Delaney Hall is a radio journalist from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who works at the Third Coast International Audio Festival of Chicago Public Radio. She has joined us this quarter for the second time to teach Documentary for Radio: Audio Vérité. We asked to her answer ten questions about her life and career and here is what she had to say.
How did you get started in radio?
I grew up listening to KUNM, the local public station in Albuquerque, NM, and I think my interest in radio begins there. It's an eclectic station, largely volunteer powered, and it was a real presence in my house--always there, always on, like some chatterbox neighbor. I still remember a lot of the shows: Hot Lix with Charlie Z, the Singing Wire, Tombstone Rock, the Home of Happy Feet (I could sing you the theme song for that one). I think a lot of people have powerful early experiences with radio--the voices coming through the little box hint at a world much bigger and more complex than the one you inhabit--and so all of those KUNM stories and sounds struck me in some lasting/formative way.
After writing for newspapers throughout college, I decided to jump over to radio and make an audio documentary for my senior thesis project. I ended up documenting an old pilgrimage route in northern Spain, hiking five hundred miles of the trail and recording sounds and interviews along the way. I didn't have much formal training in radio at that point, but the whole experience was a chance to teach myself how to record, edit, and structure a story in sound.
Then I moved to Chicago and got an internship with the Third Coast International Audio Festival, based at Chicago Public Radio, which eventually turned into a full-time gig. Third Coast celebrates and supports innovative audio documentary work from all over the world--we produce a weekly radio show on WBEZ, curate an online audio archive, and organize an annual conference for producers, along with regular listening events for the public. So that experience got me quite hooked.
Why did you choose radio over print journalism?
I still write, actually, but I do think there's something special about sound. For one thing, it can be very intimate and direct. Hearing a human voice reveals so much that's difficult to replicate on the page: pitch, intonation, accent, innuendo--even pauses and silences carry meaning. So I think there's an efficiency and an immediacy to a good piece of tape.
It's also sort of a cliché to say that radio is a visual medium, but I suppose I'll say it anyway. I think sound requires an imaginative engagement--an active collaboration in creating the images a radio story conjures--that's unique.
What is your favorite story that you have covered?
I loved working on a recent story that explored the connections between early hip-hop history and the 1977 New York blackout, which left all five boroughs of the city without power for a full day. According to Grandmaster Caz, one of the very first DJs and a self-appointed chronicler of early hip-hop lore, the blackout helped to propel the relatively new genre out of the Bronx and into the wider world. He thinks that in the rampant looting that followed the blackout--and there was, indeed, a whole lot of looting, all over the city--aspiring young DJs were able to get their hands on turntables and mixers that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to afford. This "new wealth," these new musical tools, made for a explosion in the culture.
The story was fun to work on because Grandmaster Caz is a big personality and a vivid storyteller. I blended his narration with music from the time, archival reports from the night of the blackout, perspectives from historians, and ambient sound from the Bronx. The threads of the personal and the historical, the mythology and the fact, wove together nicely.
What radio shows do you listen to?
Many of the usual suspects: Radiolab, On the Media, Re:sound, and This American Life are some favorites. I'm also dedicated to a few podcasts, like 99% Invisible, a beautiful little five minute show about design and architecture by Roman Mars, and Love & Radio, by a friend and WBEZ producer named Nick van der Kolk.
Working with Third Coast, I was lucky enough to be exposed to a ton of ear-expanding international documentary work as well, and so I also recommend a few shows/production companies from beyond our borders: 360documentaries from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Falling Tree Productions in the UK, and Earbones Productions up in Canada, to name a few.
What advice would you give students who also want to become radio journalists?
Start making stuff! Today! Download some free editing software, buy an inexpensive recorder, and start interviewing people. Work for the school newspaper to build reporting skills or volunteer for the campus radio station. Check out online resources like www.transom.org and www.thisamericanlife.org/about/make-radio, which are an autodidact's dream. I also recommend internships--many of them are unpaid, which is a problem the public radio system needs to work on, but good ones will teach you a tremendous amount and help you make valuable connections at a station.
While it certainly helps to have some technical skills and reporting experience, I do think there are many roads to radio. I know someone who was a chef before becoming a radio producer, another who studied coral reefs, another who was a community organizer, and another who painted houses. I'd like to think each previous job informed their radio making, somehow.
Who are some of your inspirations?
There are many. Among them: Jens Jarisch, a German producer who creates riveting, challenging, form-breaking audio documentaries. Kelly McEvers, now NPR's Baghdad correspondent and one of the most persistent reporters I know of. Brooke Gladstone, the host of On the Media, who is so light on her feet in an interview and crafts the best questions. Eurydice Aroney, an Australian producer who makes hilarious, frank, and inventive stories about women and family life. Adrian Nicole Leblanc, an immersion journalist who inhabits her stories so thoroughly that she almost disappears inside them. Chris Watson, a nature field recordist who once captured the sound of a snoring cheetah. Scott Carrier. Joe Frank. And Studs Terkel -- because this is Chicago, after all.
