Sue Monk Kidd spoke in Wichita Thursday night. She was at Watermark to promote her new book, “The Invention of Wings.” It is a story of the “Struggle in the human spirit for freedom,” she says. It is historical fiction based on Sarah Grimké, an abolitionist who was born into a slave-owning family in the 1830s.
Kidd says she has always been interested in these topics. “Gender and race matter deeply to me,” she says. She is a product of the south of the 1950s and 60s and says she graduated in the first integrated class at her high school. “I feel a responsibility to be a witness to it,” she said.
She said her hope is that the reader will feel this story, to feel enslaved and to feel women with very few rights. Her favorite line in the novel is, “Press on, my sisters.” She said she was reminded of the Julius Lester quote, “History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another’s pain in the heart our own.”
Asked about the conversation she has had about slavery while on tour, she said it was still a very difficult topic. “Slavery is ground zero for racism,” she says. And it’s hard for people to discuss it, to accept what it means in our history. “Slavery is America’s original sin,” she said. “It is an American wound.”
It is my mother’s birthday – at least for a few more minutes here on this April 24th. She died in 2001, at the age of 82, and there hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t missed her
“The soul is contained in the human voice,” says David Isay, creator of 
They do take photographs of the participants, but Isay says, “We will never have cameras in the StoryCorps booth.” He loves the intimacy and power of the human voice, and said even if they were video interviews he would probably close his eyes to listen to them. 
“The trick is not to wait,” he says. StoryCorps has a “National Day of Listening” the day after Thanksgiving, when they encourage people to have these conversations. Of course, it can be done anytime. “It’s always an amazing experience to have these conversations,” he says. He knows of what he speaks. He says he recorded an interview with his father, and listened to it the first time at 3 a.m. the night his father died. 
They are thrilled to have the Morning Edition segment, but only 1 of every few hundred interviews is edited down to a short segment for the radio. Recently they started doing animations of a few of the stories to appeal to a younger audience. Those are done for about 1 out of every 200 radio segments. 
He said StoryCorps is about celebrating the American story and being reminded to pay attention. “It’s amazing the poetry, the grace, the beauty you can find in people walking down the street if you just take time to listen,” he says. 
I spent part of Friday and all day Saturday at the KWA Writer’s Conference in Wichita. It was wonderful to be with other writers and to pick up some tips on structure.
