Photo courtesy of www.storycorps.net

Dave Isay, creator of the StoryCorps series heard every Friday during KERA‘s Morning Edition, is traveling the country to celebrate the paperback release of Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project. Monday night, the former radio producer brought these tales of the unsung American to Plano’s St. Andrew United Methodist Church. It was his first time bringing the story of StoryCorps into a church. Of the 200 people in the room, more than half were public radio listeners, and roughly one-third were church members. Some had never heard of the project and were attending in support of their church; once the stories and lecture ended, they jumped to be first in line to get a new copy signed.

The StoryCorps project travels the United States facilitating interviews between two people who already know (and usually love) each other. Half of the participants in every city are located through an outreach process to “those who won’t hear about it on public radio or in newspapers,” Mr. Isay said. “We want to make sure we get the full spectrum of the human voice.”

During each interview session, a humanity is sometimes revealed through the telling of one person’s unique history, one individual’s story of a life, and those sessions are condensed for broadcast on National Public Radio. On this book tour, Mr. Isay does not read from the book, he merely introduces the recordings, letting the authentic voices of experience speak for themselves.

StoryCorps launches the first annual National Day of Listening on November 28, 2008.