments. At the time I was in New Orleans, none of the StoryCorps interviews had aired yet. But when I spoke to WWNO’s programming director, Fred Kasten, he told me that when he begins to select material from StoryCorps, he will probably look for stories — not necessarily all about the hurricane — that tease meaning from the mundane. “The minutiae of daily life can be very interesting, particularly in the hands of a good raconteur,” says Kasten.
For the past hundred years of broadcast history we have depended on a small group of good raconteurs to bring us our news, but recently it has become increasingly true that getting a story to an audience does not require the blessing of a network. The larger context of the personal-narrative renaissance has to do with the democratization of news-bringing, and the fact that perhaps right now we are remembering something that we have always known: good raconteurs are everywhere.
And with new technology, for those who want to give their stories a better chance at traveling further than an archive at the Library of Congress, the equipment is more affordable and easier to use than ever before. When Isay, Richman, and Collison started out, producing a radio piece required an entire studio full of expensive gear. Now, anyone with a few basics — a mini-disc recorder, a decent microphone, a computer, and a copy of the free version of the editing program ProTools — can make a documentary.
And an audience is easier to come by, too. Not even a decade ago, the only way for an amateur radio producer to get a piece distributed to public radio stations was to subscribe to an expensive satellite-feed system. The system still exists, but it is no longer the only place that programmers look for material. In 2002, radio producers Jay Allison and Jake Shapiro founded PRX (www.prx.org), a sort of Internet sounding board for radio pieces. Anyone can post a piece, and both a review board and community members review submissions. Public radio stations often troll PRX for content and, after paying a licensing fee, a programmer can pick up a story from the site and air it. According to Shapiro, more than 8,000 pieces have been licensed by more than 220 stations.
Another of Allison’s Web projects is Transom (www.transom.org), a site that provides tips and advice to radio documentarians, and showcases a new documentary each month. Some of the work that Transom features comes from people with radio training, but a good bit comes from novices with extraordinary stories — and the drive to put in the long hours necessary to perfect a radio piece.
One of those novices with a story was Sue Mell, whose documentary, “Girl Detectives,” was featured on Transom in December 2003. Mell originally hoped to attract the attention of Ira Glass, but she knew that a wide gulf of technical expertise stood between her and This American Life, so she turned to Transom. Mell now describes herself as “the Transom poster girl” — she produced the first version of her draft by following Transom’s advice on equipment and editing technique. Later, after Allison expressed interest in featuring “Girl Detectives” on the site, she worked with a Transom editor to polish the piece into a radio-ready documentary. Of course, Mell had a particularly compelling story. She had been working as a stand-up comedian in San Francisco in 2003 when her friend Laura’s husband, Jay, was found dead, his throat slit, in a movie theater parking lot. The police ruled his death a suicide, claiming that he had planned to make it look like a murder so his family could collect on an insurance policy. But Laura was sure that her husband wouldn’t have killed himself. “Girl Detectives” tells the story of how, without the help of the police, Laura and a few close friends tried in vain to solve Jay’s murder.
On Allison’s recommendation I visited the archive section on Transom and listened to “Girl Detectives” in MP3 format. Mell lays out the story in simple language, but from the beginning it’s clear that, just as Colonello’s story was not just about a hurricane, “Girl Detectives” is not just about a murder. Rather, it makes a subtle point about what it means to feel not just bereft, but also frustrated. “We’re all so helpless in the face of death, and even more so in the face of an unsolved crime, of a murder,” Mell says at the beginning of the piece. “And women, women are always relegated to the role of providing comfort where really, there isn’t any to be had. We make phone calls, we make coffee, we hand out Kleenex, and we’re advised, over and over again, not to antagonize the police. The police will find the answers. This, after all, is their job.”
After it aired on Transom, Mell came pretty close to getting “Girl Detectives” on This American Life. But Glass wanted to take the story in a different direction; among other things, he wanted Laura’s voice in the piece, and Mell knew that speaking on air would make her friend uncomfortable. So in the end, there was no This American Life for “Girl Detectives.” Nevertheless, the piece has slowly found a substantial audience. A version aired on the San Francisco public radio program Invisible Ink, and it’s exposed to Transom’s roughly two thousand daily viewers as well. Through “Girl Detectives,” Mell has found that these days, an important story doesn’t necessarily need an important radio show to carry it. And when that story is about what it feels like to be voiceless and powerless, it is especially important to know that people are listening.
Kiera Butler is an assistant editor at CJR.
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