StoryCorps collects local treasures

[ Originally published on: Saturday, November 22, 2008 ]

The story Natalie Demers told was about listening.

In a small, closed room, the 34-year-old woman told her friend and colleague, Holly Mott, about growing up as a white South African during apartheid -- and how it affects her job as academic dean at Stoneleigh-Burnham School.

At the private, interracial all-girls' school she attended growing up in Durban, ''everyone had a different story to tell,'' and celebrated their differences, singing in Zulu, learning to gumboot dance and braiding each other's hair.

''It was a real celebration of difference, and we asked questions and we wanted to find out what life was like for students who lived in different parts of the country,'' Demers told Mott in a 40-minute conversation recorded Thursday for StoryCorps at Greenfield Community College.

The two women were among eight pairs of participants on the first of three days of recorded conversations at GCC as part of a 2½-week-long visit by the independent, nonprofit project that aims to celebrate the uniqueness of people's lives through the art of listening.

Twenty conversations will be recorded there through today before the traveling oral-history team heads to similar sessions in Lenox and then Northampton and Amherst. Friends, parents and children and couples come together for 40 focused minutes with only a StoryCorps technician present. All are encouraged to have one person ask the other meaningful questions about his or her life, and then simply listen.

The exercise comes as the Brooklyn-based organization launches its first ''National Day of Listening'' next Friday, encouraging people to create an annual post-Thanksgiving tradition of listening to each other's life stories, and recording them.

''The project tells people that they matter and they won't be forgotten,'' explains StoryCorps founder David Isay. ''In the midst of all of the technology we're barraged with and often distracted by … StoryCorps is a little slice of the day set aside to focus on someone important to you face-to-face; telling them you love them through listening. It's about honoring people who matter to you and remembering what life is all about.''

Thursday's conversation between Demers and Mott were seen as part of Stoneleigh-Burnham's plans to develop its own oral-history archives to help students at the all-girls' school gain strength from stories of other young women. It brought up recollections of witnessing terrible violence in South Africa, of Demers' Dutch father telling her about hiding Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Another Thursday afternoon conversation, between Marie and Matthew McCort of Granby, brought out surprises that they'd never heard during their 17 years together.

''In normal, everyday life, you don't ask questions like he asked me, if I remember when I first fell in love with him. In normal life, you just don't ask those questions that are so important.''

He asked her when she felt most alone in her life, why she loves him, how she felt when she gave birth to their son after a miscarriage and being told she would never be able to give birth.

''It's like seeing the puzzle come together more,'' the Granby landscaper and massage therapist said of getting a chance to understand his wife a little better.

''We need to be listening to each other and telling stories,'' she said. ''We've lost that. Nobody talks to each other any more.''

Demers, too, called the sharing experience ''a treasure … So often we skip by the deep stuff, the truth, the personal things, to get on with business. It was a real treat to be there with 40 minutes carved out. It was a bit uncomfortable, because we're taught not to say real things, but it was liberating, because I had to be honest. It was a huge experience, so much bigger than I ever thought it would be.''

With traveling sound booths that crisscross the country and permanent stations established in New York City and San Francisco, the 5-year-old oral history project has recorded more than 21,000 interviews. All are collected at the Library of Congress, and a small fraction of them are edited down for airing on National Public Radio's ''Morning Edition'' program on Fridays.

In addition, beginning Jan. 14, local public-radio station WFCR will broadcast parts of the 200 collected local StoryCorps segments Wednesdays during the program, just after 6:30 and 8:30 a.m.

WFCR was responsible for bringing StoryCorps back to the region following the success of a visit to Springfield earlier this fall.

The station is also setting up an archive of area oral histories at the W.E.B. Dubois Library at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

The project will travel to Northampton's Forbes Library Nov. 29-Dec. 2 and to Amherst's Jones Library Dec. 3-5.

On the Web: www.storycorps.net

www.nationaldayoflistening.org

You can reach Richie Davis at rdavis@recorder.com or (413) 772-0261 Ext. 269

 

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