by Nathaniel Dunaway
Entertainment Editor
We here at The Journal are forgoing our new column “Portraits of a University” this week to help bring attention to and raise awareness of the National Day of Listening.
Launched by the non-profit oral history organization StoryCorps (who had a profound influence on the aforementioned column), the National Day of Listening is an unofficial holiday or day of observance that takes place the day after Thanksgiving — commonly known as Black Friday — and encourages everyone and anyone to sit down with loved ones and record their stories.
Founded in 2003 by David Isay, StoryCorps’ mission, according to their website, is to “provide people of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share and preserve the stories of our lives.”
Formal StoryCorps interviews take place in recording booths located in major cities across America, and these interviews are all cataloged in the Library of Congress, as well as on the StoryCorps website.
The National Day of Listening is a bit more informal, a more do-it-yourself approach. The day of observance was formed as an alternative to the consumer-oriented Black Friday, and its main purpose is to encourage spending time with family and hearing their stories.
StoryCorps is all about preservation of these stories, and suggests recording interviews with your loved ones. Nowadays this can be done with the voice memo function on the iPhone, or with any number of voice-recording apps available for iTunes or Android.
On the StoryCorps website, you can find an extensive list of questions to ask family members to help get started, including “How has your life been different than what you’d imagined?”, “What did you want to be when you grew up?” and “Do you have any favorite stories from your childhood?”
The idea behind the National Day of Listening is simple: listening, as StoryCorps’ motto tells us, is an act of love. How many of us have grandparents whose childhoods we know very little about? Aunts and uncles who’ve lived experiences we’ve never known of, simply because we’ve never thought to ask? One day, these people will no longer be present in our lives, and wouldn’t it be a shame for them to have left behind stories untold?
I plan to interview two of my grandparents next Friday, and maybe my parents as well. Eventually, I’d love to hear and record stories from every member of my family because listening is important, and family is important.
The purpose of this piece is not to condemn Black Friday or consumerism or materialism or any of that. The purpose instead is to suggest that many of us — all of us — have stories to tell. All we really need is for someone to ask us to tell them.
For more information, and to hear the stories of over 80,000 Americans, visit the StoryCorps website at storycorps.org.