What is your favorite aspect of working at the University of Chicago?
I've only taught once before at the University of Chicago, with my colleague Julie Shapiro of the Third Coast Festival, but I loved the students. They were smart, thoughtful, creative, confident, independent, and pretty fearless in tackling some of the assignments we gave them. I learned a lot from them.
I also like the gargoyles and the new library bubble.
What do you hope students will take away from your class?
I hope they take away some practical skills -- how to identify worthwhile stories, how to interview, how to voice narration, and how to record and edit audio. I also hope they gain a deeper respect for the challenges of journalism and documentary work: the need to research thoroughly, think critically, and report accurately. Finally, I hope they take away a sense of the particular power of sound, an appreciation for the flexibility of the radio medium, and a desire to invent, disrupt, and try new things.
How do you go about choosing stories to cover?
That's a really good question and a difficult one, and I think it's probably different for every radio producer/journalist. I don't really work in news, so I don't cover a beat and I'm a little freer to follow my whimsy and shifting interests, which is both good and bad. Mostly good.
I often find stories just at the periphery of what I think I'm looking for--a surprising fact or anecdote will jump out at me and then open into a whole new and unexpected direction. So, for example, I stumbled across the previously mentioned hip-hop story while researching the public reaction to the 1977 New York City blackout. Or, to give another example: I'm now working on a historical piece about a poetry column that ran in the Defender newspaper back in the 1920s and 30s during the Chicago Renaissance. I stumbled across the subject while reading a Gwendolyn Brooks biography that briefly mentioned her first poems were published in the column. I got curious, looked into it, and it turned out no one had really written about it before.
I do wish there were some sort of magic formula for what makes a valuable and engaging story. Maybe we'll try to derive one in class this winter.
What are your hobbies outside of radio journalism?
I love bicycling, exploring Chicago, spending time in the Southwestern desert (where I'm from), knitting and other crafting, hanging out with my dog, reading books, listening to music, and cooking.
Amy C. Chou is a fourth-year English major writing a nonfiction thesis about her experience with a rare form of cancer as a 19-year-old. She is from Pasadena, CA and plans to move back to Los Angeles after graduation.
by Krissy Rogahn
When we think of the Chicago literary scene, it's not likely that we think of public library basements, with the community knitting circle next door and toddlers discovering Dr. Seuss overhead. But that is just the place five emerging University of Chicago fiction writers found themselves on October 26, gathered in the auditorium of Blackstone Library to read their work for an audience of community members and students. The reading was co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Committee on Creative Writing and the Friends of Blackstone Library, as part of the Despres Family Memorial Lecture Series, which brings esteemed and aspiring writers to the library, encouraging conversation between the local and wider Chicago literary community.
Chicago born-and-bred Tribune journalist Rick Kogan hosted the event, urging the five new writers to continue their noble craft, even in the face of pressing economic and social concerns. The featured readers were University of Chicago undergraduates Sophie Werely, Allison Bulger, and Rachel Miller, MAPH student Adam Rosenthal, and PhD student Marianna Staroselsky.
Their fiction pieces, most being selections from much longer works or novels in progress, spanned genres, styles, and--since literature can admit no bounds--even included an a cappella portion of Celine Dion's 1999 hit single "That's the Way It Is." Though diverse in content, all readings were alike in sophistication. Rosenthal's piece was a humorous meditation on the role of the writer as witness at the end of all things, when reality comes to reckon with fable and "the world starts to end in a culmination of ever apocalypse story around." Miller, easing into a conversational narrative voice, read about the limits of friendship when two adolescent boys come to face an attempted suicide, while Wereley read about small towns and murderous mermaids, and Staroselsky parodied conceptions of bodily femininity. After the writers had finished, Kogan praised them for their distinction--referring both to the uniqueness and the cultivation of written voice.
To round out the hour, he asked each young writer to share his or her own philosophy of and relationship to writing, asking the canonical question, "Why do you write?" Students highlighted the healing properties of writing, or their own creative impulses. As Staroselsky puts it, "You can be Tourettic by law and Freudian slip like it's your job. It's such a fantastic excuse to be as socially inappropriate and uncensored as you like, it's a beautiful space really!" For Rosenthal, the answer was just another question: "What else is there?"
The event also urged these young writers to think about reading as a practice. According to Miller, giving students the opportunity to participate in a public literature forum extends the experiences of the classroom and the workshop into a new setting: "Reading your work in front of other people is like an instant writing workshop: you know exactly what falls flat and what works as soon as you start reading your sentences. It's great to hear what other students are working on, and it's also really helpful to see how the work that you've been doing translates outside of workshop."
As young writers, it should sadden us to reflect that in our present literary climate reading one's work has become alienated from the act of writing it. We must work to change those popular conceptions of the "reading" that have reduced it to a gathering of eccentric intellectuals, munching cheese, drinking bad wine, and exchanging words like fifth-graders exchange secret notes. Ask anyone: the space of the reading is a closed-door hovel of creative clique. Beneath the thick-framed glasses and coffee-stained manuscripts, writers are only preaching to the ever-dwindling choir. But what can we really do about it?
