10A
NEWS / MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2010 / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / KANSAN.COM
SPEAKER
The art of storytelling: Ira Glass lauds oral tradition
BY ALEX GARRISON
agarrison@kansan.com
It's Saturday night and the Lied Center is packed.
Immersed in total darkness, there's a certain electricity in the air as a familiar voice begins to float through the theater.
It's a voice you might not think would be destined for radio greatness. It's high-pitched, it's nasal, it's undoubtedly nerdy. But it also boyishly charming, articulate, friendly but direct. It's speaking to hundreds of strangers, but, somehow, it still feels intimate.
"You have to remember, this is radio. Not seeing contains a power
in itself.
This isn't the first time these people have sat in silence listening to Ira Glass. Many of the more than 1,500 people here are among the 1.8 million weekly listeners of "This American Life," the nationally syndicated show Glass began on Chicago's WBEZ public radio station in 1995.
Some of the younger people here may not even own a radio, but it's obvious they're still devotees. "This American Life" is the most popular podcast in the country most weeks. These people, many of them KU students, carry Ira Glass around with them in their pockets.
The lights go up and the anticipation becomes palpable. Dressed in a sharp suit, seated behind in a table topped with audio mixers, CD players and wires, he looks at home.
Daniel Johnson/KANSAS Ira Glass, host of This American Life on National Public Radio, speaks at the Lied Center on Saturday night to a full house. Glass presented "Radio Stories and Other Stories," a talk using sound bites and music from his weekly show to discuss creativity and the art of storytelling.
But Glass is out for his own amusement. "You look nothing like I expected," he says to the audience with a wry smile.
During the nearly two hours Glass spoke, aided by music and audio "quotes" from his show, he laid out his model for structuring stories, gave his advice for students and writers — mainly, kill the topic sentence — and both lampooned and venerated the state of American media.
Glass talked about the 400th episode of "This American Life," called "Stories Our Parents Pitched Us," and the story of his grandmother meeting Hitler before World War II.
people and their lives.
"It's a failure of craft. The job of journalism is not just to tell what is
This led him into explaining what makes "This American Life" different from traditional broadcast media productions — stories of everyday people and, in a word, a sense of fun.
He puts one thing in every story to amuse himself, he said, adding that the reason traditional media are losing audience members is related to their serious tone.
"This American Life" has a reputation for being a news show that isn't really journalism — not in the objective news-delivery of broadcasters. It frequently features first-person stories and works of fiction, and it uses music to punctuate and add depth in a way traditional media does not. Glass says the stories are true, but they rarely include specific time elements or anything "new." Rather, the stories are those of everyday
HAVE I TOLD YOU
ABOUT WHEN
GRANDMA FRIEDA MET
HITLER?
"It's a failure of craft. The job of journalism is not just to tell what is new,but to tell what is."
IRA GLASS Radio host
Grandma Frieda didn't make the final cut, but was an example of the way "This American Life" is rooted in an oral tradition present across many cultures — the tradition not of "news."
but of just telling stories.
new, but to tell what is. They make the world seem smaller and less interesting, and, well, stupid," said Glass, who won last year's Edward
"Something about the show always seems to captivate me," Adam Crifasi, a senior from Olathe, said before the show. "He has a special way of connecting seemingly unconnected ideas."
IT'S NOT JUST IN THE BIBLE, IT IS THE BIBLE
He went on to deconstruct how he puts together stories, giving the advice he said he had wished someone told him in college.
R. Murrow Award for outstanding contributions to public radio.
"It's not about reason or logic, it's about motion. It has a destination; it's like a train leaving a station. Lay out what happened, then what happened next," he said, gesturing his hands into rungs on a ladder of rising action.
"You can imagine the shock I experienced when I discovered this thing my
The next step, then, is to provide some context, some universal theme, some "moral to the story"
and, after talking with more people, realized his "invention" was not quite his own.
He later saw this kind of storytelling in his rabbis sermons.
IRA GLASS Radio host
this thing, my invention, wasn't just in the Bible, it was the Bible!"
GETTING OVER THE GAP
Glass continued his advice to "anybody who wants to do something creative with their lives" by telling upstarts to "get over the gap" — to overcome the self-consciousness of observing beginner's work compared to professional work.
The key, he said, was to just keep writing.
"When we're taught writing, they don't teach us this. I blame the topic sentence. We must destroy the topic sentence!" he said, then breaking into a bit of a laugh. "That, of course, is a topic sentence."
even about?"
Glass played a tape he made when he was 26 and cutting it off in the middle with jokey self-deprecation. "What is this story
Cooper Nickel, a freshman from Lindsborg, said he found Glass' stories inspirational.
"It made me think, 'Hey, I can do that!' he said.
THRIVING CULTURAL LANDSCAPE
that serial reality TV represents an ability and interest in staying with characters over long periods of time.
Glass ended the night by talking about the state of American storytelling and the future of long-
He argued that his craft wasn't being threatened, but rather that America's cultural landscape is thriving, and that growing competition for people's attention leads television producers in particular to create better content, and
form features in an age of Twitter, reality TV and short attention spans.
"I'm watching the Jersey Shore" just like everybody else," he said.
IT WAS, LIKE, UH, REALLY GOOD
Connor Donovan, a senior from Ann Arbor, Mich., left the auditorium jump. An amateur radio journalist himself, he was excited about having seen a famous radio host stutter, lose his train of thought and say "like" like the rest of us.
"Everything he said was unbelievably inspirational. It sounds super cheesy, but I feel invigorated," he said. "I think I'm going to be in a euphoria state for awhile."
— Edited by Kelly Gibson
Check out an audio slideshow at kansan.com