Radio Works! so far …

I’ve been working on the Radio Works! component of the Life Stories project for a few months now and am finally taking the time to pause and reflect on my experience so far.

First of all, it has to be said, I feel extremely blessed to have been given the opportunity to do this work. Making radio has been a passion for me for over ten years and training / helping people find their voice through this medium is one of the most satisfying things I am able to do. I am also thrilled to be fusing some of my different worlds, through the association of the Life Stories project with CKUT 90.3 FM Radio, where I’ve been actively involved for the past 6 years in different capacities: as a volunteer programmer, as a Steering and Programming committee member and for a two-year-stint, as the Spoken Word Programming Coordinator. It has also been really gratifying to re-connect with Lorna Roth, who was a professor of mine during graduate studies in Media Studies about 11 years ago.

In my eyes, this Radio Works project is a true litmus test of how well the university-community alliance can work. While CKUT Radio is officially a campus-community radio station affiliated with McGill University, it is, in practice, very much more a community than university radio station, where all kinds of different communities of Montreal can be found broadcasting on its airwaves.

Once you are familiar with a community organization, like any type of organization, it becomes easier to navigate within it. So my familiarity with the staff and processes at CKUT has been an enormous help in getting Life Stories radio pieces on its airwaves.

Case in point, last spring, before being hired to coordinate the Radio Works project, I produced a series of interviews around the Untold Histories performance series. To air them on CKUT, I simply approached Liz Pieries, producer and host of the Monday Morning After program and asked her if she’d be interested in airing them on her show, to which she promptly said yes. Liz is a good friend and a long time collaborator who I met about 5 or 6 years ago when I was hosting the Monday Morning After and she was its technician.

Once Lorna hired me to coordinate Radio Works component, I opted for the more official way of doing things. I set up a meeting with current Spoken Word Programming Coordinator, Courtney Kirkby, to discuss some of our projects’ ideas and how to go about working with CKUT. Courtney suggested that the Tuesday Morning After program had a new producer who could probably use some programming content and gave me his contact. Once I contacted him - a few months later -- the host had not heard anything about my discussion with Courtney and said he already had a pretty packed show but agreed to air the Life Stories pieces on a weekly basis for a trial period of 5 weeks at which point we could evaluate whether the collaboration was worth pursuing. This response set some faint warning bells off in my head and so I started to look into other options, letting him know that I would be doing so.

The warning bells were dead-on. The second piece we had to air – an interview I conducted with Refugee Youth working group co-coordinator Gracia Jalea -- was not aired when it was originally set to, due to the host’s oversight. When he did air the piece, the following week, the host introduced it so badly I was left feeling embarrassed and apologetic towards Gracia. On air, the host dismissively said he couldn’t remember much of what the segment was about due to a “bender” he’d been on that past weekend. My ears burned from this and I promptly wrote to Liz from the Monday Morning explaining my situation and asking her if she had some time for us.

She did and offered us a 15 to 20 minute segment every two weeks. What good luck! With that, I emailed the Tuesday Morning host and directly but diplomatically explained to him why I would not be pursuing our collaboration. He wrote back expressing his understanding.

Then there was the question of the archived broadcast. After a segment has aired on CKUT’s airwaves, I always download it from their website archives and upload it to the Citizenshift website and then to the Life Stories one. Before uploading Gracia’s interview, I edited out most of the offending host’s comments. Any ethical concerns I had about misrepresenting the “real” broadcast, were outweighed by my concern that his comments, so disrespectful and dismissive, would be forever documented in such a public manner, able to be listened to over and over again.

Did I make the right decision? I think so. But it brings up one of the important distinctions between producing oral history interviews and producing oral history interviews for radio. While the first is most concerned with documenting authentic communicative acts, the second is more concerned with presentation – not just the “what” of the interview or conversation but the “how” – i.e. how does it sound? As an interviewer, one of my biggest priorities is always ensuring that I’ve made my interviewee sound as good and as smart as possible and provided them with a safe and respectful place to air their thoughts and feelings on a subject. However, in this collaboration with CKUT and its programmers, I do not have total control over the space in which the Life Stories radio pieces get aired, nor the manner in which they are presented. Other people are involved and working with them and their flow is part of the process.

So, perhaps, in hindsight, I should have simple operated as I had in the first place and continued working with Liz from the get-go. But once my role within Radio Works had been formalized, I felt it important to approach CKUT in an official capacity and not to simply operate from the perspective of an “insider” who knew the ropes. This choice was also informed by memories of being the Programming Coordinator myself and feeling frustrated when programmers left me in the dark about whom and what they were programming onto their show.

