Category: Narratives

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StoryCorps, the initiative that helps give people the opportunity to record, share, and preserve their own personal stories, has been around since 2003. What started out as just an idea and experiment from founder Dave Isay turned into an American success, and it’s now a global project. Isay is the winner of the 2015 Ted Prize, and with the funding from the million-dollar award, he and the StoryCorps team have launched the new StoryCorps app.

A week after the app launched, I got the chance to talk with Isay on Skype about StoryCorps, its app, and what it means for the future of the oral history project. Below is our edited conversation with some audio clips.

Q&A

Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps, accepts the 2015 Ted Prize and announces his Ted Prize wish -- a StoryCorps app. Screenshot courtesy of Ted.com.

Sonia Paul: Dave, could you please just introduce yourself and StoryCorps a bit more, for people who might not know much about it?

Dave Isay: Sure. I’d been in public radio for many, many, many years and used to make documentaries for NPR. But I was always an independent journalist, and then had this idea about a dozen years ago to start StoryCorps. I did all social justice documentaries, and saw when I did these documentaries that people who felt like they hadn’t been listened to before, that the act of being interviewed could be an important moment in their lives, sometimes a transformative moment in their lives. I could literally see people’s backs straighten when they’d be listened to for the first time, whether it was in a prison, or psychiatric hospital, or wherever it was.

So I had this crazy idea twelve years ago to start this project that kind of, in a way, turns documentary on its head, at least broadcast documentary. And it says that the purpose of what we’re doing is not about the final product. It’s not about doing interviews to create the final product; the purpose is the interviews themselves.

I wanted to give many, many, many people the chance to be listened to in this way. So I put a booth in Grand Central Terminal where two people can come, and they’re met by a trained facilitator. You sit in basically a soundproof booth for forty minutes. And you have a conversation. And a lot of people think of it as, “If I had forty minutes left to live, what would I say to this person, or ask of this person who means so much to me?” So very intense conversations.

Photo by Renée Johnson on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

At the end of the interview, you get a copy. And another copy stays with us and goes to the American Folklore Center at the Library of Congress. So your great-great-great grandkids can somehow get to know your grandmother through her voice and stories.

So it was a kind of crazy idea that took a little while to take off. But it worked, and we’ve now recorded about 65,000 interviews, with about 100,000 to 110,000 people. Most people come in pairs, across America, all fifty states, thousands of cities and towns, in eighty different languages.

It also turned out that there was pretty amazing content coming out of these interviews. So we also have broadcasts on NPR every Friday, and we’ve done animations for PBS. We have a couple of dozen of those, and we have books that have come out, all of which just celebrate the poetry and wisdom and beauty in the words of everyday people all around us. And it’s a project about listening, and helping us recognize our shared humanity — that if we spend a little more time listening to each other and a little less time shouting at each other, we’d be a better and stronger country. So it very much speaks to the core values of public broadcasting.

Here’s an example of one of a StoryCorps animation: “Danny and Annie,” a married couple who recount their twenty-seven-year romance, from their first date to Danny’s final days with terminal cancer.

Dave Isay: And then a couple of months ago, I got word of this Ted Prize. Ted is the amazing organization that has the conferences and does these videos that everybody knows about. I had actually never even seen a Ted Talk. I was the last person in the universe, when they called me and told me I had been nominated for this thing. But I’ve since seen a bunch, and they asked me to come up with a wish for humanity, which I did, and then got a call a few weeks later which said that I’d won, and then a couple of weeks ago gave a Ted Talk where we announced what that wish was. And we’ve created an app that takes StoryCorps out of the booth and gives anybody, anywhere, the chance to record a StoryCorps interview. It’s basically a digital facilitator that walks through the StoryCorps process, and then with one tap you can upload your interview to the Library of Congress. So that’s a very, very long answer, from Brooklyn to India, to your question!

Sonia Paul: Ok, thank you. And so, just to make sure we’re understanding correctly, has StoryCorps always worked with the booth setup, in that two people or more duck into the booth to do the interview?

Dave Isay: Yes, well they don’t duck into a booth. Because now it’s very hard to get an appointment. You know, you make a reservation. And you come into the booth, and you record the interview with the help of a facilitator. We also do these in quiet rooms around the country.

