Book #80: Listening Is an Act of Love edited by Dave Isay

Listening Is an Act of Love is a collection of oral histories collected by the Storycorps project. I'd never heard of Storycorps before (or maybe I had, and forgotten about it), but it's apparently this amazing, fantastically cool organization that goes around collecting people's stories, and the vast collection is really a big part of "the American Story"--a total ground-up version of history. Anyone who wants to is invited to come to one of their booths (one in Grand Central Station, one at Ground Zero, several traveling booths) and be interviewed (by a family member or a facilitator) and just tell their story. If they want, their story can be collected in the Storycorps archives or they just get a copy of it to keep for themselves. The book version is a compilation of some of the most interesting stories people have told and given to Storycorps to share. And, oh, they really are so interesting! They're mostly short snippets, mostly about very individual memories that in theory aren't very meaningful to anyone else, but just knowing how important they are to the speaker makes them fascinating. I LOVE oral history (I worked a bit with it while I was an undergrad) and I love the vision that Storycorps has of history. I would love to do something like this with people--interview them and collect their stories. Wouldn't that be just a great career to have? It's such a meaningful thing to collect and do--like the title of the book says, it's an act of love.

I'm looking at the Storycorps website (www.storycorps.org) in the hopes that the mobile station will be coming around here sometime--or more interestingly, around Utah to get my grandparents to do it--but it doesn't seem like it is. But I definitely want to keep checking this out.