PROVIDENCE Sue Pettine thought she’d quietly retire this month.

Her daughter had a different idea: Tell the nation.

Yesterday, in Kennedy Plaza, inside a 26-foot silver Airstream trailer, Pettine, 63, of Fall River, did just that. StoryCorps visited Rhode Island. And Pettine visited StoryCorps.

Sue Pettine of Fall River, center, prepares to be interviewed for NPR’s StoryCorps program by her daughter, Amy Pettine of Providence, right, with coaching by show facilitator Naomi Greene, left. StoryCorps’ trailer is parked in Providence’s Kennedy Plaza for a three-week stay.

The Providence Journal / Bill Murphy

“It seemed like a good opportunity,” said Amy Pettine, 31, of Providence. “I thought it would be a good opportunity for her to reflect on the next chapter of her life.”

Reflect aloud. And speak into the microphone.

StoryCorps is a countrywide oral history project of National Public Radio. It’s a history of people, by people and between people.

Interviews are its essence.

One friend or family member asks another questions about their life. Everyone hears the answers. Some are played once a week on NPR. All are archived at the American Folk Center of the Library of Congress in Washington.

“These stories become a part of recorded history,” said Julia Lazarus of Providence. “That’s meaningful when you think of history and all the voices that haven’t been included.”

StoryCorps is four years old, but its two traveling trailers have been operating only two years. This local stop, which continues through June 30, is being done through the John Nicholas Brown Center for Study of American Civilization at Brown University. The stop’s coordinators are three students or recent graduates of Brown’s master’s program in public humanities: Lazarus, Deborah Abramson and Stephanie Fortunato. They were the initiators of the project.

The medium matters. This isn’t the written word, but the spoken one.

“There is a texture and richness of someone’s voice,” Fortunato said. “That makes it more real and makes it easier to connect to that person.”

Amy Pettine can connect with her mother anytime she wants. She can call. She can visit. So why, you might wonder, would they make an appointment for a 40-minute StoryCorps session to record their conversation?

“You have memories,” Amy Pettine said. “You’ve got to capture those memories.”

The capturing could occur in the privacy of one’s home. But usually it doesn’t, Sue Pettine said. There are distractions and a lack of commitment. Sue Pettine knows. She interviewed her mother years ago for a graduate school project, sat across from her and recorded their conversation.

“It’s different than riding in a car chatting,” Sue Pettine said. “It creates a whole different scenario.”

“I thought of things I wouldn’t bring up in (normal) conversation,” Amy Pettine said.

In StoryCorps, people talk about whatever they want to talk to about. Usually it’s one person’s personal experience. Sometimes it can be two people’s common vocational enterprise.

Yesterday, Robb Dimmick and Ray Rickman of Providence talked about their business, Cornerstone, a used and rare book store that operated for 20 years on Benefit Street.

“Our book store was more than a book store,” Rickman said. “It was a community center.”

Literary giants such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou visited the store, which not only offered stories, they said, but created them.

Occasionally people called Cornerstone accidentally, when they meant to call Corner Book, an “adult” book store.

“We didn’t carry the kind of titles they wanted,” Dimmick said.

Rickman and Dimmick have two decades of stories to tell. But getting around to telling them, Dimmick said, is another matter.

“You live your life and reflect, but you don’t stop and have a conversation about it. You’re too busy living.”

The StoryCorps project is based on the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s. Recordings were made of average Americans during the Depression, and some who went through harder times than that: former slaves.

“That story is not told anymore, and it’s certainly not told by them,” Rickman said. “One day, I think people will care about this.”

So far, StoryCorps has recorded about 10,000 interviews. A tiny fraction of them, one a week, are broadcast Friday mornings on NPR’s Morning Edition program. All the rest are archived in Washington. However, the group who organized StoryCorps’ Rhode Island visit said it hopes to create a local and accessible archive, either online or in a place, of the StoryCorps interviews conducted here this month.

Then everyone can hear Sue Pettine talk about her retirement from teaching, her courtship with her husband, Louis, and how she let him think she was 16 at the time so he wouldn’t go looking for a girlfriend who was a little older.

“You lied to him for a whole year?” Amy Pettine said to her mother during their recording.

“By then,” Sue Pettine said, “he was already enamored, so it didn’t matter.”

To schedule an interview slot with StoryCorps, call (800) 850-4406 or visit www.storycorps.net.

brourke@projo.com