What changes with the app is that the app becomes the facilitator. So that allows us to do many, many more interviews, and you don’t have to come to StoryCorps, you don’t have to make a reservation. Anyone can do these interviews. And, you know, it’s an experiment just like StoryCorps was an experiment 11 years ago when we opened up. And we’re going to see — you know, we’ve seen, really, a tremendous response.

I don’t have the stats today, but it’s obviously growing very, very quickly. If you go on the site and see the interviews that are coming in from all over the world. And we’ll see what happens.

  IMG_6415IMG_6416IMG_6417

 

Screenshots from the StoryCorps app. It walks you through the process of doing an interview.

Sonia Paul: Yeah, and so I was curious about this idea of the app becoming a digital facilitator. Do you think that having the other human being there in the beginning ever added to the experience in any way?

Dave Isay: Of course, yes! I mean, having the facilitator there was huge. But you can’t scale. You know, obviously our facilitators are paid; they’re highly trained. But, you know, we’re doing 5,000 interviews a year, 6,000 interviews a year. And that is the gold standard of the StoryCorps experience, and it always will be. But it was time to experiment and see if we could spread this wider and spread this to places where we couldn’t necessarily go with facilitators.

So again, it’s an experiment. And having a facilitator is great. We do our best to approximate the facilitator with the phone; we’ll see how it works. I’m very encouraged by the interviews that are coming in that, from what I’ve heard, and again, they’re coming in far more quickly than what I had expected, a week into it.

But people are being respectful, and they’re taking it seriously. You know, they’re not the same as StoryCorps interviews, but people are having the opportunity with this app to, you know, have meaningful conversations. And that’s what it’s all about.

Dave Isay expands on the differences between the app and the original StoryCorps experience:

Sonia Paul: And so what kind of hurdles are you anticipating in getting the app off the ground, if anything?

Dave Isay: My first hurdle was that I didn’t think anybody would use it. I mean, the technique is the easy part. When we started StoryCorps, no one actually came to the booth. And it took years before people understood what was going on, and we ended up kind of selling out the booth, and that was because of the public radio broadcasts. But, you know, there are stories coming in from all over the world every couple of minutes now. I did not expect this kind of pick up this quickly.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen with it [the app]. But I think what we need to do is we need to keep pushing out best practices to people, and encouraging them to do interviews that approximate the StoryCorps experience as closely as possible, and get the word out. And especially because StoryCorps was born out of a kind of social justice, documentary work to, make sure that people who feel like their voices are least heard know about this and have the opportunity to be heard through the app.

Sonia Paul: Right. Yeah, and I downloaded it, and I was looking through it. I mean, obviously not everyone in the world speaks the same language, but the default language for the app right now is English. So I was curious, how do you plan to make it available in other languages and work around issues of translation and interpretation?

Dave Isay: We’re going to translate it into other languages. I mean, this is all very new. But, you know, the app has been created in a way where we can swap other languages. Ted has a community of translators who are getting to work to start translating this thing, and we’ll have a plan and slowly roll it out, depending upon resources, in other languages, as time goes on.

Isay discusses a potential model for how StoryCorps could work in other countries:

Sonia Paul: So I have a question now that’s not directly related to StoryCorps, but it’s kind of related. Have you been paying attention to the emergence of these sort of live broadcasting tools like Meerkat and Periscope?

Dave Isay: Yeah, two weeks ago, yeah.

Sonia Paul: Yeah, so now people can essentially livestream their lives to the world. And now, with social media, putting a status update on Facebook or Twitter is pretty normal for a lot of people. And obviously, StoryCorps is very different from those things because the point has always been to preserve the art of that interview. But do you think we, as a society, are sort of heading in a direction in which people are becoming more accustomed to simply blasting out their lives more, rather than asking the kinds of questions to others that we need to ask in order to actually understand?

Dave Isay: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I do feel like StoryCorps is different. I mean, StoryCorps is an act of generosity. It’s about listening to another person. And it’s kind of the opposite of the selfie, right? And I do see there are some interviews where people are getting on and doing their own life story, and it seems to be helpful to them. I mean, I’m looking at what’s come in in the last couple of hours, and, you know, it’s mostly people talking to each other.

