I am launching the debut season of my first podcast! It's called "Something Happens." It's about the amazing, scary, unexpected, sometimes weird or hilarious *thing* that happens when you turn on a recorder and talk with someone. I've been recording people (with their permission!) for years. It started as an urge, in the ethnographic/oral historian tradition, to capture stories within the folk dan
ce community I am part of in northern Vermont and beyond. But the more I sat down with an audio recorder and talked to people, the more I wanted to do it, and the more I noticed that something else was going on in these sessions beyond simply sound-recording. The microphone becomes a lens and focus ring, a compass, a quiet listener inviting reflection. Now I have hours and hours of tape that I've recorded on my own, sometimes just on my iPhone, sometimes with borrowed equipment, but the audio files are just sitting on my computer. It's time to make them into stories and set them free! What has really brought this project into focus for me has been the recordings I've been making most recently. This winter I started interviewing my mom. She has been living with Parkinson's disease for 10 years and early this winter we learned that her chronic kidney condition has taken a critical turn for the worse. As much as I love interviewing people, sitting down with Mom and pressing "record" was one of the more challenging things I've done. Our conversations thus far have also been some of the most surprising and revealing I've ever had, not only in what I'm learning about her, but what I'm learning about myself. I plan to continue making recordings with her as long as I can. While "Something Happens..." will look at other stories beyond the complex situation my family and I are in, doing interviews with my mom is most certainly acting as the catalyst for turning my recording passion into something more organized and something that can be shared. What I'm learning through these moments of close listening is that the time is now. We can always benefit from listening to and talking with each other. So don't wait and wonder what would happen if you did. Just press "record," for real or simply in your mind, and tune in. For starters, you can tune in to Season 1 of my podcast and I'll show you a little bit of what I mean. Thanks for listening!
