What is StoryCorps, Anyway?

This review draws on conversations the four coauthors had about the StoryCorps phenomenon, which we appreciate as a provocative, contemporary example of the public use of oral narratives. Like many readers, we came to Listening Is an Act of Love through National Public Radio’s Friday morning StoryCorps segment. Our discussions were inspired by: the weekly story broadcast’s emotional “driveway moments,” our knowledge of the Corps’ dedicated facilitators, the public’s active participation in the traveling recording booths, and the announcement that StoryCorps interviews would be archived in the Library of Congress. What, we wondered, might StoryCorps disclose about the public uses of oral stories in the twenty-first century. As we met, Listening was published and added to our fascination with StoryCorps as a multiply-mediated phenomenon. We use this review to explore issues that, we think, reach beyond StoryCorps’ print form.

The “we” used throughout this review is collective, but the views presented here draw from our different disciplines and research histories. Our roots are in anthropology (Abelmann), folklore and history (Davis), communication and rhetoric (Finnegan), and psychology (Miller). In this review, we first examine the claims Isay makes for StoryCorps, not to undermine the great interest or significance of the project, but to think about its place in the genealogy of oral history and the implications of its radio, digital, print, and archival lives. We follow with a discussion of how we might think about StoryCorps’ narratives in terms of genre or mode. We close with a discussion of two issues which we argue are elided in the book’s presentation of the narratives, namely the narratives’ particular esthetics and historicity.

Listening Is an Act of Love presents a selection of forty-nine story excerpts chosen from more than ten thousand interviews collected since Isay started the project in 2003. Arranged into five thematic chapters that cover “Home and Family,” “Work and Dedication,” “Journeys,” “History and Struggle,” and “Fire and Water” (the latter highlighting stories of those who survived 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina), Listening is said to represent “some of the most remarkable stories” shaped into “a moving portrait of American life” that connects us to “real people and their lives—to their experiences of profound joy, sadness, courage, and despair, to good times and hard times . . .” (jacket copy).

Each story excerpt is the product of an interview produced (usually) two people guided by a Corps facilitator. As represented in this volume, in each case, the narrator interviews another person, usually a loved one, invoking a past experience from his or her life. Many of the stories draw on family or other intimate relationships. Isay notes that the resulting stories have been “fact checked” and that participants have given permission to have their stories edited and published. Each excerpt is followed by a black and white photo of the collaborating interviewees.

Isay and the book’s back jacket reviewers link StoryCorps to the practice of history, especially oral history, claiming that it will create an unprecedented, comprehensive record that Americans can consult to find out about the experiences of their elders. Isay ties StoryCorps to the life history work of folklorists John Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Zora Neale Hurston and, most directly, to the archived Federal Writers Project (FWP) recordings of the 1930s (253–54). His celebratory and documentary aims are grand: the project is “collecting stories of everyday Americans,” of “Americans of all ages and from all backgrounds and walks of life,” and “preserving them for future generations” (book jacket cover). We take some issue with these claims.

First, is this oral history? We would suggest that the highly sculpted techniques of the interviews (in many cases eliciting an often-rehearsed moment, story, or memory) and the forty-minute time limit on the interview diverge from the current practice of oral history. We and many of our...