Recording life: StoryCorps comes to SF

October 10, 9:13 AMSF Cultural Events ExaminerKate Cohen

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The StoryBooth at NYC's Grand Central. 

My grandmother tells a few stories we would like to hold onto and though she has a pile of blank journals from well-intentioned relatives, the pages remain empty and she continues to balk at the task of writing her life story—or at least some shocking tidbits about her years in Greenwich Village or in Appalachia as a nurse on horseback.

Luckily, Grammy likes to talk and she doesn’t need much prodding. She’s visiting San Francisco next week and when she opens the floodgates, I’ll be armed with high tech digital recording equipment to capture each “I remember when…”

We’ll be taking a field trip to the newly unveiled building of the Contemporary Jewish Museum where the StoryCorps StoryBooth, a miniature recording studio equipped for interviews, opens to the public, on Sunday, October 12. 

The concept is simple yet brilliant: Enter the booth (for free) with friends, family, or solo and emerge with a copy of the recording. Sign a waiver and your stories will be archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. If your Grammy can spin a good tale, she might just end up on KQED and NPR’s Morning Edition.

The CJM is hosting a Community Listening Party on October 26 from 3pm to 5pm (free with museum admission) where StoryCorps project founder and MacArthur Fellow Dave Isay will speak and read from his book Listening is an Act of Love. Isay, a veteran radio documentary producer, launched StoryCorps in 2003. Drawing inspiration from the oral history project of the Works Progress Administration, Isay endeavored to pick up where the WPA left off with the original StoryBooth located in Grand Central Terminal. The project mushroomed and picked up a Peabody Award along the way.

The StoryBooth will make its home at the CJM for one calendar year. Visits are by appointment only.  Two other booths are currently in operation in New York and Nashville while Airstream trailers called MobileBooths travel the country collecting stories.

Grammy and I can’t wait.