“I just tried to follow pink in my life on yesterday,” explained Finnish artist Meiju Niskala last Wednesday. Tuesday, my pink pashmina, visible from outside our Foley Square fishbowl of a StoryBooth, beckoned Niskala inside from the cold to make an appointment.

Her intended conversation partner unavailable, Niskala arrived for her appointment alone granting me the opportunity to find out more about a woman who described herself on our participant data sheet as an “everyday explorer…who tries to be actively lost.”

The former Berklee College of Music saxophone student has spent the past decade expressing her creativity in uncommon fashion. A writer, amateur tap dancer and collector of photo booth pictures and four leaf clovers, Niskala described herself as a particularly curious and amiable child albeit lonely.

“I am just sad because I’m feeling that there is no one else who can share the same history as me,” she confessed. A passionate person who sees no boundaries between life and art, Niskala eventually found love through one of her explorations.

“When I was looking for the love of my life, I was setting up Post-it notes in quite many places. It all started in this way. I was in the library…It’s not interactive at all and I’m feeling that the main reason to be alive is to be interactive with things. So I started to place Post-it notes inside the books, just like saying ‘Hi’ and ‘I thought that this book’s most meaningful sentence in on page 57, chapter 3, line 5. If you feel that way as well, let me know. This is my address and my phone number.’”

Eventually, Niskala left Post-it notes in the most romantic books she could find authored by Georges Perec and Jonathan Safran Foer among others. She met a number of people along the way including her librarian boyfriend.

As our conversation reached its end, Niskala shared some tips for original living through incorporating art into one’s every day life. New York straphangers, pay heed.

“If you have a 30 minute long ride between your work and home, just put an empty paper on your hand, take a pen or lipstick or whatever which creates color and just point it on the paper and then let the shake of the train make the forms . Do that everyday in a year and then compare what happens. Could you see which are the Fridays?”

So there is your homework for 2009. Mass transit commuters in Gotham and beyond can take part. You’ll have to stow your iPod in your pocket to free your hands but you can keep your earbuds in. Happy drawing!

Author Po Bronson, with whom I share a hometown and a high school, walked readers through the discovery of their professional paths in his 2002 New York Times bestseller, What Should I Do With My Life? I didn’t ask myself this question until my senior year in college and I still haven’t come up with a sufficiently satisfying answer. Meanwhile, I hold deep admiration and envy for those who have always known what their life’s work would be. The derivative trader, for example, who capitalized on a knack for math and threshold for risk, or the jazz saxophonist who discovered a passion for music at 11 and years later so inspired practiced for months in the solitude of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg Bridge.

Many factors inform our career decisions from family history to films, but what else orders our professional steps? StoryCorps participants Nerio Varon and Ave Lynne might add nationality. The two Filipino Americans provided some insight into the Filipino American tradition of nursing on a recent visit to the booth. Nerio, a current student at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, and Ave Lynne, a recent graduate, chatted about their experiences immigrating to the United States from the Phillipines, Ave Lynne’s new gig with the Visiting Nurse Service of New York and the advantages and disadvantages of working as a hospital nurse compared to a home care nurse. Early in their conversation, Nerio made reference to a tradition of nursing among Filipinos. I asked him and Ave Lynne to elaborate on an occupation so common in their community that it has a blog dedicated to it, Filipino Nursing Herald. Ave Lynne offered her thoughts.

Ave Lynne: It’s become a cultural thing. In the Philippines, it’s just like, “Oh yeah, take nursing ’cause when you go to America you’ll make a lot of money…I don’t know where it came from, where it originated. Maybe a lot of the women from the seventies, I think it started then. I don’t know. A lot of the women were taking nursing and I think they were recruiting at that time. America needed a lot of nurses and were recruiting a lot of nurses. So then it just kind of stuck.

