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Isay: Listening is an Act of Love

Many people can tell stories, and some can tell them well, but a precious few can spin a tale without speaking at all.
August 24, 2006

Many people can tell stories, and some can tell them well, but a precious few can spin a tale without speaking at all. David Isay, an award-winning radio documentary producer whose work rarely features his own voice, is one of those few.

In an informal conversation with new students at Columbia’s journalism school Wednesday evening, Isay quickly got to the heart of what we all came to Columbia to learn, urging us to “find poetry where you wouldn’t expect to find it; to shine light in places you wouldn’t usually see and try to celebrate those places.”

Isay, a former medical student who is now the executive producer of Sound Portraits Productions, then showed us what he meant, playing excerpts from several of his more provocative pieces:

The choked-up inmate’s description of his cellblock as a “graveyard of time” in Toss Me the Keys, a 1989 exploration of lifers in Louisiana prisons;

The tragically innocent voice of a 14-year-old boy spouting off brands of liquor as if they were multiplication tables in Ghetto Life 101, a 1993 look at the world of children growing up in Chicago public housing;

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The clear, crisp words of a prison guard recounting the lethal injection process in Witness to an Execution, a 2000 view of the death penalty’s effects on those who administer it.

The teary eyes and painful grimaces on the students’ faces as they listened said it all. In each case, the emotional testimonies, captured in sound alone, made the story more real, more powerful than all the visuals in the world.

Isay says radio is an intimate, melancholy medium particularly suited to this task of covering stories that are “not easy to make, and not easy to listen to.” In 2003, he launched StoryCorps, an ambitious oral history project with two permanent recording booths in New York City and two mobile booths that roam the country gathering people’s stories.

Isay shared several clips from the StoryCorps collection, including a touching marriage proposal and a heartbreaking goodbye between a wife and her dying husband. Then he left us with what may be our most important lesson of all:

“The stories of everyday people are better and more real than any of the celebrity crap we get fed everyday.”

Jennifer Rae Taylor is a contributor to CJR.