I do think that this is different. The stuff that I’m hearing — and I’m not a tech person, I am not that interested in a lot of tech stuff. But from what I’ve seen from social media and elsewhere, the kind of stuff happening on this app feels very different than what you see elsewhere.

Dave Isay and I discuss more the kinds of conversations StoryCorps produces. But should we need an app to do this?:

Sonia Paul: And if you happen to know, what countries are using the app?

Dave Isay: You know, you’d have to look. I don’t even — I can’t even recognize the languages. If you browse, it seems like a lot of them are in the U.S., from like, all kinds of different towns. It’s largely younger people who are using it.

But, you know there’s Arabic and there’s French, and you know, I don’t know. You’d have to check. And I haven’t had. And you know, it’s Monday morning, and we haven’t gotten the status yet of what’s happened over the weekend. But they’re clearly coming in from all over the world. And unfortunately, we don’t have geo-locate yet on this app, so I can’t easily tell you. But that’ll happen in a couple of weeks.

Sonia Paul: Right, and so, just to be clear, you’re using the funding from the Ted Prize to go forward with this app, that’s how you’re able to do it?

Dave Isay: Used.

Sonia Paul: Oh, right, used! But was the idea for the app something you had before the Ted Prize, though?

Dave Isay: Yeah, but it wasn’t going to happen. Doing something global and doing this app wasn’t going to happen in the next five years, until the Ted Prize came around. But you know, Ted is about digital, and it’s about global. So there was only one way to yes to work with them. And I’m glad. You know, it’s a great thing. It’s great to be pushed out of your comfort zone, and this was a real push. And it’s exciting to see where it’s going.

Here’s the full audio interview with Dave Isay:

Sonia Paul is a freelance journalist based in India, and is the editorial assistant at PBS MediaShift. She is on Twitter @sonipaul.

This piece originally published on April 7, 2015, on PBS MediaShift.

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Outside the Cafe Coffee Day where we met in Lucknow, India.
Outside the Cafe Coffee Day where we met in Lucknow, India.

It was almost a year ago, at a Cafe Coffee Day in Lucknow, that she first stunned me with the comfort with which she carried herself. She had paired a dark men’s suit slightly too big for her petite frame with a sky blue and silver tie, a colour combination that synced well with the blue glow emitting from her Bluetooth earpiece. She was still chatting away on it when she sat down, splaying her legs wide and hunching forward slightly as she brought the conversation – a work-related one – to an end. Once she put the phone down, she apologised for making me wait, and extended her hand to shake mine briskly.

Other than a hairband keeping her shoulder-length hair away from her face, nothing about the 24-year-old woman’s dress or gestures was feminine by conventional Indian standards. Her androgynous features, not to mention an obvious self-assurance, worked to her advantage. Hardly anyone cast a second glance at her even though cross-dressing is not by any means common in Lucknow.

A mutual friend had suggested we meet, as I was reporting a story on Lucknow’s gay community at the time. Aside from the city’s elite circles, the LGBTQ scene here is virtually nonexistent. Lucknow is a growing city, but at the same time it climbs to modernity, it clings to the past. It remains tightly conservative. Local organisations working in HIV/AIDS prevention double as social support groups for its more working-class employees and target populations. These populations often refer to themselves as “MSMs” – men who have sex with men – since labelling a behaviour is easier than labelling an identity. Most of them remain closeted to everyone except their closest friends.

Though there have been attempts, establishing a similar group for lesbians or women who have sex with women is nearly impossible, simply because it is harder to find and reach those women. Men might find each other after sunset in public places like parks or railway stations, but most women in Lucknow are never unaccompanied after a certain hour, if they are out at all at that hour.

Yearning to be free

Needless to say, Arshi* was rare, even to herself. In a city population of nearly three million, she knew of only three other lesbians. But rather than shying away from her feelings, she embraced the freedom they offered her.

She would often hit on other girls by “giving them punch lines, making them feel shy, or giving them stray looks,” she told me. Even if people picked up on her sexual inclinations, no one took them seriously because she was a girl. Not even her mother, aunt or grandmother (she has never known her father) acknowledged her behaviour as anything more than a joke.