Ave Lynne was right on the money. As Barbara Marquand reported for MinorityNurse.com, thousands of Filipino nurses came to the United States in the sixties and seventies making Filipinos “the number one source of foreign-trained nurses in the U.S.” Nerio elaborated:

“It became our stereotype. If you’re Filipino, you go to nursing school. People are always gonna be sick…You heard about companies, Fortune 5000 companies, firing people. I think medical is the way to go. You’re always gonna have jobs. And nursing especially with all the many fields. You can become a school nurse, you can go in the service, a whole variety of deifferent specialties. My classmates vary from 19 year olds to forty five year olds. They want to switch up their majors for that reason that they have a choice after they graduate whether they want to work in a hospital or home care or open up their own shop and become nurse practicioners. It’s a good thing.”

It’s hard to disagree.

In the past two months Foley Square has traded heavy heat for crisp breezes–I have the cold to prove it–but also photo happy tourists for jumping stilters and conceptual artists. Yep, this little patch of concrete elicits a variety of types not just federal employees and legal professionals from the nearby courthouses and government offices. Each day we welcome public to the booth, we’re not quite sure who will be milling around just outside our bright box in the shadow of Lorenzo Pace’s grand granite sculpture, “The Triumph of the Human Spirit.”

Some days we’re met by incorrigible skateboarders who define rebellion as skating across our accessible ramp after we’ve told them not to (a wild bunch, they are) but on other days we are witnesses to some of the unique recreational and cultural pursuits that in their concentration distinguish New York City from so many other spots across the globe.

Just two Saturdays ago, some jumping stilters compared hang times while even the most disaffected skateboarders sat in awed observation. That same day two members of Abyssinian Baptist Church, longtime friends and media professionals, spotted some jazz friends, twin dancers, outside our windows and proceeded to have a brief and boisterous reunion in our reception area. And just this morning Main Street Meltdown, an ice carving of the word “Economy,” melted in the foreground of our glass and aluminum perch, the project of artists Nora Ligarano and Marshall Reese. So a visit to the Foley Square StoryBooth provides not just the opportunity to tell your story and pass it on, but to rack up some new ones.

What with behemoths like Borders and Barnes & Nobles plying the masses with square footage, seats-a-plenty, embedded coffee shops and the low prices economies of scale allow, it’s difficult even for even literary locavores to patronize independent bookstores yet booklovers are still drawing up business plans and leasing storefronts. In fact, the New York Times‘ City Room blog recently spotlighted a few upstart booksellers while pondering their viability.

Well, StoryCorps already gleaned some insight into the subject thanks to Buffalo, New York couple Kenneth and Sharon Holley. Visitors to our MobileBooth in July, the Holleys, who met at the North Jefferson library where Sharon worked when Kenneth popped in to check out a book by John A. Williams, recounted two decades spent owning and operating the now defunct Harambee Books.

I didn’t facilitate this conversation, that task went to Whitney Henry-Lester, but I did get a chance to edit this interview for potential broadcast. You see, when not leaned over a log sheet in the Foley Square StoryBooth, I and other facilitators are often in StoryCorps’ Brooklyn office editing many of your conversations into two to three minute segments. In this particular instance, I happened upon an interview that dovetailed with my interests: the Holleys’ bookstore specialized in titles of African American interest and my undergraduate and graduate study was in literature and African Diasporic studies.

I can’t overemphasize how much the Holley’s afternoon conversation contextualized a range of issues, from the importance of literacy and education to African Americans to the rise of Street Lit. To be literate and African American was once an especially dangerous combination. Enslaved Africans were widely proscribed from reading, writing or teaching these basic skills to their progeny during of American slavery’s brutal four century long tenure. In the instances where enslaved individuals acquired these skills, they often put them to use in liberatory efforts, not the least of which were slave narratives, which broadcast the atrocities of American bondage and helped abolitionists shift public opinion.

So beyond being an independent bookstore, being an independent Black bookstore has a special significance. The Holleys’ bookstore wasn’t just a place to pick up a copy of Toni Cade Bambara’s latest collection of short stories or A.B. Spellman’s jazz histories, it was a venue that served the social and political needs of the Black Buffalo community. Sharon Holley explained,

We looked at the bookstore as a meeting place. Even people who I see today who say, “Aww, I sure wish you had that bookstore back.” And you know, I look at them, I remember, “I don’t remember them buying a lot of books.” But they would come there all the time. It was like the place where you found out what was going on in the Black community.

