News from Salt Part 4, from Alix Blair, Guest Blogger

Hi Blog: At Salt, for one of our classes, at the mid-point, we write what's called a Taking Stock Paper. In this paper, we address for 6 pages what we've come through since the beginning, in terms of learning documentary work and our personal experiences. I wanted to share my paper. I had joy in writing it. It's a good practice to be forced to reflect on where you started, where you've gone, and what's next. I'm going to break it into parts so it doesn't look (hopefully) overwhelming in the blog space. (*you'll see I end the paper with those two quotes I love, Cather & Ondaatje, that I posted in an early blog entry here)


PART ONE: For me, (re-)reading Telling True Stories has become a part of my night habits—brush teeth, get into bed, open random page in Telling True Stories and feel reassured that I’m not alone in the work I’m doing, that I fit into a line of many, many people that have done this work before me and struggled as I do now. I keep the book on my bedside table (which is actually an old suitcase standing on end). I have sentences throughout the book underlined in a thick blue marker and sometimes, over those underlines, circles around the words: curiosity is the beginning (Gay Talese), warn your subjects of your separateness (Anne Hull), don’t just feel relieved that someone is talking to you (Victor Merina), and especially, to do this work well you must find your own way and make your own mistakes (Adrian Nicole Leblanc).
The beginning of this audio documentary work. It felt like an enormous thing to arrive in a place that you have no ties to and to feel urgency to find a story, though you are a stranger. And you want the story to be really, really good. I think of all the expectations I have carried with me from the very start of what I want(ed) the story to be. How do you go forward when anything and everything is a possible story? I struggled with this a lot in the beginning. Everyone I knew in any way, I asked them for stories. The way other people may ask neighbors to borrow sugar or eggs, I asked for stories. At dinner with new acquaintances, I asked for stories. I collected them. I spent hours on Google and Craigslist and all the Maine newspaper websites and then read those same newspapers in coffee shops, hoping there would be a secret, amazing story that I had missed in the first reading.


PART TWO: I began with three stories in the early weeks. I made interviews and took the time to do careful transcriptions. Each story had its own, very valid reasons for not working out as a radio story. I resisted giving up each story for a long time, probably too long. I had already put so much energy into them, and time, and emotional investment. I got to a point where the thought of starting over completely yet again seemed impossible. And with that, a fear. I was very scared, if I had invested so much (and so many weeks) into these three stories, and they didn’t work out, what guarantee did I have that the next one would.

I’ll say now, how grateful I am that those stories didn’t work out because I have learned so much by those losses. Those three falling through taught me to understand why they wouldn’t be strong stories and the absence of material that would have made for a weak story, had I pursued them anyway. It was very hard for me to give them up, but a very necessary learning.

There I was, about the fifth week into Salt with three stories I had invested in and had to let go of. At that point, I emailed a friend of a friend of a friend, who works with a fishery association. I literally asked her if she knew any stories with interesting characters, perhaps somewhere outside of Portland (I wanted to explore more of Maine), perhaps something to do with the ocean. This is another point to mention, that I have learned, oh the kindness of strangers, to want to help me tell a story for some reason! The friend of a friend of a friend responded about a lady who is a periwinkle harvester. Great! I thought, I don’t even know what that is. So from there, I decided to do a story about a periwinkle harvester, a simple profile story of a person and their work. Oh, little did I know how it would unfold into something so much larger. And little did I know how very far away Lubec is, seemingly the ends of the earth, so very different from Portland, indeed.



PART THREE: The middle of this audio documentary work. Since Lubec is a ten hour round-trip drive, and with the necessity to organize my recording around the people who are part of my story, I’ve gone up to Lubec twice, staying for up to six days at a time. Just as my periwinkle harvester’s work depends on the tides and the weather, my audio recording is now linked to this as well, since, of course, I cannot record her working if she’s not out on the water working. I like thinking that, because of this, my audio recording is, in a small way, linked to the cycles of the moon just as the tides are.

My plan was to tell the story of a periwinkle harvester yet almost immediately from talking with the harvester, I learned that that was only a small part of what was happening. At the moment of writing this paper, I have hours and hours of transcription and only a very rough outline of what the audio story will be. It is a story of a town desperate for jobs, the collapse of the fisheries there, a political battleground that could potentially change Maine’s constitution,and one woman’s fight to protect her bay… and it all started with snails. And it needs to fit into eight minutes.


