StoryCorps Comes to Tulsa

NPR's oral history project gives you the chance to record your stories

Beginning October 23 for six weeks, StoryCorps in Tulsa will be recording 220 tales of ordinary and extraordinary like from people throughout northeastern Oklahoma. Here's a colorful flyer that details the process. An online sign-up page will be posted here to allow you to schedule your own interviews online.

Everyone has a story to tell. Stories about survival. Stories about meeting your spouse for the first time. Stories about glory days. Ordinary stories about ordinary people that, when voiced authentically, become extraordinary.

The spoken word was once our only history, responsible for imparting both fact and fiction to future generations. Oral history has lost some currency in recent years, but one project hopes to change that.

StoryCorps is a creation of Sound Portraits Productions, an independent production company based in New York City. Modeled after the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s, it’s a national project that aims to instruct and inspire people to record each others' stories in sound.

From 1936 to 1940, the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project employed hundreds of writers to conduct oral-history interviews with Americans and document their stories. Characterized by some as the federal government’s attempt to “democratize American culture,” the project gathered what remains the most important collection of American voices to date. StoryCorps hopes to build and expand on that work, becoming a WPA for the 21st Century.

Like the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project, the oral histories gathered by StoryCorps will be stored at the Library of Congress and will be accessible to future generations. Unlike the WPA, however, StoryCorps will not employ writers to collect these stories. StoryCorps is inviting people to interview one another.

“We’ve found that the process of interviewing a friend, neighbor, or family member can have a profound impact on both the interviewer and the interviewee,” says David Isay, the award-winning producer behind StoryCorps. “We’ve seen people change, friendships grow, families walk away feeling closer, understanding each other better.”

Isay started StoryCorps in 2003, by opening the first soundproof “StoryBooth” in New York’s Grand Central Station. In 2005, the project hit the road for its first national tour with two custom-built “MobileBooth” trailers outfitted with recording studios. Over the course of 10 years, he hopes to travel around the country collecting the stories of over 250,000 Americans.

Participants come to the booths to record personal stories that are important to them. A trained StoryCorps facilitator guides the interview and handles all of the technical aspects involved in recording it. At the end of a 40-minute session, participants walk away with a CD recording of the interview, and with their permission, a copy of the CD is sent to the Library of Congress.

In addition to preserving these stories in the Library of Congress, StoryCorps shares interview excerpts every Friday during NPR’s Morning Edition. Listeners across the country have heard veterans talking about their years of military service, a grandmother imparting advice on marriage, a birthmother explaining why she gave her son up for adoption, and survivors of 9/11 recalling their experiences. The stories vary greatly in both subject and narrative voice, and as a collection present a rich and textured picture of American life.

"StoryCorps is a manifestation of the ten-year mission of Sound Portraits Productions,” explains Isay. “[We strive] to tell the stories of ordinary Americans with dignity, celebrating the power and poetry in their words. We believe that listening is an act of love, and that StoryCorps will engage communities, teach participants to become better listeners, foster intergenerational communication, and help Americans appreciate the strength in the stories of everyday people they find all around them."