The late Alfred Ligon, proprietor of the oldest Black bookstore in Los Angeles, now defunct, offered a similar analysis of Black bookstores in a 1982 interview with the Los Angeles Times,

“It’s a starvation business. But we’re an institution. Even just a trickle of people who want these books justifies our existence.”

Ligon’s bookstore closed in the nineties as did the Holleys and enumerable independent bookstores serving various demographics throughout the nation. So consider what is your relationship to your local bookstore, be it a chain, or a independent. Are you attracted by low prices or programming, the breadth of titles or quirkier stocks? Has a bookstore opened or closed in your neighborhood in the past few years? What was is impact? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The five W’s of twenty first century farming are on many American’s minds as the popularity of journalist Michael Pollan’s work, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), the locavore movement and green markets attest. With this interest have come debates about what we eat and where it comes from, but only recently have we seen portraits of who tills the soil, harvests the crops or sells the bounty. Often those are tethered to foodies’ fetishistic concern for food provenance.

Enter Maggie Hollenhorst. The Milwaukee resident was brought to our Lower Manhattan StoryBooth on the Thursday before Labor Day by her brother, StoryCorps’ own Andy Hollenhorst, to discuss her nascent but already impressive career in agriculture. After recording a shout out to their new nephew, the two traced Maggie’s journey from University of Wisconsin Geography major to jail farmer.

Early in their conversation, Maggie touched on an anxiety of many recent college graduates as they identify and embark on careers.

…since I finished school I felt like I learned how to think but I didn’t learn any real skills, and it was hard to get a job and really more difficult than I expected to find something that I found fulfilling.

But through stints at an educational farm in the northeast and at an apiary in Jamaica, Maggie narrowed her focus on horticultural therapy and prison horticulture and expanded her skill set. Having connected with the Hunger Task Force in Milwaukee soon after they assumed operation of an 150 acre farm across the street from the Milwaukee County House of Correction, Maggie found a position where she could exercise her commitment to engaging non traditional communities, like prisoners, with agriculture and also help to feed the poor and homeless of Milwaukee. The farm once supplied the jail but now feeds Milwaukee’s needy.

Working alongside volunteer non violent inmates nearing release, Maggie had the opportunity to make a number observations about life for the incarcerated and in the booth she relayed her own euphoric workdays as contrasted to those of many of the inmates.

Maggie: It’s really interesting being around people that always want the time to move faster than it is. It’s so strange… I mean, typically people want time to move slower ’cause that means you’re getting older, things are changing.

Andy: You want the endless summer. These guys don’t want the endless summer.

Maggie: I feel like every day I’m at work thinking, “This is such a beautiful day. I hope this summer never ends.” And they are just saying, “November, November, November 15th,” you know. Whatever their day might be, that’s the only day that’s gonna be a good day but despite that I’ve been impressed. They can have pretty high spirits and really have a good time and be social. It’s not like doomsday… They are not in their forever so there is still some hope there which is nice.

As for Maggie’s hopes, she dreams of having her own farm and running her own CSA, so in the future you may have Maggie Hollenhorst to thank for the evening’s spread.

Looking for a bright spot in a slumping housing market? Well, feast your eyes on Sophie Santino, 85 years young today. On Tuesday, July 15, 2008, the Topeka, Kansas native closed on her first home, a Brooklyn cooperative purchased with her savings and the aid of her four children, Sandra, Mark, Gina and lastly Claudia, who brought her by our Lower Manhattan StoryBooth the next day to commemorate the delayed milestone.

Sophie didn’t start out as the most enthusiastic storyteller. As she confessed in the final minutes of their conversation, she gave Claudia “hell” for making the StoryCorps appointment without her knowledge.

I said “How could you do that!” And I was actually mad. I kept my face in the window of the subway.

Once Sophie arrived at the booth and got to reminiscing on her doting parents, two handfuls of siblings, cousins/playmates, big band-leading uncles in Topeka and her own relentless exploits on the dance floor, her disposition brightened. Her parents were immigrants from Mexico, and she couldn’t stop praising the quiet sensitivity of her Dad, in particular.

