Volunteer Spotlight: Miriam Murcutt

Miriam Murcutt, Interviewer for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program. Interview conducted by Cyns Nelson, MROHP Program Coordinator

In lieu of asking Miriam to draft replies to questions, I prompted her to reflect on specified topics and then recorded an oral interview. This article gives you snippets of our conversation, pulled from the interview transcript. The entire recording lasted nearly an hour and includes wonderful detail about Miriam’s years in the UK, her travels with spouse Richard Starks, and books they have co-authored: Lost in Tibet, Along the River that Flows Uphill, A Room with a Pew, Greenland for $1.99, and their new novel In a Town Called Paradox.

Miriam has been volunteering with the oral history program since 2014. She joined MROHP shortly before I took over as coordinator, and she has conducted thirteen interviews for the oral history archive. Miriam’s British accent and sharp wit make her popular with the oral history cohort; I was keen to learn about her background and arrival in Boulder, along with other topics.

To listen to Miriam's full interview, click the radio!

Miriam Murcutt; Photo courtesy Miriam Murcutt Upbringing

I was raised in southern English cities, in Chichester, in a place called Horsham. I was brought up in pubs, because my father was a licensed victualer. ...That means he was licensed to sell booze, basically (laughing). My twin sisters—I'm not one of the twins, they were twins—and I were brought up by my mother, my father, and my grandmother, who lived with us all of our lives.

Transition to U.S. and Boulder

We [Richard and Miriam] had traveled to the U.S. a lot, and we looked for a base that we could run the business from. [They had published a directory, Invest in the UK, which had a sizable distribution in America.]… Richard had read about Boulder and what a good community it was. ...It was really business, then, that brought us to Boulder, but also a love of the mountains, and the setting, and Boulder's reputation as a good place to live.

[Richard and Miriam came to Boulder in 1991 and began living here full-time in 1997.]

CN: What was your impression of Boulder Public Library, at that time, in comparison to what you had experienced prior to?

MM: Oh, well, it was very glamorous. The libraries in Britain suffer from severe lack of funds. I was amazed to see popular books, with five copies of them, in the Boulder Library. That, to me, was quite astounding.

Volunteering for the Library

[Miriam had taken Conversations in Spanish at the library, and she thought about being a tutor for English learners.] Tutoring was very difficult, because I've got an English accent.…I didn't go over well at all with the students. It was quite instructive, actually, because it made me realize that, of course, learning a language and being able to speak the language of the country you're in makes you accepted. So, why would anyone want to say “toe-MAH-toe” in a country where they say “toe-MAY-toe”! …Anyway, it was a good course. And that introduced me to some of the volunteer services at the library.

Volunteering for MROHP

I was very interested in the preservation of history, through the mouths of ordinary people.

… My grandmother lived to be 100—she lived with us all our lives, with our family all our lives—and I didn't ask her nearly enough about her history. … It impressed upon me the value of recording ordinary people's lives. They don't have to be politically correct about the way they interpret their lives; and they have some detail that, perhaps, historians gloss over in presenting the big picture. … Interviewing struck me as being a good way of getting some involvement with other people when I was leading a rather isolated life, writing novels and things. Basically, also, learning a bit more about Boulder, the history of Boulder. … I do like to get—and HAVE got—a lot out of the oral-history interviewing part of the program, and also meeting with the group, whom I view as being an extremely amusing and lively group of people. Some of the best meetings that I've ever been in, actually. You have a laugh, as well as the serious stuff! … I hadn't realized, until I'd sat in on some of the [oral history] meetings, that of course the way the interviews are preserved is actually more important than the interviews themselves. Of course, you [need] something to preserve…but it's equally important to have something that is transferable into modern technology…in a highly accessible, modern, accessible format.

Memorable Interviews

[Miriam’s very first interview was with the volunteer fire chief of Four Mile Canyon. His oral history focuses on the Flood of 2013.] It had obviously been traumatic for him, as someone who was meant to rescue people— particularly with the flood—being totally unable to rescue anybody, because the roads were washed out. And he was describing how he had phone calls from children, saying: "My mother is up to her elbows in mud. What are we going to do? What are we going to do?" And he actually broke down, in that interview. And I felt really guilty about this, because I felt I'd forced him into a place he didn't necessarily want to be.