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Behind the Scenes with Dave Isay, creator of StoryCorps
Interview conducted by Katia Dunn
> You were inspired by the Works Progress Administration and their
effort in the '30s to record the stories of everyday people. How did that lead
to StoryCorps?
For many years I'd been picking through the WPA recordings, looking for great
bits of tape and sort of sucking at the marrow at the acetate disks made in the
'30s and '40s. At some point I said to myself, "Why is it that this is the only
thing like this that's around? Why aren't there other beautiful recordings of
ordinary people?" That was one of the factors—but not the only one—that led to
StoryCorps.
> What were the other factors?
Most of all it was seeing the positive impacts that interviews had on the
people in the documentaries that we were producing here. I saw that in the
programs where family members interviewed one another, it really made a
difference in their relationship. The idea was to create this program where
this would be happening all day, everyday, for people. It's not about making a
documentary, not about creating work for broadcast; it's about using audio to
make a meaningful experience for citizens, for ordinary people. Any broadcast
that comes out of this is just gravy, it's just icing on the cake.
> Unlike your earlier projects, you're not the one conducting the
interview. Is it hard to take yourself out of the project so much?
I wasn't sure when we started this if there would be any broadcastable
material. It was this crazy narcissistic thing, like could anything broadcast
able ever happen if I wasn't in the room? Low and behold, lots of stuff going
on is broadcastable, so I realized I was inconsequential all along.
> Given all that, was it pretty scary going into this project?
Oh yeah. I was pretending all the way until it opened that this idea was going
to work, but really I had no idea. You kind of put yourself into a trance and
believe what you're saying. My gut told me that it might work, but until it
actually started running I didn't know. I've been very gratified. For me, it's
like this little miracle in Grand Central Station.
> Is there a master broadcast plan for the recordings?
There wasn't when we started, but there is now. The plan is to open StoryCorps
booths across the country. Chicago would be next, and the dream is in five
years to have seven permanent booths in big cities and three traveling mobile
booths. Hopefully it will be broadcast on local stations that are sponsoring
each booth. We're finding about one in 40 interviews has something that's
broadcastable, and we'll figure it out station by station. Who knows? But
again, it's not a broadcast project. That's all secondary. It's really about
what happens to people in the booth.
> I'm thinking about how anxiety producing it can be to listen to tape,
just praying that someone says something interesting. It must be nice not to be
so obsessed all the time about getting good tape.
It is nice. In some ways, I was actually just thinking last week, I'm living
out my dream. I get to sit here in my office, and seven days a week, eight
hours a day, there's tape being recorded. And then it gets filtered off and I
listen to the best of it. I'm a bit of a shut-in and there's nothing I like
more than editing, so to be able to not leave my office and have this tape come
to me is a dream come true. I'm pretty lucky.
> How hard has it been to get support for this project?
This is an insane project. We charge $10 a participant, and it costs us $100,
so every day all day were losing money. My company is just about bankrupt. But
we're soldiering on. We're just going forward and doing everything we can to
raise money. Eventually I think the participants are going to pay for the
project by giving individual donations, but we're just waiting for some angel
to come in and pull us off the treadmill.
> In 80 years, what do you hope the impact of StoryCorps will be?
I think if you're looking at the broad impact of the collection as a whole, you
get a sense of bottom-up history as opposed to top down history. Bottom-up
history is what the WPA recordings were very much about. It's about history
through the eyes of ordinary people. [In the StoryCorps interviews], you hear
about day-to-day life growing up in the Bronx in the 40s, or about being on
Coney Island in the '20s. We spend so much time documenting the stories of
famous people and politicians through the eyes of journalists. This is turning
the tables and letting people talk about history through their own experience.
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