I’ll never forget when my mother used to bathe us then she would hand us over to our father and he would clip our toe nails. What other father would do that?! And at the time we had an outhouse and when winter time came by, my father would warm a blanket and he would take the three of us girls to the bathroom and he would wait outside. It was cold, it was snowing, but he made sure that we all went to the bathroom and then he would cuddle us, bring us back and sit us near the stove so we could warm up.

A marriage brought Sophie east in her thirties and she immediately took to Brooklyn, but with the hustle and bustle of raising children and changes in her personal and professional life, Sophie never got around to signing a contract on a home. When queried by Claudia as to her immediate reaction to finally attaining that final component of the American dream, she confessed an unexpected emotion.

You ask me, “Aren’t you happy?” …Like I told you, it’s like a bittersweet thing. This should have happened a long time ago and I blame myself for not bringing it up. I wish I had. And I feel that at my age, I pray to God, give me some more years so that I can enjoy my little place. And I know it would make you and all the rest happy if you knew that I was, that I was happy too Claudia. And I want to be happy, I really do, but I’m scared Claudia because I am so old…but being around you girls I know that you’re gonna make a lot of racket when I move in there…It will make me lots happier knowing that we’re all together, Claudie.

This emphasis on family and connectedness evoked in early recollections of a Topeka childhood to final imperatives to her children to “be happy” and “get along” just begin to describe a purposeful and quick-tongued woman who will hopefully celebrate many more birthdays in her spanking new digs. Happy Birthday, Sophie!

When octogenarian Ruth Preminger entered the Lower Manhattan StoryBooth four Sundays ago, across her heart lay a broach containing a photograph of herself and her Hungarian-born mother, Rose Tucker. When Ruth exited the booth with her interview partner, daughter-in-law Beth Preminger, the pair in the small timeworn photograph, their challenges, their resilience, their accomplishment and their taut connection to each other were made vivid.

Widowed when Ruth was just 3, Rose and her brood lived in Philadelphia with her sister Jean, until Jean’s expanding family forced Rose to place a 6 year-old Ruth in a local orphanage. Ruth’s memories of the day she left her mother’s care were sharp.

I can feel my mother holding my hand to this day. She dressed me in a white linen dress with a green linen yoke.

Ruth rattled off the names of her orphanage chums and matrons with a depth of fondness and not a hint of bitterness at what must have been a trying circumstance. Threatened with punishment for ripping her bedsheets, usually a spell confined to a closet, Ruth learned to darn exceptionally well and expressed great pride in that skill later drawn upon in her diverse design career.

The only Jewish girl in the orphanage, Ruth mentioned occasional quips about the superiority of Christianity but emphasized the kinship and kindliness among the girls and joked about her unusually extensive knowledge of Christian hymns. Moreover, Ruth evinced a deep understanding of the challenges that surely faced her mother, a single parent at the eve of the Great Depression.

While Ruth was in the orphanage, her mother rented a room above a tailor shop, secured a position at a department store and kept Ruth on some weekends, the two of them sharing her single bed. When she remarried she regained custody of Ruth and integrated her daughter into their new blended family.

Whether it was losing her father young or spending six of her formative years in an orphanage where she was the only Jew, Ruth maintained a serenity in her conversation with Beth, which she attributed to her mother and stepfather’s abiding affection. “Love covers everything,” she reflected. Not only is there no room for resentment in Ruth’s mind, but no reason.

“I don’t feel that the experience really affected me other than to tell the story [that] I always felt my mothers love.”

The sheer volume of e-mail forwards about friendship have made reflections on that bond seem trite but Jack and Evelyn Zelmanowitz’s recent conversation could stir the most jaded. The couple came to our Foley Square StoryBooth with Amy Weinstein of the National September 11 Memorial Museum to remember Jack’s older brother, Abe Zelmanowitz, a victim of the September 11 attacks.

Jack & Evelyn Zelmanowitz have been in indefatigable in their remembrances of Abe in the almost seven years that have passed since the tragedy. They have been featured on TV shows and documentaries and quoted in newspaper and magazine articles testifying to Abe thoughtfulness, loyalty and commitment as exemplified by his actions on September 11, 2001.

