Transom Podcast

“Working With Studs – A Transom Radio Special” on PRX

Bonus tracks from “Working With Studs”

About Working With Studs

Back in the 1980s, long before coming to work at Transom, I’d been working with Studs Terkel at WFMT Radio. Despite exiting ’FMT in ‘91, and leaving Chicago in 2001, I continued working as Studs’ transcriptionist and editorial helper for the rest of his life.

Last year, during a planning meeting for a Transom radio special series, Jay Allison said, “OK, Syd, you have to produce an hour.” Until then, the extent of my audio work had been making Sonic IDs (WCAI’s 60-second station ID breaks). I’d never produced anything longer than 90-seconds, and I hadn’t even touched a Pro Tools session in 6 years. Knowing I had the creative and technical support of my Transom community kept me from being paralyzed with fear.

My original idea, prompted by a conversation with Samantha Broun, was to use audio made during my work on his memoir Touch and Go. I had a box containing 30 cassette tapes of Studs talking about his life and work. Where to begin?

Jay wisely urged me to focus the piece on working with Studs rather than on his work, and offered structural suggestions. Viki, knowing how self-conscious a writer and reader I am, made a great suggestion: instead of writing a formal narration, I should make notes and simply talk to her rather than read her the narration.

Everyone at Transom gave great notes on early drafts — gratitude for all they contributed in the making of this hour.

For the piece, I chose to interview others who had worked closely with or around Studs. From WFMT, three former colleagues: Lois Baum (Associate Program Director who’d worked with Studs for over 40 years), former WFMT sales manager Tony Judge, (who’d become a friend to Studs and accompanied him on long distance interview trips for the books), and George Drury. George started out as Assistant Librarian and became Spoken Arts Curator before becoming a teacher. His archival nature and memory were essential to this project, and he generously shared audio and ideas. Studs’ publisher André Schiffrin was the natural choice when discussing the oral history work. And I included Tom Engelhardt, an editor I’d bonded with when he worked on two of Studs’ later books.

For me, the opportunity to talk with the others about our old friend close to a year after his death was a joyful experience.

Of course, my original plans went kerflooey. For starters, much of my Terkel tape wasn’t usable. He was frail when we worked on Touch and Go, recovering from a lengthy hospitalization and a raft of ailments. He didn’t sound like himself. Fortunately, in 2001, Jay had asked me to interview Studs in Chicago for a Transom manifesto. That tape was perfect for my needs.

George Drury suggested I get in touch with German documentarians Hans-Ulrich Warner and Uli Swidler who kindly shared audio from television and radio documentaries they’d done on Chicago and Studs years back. Jesse Hardman heard about the piece and volunteered tape from Studs’ 90th birthday celebration. Studs’ son, Dan Terkell, dug out and sent tapes I requested from the house. Russell Lewis of the Chicago History Museum and Steve Robinson of WFMT graciously gave me permission to use material under their respective purviews. But there’s only so much you can pack into an hour, and much of what I gluttonously requested was eventually put aside.

Thanks to Sara Chapman and Tom Weinberg of Media Burn, Jyothi Natarajan of the New Press, David Krupp, and those interviewed for helping me get my hands on the photos.

At first,

“Matthew” on PRX

About Matthew

I first met Matthew in the spring of 2008 when I was a visiting artist teaching printmaking workshops at Laguna Honda Hospital (LHH) in San Francisco. LHH is the city’s long term care facility. Many of the residents are elderly and suffering from some form of dementia. Matthew stood out both because of his youth and clarity of mind. He wore a face-mask, got around in in a wheelchair and was obviously in recovery from some kind of procedure. I never knew much more than that during our time in the workshops. He also stood out as a skilled artist.

