Telling People’s Stories

Long before podcasts gained popularity, I listened with avid interest. Months or years worth of episodes piled up on my iPod like a pile of raked leaves in the fall that I dove into and binge-listened to my heart’s content. Years ago, I alternated between podcast binging and audiobook listening but the advent of the “podcast age” relegated the audiobooks to a thing of the past.

One of the original podcasts that gripped my attention was Storycorp, a podcast produced by NPR. Although Storycorp now has an app of its own and many other ways for ordinary people to sit down and interview each other, the initiative began as a mobile recording booth set up in New York City’s Grand Central Station with one simple premise: collect people’s stories. Anyone could walk into the booth with a relative or friend and interview each other. Each person had a story worth telling and as a result of these recordings, each story now finds a permanent home in the Library of Congress archives alongside interviews form the Great Depression made as a part of the Federal Writer’s Project, recordings of former slaves and many more.

I recently had the opportunity to revisit this podcast in my podcast rotation and fell in love with it all over again. Each person featured, as well as all the ones not featured, has such an amazing story to tell. These people have names that only those in their personal circle of acquaintances know. These people have not achieved some noteworthy status in the eyes of the public. Many of these people, if described using simple adjectives, would appear as the very definition of ordinary. Yet they are not. A soldier tells of the terrible loss of his wife, a fellow soldier, in Iraq, giving honor to her life and laying bare his struggles with grief and PTSD> A woman and her son, a man with Asperger’s syndrome, over the course of three separate interviews, paint the picture of life with an ordinary yet extraordinary disease over the course of his journey from middle school to the brink of adulthood after a tumultuous journey through college. A mother lost her son yet through forgiveness and love gained another, the boy – now man – who killed her biological son. I could continue but I will refrain.

As I listened, my ind continually turned to thoughts of my grandfather, a man whose mind contains an immense, incalculable wealth of stories and memories. Even before my grandmother’s death last summer, I started pulling out my phone every time my grandfather started a trip down memory lane. My voice memo app holds only a fraction of the total percentage of the stories and memories he knows. These stories deserve to be told as well.

Throughout the past year of my blog and the past decade plus in my journals, I have done a good job at telling my story. It would be disingenuous of me to say that my story should not be told. However, a singular focus on myself neglects all those around me. They deserve to have their stories told. In the future, I hope to carve out space here – and elsewhere, though here especially – to tell the story of others. I will have to start small with my expectations and plans but one day soon, I hope to bring you my grandfather’s story and the story of many more.