I dived into Abigail Perkiss’ Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore, after listening to a short podcast episode with the author about the book hosted by the New Books Network. I appreciated the conversation for the context it helped provide about the oral histories featured in the book and more specifically, how her own students were critical in the collection process, even though none of them had ever conducted an oral history before and many were not history majors at all. Understanding the background of the project and knowing that the oral historians involved in it were not just from the same community as their sources but had also just endured the same traumatic event really sheds light on why the project was so successful. The interviews captured in the text came from a space of deep vulnerability that is not necessarily guaranteed with a project of this scope. Below are some key questions I hope to pose to Perkiss on the project and how she approached constructing the book:
- The text incorporates so many voices and individual stories, which is a testament to what can be created from an oral history project. I’m curious how you went about selecting which parts of the interviews would be featured in the book and what overall considerations you made when turning these hours of conversations into a concrete and coherent narrative. What was the outlining and preparation process, and did you have a sense of the final product you were hoping to create/the ultimate story you were hoping to tell as you entered into the oral history collection process, or did it unfold organically?
- Given the focus of your upcoming on MOVE and media narratives in the wake of the bombing, I’m curious about your thoughts on media coverage of Hurricane Sandy, particularly local news coverage. When analyzed alongside the oral histories collected for your project, what did the media miss or fail to capture? What, if anything, did journalists get right? Relatedly, what does oral history offer that journalism perhaps cannot provide when it comes to recounting traumatic events of this scope?