Arshi never had an honest conversation with her family about her attraction to females, she said, because in the back of her mind, she feared their reaction. She is an only child, and she would not do anything as rebellious as be with a woman or defy certain expectations because that would devastate her mother, who is a fairly religious Hindu and raised her as a single parent.

“Obviously I will get married, just for her,” she told me. “I want to give her each and everything she got in her life, not from her parents, not from her husband.”

Like the other gay and bisexual men I interviewed, Arshi accepted she would never fully come out. Her identity is too intrinsically tied to that of her family’s. And breaking that social structure was not necessarily her goal.

But she did want to be free.

“That’s why it’s even more important for me to build a good business,” she had told me, “because if I can build a good lifestyle, then nobody is going to force me for marriage.”

So alongside her schooling at a local technical college, Arshi stayed busy with various work schemes. Meanwhile, she allowed herself to explore her sexuality.

“I met with many girls who were interested in being bisexual because the only thing they wanted at that time was sex,” she said. “It’s just because a lot of the times they can’t find a male partner. And also because girls are generally considered ‘safer’.”

‘A phase in teenage years’

People’s perceptions of women in India and their expectations of them – especially in an emerging city like Lucknow – always remained in the backdrop of our conversations. It had seemed to me that Arshi’s projections as a confident, cross-dressing lesbian was as much about claiming her female identity as it was about asserting a gay one.

So when I met with Arshi again recently after months of not seeing each other, I was surprised to find that she had willingly allowed her mother to create her profile on the matrimonial website shaadi.com, and that she no longer considered herself a lesbian.

That identity started unravelling when Arshi confessed to one of her best friends – who is straight and about to get married – that she had feelings for her. Her friend, in response, told Arshi that she wants to see her happy too. But, given the circumstances of her life, she should be happy in the way that she can be.

In other words, her friend was encouraging Arshi to marry a man.

When we met again, gone was the suit that she had once sported so brazenly. In its place Arshi wore a Chinese-collar kurta that her friend – the one she had confessed feelings for – had given as a birthday gift. She had also allowed her hair to grow out, though she preferred to keep it in a low ponytail tucked into her coal-coloured jacket instead of allowing it to flow free.

Her way of speaking was the same – voice chipper, words articulate. But the now 25-year-old was viewing her previous behaviour and attraction to females in a different light.

“I personally feel that it was a phase of my teenage [years] in which I was confused at what I have to do, how I have to do it and what I should do,” Arshi said. “It was a phase which is now a bit clear to me.”

Giving up the ‘habit’

We were back where we had first met, Cafe Coffee Day. One of Arshi’s close friends, Anjali*, who is also friends with the friend getting married, joined us.

“Actually, I was pissed off when I heard that my bestie was going to get married,” Arshi told me. “But gradually, I met with my sister. She told me that, ‘Arshi, I think there is something wrong with you.’”

Arshi continued speaking, recalling the conversation with her female cousin. “She just examined me, and she came to the conclusion that, ‘Sweetheart, she is your very best friend, and you talk a lot. She is now like your habit. She’s not like your life. She’s your habit. That is the main point that you are feeling so crushed about.’”

To get over her best friend, Arshi’s cousin sister pronounced, she needed to change her “habit”. She must not message or talk to her friend daily. If she tried it out for two days, by the third day, she would not feel anything.

Arshi was resistant at first, but she gave it a try. The two days she did not talk to her friend were agonising, she said, but as predicted she could feel herself becoming less attached.

But when she would go and hang out with Anjali at their usual spot in front of a local park, her tears would flow. The fact that goons would come and suggest they were a couple angered them both, and Anjali was quick to yell at them to back off.

“She has been like my backbone through this whole time,” Arshi said of Anjali. “There are a few people who came in my life and cheered me up, like my sister who came and counselled me. They first knew who I am, and they said what I should do.”

“But how much do they know you versus how much do you know you?” I asked her.

Arshi paused, reflecting for a moment. She smiled. “Hmm, actually, this is a very vital question that you have asked me. I know zero about myself. These are the persons telling me who I am.”

Widespread gender bias

“I used to think I am a boy,” she continued. “When I was small, everybody used to say, ‘ladki ho, ladki ho, ladki ho’ (You’re a girl). But then I used to say, ‘No, I am a boy.’ And then people used to tell me, ‘Stay in your limits, be a girl. Don’t go out.’ But I used to be like, ‘Nahi.’ If I do like this, then my father might never come back.”

