Behind the Scenes with Kelly McEvers, prodcuer and co-founder of Sixbillion.org
Interview conducted by Julie Shapiro

> Where did you come across the theater version of Guantánamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom' , and how did you make the decision about adapting it into an audio piece?

I heard a review of the original play on the BBC in early 2004. It was late at night, and I was driving through the desert in Nevada. About five minutes after I heard the report, I lost all radio connection whatsoever. But I immediately thought the play could be a perfect fit for Six Billion. First, it was something beyond the usual radio documentary, in that it was a play based solely on documentary work. Second, here was one of the only pieces of reportage about Guantánamo that actually involved the personal stories of the detained. I mean, we all knew there were some guys being held there, but that was it. We didn't know, and still don't know, much about how it happened to them, and why. So we tracked down the director of the play in London and wrote to him.

> This adaptation must have posed a challenge or two, to put it mildly. Can you describe the process, the collaboration, and which decisions were most important to everyone involved?

It was a very involved process. The play had a good run in London and was set to make its U.S. debut in New York City in the fall of 2004. The director in London, who has worked on other "documentary" theater projects there, was really supportive of our proposal. He sent us the script, which, in addition to Moazzam Begg's story, follows the stories of several other detainees. It also has scenes from press conferences with Donald Rumsfeld and statements by family members of people killed at the World Trade Center. It was immediately clear to us that we wanted to excerpt the play and follow the story of one detainee.

First we had to secure the rights to the script itself from the authors—one a veteran foreign correspondent and editor at The Guardian, and the other a renowned South African novelist—which they generously granted. Then, we had to gain permission from the theater in New York that had exclusive rights to produce the piece in the U.S., which they also generously granted.

Then we went to see the play, and it absolutely floored us. When you walked into the theater, it was as if you were inside the detention center at Guantánamo. Detainees in orange jump-suits were sitting in their cages, praying, reading, sleeping, doing sit-ups. They remained that way through the entire play; occasionally a soldier would march through and chain their hands to their feet in order to move them to another section. It was so arresting, I found it hard to move once the play was over.

We decided we should use the actors most recently engaged with the work. After that, it was just a matter of recording and editing and mixing—things we actually knew how to do. The whole process, start to finish, took about six months.

> Was the play intended (and then the audio piece as well, afterward) to hopefully impact Moazzam Begg's situation in a positive way, or even draw support for his (and other prisoners') release, or was it more meant to draw awareness to what's going on at Guantanamo (and elsewhere) with political prisoners?

While the authors and directors of this work were clearly engaged in advocacy here—and I completely respect that—we were after something a bit more like journalism. So I think we were tending toward the latter aim you mentioned, to employ a single story to raise awareness about a very bad thing that is happening to some 550 men at Guantánamo. Radio is so intimate that when you hear a story like this, you can't help but feeling something for the subject. What you do after that is an action I can not predict.

To be honest, I think one of the shortcomings with public radio is that we are preaching to the choir. Of course our listeners were outraged when they heard this piece. But they're not the ones who need to be outraged. What we really should do is play this piece for mid-level bureaucrats in the Pentagon, people who have no idea what their memos and policies actually mean each day for these detainees—men who, guilty or not, have children, wives, fathers, and mothers.

> The world learned that Moazzam Begg was released from prison, after three years, at the end of January 2005. How and when did you hear the news? How did it feel to learn this, after having worked on the audio piece, and becoming so close to the story?

I heard it on the BBC. And I have to say I felt elated. This radio intimacy I mentioned of course made me feel like I knew him—even though our piece was one more degree removed from reality, in that his words were spoken by an actor—so I couldn't help but feel a certain joy at the news. Sadly, there are still 550 guys who were not as lucky as Moazzam Begg and the other three British citizens released in January. So his release is bittersweet for those who remain in Guantánamo, and for us.

> Can you talk a little bit about SixBillion.org a larger sense? How did the project come about?

It should come as little surprise that it was after September 11, 2001. We were pretty seduced by the idea that the jokey '90s had come to an end and it was time to get serious. Basically, we had a lot of friends working on long-form journalism who were concerned about where to place their stories. And we thought there needed to be another space for that—a space that was free of the marketplace, in that it was nonprofit. But also a space that really cared about storytelling in a deep and thoughtful way.

Part of the '90s mentality, too, was this idea that content had failed on the Internet, that because it didn't sell, it was over. And I just wasn't willing to accept that. Not only is a web site a very cheap and accessible way to publish; in my opinion, it's the only place to really experiment with form today.

> And while we're at it...the tagline for the web site is "an online magazine for narrative journalism." So...what exactly is narrative journalism?

As far as I'm concerned, the answer to that is fairly simple: Tackling an issue of the day in the form of a story. Others may define it in a different way. But I think we all agree that personal stories are working right now in our culture—in other words, reality TV isn't going away. At Six Billion, we think that the most complicated "issues" can best be explained by stories, whether the three-decade civil war in Afghanistan that eventually gave way to the rise and fall of the Taliban, or why hand-carved gravestones are culturally and historically significant in Rhode Island. But we also agree that one form of storytelling—writing, sound, or imagery—should not hold sway over another. That, in fact, each form has a lot to learn from the others. So that's why we have all these different genres, or categories, of stories.

> What's down the road for SixBillion.org?

We've applied for 501(c)(3) status, which means we're becoming a legitimate nonprofit organization. Before now we've relied on donations from individuals to keep us going. The idea with the nonprofit status is to raise money to continue to be able to pay contributors competitively, and to be able to seek out contributors from all over the place—both pros and amateurs—who we think are telling important stories.

In the more immediate future, we're working on Issue Four, which will be out later this year and will have something to do with faith. In the longer term, we're hoping to move away from the "issue" model entirely, and be more like a web site and less like a print magazine. In that model, we would just post stories as we get them, and our email-subscriber list would generate a message every time a new story comes in. We would still operate around themes, but these themes would be something we're thinking about over a period of time, rather than for a single, stagnant issue.