Historically, the voices we’ve heard most in books and literature have been those of white men, and even though there has been a movement to include more varied voices, there are still stories we don’t often hear. The Louisville Story Program, however, is a nonprofit organization focused on helping the stories that don’t often get heard come to light.

The first person narrative stories are made into professionally published books, but the way these stories come to fruition vary. Sometimes Louisville Story Program staff do intensive writing workshops with high school students in neighborhoods we don’t hear from very often. The teens write their own stories under the guidance of individuals who help them focus and make their writing the best it can be. In other situations, Louisville Story Program staff listen and record the oral histories of community members like horse racing professionals at Churchill Downs and turn those into published works.

This week, we talk to the deputy director of the Louisville Story Program Joe Manning. He is a songwriter/ musical performer as well as an author whose collection of essays about his experience as a young man on a merchant freighter that traveled the globe is called Certain Relevant Passages and was published in 2017.

Joe tells us the easiest and most important question an interviewer can ask to get a great answer, how his very young daughter has helped him listen to more audiobooks, why it's so important for underrepresented groups to be able to tell their own stories instead of having others tell it for them, and why two important words for The Louisville Story Program are community and communion.

Books Mentioned in this Episode:

1- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery