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Behind the Scenes with Matt Power, co-producer of Holy Soul
Interview conducted by Katia Dunn
> This story was first published in print. Why did you decide to make it
into a radio story and how did it change during the process?
I got a call from Emily Botein, a senior producer at The Next Big Thing. A
colleague had given her a copy of the piece, and she wanted to know if I would
come in and read it. It hadn't ever occurred to me to do the piece for radio.
Having been influenced so much by Dave Isay's style at Sound Portraits, where
his voice almost never appears in any of his pieces, I found the idea of
putting my voice on the air a little unappealing, or somehow counter to the
principle of telling other people's stories that got me interested in radio in
the first place. But I agreed to come in and try it. I had brought a copy of
the story, and had planned to just sit in the sound booth and give it a nice
dramatic read, and then be done with it. Well, Dean Olsher had other plans. As
soon as we were locked in the booth, he informed me that I was not going to
read the story, but rather absorb each paragraph and then tell it to him. TNBT
tries to have a very fluid, conversational style, a sort of naturalistic
storytelling. The absolute worst thing you can say about a piece is that it
sounds "read." So I found myself in a sound booth with Dean as my coach, trying
to tell a very personal story the way I would tell it to a friend. And if
something didn't come out right, I got to do it again. Of course, we aren't
afforded those sorts of opportunities in real life, but through the magic of
ProTools you can add a great deal of fluidity to the telling of a story. In
some ways I think that's the central paradox of radio documentaries that we
labor to manufacture a moment that seems to occur in real-time. So anyway, the
piece came out quite differently than the written version, and it was steered
away from a more literary tone. Some things that work fine on the page sound
forced or hollow when read aloud. So a lot of the darlings I labored over in
print had to get killed, as Faulkner would put it.
> Holy Soul is such a personal story; were you at all hesitant to share
it with the world?
The world, not so much, because you're never going to meet most of them anyway.
But it is certainly the most personal thing I've done. I was actually sort of
pressured into writing it by my friend Jenn Bleyer, who was the founder of
Heeb. She sent me my first edit on the morning of 9/11. But as far as
publicizing the story to the world, I was more concerned about how my own
family would accept it. I had never told them about the thing with Allen, so I
found myself having to tell my mother about it. There's no easy way to tell
your mom you had an affair with someone 50 years older than you when you were a
teenager, and now you've published an article about it. She actually laughed
when I told her. And I let her tell everyone else. Except my father and
stepfather, who I figured would never find out about it unless I published the
story in Golf Digest or Heeb bought an ad on Dale Earnhardt's bumper.
> Public radio usually resists sexually explicit material. How did
listeners respond to this aspect of it?
I've gotten more fan letters, and more positive feedback on this story than
anything else I've done. The novelist Rick Moody sent me an email, he had heard
the piece while he was stuck in traffic on the Throg's Neck bridge. And almost
universally, the response was "Wow that really pushed the envelope. I don't
hear stuff like that on the radio. But I really liked it." A lot of gay couples
wrote me these joint letters thanking me. Maybe the people who were horrified
and/or sickened by it didn't bother to write. But of course, the piece was more
suggestive than graphic. And if public radio is afraid to address the real
issues of life—which is inherently, profoundly graphic—then it will languish in
irrelevance. I think real courage in radio has nothing to do with shocking
people but with showing them an unblinking view of the world. Otherwise,
Ashcroft and Falwell win. I did, however, get to slip the word "bullshit" under
the FCC radar, which is a source of pride.
> How do you think Ginsberg might have responded to this story?
I'd like to think he would have been proud. He told me once that there were
very few moments in art today—film, literature, poetry—that had a real sense of
tenderness. I think that is something I tried to infuse in the piece, some sort
of sympathy with our own mortality. We all have the same broken heart. And that
sort of empathy wasn't so hard to conjure up, as my neighborhood (the Lower
East Side, the same one that Ginsberg had lived in) was filled with smoke from
the World Trade Center the whole time I was working on the story. Those nights,
I had a real sense that I was trying to deliver Allen into this very specific
moment, personal and historical, that he had missed and in many ways predicted
in his own work.
> Does Ginsberg still influence your work?
Always. I don't write poems so much anymore, but I've really carried some sense
of Allen as a person through my life. I've spent the last seven years living in
New York City, and he's been a real presence in my coming to understand and
love the place. He had an expansiveness, a sense of lonely empathy that made
him turn outward into the world, which I think is really crucial to telling
stories that reach people. And as far as radio, he had this rich voice, and
every time I heard him read he was totally invested in it, emotionally. And
something of those cadences seeped in to my own radio voice.
> How does radio compliment your work as an artist?
It seems to stretch different muscles, which is great. Particularly with my
longer narrative pieces—say, the train hopping or dumpster diving stories—I
went out into the world, I spent three days under a bridge in Portland, Oregon,
waiting for a train, I dug through trash bags up to my neck in Greenwich
Village, and met all these fantastic, amazing characters. I think it's that
sort of forced engagement, having to stick a microphone in someone's face and
ask something, and having to listen, that really gets me excited about radio.
So the microphone is sort of a shield and an olive branch. You live for those
moments that you know you're getting great tape, and you can barely contain
yourself. And of course maybe you go to load it and it's too hot, but that's
just part of the learning process. I came away from that train-hopping foray
with about 12 hours of interviews for a 12-minute piece. And sifting through
it, finding the great moments, and cobbling them together into a piece is a
really extraordinary process, and makes me think much more critically about
pace, structure, how a narrative works best. I've been lucky to work with a lot
of great producers at TNBT who have been patient collaborators in all my
pieces. That said, I have been a character, more or less, in all of my pieces,
and I think that's something I'd like to move away from, at least some of the
time. I tremendously admire the work that Dave Isay has done, and I think
airing the stories of people that would never reach a wider audience is the
great virtue of the medium.
> As an artist coming from another medium, what unique potential do you
see in radio?
The great thing about radio is it has this stealth intimacy that gets inside
people in a way that other media don't. You listen alone, ultimately. And that
gives you an opportunity to bring important, untold stories straight to an
audience. I'm living in India right now, and the illiteracy rate is upwards of
40 percent in many places here. Between poverty, illiteracy, and the sheer fact
of geography, radio is the only connection for many people in rural areas. It's
absolutely indispensable to people's lives, not just for crop reports but for a
sense of community, of being part of something larger than yourself, your
family, your village. And there are a lot of very interesting progressive radio
projects going on here, community stations, women's voices, pirate radio in the
Bombay slums. I've been reading about similar projects in Afghanistan right
now, or Radio Soleil in the Haitian community in New York, and it seems like a
very efficient way to connect and improve people's lives. I think the more
people who engage and make radio, the better it will be. And during the
blackout last summer, I sat on a stoop in Spanish Harlem drinking beer, and the
ONLY way to find out what was going on was to gather around a car radio.
> If you could make a radio story about anything or anybody, who/what
would it be?
My father. I think you travel out into the world and sometimes the hardest
stories to do are back where you started.
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