I interrupted her to make sure I understood her correctly. “If you act like a girl, your father will never come back?” I asked slowly. I did not have the heart to phrase the question the way I was interpreting it. That he would have preferred a son?

Gender bias is widespread across India. Recent data looking specifically at son preference and women’s attire shows nearly half of Indian families would prefer a son to a daughter. Meanwhile, 77% of those surveyed also disapproved of young women wearing pants – an act that does not so much signify “boyishness” as much as it does social status and modernity.

My face must have reflected my thoughts, because Arshi’s eyes softened a bit, and her pace of speaking slowed. “Yeah,” she murmured. “So I used to live a little like that.”

I did not know how to respond. But in my head, I could only imagine what others might say of Arshi’s change of habits. I had to broach the topic. Is this a way to go back into the closet?

Arshi responded with an emphatic “no”. But how she explained it brought up a different kind of social constraint in India – one men might face.

“I used to feel like I was hiding in the closet,” she said. “I was hiding all my feelings, my emotions. But now I am free, I can show my emotions to anybody without thinking ‘Oh, what will they think of me?’”

“Now I am free,” she repeated. “And it’s very relaxing and very soothing to be a girl rather than to be a boy. I would say this because boys take a lot of pains to make you comfortable.”

“Like what kind of pain?” I asked.

“Like a lot of emotional pain, some physical pain, financial pain. Each and every pain they are taking for us, to make us feel comfortable,” Arshi said, gesturing to the three of us women at the table. “When I lived my life like a boy, I used to take all these pains in for my friends, relatives, my family.”

There was a pause. “So what do you consider yourself?” I asked, drawing the words out.

“I don’t consider myself straight, I don’t consider myself gay, I don’t consider myself a lesbian,” Arshi said. “I consider myself a human being. And why not live like a human being? Because human beings have feelings for each and every one. A male or a female.”

“I am very emotionally attached to my best friend,” she said. “Maybe someday I will even get attached to someone else emotionally.”

But when we started talking about her friend’s upcoming nuptials again, her brave, direct front softened once more. “I will go [to her wedding] but I will cry quietly,” Arshi told me, “because I will be losing a very good friend of mine.”

* Names changed to protect identities.

Sonia Paul is a freelance journalist based in Lucknow. She is on Twitter @sonipaul.

This piece originally published on March 5, 2015, on Scroll.in.

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Lalji Tandon and Rajnath Singh at the Kudia Ghat meeting. Tandon, Lucknow’s current MP, has been sidelined so that Singh can contest the seat this year.
Lalji Tandon and Rajnath Singh at the Kudia Ghat meeting. Tandon, Lucknow’s current MP, has been sidelined so that Singh can contest the seat this year.

On the night of 23 April, over dinner at a friend’s place in Lucknow, I was invited by Anshuman Dwivedi, a teacher at a local coaching institute, to attend a gathering at Kudia Ghat in Old Lucknow. The aim, Dwivedi said, was to pledge to protect the Gomti, the river that bisects the city.

But Dwivedi, who was the event’s main organiser, soon admitted that the meeting had another, hidden motive. “We’ve invited Rajnath Singh,” he said. He paused, presumably to allow the words to sink in. “We can’t put it because of the Model Code of Conduct that it’s a gathering by caste. But it’s basically a gathering of Brahmins.”

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Abhinandan Pathak, a physical education teacher from Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, has taken three months off to travel around India and campaign in support of Narendra Modi. (Sonia Paul for The Caravan)
Abhinandan Pathak, a physical education teacher from Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, has taken three months off to travel around India and campaign in support of Narendra Modi. (Sonia Paul for The Caravan)

On the morning of 3 April, Abhinandan Pathak stepped off his sleeper compartment at Lucknow’s Charbagh Station. A posse of five men, including his 14-year-old son, Shivam, accompanied him. He wore white trousers and a white kurta, a gold Nehru vest, and a turban and neck sash coloured saffron and green—the colours of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

His silver hair and beard, and a pair of rimless spectacles, rounded off Pathak’s imitation of the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi.

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