Excerpt: ‘Listening Is an Act of Love’

Because of the intimacy of the interviews and concerns about identity theft and privacy issues, from the earliest days of the project we were apprehensive about making the entire collection accessible to the general public. We decided initially not to put full interviews on the Web. (For the time being, researchers can go to the Library of Congress, show an ID, and listen to any session they choose.) Instead, we chose to edit a short excerpt from one interview each week on our Web site for all to hear. A handful of these were broadcast on public radio in New York and nationally on NPR. In May 2005, we began airing StoryCorps stories every Friday on NPR’s Morning Edition, the ­top-­rated morning radio show in the country, to an audience of more than 13 million listeners. Today, it’s among the most popular features on public radio.

Other aspects of the project seemed to work equally well. The facilitators took to their jobs with skill and grace, their presence deeply valued by participants. Something about that third person in the booth seemed to keep the conversations flowing. Instead of saying, “I told you that story a million times!” and clamming up, cantankerous grandmothers would turn to the facilitator and launch into an old family yarn as if the facilitator were listening for the entire world. Facilitators started referring to this as “the magic of the booth.”

From the day we opened, StoryCorps has worked relentlessly to reach out to underserved populations. We have recorded interview sessions with homeless people, the mentally ill, foster care kids, people with AIDS, and beyond. Early on, a homeless woman came to the booth to tell her story. (When a participant comes alone, the facilitator will ask the questions.) At the end of the session she insisted on giving the facilitator her food stamps as a contribution to the project. She ­wouldn’t take no for an answer. Then she headed off to the bank so she could lock the CD of her interview in a safe-deposit box along with her most valuable possessions.

Part of the appeal of the “citizen interview” model of Story­Corps is that sessions can be conducted in any language the participants choose, as long as one person in the pair can communicate minimally with the facilitator. As soon as we opened, we began recording interviews in Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Tibetan. At some point Chinatown’s Cantonese community got word of StoryCorps, and it briefly became something of a fad there. We had days when everyone who came to the booth recorded their sessions in ­Cantonese —­ telling stories, laughing, crying. Most of the facilitators ­didn’t have a clue what was being said, but they knew that the participants were having a ball.

Some people came back over and over again. A schoolteacher named Louisa Stephens made a reservation every few weeks to come to the Grand Central booth. Eventually, she recorded close to one hundred interviews with family, friends, students, or even people she met in the subway or walking down the street. One day early on, a facilitator asked what kept drawing her back to the booth. “I love it,” she said. “I exercise restraint and discipline in not coming down here every couple of days. You come to the booth and the door shuts, and it is just so quiet. It feels like something in your brain opens up, and you can expose parts of yourself too fragile to expose to the noisy world. And you can engage each other in a way that you ­can’t in ordinary life. It also makes me feel as if I’m speaking to people in the future — it gives me a toehold into another world. It’s just perfect.”

Not all the news in those early days was as encouraging. From the very start, we believed that StoryCorps should be accessible to everyone at little or no charge. Each interview costs us more than $250 to record, but we decided to ask for only $10 as a suggested donation to participate. If participants ­couldn’t afford the $10, no problem; if they wanted to give more, great. We knew this business model gave new meaning to the term ­non­profit, but were determined to make up the difference through donations and grants.

We had some early success with foundations, but before long the rejection letters started piling up. StoryCorps is an undertaking unlike anything attempted before, so it ­didn’t fit in any foundation’s guidelines. No funders seemed interested in taking a risk on this untested project. We watched our bank account dip each week. Before long we were perilously close to bankruptcy. I asked a close friend from college, now a banker, to take a look at our books and assess the situation. He said it could go either way: If we got an infusion of cash over the next few weeks, we might survive; otherwise, it was all over.

Fortunately, a few days later, some visionary philanthropists stepped in. The funding ­freeze-out ended. ­We’ve been expanding the organization ever since. Today, StoryCorps is one of the ­fastest-­growing nonprofits in the nation.

A few months after we opened, a Brooklyn couple came to the Grand Central booth: Danny and Annie Perasa. He worked as a clerk at ­Off-­Track Betting; she was a nurse. The two were consummate New York characters with storied lives and thick Brooklyn accents. They had come to the booth because they wanted to document their love affair. Danny recalled their first date ­twenty-­five years before: “I said, ‘I’m going to deliver a speech, and at the end you’re going to want to go home. You represent a dirty ­four-­letter word, and that word is love. If ­we’re going anywhere, ­we’re going down the aisle because I’m too tired, too sick, and too sore to do any other damn thing.’ And she turned around and said, ‘Of course ­I’ll marry you.’ ”

Excerpted from "Listening Is an Act of Love" by Dave Isay. Copyright 2007 Dave Isay. Reprinted with permission of Penguin Press. All rights reserved.

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