PART FOUR: What I have learned from this (and again, I’m still just at the beginning of unfolding all the pieces of the story, with still more recording to do, let alone begin a second audio story!) is the immense need for flexibility as one works on their documentary. The story I have now is not the story I thought I would collect.

There are times it is very hard to be doing this—due to the circumstances of distance— without a break. Two days ago, when I returned from the six days in Lubec, I felt raw. I had spent on average ten hours a day, no breaks, recording and talking to people. It’s a great deal of mental work to be constantly anticipating questions and engaging in the most attentive listening. I felt raw and heavy with information and people’s emotions. I went to have dinner with friends in Portland and found I couldn’t engage at all. This has taught me that, at least for myself, when doing documentary work, it is so important to create space to process everything that is gathered and take a break. I also happen to be a “comforter” personality and it is hard for me to maintain a certain, necessary distance when my subject is clearly emotionally upset and feeling hopeless. There’s been a lot of hopelessness and desperation expressed by the people I’ve talked to, and I have often felt overwhelmed by it.


PART FIVE: Some of the many things I have learned so far. I have learned to be more aggressive in guiding interviews. I think it is helpful for the person you're interviewing too, to have a map of where the conversation needs to go. This is one thing I’ve struggled with before in terms of being just so grateful that someone is willing to talk to me, I’ve shied away from asking more directly what I’m seeking to understand. I have greatly appreciated leaving the microphone on even after the official interview is done. I’ve learned to be more discerning with the sounds I collect, in order to anticipate the time I will need on transcription later. There is a fear that you have to collect everything or you might miss something. And of course, there will be things you miss. In a way though, I find this very “Zen”, it’s a good teacher in letting go. I think it’s similar in photography. The moment comes and goes, you might miss it, but you can’t dwell on it, and hopefully you’ll learn to be ready for the next time something comes that you’d like to document.

Coming to Salt, I had worked in producing audio stories before, but I had always gathered stories from people I knew or had connection to. This was my first time, as a total stranger, asking people to tell me their stories. I have learned to be much less afraid of calling strangers. Still, I hate cold calls. I hate them, and though I have more confidence now to do them, I still hate the two minutes you have when you must explain yourself and convince someone to want to talk to you. Several times now, I’ve filled answering machines in explaining myself and have had to call back just to leave my number.

One thing that has been on my mind, in this work, is several times now I’ve been thanked by subjects—thanking me for listening, for showing interest in their lives. And even without this, I feel a certain weight to do justice to their story. To honor their voices and sometimes (all the time), I am terrified I won’t be able to, that it won’t be good enough.

There are two quotes I have copied into my Salt notebook, that I often call upon in this work as inspiration. One, Willa Cather: he had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind. And the other, Michael Ondaatje: everything is a collage, even genetics. There is a hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

And so, while I’m still very much in the middle of my work at Salt, with hours and hours and hours of transcription ahead of me, I already know this: that the people I have talked with, I will carry them with me. I hope I am able to honor their stories in this work, in this time, for now.

News from Salt Institute Part 3 from Alix Blair, Guest Blogger

Friday night now (April 24th). The last two days have been the school-wide critique for every Salt student & their work thus far in the semester. Everyone has about 20 minutes to present their work and receive praise/critique. I fluxed between feeling like, "this is okay, I don't care, it's just a draft" ... to nervous butterflies, because clearly I care a lot about what people think of my work. The teachers chose the students randomly with no previous announcement-- that is, you never knew when it would be your turn. Thursday passed without my turn and this morning, Friday, I commented to my friend, "I bet I'll be last"... sure enough (should have bet money!) I was last. It definitely made me anxious all day, just wanting to get it over with.

I felt especially nervous because unlike most all of the radio students, I was behind in my work (thanks to the 20-30 hours of audio I had collected) to the point I had not yet shared any audio version with anybody. So I had not yet had any feedback, whereas most folks had already shared their stories several days earlier to other radio students. The way Salt teaches, you focus first on perfecting your script, your paper version, before you get to work in Protools-- essentially your story's laid out before you and your next steps are to make your audio clips, record narration, and mix it together (oh, so easy-- please read the intense sarcasm)

I started my ProTools session at 8am on Wednesday morning (I had already lined up my audio & made my cuts), so started the piece at 8am and finished (the draft that I shared today) at 3am the next morning.

