Oral History Workshop Teaches There is Not One, But Many Histories

Back in 2007, NPR’s StoryCorps project rolled through Northern California, offering residents a chance to record interviews with their families. The project consisted of an RV that had a tiny recording studio inside, complete with padded sound walls, state of the art microphones and comfy chairs.

Always a fan of radio journalism, I jumped on the opportunity and picked my father to interview. For an hour, I heard his stories of growing up in the Soviet Union, working on and escaping from a collective farm and when already in the U.S., walking on the freeway to get to an interview in the Silicon Valley because no buses would go there.

It was a moving experience and at the end, we were handed a copy of the interview, while another copy was sent to the Library Congress. Yup, my father’s story would now be housed in the same repository of American history as the U.S. Constitution, Civil War letters and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Not bad for a kid from a small town kid from the Ukraine.

StoryCorps never made it to Petaluma, but now residents have a chance to learn how to conduct an oral history interview and record it with a new workshop on Nov. 5. The woman behind the class is Kelly Sturgeon, a Petaluma resident and oral historian who has spent nearly two decades recording people’s stories, first at nursing homes and later with Vietnam War veterans and anti-apartheid leaders in South Africa.

“There are different reasons for doing oral history, like creating a record for libraries and museums to collect,” said Sturgeon, who founded mystorycatcher.com with her husband Berkley. “The other is for families. Interviewing someone about their lives is a way to say that what they did in their life matters. it’s a very natural thing for people to want to do.”

The all-day workshop will focus on interviewing techniques, preserving photos, recording interviews with audio and video and even ideas about how to parlay oral history interviews into your own business. And if you thought that conducting an interview is as simple as just sitting down and talking, think again.

“You have to be a really good listener,” says Sturgeon. “Not just an active listener, but also a deep listener, listening for what the story is as it’s evolving at the moment, the images that are coming to their mind as they are talking, the words they are using.”

Sturgeon says doing oral history is a way to understand history through people’s experience of different life events, both big and small. In 2004, she participated in a project organized by San Francisco State University that sent students to South Africa to interview anti-apartheid leaders. Later, South African students came to the U.S. and interviewed leaders in the Civil Rights movement.

“It made me question how we understand our history,” Sturgeon said. “The truth is somewhere in the way we remember it. There is no one truth, there are multiple.”

Another time, Sturgeon interviewed a friend who was dying from pancreatic cancer.

“I remember thinking that if I didn’t capture his story, I didn’t know how I could live with myself,” she recalled. “I asked him to do the interview, even though I was afraid of offending him, but I also felt that I needed his story recorded. It was such an honor...During the interview, he didn’t focus on dying, he was so into living and being right here in this moment. He died two weeks later.”

Virginia Hotz-Steenhoven, who works for the disability resources department at in Petaluma, attended Sturgeon’s workshop last year and plans on returning.

“It’s so fascinating to listen to people talk about their lives,” she said. “When you’re doing oral history, you gain perspective on certain things. Everyone has an interesting story. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t.”

The oral history workshop will be held Saturday, Nov. 5 from 9am to 4pm at the Sheraton. The cost is $100, with a 15 percent discount given to people employed in the eldercare/hospice field. For more information, check out www.mystorycatcher.com