The Anvil City Science Academy is a charter school with forty-four fifth through eighth grade students. This year, A.C.S.A. students will create a play inspired by the lives of Nome residents. They used StoryCorps as a way to record and save those stories.

Here are the beginnings of some of the stories shared during their project:

Lawyer Kirsten Bey moved to Alaska and started dog-mushing all because of a chance car ride between Valdez and Anchorage. As a child she didn’t even particularly like dogs. Now she considers herself lucky to lead the life that she lives.

James Agloinga grew up in the village of White Mountain. He considers how education can mean different things: in his family it meant learning how to hunt and help the family, while for his daughter it has meant learning academic and professional skills, such as how to use a computer.

Linda Gologergen doesn’t recall reacting strongly to Alaska becoming a state. She was a child at the time and her home in the village Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island was physically very far from where those decisions were being made. She does remember school lunches, the records her father brought back from the Indochina War, and the barge that arrived once a year to bring supplies to the island.

Becka Baker’s real name isn’t Becka. It’s Edna. She never liked the name and vowed never to give her children names they wouldn’t like. Her son Klay has three names. She explains how he got them.

Most students chose subjects or events that have shaped Nome’s story. Subjects ranged from historical events, like the relocation of King Islanders to the city of Nome, the history of the William E. Beltz School, and Alaska Statehood, to significant regional pastimes such as dog mushing, flying, crabbing, and gold-mining. Students chose community members who have lived through these experiences. Sometimes those community members were complete strangers and sometimes they were relatives. Many interviews focused on the history of these events, through the lived experiences of the participants.

One of the highlights for me was visiting the middle school classrooms at the beginning of this project. In two sessions, students interviewed each other with questions they thought they’d like to be asked. By the time interviews had begun, the questions had developed even more. Some were straight forward: Who are you? Some were specific: Can you tell me about a highlight in your experience as a pilot? And some were unexpected: Did you ever consider having a mascot? Did work on the Pipeline freak you out?

In keeping with the students’ goal of the StoryCorps Anvil City Science Academy colaboration, it was a “not-boring experience”.

Banner Creek is a neighborhood 12 miles outside of Nome. Facilitator Anahma Saito lives there with her family. This weekend StoryCorps Nome moved to the country to record her neighbors’ stories. Banner Creek became a neighborhood when a group of friends moved out of Nome in the 1970′s looking for a place to live where they could raise their dogs and mush in open country. Many residents continue to mush including StoryCorps participants Marianna Mallory, 10 and Maisie Thomas, 11 and Conor Thomas, 53. And many of the stories involved mushing.

Though some residents have running water and internet, none have phone lines. In the winter everyone parks their cars up on the Kugorak Road and snowmachines or walks home. If you want to know what people are up to, you just look towards the road. In between interviews, we’d have coffee with participants and more than once, people noted the whereabouts of their other neighbors: “Nope the Mallory’s didn’t go to church today, too cold, or, I thought I saw your truck over here and thought I’d say hi.” Resident Margaret Thomas explained, “It gets really interesting when someone in the neighborhood starts seeing someone new.’

Banner Creek’s listening booth consisted of the one-room cabin where Anahma gave birth to her daughter last year. Setting-up consisted of pulling the recording equipment (and the generator to power it) over to the cabin by a sled.

Neighbors walked, skied, and snowmachined to the cabin’s front door to share their stories. Recording highlights included hearing the youngest members of the community describe what its like growing up in Banner Creek. Another highlight included a man who walked in silently with is wife, sat down, and began speaking with these words, “I’m gonna tell you about the love of my life.” What followed was a love story for the books. The Banner Creek recordings concluded with StoryCorps’ local radio producer being interviewed by her seven year old daughter about one of the most meaningful moments of her life: her daughter’s birth.

Having spent not a wit of time outside all weekend, Anahma and I took advantage of the full moon on Sunday night for a midnight walk. It was clear from that late hour why people would choose to forego certain conveniences in order to live in this place. StoryCorps participant Conor Thomas had concluded his interview saying “a good mush goes a long way.” And so does a good view.