At the end our our six week long workshop Matthew was getting ready to be discharged from the hospital. He pulled me aside as people were leaving on the final day and asked me if I’d be interested in making some kind of art project based on the healing process he was going through. At this point he revealed what was behind the mask, a face undergoing dramatic transformation through a series of surgeries. When we first met he’d already undergone a couple of surgeries and as I write this he is recovering from his ninth. I was honored that he trusted me enough to show me his face – he had never taken his mask off during the workshops. I also felt daunted by the idea of making ‘art’ from this very heavy story. I had ethical concerns about what it would mean for me take his very personal experience and try to express it through my art practice. What I ended up proposing was that we make some kind of collaboration. It was obvious that he wanted to share his story and working together felt like the best way to approach it.

At the very beginning of our collaboration I asked Matthew to articulate what his goals were for this project. His response made a lot of sense to me. He said that he wanted to use art as a way to come to terms with his new appearance. We began by making drawings – portraits of him before and after the incident. We also took lots of photos and continue to do so before and after every surgery. In addition, we recorded his story in the form of audio interviews.

At the beginning of our work together Matthew and I were meeting once a week – making drawings, taking photos, etc. There were times when he was extremely depressed and struggling with illness and addiction. In addition to being his artistic collaborator I became a part of his support network in some small way, getting him out of the house for walks when he was too depressed to work and occasionally providing a shoulder to cry on. As time has passed I have seen him overcome incredible difficulty. He successfully completed a treatment program to help him kick meth addiction and is now comfortable enough with his appearance to have posted several of our photos on the web along with prolific blog postings about his progress through the surgeries. The more I get to know Matthew the more impressed I am by his resilience and his commitment to being a leader in AIDS and addiction advocacy in the face of his challenges.

Tech Notes

The interview was recorded at Matthew’s kitchen table with a Shure Beta 87A and a Marantz PMD 660. Editing was done in Logic Express. So far I have decided not to use music, mostly because I’m new to this form and overwhelmed at the thought of it! The subject matter is very sensitive and I’m nervous about overpowering the story with music, or choosing something that will feel trivializing. I am open to suggestions from the Transom community.

 

Additional Support for this work provided by

About Kidnap Radio

I was 19 when my father was kidnapped in Colombia. It was 1999. My mother came to my college campus to deliver the news and I flew to Bogota to be with my family for a few weeks. (My mother is American, my father’s Colombian and they divorced when I was 5.) After that, except for brief trips for a wedding and a funeral, I didn’t go back to the country where I was born until I traveled there to report this piece in the spring of 2009.

I was able to make the trip thanks to Jay Allison. I met Jay in Woods Hole through Ibby Caputo, a dear friend and a former intern at Atlantic Public Media. After hearing part of the story of my father’s kidnapping and rescue, Jay suggested I undertake this project and guided me along the way.

I asked my father to meet me in Bogota for a long weekend in April so that I could interview him. I had heard bits and pieces about the kidnapping in the intervening years – when I would visit our family– but in the course of our interviews I realized I had known very little about what he’d endured: All I knew was our family’s side of the ordeal.

My father’s kidnapping began on November 22, 1999 and ended August 13, 2000. He was kidnapped by the FARC and kept in 38 different places, spending the first months of his kidnapping alone, with only his guards and a radio, for company.

After talking to my dad, I went on my own to the radio station in Bogota, Caracol Radio, that had sent out messages from my family to my father, and continues to send messages to hostages from their families every Saturday night from midnight to 6 a.m. The show is called Voces del Secuestro, or Voices of Kidnapping. (There are several other stations in Colombia that send messages out on other days of the week). The host, Herbin Hoyos, is a journalist who started this program in 1994, after he was briefly kidnapped and scolded by another hostage for not using the radio to reach out to hostages.

Since then, Hoyos has broadcast messages from the family members of the kidnapped every weekend, despite threats from the FARC and assassination attempts (the most recent sent him into exile in Europe this fall). Today, around 50 messages go out on every show; at the height of the kidnapping craze, there were as many as 100, much shorter messages.

As I sat in the radio station listening to the messages, which are somewhere between prayers and diary entries, I noticed that many of the people calling in to the station were talking to relatives who had been gone for several years, sometimes for as long as a decade. Like my dad, they were kidnapped because the FARC and other groups, including right-wing paramilitaries and gangs with no political agenda, had made kidnapping a major industry in Colombia. Unlike my dad, these people hadn’t come back.