So working with a community organization means working with its community members and with its processes, with all of their strengths and shortcomings. As I train CURA project members to do radio and introduce them to CKUT (it is a requirement for them to not only have CURA training and membership but also CKUT training and membership), it is fascinating to observe how a mostly academic group interacts with and within a less academic, community-oriented, young, “power-to-the-people” activist kind of context. I am sure I will have more thoughts on this, as the Radio Works project evolves …

Now I have a new dilemma, much less serious, but which brings up the ethics of editing and public representation again. Our last segment was a piece produced by intern Audrey O’Breham. She edited the talk that was held at the Cinematheque Quebecoise following the screening of “Life in an Open Prison,” a documentary about the Cambodian Genocide produced by students from St George High School. Audrey’s piece was aired but due to lack of time, Liz cut the piece short, causing a part of it to not be heard. This time I simply uploaded the broadcast as it aired onto both Citizenshift and our website, but I did wonder first whether I should edit in the remaining un-aired minutes. It seems less imperative in this case because it was not an interview with one person, who granted us their time and energy, but a collective talk that was already made public. The only one truly affected is Audrey, since her editing work has not been presented in its integrity. Did I make the right decision? Again, is it more relevant to publicize the true broadcast or to publicize the intended broadcast?

Another more thing that I am thinking about a lot. Why is it that everyone who is producing radio for this project thus far is white? I think it has to be said: there is something fundamentally troublesome about this reality, especially in the context of this particular project. I am thinking about it a lot because, this dynamic – white people ending up doing most of the speaking and organizing within the context of an extremely progressive project whose objective is in part to better understand questions of culture and race – happens time and time again. For all kinds of reasons. But these reasons need to be understood so that the dynamic can change.

For example, back in early September, several members of the Cambodian working group approached me collectively and individually about the possibility of producing some radio. We got together for a coffee meeting and I explained all of the possibilities, told them I was there to support and train them, in whatever ways necessary. They left seemingly full of enthusiasm and inspiration, saying they would bring it up at the next working group meeting and then get back to me. When I followed up a few weeks later via email, everyone had the same answer: I don’t think I really have time at this point. I was left wondering, what happened?

It is very possible that I simply have to take their explanation at face value. This project is full of extremely busy people with full lives. But … I felt the excitement and enthusiasm coming from these folks and so I cannot give up on them so easily. What can I do to encourage them, help them find the time to use the radio medium to voice their stories? I have since had the opportunity to sit down with Cambodian working group coordinator Ry Duong and broach the topic. Perhaps we will get to the bottom of it. I hope so.

In writing this, of course my hope is that other less-represented project members may read about these concerns and be inspired to participate in Radio Works. Or at least, to communicate to me about reasons for not wanting / being able to. There are of course so many facets to this project and so many ways people are already communicating their stories. Radio is not the only way to ensure a particular voice or story gets heard. But is certainly a very effective and very public one. And I want to do my best to make sure that Radio Works truly reflects the diversity that does exist at the heart of this project.

Lastly, I want to tell you a bit about the latest project I have been working on. For the past few weeks I have had the pleasure to work with former Ethics and Training Coordinator Afsaneh Hojabri on a half-hour documentary entitled “Stories of Iranian Montrealers about Iran’s post-election uprising.” As I write this, we have just put the finishing touches on it and it is set to air Monday morning (Dec 7 at 8:30 AM on CKUT 90.3 FM).

I approached Afsaneh about the possibility of doing some radio after she had been blogging to our website about recent events in Iran. This subject is so current, doing a radio piece about it is like engaging in oral-history-in-the-making. After reflecting on the energy and time commitment it would take her, Afsaneh agreed it was something she was interested in doing and got down to work. She interviewed five Iranian Montrealers, asking them to explain the significance of this historical moment, both politically and personally. I had warned her that interviewing so many people would involve a lot of hours of work, in order to edit these conversations down to a 30-minute documentary, but there was of course, so much she wanted to voice about this event. Thanks to many hours of collective listening and editing work on our part and many more hours done privately by Afsaneh and her sharp, analytical mind and organized work ethic, we have finally completed a beautiful piece of audio work which explains quite clearly the reasons for the world-wide uprising following Iran’s last elections, as well as providing a sense of its emotional significance for some members of Montreal’s Iranian community.

I am quite proud of our work and grateful to have had the opportunity to help make it happen. I hope many people listen to it and come to understand a little better, why this particular moment in time was so historically significant and emotionally charged for so many. I certainly gained a much better understanding of the Iranian elections, the reactions to it by its people and diaspora by working on the documentary. And I am grateful that Liz accorded us more time on her program than usual to enable the airing of a half hour piece. The interviewees were so thoughtful and detailed in their responses that it was truly so difficult to cutthem down to the heart of the matter. There was so much to say. So much was said! That is what is so gratifying about doing this kind of work – by training people to make radio, by helping them to put ideas together, I learn and gain so much myself. It is a true exchange.

I look forward to more such stories to work on. Many more interesting radio projects are already in the works ...