A word about narration-- a misguided radio class T.A. in 2004 told me I sounded like a British robot (??? I know!) when I did narration. Though five years older (wiser?) now, I still dread, and I mean DREAD narration. (That TA, like a mean boy you once liked-- you never forget what they said and they, to this day, have no idea you still carry those words with you).

Narration: I read my entire narration three times. I put up the photographs of two friends (who are looking at the camera when the photo was taken) at my eye level, so when I read my narration, I was looking at them, to try to help me feel natural, like I was talking to them on the phone. Ira Glass spoke at the Merrill Auditorium in Portland a few days ago and said your narration should sound like you're talking to your best friend late at night in bed on the phone-- that kind of intimacy given to the radio listener. The first time, I just read my words straight through (I had already obsessed on trying to make my word choice sound conversational). The second time, I read "over the top", smiling the whole time, and even outloud pretending to be my friend asking me the question that my narration was trying to answer. And for the third time, the time that would be the most successful (no one called me a British robot, actually I was complemented on my voicing). I listened to my favorite Lil Wayne song and danced and sang it out as loud as I could. As soon as the song finished, I went straight into my third read.

Actually, in one of Davia's workshops she referenced the brilliant Brian Eno http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/57/freestyling/ and his article about the power of singing in our lives. I have a terrible voice (once I was booed while singing kareoke) but Lil Wayne definitely helped with my narration as a radio producer.

And so out of those 20-30 hours of recorded tape, I came in just under 10 minutes (including my host intro)

One of my favorite sounds is my recording of hundreds of periwinkle snails spitting out ocean water (my story has a lot to do with periwinkle snails)
The voice of snails! Who knew!

Tomorrow, early, early morning (Saturday April 25th) to Boston for the Megapolis (Audio) Festival.
with love, Alix

This is me at 8:30 in the morning after going to bed at 3:30, from working on my audio story until 3 am.
I am very tired!!

More News from the Salt Institute by Alix Blair, Guest Blogger

Here is Alix's second dispatch from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine. (Her first post can be read here).

We talk about finding and directing the EMOTIONAL CENTER of our story, how is it best if-- instead of in one sentence--you should be able to sum up your story in ONE WORD and most often, that is your emotional center and the direction you should craft your story in.

It looks like one of my two stories for Salt's radio program will take place in Lubec, Maine. It is the eastern most area of the United States and a ten-hour roundtrip drive from Portland! Recently driving the 5 hour return, I had the good fortune to hear Soundprint's Treasure Isle story which I fell in love with.

It's funny & shocking how much finding an audio story is like falling in love. You live it so much in your head before the first meeting. You invent conversations and scenes and expectations. You create the imaginary future and its brilliance. You spend hours fretting over the phone, wondering why they don't call you back. Did you say the wrong thing? Did you scare them away? Finally you meet the real thing.You learn it's not at all what you had in mind, you have to let go of certain preconceived ideas for the story. The story is different than you created. You must be open to all the new things that unfold and yet keep a map of the places you believed in--what brought you originally to the story in the first place.

Flowers in my tiny apartment, only a few blocks to walk to Salt.
They are a healthy reminder that there's life outside of hours and hours of transcription!

Here's some of what we're listening to (a mishmash selection of the past several weeks.) We usually start our Tuesday and Friday radio classes with 2-3 listenings and discussion of radio pieces, most often produced by past students. These are some of my favorites.

"No Praise, No Blame, Just So" Jessica Alpert.
Kitchen Sisters Tupperware Party
"Bringing the work into you" Megan Martin.
"Just another fish story" Molly Menschel--this one we listened to as before-Salt "homework." I love this story so much.
"World's Longest Diary" Dave Isay

We're reading Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writer's Guide compiled by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call. I love this book. I LOVE THIS BOOK! It is so helpful, such a diversity of voices talking about documentary work. I am inspired by it. I re-read it all the time, certain passages that give me guidance. This book is wonderful.

Here are two quotes I collected that inspire me in this world of radio documentary work. Not related at all to Salt, but I have the quotes on scraps of paper pasted into my Salt notebook:

"He had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind." Willa Cather

"Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross." Michael Ondaatje.

Alix tries to stay warm in the cold Maine air and blend in with the locals!

Hidden Kitchens Texas

We are pleased to announce the publication of our new book, HIDDEN KITCHENS TEXAS—Stories, Recipes and More from the Lone Star State.