Some were almost certainly alive, like the soldiers and policemen held as political prisoners in the war between the FARC and the Colombian military. But others whose names were on the radio – civilians, by and large – were missing and unaccounted for.

Their families became the focus of my piece. Thanks to Maria Isabel Campos, the producer of Voices of Kidnapping, I was able to reach more than a dozen of these families in Bogota, including Ismael and Amalia Marquez. This couple has been keeping track of all the kidnapped families since their son, Enrique, was kidnapped in 1999. When I asked Amalia for help reaching others, she took out a tattered address book and turned to a page with my own family’s name and phone number.

It was chilling to uncover this corollary to my life – our life – this family of people who are bound only by the loss of a family member and a radio show. I dedicate this piece, Kidnap Radio, to them. They opened their doors to me, and taught me whatever it is that I have tried to convey with it.

From Print to Radio

This is not my first encounter with radio – in 2006 I took a radio ...

“Cat Lady” on PRX

About Cat Lady

I had struggled for a year, trying to write a piece about my mother, about myself, about what I observed to be an awkward, even incompatible relationship between the roles of artist and mother, about a child’s inheritance of his parents’ pain and desire. I had a long and unfocused essay, which I put aside.

A few months later Holly Hughes invited me to participate in a night of readings that would all be pet-themed. Did I have anything that would fit? I, barely legal, was excited and intimidated by others she told me were on the bill– Eileen Myles, Kate Bornstein– artists who were much older and more accomplished than I. Yes, I said, I have something. I read over and threw out that previous manuscript and sat down to write a short poem about my mother… and cats! Three days later I had overstayed my welcome in various diners across New York City and had a twenty-minute short story.

The piece went over quite well and Holly encouraged me to stage it, which I eventually did. As a theater piece it’s been performed, under Elizabeth Gimbel’s direction, in cities across the country and in Europe as well.

While I began in the autobiographical, the characters and events in “Cat Lady” are decidedly abstracted and fictionalized. My actual mother speaks in more dulcet tones and, as she herself points out, would never feed the cats Whiskas.

Tech Info

This was recorded in a studio at The University of Michigan’s Duderstadt Center with Katherine Weider and Stephanie Rowden. I edited it with Garageband.

Additional Support for this work provided by

Last year, Transom and the FLIK International Film festival put out a call for multi-media self portraits. We have our two winners. Soon, we’ll be featuring “I Hate Drake” from Mortified, but right now Transom is hosting James Barany’s poignant and powerful piece about his own obesity called, “My Most Important Self Portrait.” The animated images of James’s body and the sounds of his voice work together in a dark and elegant duet.

Jesse Hardman and Maura O'Connor recently drove around the southwestern United States visiting some of the 33 Native American reservations that have their own radio stations. They

said it became clear that "radio, often dismissed as outdated for the Web 2.0 era, was the most essential medium of communication in Indian country." Airchecks from these stations sound alive and connected, peopled by a real range of characters. On Transom, Jesse and Maura put together a report, full of photos and audio, and we also created two radio pieces. One is an NPR-style news magazine piece. The other is a Transom-style collage. Listen to both. Tell us what you think. On our discussion board, we'll be joined by some of the staff of the tribal stations and they'd like to hear from you.

“Jennie’s Secret” on PRX

About Jennie’s Secret

I don’t remember how I first encountered the story of Civil War veteran Jennie Hodgers (aka Albert Cashier), but I was smitten from the start. I was amazed that hundreds of women had posed as men during the Civil War. I couldn’t imagine how she (or they) pulled it off. And I was positively gob-smacked when I found out that Hodgers went on to spend most of her adult life – as a man – in the tiny town of Saunemin, Illinois. That’s just 12 miles down the road from Pontiac in Livingston County. And Pontiac is where my family comes from.

For me though, probably 
the most fascinating part of this project was trying to unpeel the onion to find a more nuanced portrait of Jennie Hodgers. I found a person who could be kind to children, offering them a treat whenever they came to her home. But there was also a hot-headed, disingenuous, petty and unquestionably eccentric Jennie Hodgers. She had her foibles, just like the rest of us.