The space of the public library surely deserves our notice. If it is true that the culture of creative writing at the University of Chicago has begun to take on a bit of that musty stasis of the Regenstein bookstacks, perhaps what it needs is a good spray of the public librarian's perfume. Maybe it needs to get out and mingle a little with the people of Hyde Park who don't have the experience of "the Core" or "Critical Perspectives" to guarantee uninspired conversations, to signify a community that has been thrust upon us. Maybe it needs to remind itself of the young and the old. The venue of the Blackstone library, hand in hand with the department of Creative Writing, offered UChicago writers that chance on Wednesday.
The Library tells an origin story resonant with that of the University--opened fin de siècle in 1904 with a private donation by a wealthy benefactor (founder of the Union Stock Yards), it became the first branch library in the Chicago Public Library System. Today, it stands out on 49th Street and South Lake Park as a curious token of its classicist and cosmopolitan past, with a domed temple architecture modeled after the Merchant Tailors Building at the 1893 World Columbian Exhibition, as well as the Erechtheum of the Acropolis. A patron, walking into the library, can look up at the thematic murals on "Literature," "Science," "Art," and "Labor" that line the rotunda. This all raises the important question: can community members use such a space, such a strange embodiment of Chicago's imagination of its own enlightened past, to imagine a new space for Chicago literature?
The short answer is yes. They can use that space and read there. They can use public libraries to help break literature out of its bookish trappings. It is clear--readings all over the city of Chicago can attest to the fact--that the movement of fiction by spoken word is one means toward building a vibrant literary community. What else is there?
See what Rick Kogan has to say about Chicago and its public libraries: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ae-1009-kogan-sidewalks-20111007,0,6813433.column
Visit the Friends of Blackstone Library at http://friendsofblackstone.wordpress.com/
by Amy Chou
Two years ago, I came back to the University of Chicago after a year-long battle with brain cancer. While my cancer was in remission, my mind was still spinning from what I had gone through. I had no idea how to be a college student again--I felt, physically and mentally, like a 90-year-old--and I wanted a way to process what I had gone through in a concrete way that didn't involve being in a support group with actual 90-year-olds. An older classmate of mine once gave me a piece of advice that has served me well: "If you're ever feeling down at the U of C, take a creative writing class and it will change your life. The teachers in that department are some of the best people you will ever meet." I signed up for one of Dan Raeburn's creative nonfiction workshops and, I have to admit, it really did change my life.
The great thing about Dan is that he doesn't waste your time with BS. In the intermediate class, we were each required to submit 8-15 pages of writing for workshopping twice per quarter, in addition to line editing and critiquing the work of three classmates each week. He gave us grades based on real-world standards and gave us feedback as if we were submitting our pieces to Harper's Bazaar or the New Yorker. This basically meant that if you didn't want to get a low grade, you had to get your butt to work. Dan expected a lot from us, and we respected him for it. I don't think I've ever taken any other class so seriously. Dan's class allowed me the structure to sit down and write about my experience with cancer in a way that I could not have on my own. I was able to turn what I had remembered as a traumatic and terrible experience into a story that I was narrating, in which the character consumed by her cancer was separate from the person I am now.
I will never forget the first time Dan asked us to read an excerpt from Joan Didion's The White Album, in which she writes, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Everyone interpreted this line differently, but for me, what it meant was that it was time to stop wallowing in the horrors of my experience and to turn it into a story. I think the best part of writing personal essays is that with each new revision, I discover something new about myself. Getting immediate feedback from classmates, whether good or bad, has forced me to step outside of my experience in a way that I don't think would have been possible in therapy or in some sort of social situation. At some point in each workshop, Dan would spend time helping us discover the universal truths that can be illuminated through our stories. While sometimes I don't see them immediately, I always leave his class feeling a little more thoughtful, a little more aware, and a little more curious. Thanks Dan, for being a great teacher and for helping me find my voice when I thought I had lost it.
Amy Chung-Yu Chou is a third-year English Literature major who will be graduating this Spring. She received the Margaret C. Annan Prize in Nonfiction and is currently working on a thesis entitled "Chemotherapy is Not an Impulse Purchase: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Survive Brain Cancer."
Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck to the bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light low over the sea, so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the other hand he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling behind, overheard all that was said.
"Fellow-critters: I'se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise dare. You hear? Stop dat dam smackin' ob de lips! Massa Stubb say dat you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you must stop dat dam racket!"
"Cook," here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap on the shoulder,--"Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn't swear that way when you're preaching. That's no way to convert sinners, cook!"
"Who dat? Den preach to him yourself," sullenly turning to go.
"No, cook; go on, go on."
"Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:"--
"Right!" exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, "coax 'em to it; try that," and Fleece continued.
"Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you, fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness--'top dat dam slappin' ob de tail! How you tink to hear, spose you keep up such a dam slappin' and bitin' dare?"
