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Radio Love Fest preaches storytelling at BAM

Ira Glass and the ‘S-Town Creators’ share their creative mojo

March 14, 2018 By Benjamin Preston Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
“S-Town” host Brian Reed. Photo by Sandy Honig
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Good stories are like icebergs in a way. We read, listen to or watch the part that exists as the visible tip, gleaming above the surface. Behind the scenes, though, lies the bulk of the story — a volume of information so dense that were it presented to the general reader, most would never finish wading through it before moving on to something else (although there do exist those bookish Silmarillion types with the courage — and the time — to proceed).

The Brooklyn Academy of Music focused on storytelling this week in its fifth annual Radio Love Fest. The public radio celebration, sponsored by WNYC and others, featured appearances by Neil Gaiman and Brooke Gladstone, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sarah Elizabeth Charles, Gerardo Contino and Kate Teller hosting The Moth. Radio storytellers from “This American Life” and its associated programs also took the stage at the Howard Gilman Opera House, sharing how storytelling has changed and how they’ve tried to make it better.

“The forward motion of events is the basis of a story,” Ira Glass, founder and host of “This American Life,” a weekly hour-long nonfiction program broadcast on public radio and online, said Saturday evening of his storytelling “aha!” moment. “People will stick with something they’re not interested in just because they want to find out what happens.”

Glass’s rich storytelling empire has branched out to foster such programs as “Serial,” the 12-episode podcast that casts doubt upon a convicted murderer’s verdict, and “S-Town,” the Serial team’s latest podcast, about an imaginative, tormented horologist living in a small, dysfunctional Alabama town. “S-Town” Executive Producer Julie Snyder and Brian Reed, its host, talked about their unique show at BAM on Thursday.

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Glass is more creative life force than ruler over his particular dominion, and has fomented an ethos that encourages producers to spend time developing stories that may not work out. Both Snyder and Glass shared the text from the programs’ guidelines that speak to that value: “Killing a story that’s good, but not great, is a victory. It makes the world a better, more interesting place.”

As Glass pointed out in his act — I’d call it a lecture, but the stories were too rich and the commentary too funny to saddle it with that grave moniker — one of the challenges inherent in storytelling is deciding which stories to tell. It was this willingness to dive into a character and his story before committing to publication that led to the creation of “S-Town” — or, as it’s known once the listener tunes in, “Shit Town.”

“Julie and I both have spent a long time at ‘This American Life,’ and that’s given us a lot to work with,” Reed said in an interview. “We had an idea of a podcast that we wanted to hear, and we made it like that. It was more like a novel.”

The convention at “This American Life” had been to present a story as a radio piece — to let the listener know what he or she would be hearing during the next hour. The format of “S-Town” was to let the story unfold naturally, to develop the characters without giving the listener well defined expectations of who they were.

As Truman Capote undoubtedly did during the years he interviewed Dick Hickock and Perry Smith for In Cold Blood, Reed said he often found that delving into the life of John B. McLemore, the show’s main character, could place quite a bit of weight upon his own psyche.

“One friend described the experience of John like a moth being drawn to the flame,” he said at BAM. “Drawn by the light; repelled by the heat.”

The light was McLemore’s nearly unbounded capacity for beholding beauty and wonder; the heat, all the negativity and self-flagellation that could come with it. After McLemore went on a tear about how humanity, which was well on its way toward destroying the planet, should consider aborting or shooting children to save them from the misery of living in such a world, Reed recalled going home and laying on his floor, utterly dejected.

When McLemore later committed suicide by consuming cyanide, Reed experienced another letdown, both in terms of the life of the story and, to a greater extent, the extinguishing of a bright life.

“I felt disappointed in the world that it had made John feel uncomfortable in it,” Reed said.

McLemore’s friends and relatives encouraged Reed to press on with the story after the horologist’s death, resulting in a novelistic podcast that broke download records in its first week. Within its first month, “S-Town” had been downloaded 40 million times, confirming the “This American Life” mantra that a good story, told well, can make the world a better, more interesting place.

“It’s only in a creative environment like that — where you’re able to try and fail — that a story like ‘S-Town’ can emerge,” Reed said.

“S-Town” being essentially radio, a big part of its success was the fact that McLemore was as good talker — deeply knowledgeable with a rich Southern drawl. As Glass pointed out in his BAM talk on Saturday, great stories often fall flat because the main character just isn’t much of a talker.

“Those people are the bane of my existence,” he said. “If something amazing happens to you, fucking learn how to talk about it.”

Glass also showcased the different formats “This American Life” has experimented with, including video, animation and now, theatrical recreations of true stories backed up by the wonderfully tedious fact-checking apparatus that makes “This American Life” as good as it is.

Aware that many would-be storytellers sat in the audience, Glass doled out some advice for them: It’s normal to be bad before you’re good. Playing and then lampooning one of his own early radio clips, he encouraged persistence as a key to success.

“You have to slug it out; you have to be a soldier; you have to be tough,” he said.

Looking back on his own long career — he first started working at NPR in the 1970s — Glass recalled a friend who had listened to one of his earlier tapes and said, “There was no sign in there that you were gonna make it.”


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