StoryCorps Coming

One of the greatest ideas to come down the pike in a long time is the StoryCorps project. I first heard about it a few years back when they opened a public sound booth in New York's Grand Central Station. The idea was simple--you pick someone of your aquaintance whose story interests you, take them into the booth and interview them. The resulting recording goes home with you, a copy is archived with the Library of Congress, and some of the best are broadcast. Instant do-it-yourself oral history. The results can be surprising and fascinating, as listeners to StoryCorps features on NPR's Morning Edition have found.

A while back, the producers decided to take the project on the road, building sound booths into two Airstream trailers and hauling them around the country. In July, they will haul one up to the North Country. NCPR will host the project for the full month--for the first two weeks next to Canton's Village Green, and for the last two weeks at Watertown's Flower Memorial Library. Is there someone you know whose story is crying to get out? Reservations for interviews will open in mid-June for Canton, and in early July for Watertown. Get more information about the project and hear some of the best interviews on the StoryCorps website. Look for local project info to come on the NCPR website.

The more things change

I've been on the road a fair amount this year, and this week was more of the same. That's a change from my unusally geographically-limited existence. Unlike most Americans, I live in the town I grew up in. In retrospect I see that this has been part of the way I cope with the rapid (and increasingly rapid) pace of change. Whatever else may be in flux, I live in this town, on this road, in this house. And for me that works. While cruising down the Northway toward NYC with Brian Mann and Susan Sweeney Smith, I wondered aloud what people who changed their jobs and places of residences frequently did instead to put some kind of constancy in their lives, to provide touchpoints to connect and ground them. That evening we had occasion to dine with a genuine globetrotter and found that we (NCPR) provided one of his touchpoints. Wherever he found himself in his worklife, he would fire up the station's broadcast stream on his laptop and hear the sounds of home. That was a great "for instance" to hear, of course, but the larger question stays with me. In this world where the rush hour seems to be every hour, what are people doing to create the calm pools, the anchorages for their lives. Grab me by the shoulder as I speed by and let me know.

Gut Feelings

With novelist, poet, and food & wine writer Jim Harrison on our air last week, and The Splendid Table's food maven Lynne Rossetto Kasper winging her way to the North Country tonight, it's all about the food at NCPR. Which is a change from the last few months--so many people have been on the road that the once hearty and sustaining comingling of goodies had dropped off to a trickle. Even staples such as milk, sugar and bread have been in short supply. It's been a much-needed wake-up call. While some people immediately considered the sad state of the station's collective kitchen and put on a clean-up effort worthy of a mother-in-law's snap inspection, my thoughts turned immediately to the website, which for lo these many years has lacked a topic page on that most important subject, food. It's just a little of this and that I threw together from stuff lying around the pantry, but I hope you enjoy it. Food and Hunger

Short and Sweet

After another sedentary winter, I seem to have found my feet at last, getting my usual late start on the yard work (on the day every black fly south of Canada hatched out in my leaf litter), revisiting my favorite neighborhood haunts: the quarry just upstream on the Raquette, the piney overhang above the falls at Hannawa, the Sugar Island loop of the Red Sandstone Trail. And trailing Kyoto and Washington DC by a month, the cherry blossoms are just about ready to pop here. That makes it the perfect time for our occasional foray into haiku, the traditional art form for the season. Try capturing the pure flavor of spring, then boil it down to seventeen syllables, the way watery sap is reduced to syrup, the way that bees make honey. Then lick your fingers clean and email your effort to openstudio@ncpr.org.

We'll post your submissions on the web, and read the most succulent entries on the next edition of Open Studio. Here's one from me:

Maybe trillium
will have blossomed overnight
since my last walk here