We hear about her darker side in the letters that Sammuel Pepper, a fellow soldier, wrote home to his wife. I got to those letters through the footnotes of an amazing book by Lauren Cook and Deanne Blanton. It’s called, “They fought like Demons – Women Soldiers of the Civil War” and I recommend it to everybody.

When I met Frank and Velma Crawford (who are in possession of over 200 of Samuel Pepper’s letters) they read me a newly discovered letter about Cashier with even more explicit information about his/her wartime experience. So hopefully this radio story deepens the historical record about Jennie Hodgers.

More nuanced information about Jennie Hodgers also came courtesy of Cathy Lannon. Today Cathy is a lawyer, but back in 1969 she wrote her master’s thesis about Hodgers’ life. Lannon was from Saunemin and interviewed older people in town who still remembered Hodgers. Here’s one story Cathy Lannon told me. You’ll see that she (and a lot of people in Saunemin) refer to Cashier as “he.”

Lannon’s great grandparents lived across the street from Albert Cashier and often invited him (her) over for meals. But that overture wasn’t always met with the gratitude that you might expect:

A few years before the rest of the world found out about Cashier’s true gender, Cathy Lannon’s great grandmother made the discovery. She had heard that Albert was sick one day and so she asked a nurse to go over to help him out. In short order the nurse came running back and spluttered,“ Mrs. Lannon, he’s a full fledged woman!“ The nurse was so upset that she packed up and left town and Lannon’s great-grandmother in a great act of empathy, didn’t tell anyone about it, including her husband.

When I first approached Jay Allison about this story, the only tape I had was of 93 year-old Nina Chesebro. Her great-uncle is the one who first hired Albert Cashier (Jennie Hodgers) as a farmhand when (s)he got to town.

I pretty much cornered Jay at a Third Coast Festival conference. He didn’t know me, but sat there anyway and listened to some tape. And then he said he bet we could make a story of it.

I was obsessed with the history of Cashier’s life. Just such a wild story. But Jay wanted to know more about the people who objected to restoring the house. After all, it’s been moved at least nine times. One time it was almost burned down in a practice drill for the Saunemin fire department. I mean the town didn’t seem too invested in the thing. And Jay wanted to know more about that.

That tack, I think, was fruitful. Because it turns out that there’s a long history of ambivalence in town about their most famous citizen. And bringing that angle together with the current effort to re-build the house gave us a frame to tell the history part.

Gear

I have almost no experience using music in stories.

“Prostate Diaries” on PRX

About The Prostate Diaries:

From Jeff Metcalf

A man walks into a doctor’s office for a physical and the doctor says, “You look good. Your heart sounds strong, lungs are clear, urine sample is clean but this next part will be a bit uncomfortable. You want to drop your pants and bend over the table so I can do a digital exam of your prostate? You might feel a slight discomfort.” And, honest to God, I start to laugh because I’m thinking why the hell would anybody stick a digital camera up my ass? All seriousness aside, in 2004 I had a physical that would change my life in ways I could not have expected. I walked out of the doctor’s office feeling very healthy. Four days later, in a phone call to the doctor, I was told my PSA levels were high, very high. Like millions of men all over the world, I had no idea what that meant. I knew this… it couldn’t be good. The doctor’s voice cracked. He suggested that I get a biopsy and talk to my wife. I asked him if I had cancer and he said that he didn’t know but the biopsy would be definitive.

I was about to leave to teach a course in creative writing in Provence, France and then attend a theater conference in Croatia. I’d do the biopsy when I returned. Until then, I’d keep quiet. This was probably one of the most stupid things I’ve done in my entire married life. And there have been many.

While I was traveling abroad, I kept a diary about my feelings. My notes were dark and angry. On my return to the states I was invited to do a reading with several other authors at a venue called City Art. I brought a short story I’d written in Provence and three days of my diary notes that I somehow felt should be read in front of an audience. I was uncertain and uncomfortable about reading from the diary. It was too revealing… too close to the bone. I almost backed out, but didn’t.

