With First Kalispell Stop, StoryCorps Mobile Tour Captures Heartfelt Conversations from the Flathead Valley

Speaking to a room full of Flathead Valley residents earlier this week at FVCC’s Wachholz College Center, StoryCorps Mobile Tour site manager Ian Murakami explained the scale of what the nonprofit has been able to achieve since it was founded in 2003.

Calling it “the largest collection of human voices ever gathered,” he shared that StoryCorps has facilitated and recorded more than 380,000 conversations involving almost 700,000 people from all 50 states.

The nonprofit’s oral history mission is “to help us believe in each other by illuminating the humanity and possibility in us all — one story at a time.”

It’s a lofty goal, and it relies in part on a weathered but still gleaming Airstream trailer, which for weeks at a time can be found parked on various otherwise unremarkable patches of asphalt across America as part of the StoryCorps Mobile Tour, which is now in its 20^th year on the road.

For about the last four weeks, the Airstream has been on one such spot within Flathead Valley Community College’s network of parking lots, as part of the college’s partial sponsorship of the tour’s visit. It’s the tour’s first stop in Kalispell, and its fifth in Montana.

Mobile tour conversations take place at the back of the Airstream where a small room has been fashioned into a recording studio, complete with red cushioned wraparound booth seating, gray soundproof foam on the walls, and audio equipment. When the door shuts with a pressurized whoosh, it can feel like the outside world has fallen away. It’s in that space that Murakami and a handful of other staff members have welcomed in a long line of Flathead Valley residents (likely as many as 70 by the time they leave town after June 27), to talk about their lives for 40 minutes at a time.

The recording booth allows for the kind of deep quiet that can be filled with conversation, and clearly there was a desire for it in the Flathead, given that every recording slot was booked. Participants may talk about things like formative experiences, or their work, or choose to spend the time remembering long-gone loved ones. The format is loose, but it generally relies on friends or loved ones talking to each other. Facilitators, like Murakami, are there to help guide people through the process, manage the recording equipment, and selectively interject with follow-up questions.

At the FVCC event where Murakami spoke, called a StoryCorps Listening Event, a crowd of over 100 people got a chance to hear a sampling of what their fellow community members chose to talk about in the recording booth. The excerpts, produced by the staff at Montana Public Radio, captured a wide range of topics.

One Kalispell conversation between a father and son delved into the experience of leaving Los Angeles in 1957 to take a job at the Ant Flat Ranger Station in the Kootenai National Forest. Another conversation between a mother and her adopted son touched on their relationship, parenting, and why the boy’s life had played out the way it had. One conversation featured two members of Code Girls United talking about how their education in computer science has helped them through life. In one recording, a young woman talked to her aunt about what it was like coming out to her. And there was even a discussion between Wachholz Center Director Matt Laughlin and FVCC President Jane Karas about their vision for the Wachholz Center, and what it meant to bring Yo-Yo Ma to town.

One participant, who had worked at a university in Afghanistan, drew on her experience helping some of the families she worked with navigate the refugee resettlement process after the Taliban took over Kabul in 2021 following the withdrawal of the United States military. The speaker herself had immigrated to the United States from Australia, and she reflected on how the foundation of a person’s life, like their education and working background, can disappear when they become a refugee forced to start anew in a place that may not recognize the life they used to have.

Flathead Valley residents Drew Bastick and his wife Lorien Cortez talked about what Bastick would want to tell his father if he was still alive.

“I would tell him I get it. I get fatherhood. I get the satisfaction of it, I get how hard it is. I get how hard it is to stick it through and see it through even when you don’t have any more in you,” Bastick said, his voice catching with emotion.

“I don’t want to make it sound negative. I think it’s a great thing. You become rich in so many ways that don’t count at the bank. You have such a rich life. You know, for your kids, the sacrifice is a lot sometimes. I’d tell him I get it.”

Summarizing some of the themes that had emerged over the course of the Kalispell recordings, Murakami mentioned unexpected friendships and relationships, community traditions, role models, the environment, the natural world, and change.

“Everybody said it’s changed in major ways,” Murakami said of how people described the Flathead.

Participants have a year to decide what they’d like to do with their recording. They can keep it private, or share it with StoryCorps and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. They can also opt to have their story shared with a local public radio affiliate. StoryCorps has a long-running partnership with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Montana Public Radio (celebrating its 60^th anniversary this year), for example, might edit a StoryCorps recording down into an excerpt lasting just a few minutes, which is then played on air to the station’s listeners. In fact, MTPR Program Director Michael Marsolek told the crowd at FVCC that his station would be airing excerpts Mondays at 3 p.m. and Saturday mornings at 9:30 a.m. into the fall.

StoryCorps itself also edits conversations and produces short narrative excerpts, podcast episodes and animated narrative videos.

One of the most viewed videos StoryCorps has ever shared on its YouTube page is of a Montanan, Marine Lance Corporal Travis Williams, remembering the loss of 11 members of his squad after they were dispatched on a rescue mission in Barwanah, Iraq, in 2005. The vehicle they were traveling in hit a roadside bomb. As Williams shared, before they set out on their mission, he had been tapped to ride in another vehicle separate from his squad members.

Telling the stories of veterans, including through a program called the “Military Voices Initiative” is just one of the many specialized efforts StoryCorps has taken on over the years, including “One Small Step,” which seeks to bring people with different political views together for a conversation intended to help them get to know each other as people.

“I think one, people just want to be listened to,” Murakami said, of what he’s learned about human nature over the course of sitting in on roughly 300 conversations over the last 18 months. “You don’t realize how many people just want to talk to each other, but they don’t know how to start. And if you give someone a good question, everything flows from there.”

Sandra Clark, the CEO of StoryCorps, told the crowd at FVCC that she doesn’t think the nonprofit’s founder Dave Isay envisioned that the need for human connection would continue to grow from when he started gathering stories 22 years ago.

“Think of it, 100 years from now, someone will be able to hear your story, archived in the Library of Congress about what was most important to you, in your voice. About you, your family, your friends or your community,” Clark said. “So thank you all for your support. This is a meaningful journey, I think, for all of us. Let’s keep connecting with each other.”

Despite the apparent appetite people have for what StoryCorps provides, the nonprofit — and public media in general — is at a “pivotal moment,” according to StoryCorps’ Chief Strategy and Program Innovation Officer Chris Norris.

Speaking earlier this month on the heels of a House of Representatives vote to claw back previously appropriated funding for public media, Norris said that his organization receives about $2 million a year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The rescission package, if it ultimately passes, would eliminate that funding starting in 2026. Norris said that money has gone towards funding the mobile tour, StoryCorps’ animations, its Military Voices Initiative, and its One Small Step program.

“For us, what that means is continuing to do the good work, but thinking about alternative models, some ways of moving from a funding-dependent model to thinking more about a business-dependent model, and ways that we can leverage our core assets to generate revenue. But this is more about the moment we’re in, and what public media means to people,” Norris said.

Saying that he grew up watching his local PBS station in Philadelphia, Norris bemoaned that even longstanding programming like “Sesame Street” has been politicized.

“It’s definitely an unfortunate time in American history, but I am confident that StoryCorps and others in the public media ecosystem will do what it takes to continue serving the American public, and we’ll pivot,” he said.

Citing the polarization, animosity and dehumanization, that has permeated parts of contemporary society, Norris argued that it makes the need for stories more important than ever.

“You need a reminder of the humanity and possibility in the soul. You need a reminder that we’re not as divided as the media says we are. You need a reminder that there’s still hope in the world, that there’s still public goods, that there’s still civic value in media.”

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