Blurb, a new print-on-demand publishing company, invited us to create a book based on our Hidden Kitchens Texas radio special narrated by Willie Nelson. The book is a colorful, action-packed road trip exploring Texas through food—told by people who find it, grow it, cook it, eat it, sell it, talk about it, and celebrate with it. It's available now at Blurb.com.

We'd love to see you at the book launch festivities at South by Southwest Music, Film and Interactive Festival in Austin this week. Here are the details:

Monday, March 16, 2009, 8PM—The Tap Room/Six Lounge, Austin, TX
Blurb Publishing is hosting a bash as part of the South by Southwest. They'll be featuring their new publishing technology including The Kitchen Sisters' new book Hidden Kitchens Texas.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 5PM—Ranch 616, Austin, TX
Hidden Kitchens Texas Launch Party

Wednesday, March 18, 2009, Noon—BBQ the Texas Way, SXSW panel featuring The Kitchen Sisters, Texas writer Joe Nick Patoski, and Texas cookbook writer and author Robb Walsh.

News from Salt Institute - Alix Blair/ Guest Blogger

Alix Blair, our former intern, is currently attending the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine. We thought it would be fun to have her report in from time to time and give us an idea of what goes on at Salt. Here's her first report.

Alix Blair recording in Bhutan on Bhutan National Day

My name is Alix Blair. In 2004 I was an intern with The Kitchen Sisters, helping with the Hidden Kitchens Project. When I was growing up, I never thought working in radio was something just anyone could do. I thought it was like farming or lobster-fishing--you were somehow magically born into. In college, thanks to a marvelous teacher (Beth Taylor!) who began to offer a radio nonfiction class, I started learning about radio, hanging out around the student radio station, and my life was transformed the moment Joe Richman and Jay Allison came to speak to the class. It was an email some years later to Jay Allison when I asked if he could point in me in the direction of the Kitchen Sisters.

From the Kitchen Sisters, my radio adoration took me to the Center for Documentary Studies in North Carolina. A most incredible place with incredible week-long summer workshops in audio production for beginners and for advanced radio producers. I had the tremendous privilege and great joy of working with audio guru John Biewen. The last two years I have worked with CDS, most recently in a non-audio role-- as a photographer with the Five Farms Project. But in all this time, and with the audio pieces I've created, I've never had the "luxury" to dedicate for the long-term to a story, to have intense and constant teacher and peer review, to solely commit weeks to audio work and navigate all the amazing and scary places documentary work can take you. Hence I find myself in Maine in the winter at Salt.

We're here in the end of week three at Salt. Portland, Maine is covered in ice and crunchy snow. Last night Rob Rosenthal, one of the two radio teachers and director of the radio program, in collaboration with the photography teacher Kate Philbrick, had the opening of their show, "Malaga Island: A story best left untold." It was incredible how many people came. Salt's main room had every chair taken and people sat on the floor, lining the hallway on either side. I am always so in love with people coming together as a community around sound. We're all so used to watching TV and movies, or going to an art gallery for a photography show, but coming together to sit with strangers to just listen!

The story at the center, like an onion, all the layers around it.

Back to Salt... we have a mix of classes, each "track" (writing, photography, radio) meets with its own students twice a week and then we all have a class, on Thursdays, to discuss the general ins and outs of documentary work--the ethics, the challenges, learning to be brave when asking a stranger for their intimate story, making very sure not to fall in love with the person you're documenting and not having them fall for you (it compromises the work!). We are about thirty students, with a mix of ages, though most in their mid-twenties. Some have had radio experience before, some have had none at all. In the radio program, we have two assignments before our feature stories--one is doing a promo for a show of our creation, one is a Vox Pop of a question of our choosing. For my Vox Pop, I want to ask people what is the moment they remember feeling like they were an adult, that invisible line that you cross. (My friend Kavanah says it's when you never run out of toilet paper! that's grown-up responsibleness).

So, the end of week three. On Tuesday we are pitching our first stories (we create two) to Andrea DeLeon, NPR Northeast Bureau Chief. I will be doing my first interview tomorrow for a potential story. I have about five ideas for stories collecting in my head. Not sure where they will lead. It's part of the desperation, adventure, falling in love-ness of this radio documentary work.

Reporting in - Radio Workshop, Interns & Oscar Nominated Films

WORKSHOP
We have 2 openings left in our Recording and Interviewing Workshop next week, Tuesday, February 24 in San Francisco. If you would like attend or be notified when the next workshop is scheduled please send us an email kitchen@kitchensisters.org or subscribe to our email list.