The reading changed the course of my life. A director was in the audience and commissioned me to write a full-length play for a local theater. The play ran to sold out crowds every night. A Peabody Award winning journalist asked me to make a radio play about the experience and we did. And, a four-time Emmy award winning filmmaker who was also in the audience offered to make a DVD of the reading if I was interested. His father had died of prostate cancer. This meant something to him. We made the DVD. It is wild and crazy… unrehearsed… insulting to the medical community and almost every institution we hold sacred. It became, in a sense, the framework for the play.

A play about cancer with a talking penis, my mother-in-law and Death (with beautifully capped teeth) is not the play I wanted to write. And yet… here it is doing something important. “A Slight Discomfort” is putting the second leading cause of death for men onstage and bullying it around. It has sharp edges and can cut. And my health? I’ll say this: I’m in trouble. I’m in a knife fight with this psychotic disease. It ain’t over yet and the fat lady hasn’t sung. But every once in a while I can hear her warming her vocals up. She’s got a nice voice. I am still above ground and this is good. I like it here. I pay attention. I don’t miss anything.

From Scott Carrier

I’m not a theater buff or goer. I admit that the theater experience can be perhaps the most amazing art form. I have been blown away. But I have also been in the room of failure. And I have been the object of said failure. So I don’t go, very much.

I went to see Metcalf’s play because I think he writes about living in Salt Lake City as well as anyone ever has, and I thought it might be about living in Salt Lake City. I don’t think I even knew what it was about. I may not even have known he had cancer. I’d been kind of out of the loop for a few years.

It was a premier, an experiment for Metcalf and the Salt Lake Acting Compa...

About Killer Whales

I’m a scientist. Well, that used to be my fulltime job. Now I make radio and multimedia about science…mostly.

Let me back up. While I was finishing my PhD in oceanography, I thought about what I would do when I graduated. I wanted a job where I’d continue to learn. And I wanted to have the chance to be creative. I considered academics, maybe science policy. And I also thought about doing radio.

I met up with Samantha Broun at Atlantic Public Media and discovered they were making “science minutes” for WCAI, the local radio station in Woods Hole. More about those science minutes later. I began to see how I could blend my academic training with my burgeoning interest in radio.

As a scientist, I studied marine mammals. Seals. Dolphins. Whales. But mostly killer whales. Last summer, I made plans to visit my friend Volker who was searching for killer whales off the Shetland Islands (north of Scotland). I decided to bring along some gear and make a radio piece about the trip.

Before leaving, Jay Allison and Viki Merrick gave me a lot of advice: Record everything. Talk with the locals. Capture conversations. Remember that the characters I find charming will probably charm others who are listening to the piece. Use the microphone like a diary, a confessional, a cell phone. Capture the sights, tastes, smells, textures of Shetland.

I went to the Shetland Islands hoping for at least one incredible encounter with the killer whales, which would allow me to capture the excitement of doing fieldwork, the joy of science in action. I had anticipated recording the adrenaline and eagerness in Volker’s voice as he coordinated the field effort aboard the small inflatable boat. The sounds of sea spray, killer whale exhalations, and shrieks of discovery each time an animal surfaced. But I learned that in radio, just like in field biology, you don’t always get what you want.

I stayed in Shetland with Volker and his field team for almost 5 days. But each day passed without our seeing a single killer whale, an outcome that was not all that unexpected (as a scientist) though somewhat disappointing (as a radio producer). I recorded as many of the locals and tourists as I could and interviewed the field team at great length. I captured ambient sounds (the wind, the birds, the hum of a motor, cooking noises, an impromptu chorus of the field team blowing air over beer bottles one night in the cabin) and transition sounds. But no whales. Maybe I had forgotten to contact their agent. I came home with hours of tape and not a single killer whale encounter.

Obviously, this changed the type of story that I could tell. I had to rethink my plan.