Abe Zelmanowitz was on the 27th floor of One World Trade Center, the north tower, on the morning of the attack. In the commotion following American Airlines Flight 11 crash into the tower, Abe rushed to the side of his friend of 12 years and fellow Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield computer programmer Ed Beyea, a quadriplegic, to offer assistance. Abe waited with his friend for help, despite entreaties from family to leave, and subsequently perished along with Ed Beyea and New York City Firefighter, Captain William F. Burke, Jr., who ascended to the 27th Floor to help evacuate Beyea, well aware that the south tower had already collapsed.

In addition to sharing the nuts and bolts of Abe’s selfless act that day, as detailed above, the Zelmanowitz’s shared how Abe’s act, told and retold, has encouraged people throughout the world. They have received letters from as far as Australia and are comforted by the inspiration their brother’s life provides as they mourn his untimely passing.

Pictured above are Jack and Evelyn Zelmanowitz. Before they exited the Foley Square StoryBooth, Evelyn read from a memorial song penned by a family member as Jack looked on.

For the better part of last Wednesday, the Foley Square StoryBooth hosted conversations between young photographers from South Dakota’s Oglala-Lakota Tribe, Arizona’s Navajo Nation, Brattleboro, Vermont and New York City. They were all participants in Exposures, a cross-cultural exchange program founded in 2003. The Vermont-based program totes large format cameras and Polaroid film to Pine Ridge’s South Dakota reservation, Arizona and New York, allowing the old fashioned look of the cameras to draw subjects in and the instant photographs it provides to serve as a souvenir for the road. The youth learn a new way of looking at their communities, through intense local workshops, and at each other, thanks to a traveling component for select youth, which includes time in Pine Ridge, New York and Vermont.

17 year-old Exposures participant Yazmyn (r) and her instructor, Synphany (l), popped in the booth just before lunch. Both offered unvarnished impressions of each other upon first meeting via a free Saturday arts program for high school students at Cooper Union, Synphany’s alma mater. Twins in temperament, both young women shared their highs and excruciating dating lows but also touched on their beefs with their native New York City. Teenage boys and their cultivated cool were Yazmyn’s thorn and Synphany’s, the self-imposed isolation of millions sandwiched together in too-small flats but fearful of making eye contact on the subway.

On the way out, I asked Yazmyn, who was wearing sleak Nikes, where she bought her tennis shoes. Brows furrowed, chins dipped, confusion abounded. I pointed towards her feet. “Where are you from?” they queried. “Seattle, ” I replied, at which point they kindly relayed East Coast carbonated beverage and athletic shoe naming conventions. Let me impart the lesson, around these parts Nike’s are considered “sneakers,” sometimes “kicks,” never “tennis shoes.” It goes to shows just how committed these folks are to cultural exchange.

Sisters Stafford and Tyla swept into our Foley Square StoryBooth Thursday evening to share breezy reminiscences of their Brooklyn childhood. Tyla, a staff person with New York City Community Partner Brooklyn College Student Center, was a veteran having previously brought in her husband for an interview and thus urged her sister to occupy the storyteller seat for a fun forty minutes.

Spirited doesn’t even begin to describe the tight twosome. When presented with an opportunity to remember their adolescent escapades, the two volleyed back and forth like Venus and Serena, never with more intensity than when recalling the antics of their bold mother Virginia.

As the two told it, and they claimed their old Brooklyn neighborhood as collective witness, Virginia once embarked on a mundane trip to the grocery store and, so overloaded on her way out, hailed and easily hitched a ride home with a Wonder Bread delivery truck driver to the awe and amusement of her fellow shoppers. Neither Tyla nor Stafford heard the end of it but by then were quite used to the fruits of their mother’s hard sell and even managed to learn a few lessons. Years later, Tyla followed in her mother’s footsteps hitching a ride with a New York Post truck one icky city day and, most recently, successfully shooed a drug dealer from her Brooklyn corner with measured admonitions. By the conversation’s end, the sisters who had difficulty pin-pointing a family tradition recognized it as their mother’s intentionality and self possession and they fondly elaborated, her good nature.