David Isay, creator of NPR’s StoryCorps project,
recently spoke at the Brattleboro Literary Festival. Isay shared clips
from his radio documentaries and talked about telling stories that
bring neglected American voices to a national audience.
- Listen to the VPR Presents broadcast:
Part One – Part Two – Part Three – Part Four - Listen to Isay’s complete presentation at the Brattleboro Literary Festival
- Listen to past StoryCorps recordings at NPR
- Learn more about StoryCorps or how to record your own story at their official website
Following his presentation, Isay spoke with VPR further. Hear him…
- Explain StoryCorps
- Share how he got into radio
- Recall his first story for radio
- Talk about the power of our stories
- Talk about the future of StoryCorps
- Share his driveway moments and his goals as a producer
- Discuss the station’s role in StoryCorps
- Riff off of Bobby Kennedy’s ripple theory
- Share his view of public radio
- Delight in the questions he’s asked at these events
- Compare the values of StoryCorps and public radio
- Detail VPR’s role
- Share why listeners should support public radio
Dave Isay is the founder of Sound Portraits Productions.
Over the past sixteen years his radio documentary and feature work has
won almost every award in broadcasting including four Peabody Awards,
two Robert F. Kennedy Awards, and two Livingston Awards for young
journalists. Dave has also received the Prix Italia (Europe’s oldest
and most distinguished broadcasting honor), a Guggenheim Fellowship
(1994) and a MacArthur Fellowship (2000).
He is the author (or co-author) of four books based on Sound Portraits radio stories: Holding On (W.W. Norton & Co., 1995); Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago (Scribner, 1997); Flophouse (Random House, 2000); and Milton Rogovin: The Forgotten Ones (W.W. Norton & Co., 2003).
Dave is also creator of the oral-history initiative StoryCorps,
which launched in October 2003. StoryCorps is a national oral history
project to instruct and inspire people to record each others’ stories
in sound. Its purpose is to help you interview your grandmother, your
uncle, the lady who’s worked at the luncheonette down the block for as
long as you can remember—anyone whose story you want to hear and
preserve.