When I returned to Woods Hole, I played the tape for Jay and Viki and they pushed me to rethink the piece through a more human lens, one that considered what motivates people to pursue their passions even if it means waiting around for days with no pay-off.

That advice really helped. So I made this piece instead, which is more about the search than the reward. And I hope that kind of quest is something that lots of people – those that study killer whales and those that don’t – can relate to.

[donation copy=”Killer whales, people, it’s not every day you get that”]

Gear

I used a Marantz 620 digital recorder and Beyer MCE 58 omni microphone. I liked the setup because all of my gear fit into the mic bag, which made it easy to transport in the field.

Those Science Minutes I Mentioned Earlier

Atlantic Public Media initiated the whole Sonic IDs idea that other local NPR stations have picked up. Like sonic IDs, science minutes (also produced by Atlantic Public Media) are brief (30 – 90 seconds), sound-rich portraits. But science minutes are portraits of scientists, their work and its relevance to everyday life.

“After The Forgetting” on PRX

About After The Forgetting

This story started in my living room. I was teaching a youth radio class for the Vermont Folklife Center, and Greg Sharrow, my colleague and friend from the Folklife Center had agreed to a marathon interview with three high schools kids. I’d given the kids a few choice details about Greg’s life—of which there are many—and they’d each prepared some questions. Greg is perfect for anyone’s first interview. He’s completely open. He’ll answer anything. And he speaks in complete sentences. One of the kids had elected to talk with Greg about his mother who has dementia. It was a phenomenal interview. The kid dropped out of the youth radio project and I fell in love with the tape and decided to start working on a story about Greg and his mother.

I knew Marj. I’d met her at parties and eaten dinner with her at Greg and Bob’s. I’d sat in the backseat a few times when Greg drove her back to her assisted living place. I remember her exclaiming about the lights driving past Wendy’s, ‘Look at all that RED!’

Greg and I both did recordings at the dinner table, which was no easy proposition in a house with sixteen fish tanks and a cockatiel. Still, some nice stuff came of it. I started to think I’d frame the whole story around a single dinner. I spent a lot of hours making a cutlery track, which I thought I might run under the whole show…so when you were listening to an interview segment with Greg, for instance, you could still hear the dinner conversation in the background, and Greg would fade out and we’d come back to the conversation at dinner. Sort of like Glen Gould’s Idea of North. In the end it didn’t work. I didn’t have enough well-recorded dinner conversation to do it, and there wasn’t enough momentum in the story. I had to ditch the idea, and the cutlery track. Still, the dinner conversation is threaded through the story, and it starts and ends at the dinner table.

My favorite audio segments came from the interviews that Greg did with his mother on the couch at his house. They are the most relaxed and intimate; Marj’s mind is at its clearest, and some of the best non sequiturs happen in these conversations. ‘What would you like to do? Would you like to go on and on?’ I edited these sections pretty heavily and slowed them down a lot. I wanted it to feel like they were floating above the rest of the story somehow.

When the story was about an hour long, I sent it to SALT Institute’s Rob Rosenthal who had agreed to mentor me on this project as part of the AIR mentorship program. I had read about this mentoring program on the AIR website and jumped at the chance. Essentially, AIR offers its members four hours of advice time with a radio producer. I work alone and I don’t have any associates in radio. It was incredible to be able to talk with someone about this story at that uncomfortable stage of production when you’re wondering, ‘What is this? And who cares?’

Rob was incredible. He listened to the show and did two thorough paper edits, and his criticism helped me take a giant step back from the story and look at it fresh. He made excellent structural suggestions and I remember he pushed me hard to look for conflict. He was left wondering what was at stake for these people. I remember really studying the end of the show then, and noticing that it felt saccharin and bloated. In that initial version, Greg went on and on about all that his mother has taught him about being alive. At a certain time I really loved that tape. What he was saying seemed important and true. But I was also made uncomfortable by it somehow. It felt like a song that only I liked and that I was probably going to get sick of.

So I went back and interviewed Greg again. I remember we had kind of a snippy interview. I was really pushing him to tell me where the cracks we...