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'Tis the season for spending quality time with family and friends. When my mom visited me for the Thanksgiving holiday in New York, we wanted to record an interview. The Lower Manhattan StoryBooth was booked, so we sat down and recorded a wonderful Do-It-Yourself interview for the National Day of Listening. During that conversation, we remembered my late grandmother and the tremendous influence she had on my life when I was a child. My family will treasure that conversation for years to come. StoryCorps strives to collect the stories of people like you and me— everyday folks whose families, colleagues, and communities influence their lives. In the next year, StoryCorps plans to facilitate conversations between another 12,000 participants, which will bring our total to 27,000 interviews archived at the Library of Congress! In order to give many more people across America the opportunity to become participants in the largest oral history project in America, we need your support. You've probably already received a letter and/or an email from us asking for your support. If you've already sent a contribution, we thank you! It's support from Alumni like you that allows even more people to experience StoryCorps, the experience you and I know is the conversation of a lifetime. Wishing you and yours a happy holiday season,
Christa Orth 
National Day of Listening Success! On the day after Thanksgiving, we estimate that 30,000 families participated in our innagural National Day of Listening. Thousands of bloggers blogged about it, hundreds of schools and libraries were involved in it, dozens of papers wrote about it, including USA Today— and it seemed like much of the country was talking about it. We knew National Day of Listening was a great idea, but we had no idea it would be so popular in its first year! StoryCorps has extended National Day of Listening through December, and is encouraging everyone to record a Do-It-Yourself interview with a loved one. It's the least expensive and most memorable gift you can give this season.
Give the Gift of StoryCorps! This year, bring people you love and admire into our StoryCorps community by giving them the gift of StoryCorps. StoryCorps is truly the gift that keeps giving!
Support StoryCorps with a one-time or monthly donation Make a one-time or monthly contribution to give more people across the nation the opportunity to experience a StoryCorps interview.
Make a Tribute Gift to someone you love All donations to StoryCorps are 100% tax deductible. Give the Gift of StoryCorps today! On the Road with StoryCorps I loved this recent StoryCorps Blog post from Carl, one of our friendly West MobileBooth facilitators. He was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in November and, with the help of interpreters, collected stories from the deaf community.
Rene Ryan, Emily Thomas, For more about StoryCorps stories from the road, visit the StoryCorps Blog. Alumni can leave comments and stories of your own StoryCorps experiences! Listen to Stories
Alumni Talk Back! A number of StoryCorps Alums have shared their answers to our Question of the Month feature. This month we're featuring Karla Sneegas' answer to October's question: What is your most memorable birthday?
Dear StoryCorps,
I've never directly responded to a question or story in the wonderful
newsletters I receive from StoryCorps but today was different. The
Question of Month raised issues for me that changed my life and changed
my husband's life.
In 1989, our lives were drastically interrupted. We were young and had a 2 1/2-year-old daughter. Ten days before my
birthday, I came home from work. After dinner, Mark, my
husband, sat me down and drew a little picture. The picture was a
rough rendition of the human heart. He divided the drawing into the
four chambers and colored in the upper left chamber with a circle that
filled the upper chamber. Then he said, "This is my heart and this is
the tumor that is my left upper atrium." I can still feel the blood
draining out of every cell of my body and landing in my feet. Later
when I asked him why he didn't tell me the minute I got home, he said,
"I didn't want to ruin your dinner!"
The tumor was diagnosed as a "left atrial mixoma." They are rare and
usually don't show up until people are later in life. They grow
slowly and most people do not know they have them. Mark and I had
decided to do some scuba diving that year. After a dive in Florida,
he felt odd. He was also experiencing pains in his arms and
dizziness. Some ten years prior he had experienced irregular heart
beats but the doctors checked it out and found nothing. He wanted to
take an advanced dive class, but the odd feeling from his earlier dive
led him to seek out a family physician (who happened to know something
about diving) and have a full health assessment. Dr. Petit thought he
might have a mitral valve prolapse and ordered an echocardiogram.
During the diagnosis, the technician abruptly left the room and
returned with a cardiologist. A tumor the size of a tennis ball was
residing in his left upper atrium.
Ten days later on my 31st birthday, Mark underwent open-heart surgery
to remove the tumor. I remember them rolling the bed out of the room
and off to pre-op. My father-in-law looked at me and said happy
birthday. I burst into tears.
This year we celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. It took over
five years before I woke up on my birthday and didn't think about the
surgery until much later in the day. But the surgery changed my life.
At a very early age, we realized how precious time is and how tenuous
our time on this earth might be. I believe this has impacted the
decisions I have made on how to spend my life on this good earth. I
have made career decisions that were rooted in this experience—
choosing careers that didn't pay the big bucks but were rooted in
giving back to the community and making a difference in the lives of
others. I remind myself that family really does come first even
though the daily grind of work sometimes overtakes that value. At a
very conscious level I try to get the balance back.
There are so many stories rooted to that day in 1989. There was the
echo technician who attended the surgery and held her hands on Mark's
head throughout the surgery and prayed. There was the family
physician who became a life-long friend and invited Mark over to work
out to rebuild his strength after the surgery. There were medical
staff that Mark met later who came into surgery to observe the rare
surgery. There was the recliner chair that my mother and I bought
before he came home from the hospital. We still have it. It said
happy father's day, happy anniversary, happy life! He cried when he
saw it. And then the little girl who still remembers visiting her
daddy in the hospital at age 2 1/2.
May 25, 1989, was my most memorable birthday.
Karla Sneegas We love hearing from our Alumni. Share your answer to the Question of the Month by emailing me. Sponsors and Partners State Farm Insurance is a proud national sponsor of StoryCorps. Additional major funding is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.   
StoryCorps is also made possible by generous support from the Annenberg Foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, Ford Foundation, Kaplen Foundation, and Open Society Institute. 
StoryCorps' podcasts are supported by the Fetzer Institute as part of its Campaign for Love and Forgiveness. 
StoryCorps is a project of Sound Portraits Productions in partnership with NPR and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.  
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For more information about making a tax-deductible contribution to StoryCorps, please feel free to contact me.
 We have a feature on our website that encourages you to listen to your friends, family, and loved ones by simply asking a question. Each month we suggest a question that you can ask your friends and family.
This month's question is:
When you were a child, what did you think your life would be like when you got older?
Talk Back! |
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