This 3-hour workshop is intended not just for people working in radio, but also for those interested in recording oral histories, web audio, podcasts and others who would like to learn interviewing, documenting, and radio and online broadcasting skills for the projects that they do. In the past we have had a freelance photographer for the New York Times, an archivist from UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, oral historians as well as many independent journalists. The group is kept to a small size so everyone has a chance to be involved. The fee is $100. A snack is provided.

SALT - THE ART OF DOCUMENTARY STORYTELLING

If you are looking to emerse yourself in the art of documentary storytelling you might also want to look into SALT Institute in Maine which trains aspiring writers, radio producers, and photographers in the art of documentary storytelling. A number of our interns have attended SALT. Eloise Melzer just returned and former intern, Alix Blair, is on her way to SALT next week. We invited Alix to report in from time to time here as a guest blogger.

Interns Eloise Melzer, Catherine Kastleman, Allie Wollner & Lisa Morehouse

Listen Up - Interns Past & Present

Independent journalist and KS intern Lisa Morehouse's story Hunters Up Their Game With Camouflaged Trucks aired on NPR's Day to Day recently. Visit her blog to read and hear more of her work. "We're all about the camos, says Gary Linman, who's had a multiple hunting vehicles, like this Jeep, painted in custom camouflage to blend in with the Alabama woods."


Ruxandra Guidi worked with us in 2002 and then left for Austin, Texas where she did production and reporting work for NPR's weekly show, Latino USA as well as freelancing for other radio programs. She dropped by our office recently on her way through town after living in Bolivia. Awarded a five-week IRP Fellowship from John Hopkins University Ruxandra traveled to Haiti to examine the effects of foreing aid on human rights, violence and poverty. Her piece, “South-South” on the effort to overhaul Haiti's' state trash collection system aired on NPR. Rux has been collaborating with her husband, photographer Roberto "Bear" Guerra, and their latest collaboration is a multimedia story which can be seen and heard on the International Reporting Project website of John Hopkins University.
photo /Roberto Guerra

Alison Budner is producing stories for KPFA in Berkeley after completing an apprenticeship at KPFA's First Voice Media Action Program. Her most recent radio show was focused on the Victory Gardens -- with one piece on the historical gardens from WWI and WWII and another on the present day Victory Gardens program in San Francisco. It is a wonderful piece that goes hand-in-hand with our Hidden Kitchens story - Garden Allotments - A London Kitchen Vision.

OSCAR NOMINATIONS
THE GARDEN
Director Scott Hamilton's Oscar nominated documentary The Garden is a portrait of the fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles - one of the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have since created a miracle in one of the country’s most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community. Learn more online and spread the word.

Robert Lloyd, LA Times Television critic, writes about another powerful, Oscar-nominated short film premiering tonight on HBO. The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306,” The film is focused mainly on the memories of Memphis preacher Samuel “Billy” Kyles, who was the only other person on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel when King was shot. Read his review here.

Photo / Samuel "Billy" Kyles at the Lorraine Motel

Thinking of this period of time again, about the sanitation workers strike that brought King to Memphis and the movement organized around the slogan “I Am a Man” made us think about about some audio clips from our story WHER 1000 Beautiful Watts, a two part story that we produced as part of our NPR series Lost & Found Sound in 1999, about the first all girl radio station. Sam Phillips started the station with his wife Becky Phillips and from 1955 through 1971, a team of women ran the station; working in almost every position from on-air disc jockey to copywriter to sales manager. It was an "easy listening" music format but along with starting the first call-in radio show, they covered the local news as well - including the sanitation workers strike.

It was on the talk show, "Open Mike" that on air host Marge Thrasher announced the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. That was a memorable moment for the women of WHER.

Donna Barlett: "I remember standing at the news machine and watching the news tap out that Martin Luther King had just been shot. Marge was on the air and I took her the paper and I could not talk and tell her what I had in my hands...I couldn't talk."

Our story on WHER is available online - Part 2 which includes the section on King is here lostandfoundsound. Take a listen.

And ah yes ! If you're interested in joining our internship program visit our site for more information.

Today is the birthday of Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, and most recently, In Defense of Food.

Michael has been a good friend and adviser to The Kitchen Sisters and when we were producing our story, Deep-Fried Fuel, about biodiesel made from farm crops and recycled restaurant grease, we spoke with Michael and asked him to weigh in on the rise of biofuels. Take a listen to this Kitchen Conversation with Michael Pollan.