whitney a jones

Transom Story Workshop: Photos

I’ve been out in Woods Hole, Massachusetts interning with Atlantic Public Media/Transom.org since the beginning of March. In addition to the radio stuff I’m working on, for the last couple of weeks I’ve been taking photos of the Spring 2012 Transom Story Workshop. A bunch of my photos are now up on Transom.org. You can check out the photostream and track the progress of the workshop here.

Transom Story Workshop

There is a new feature up on the Transom.org website about the Transom Story Workshop Class of Fall 2011. All of the pieces that we played at the public listening event in Woods Hole on November 18th are there, along with a few words from each of us. Go give them a listen: http://transom.org/?page_id=21910

A Radio Story

Early this year I decided that I wanted to learn how to make radio. I was drawn in by public radio shows like This American Life, Radiolab, The Moth, Snap Judgment. I didn’t know exactly what it was about these shows, but when I listened I felt like these were my kind of people. In the middle of a This American Life epidsode Ira Glass started talking about a website called Transom.org that, from what I could tell, had something to do with making your own radio stories. I was at work and I scribbled down the name on a post-it note. I think I may have misspelled it. The note got lost in a pile of papers. A week or so later when I found it again, I made my way over to Transom.org and started reading radio “manifestos” from all these people I had been listening to week after week. I read about recording gear and editing software. I got a microphone for my ipod and nervously interviewed a couple of family members.

In July I saw a post that there was going to be a Transom Story Workshop where, for a lucky few, the website would come to life for seven weeks on Cape Cod. Still haunted by the ghost of grad-school-applications-past I was reluctant to apply. I felt like I was so less interesting than the people in the stories I listened to and that I probably didn’t have a very good shot of being accepted. I applied just before the deadline.

To my surprise, I was accepted. I had to read the email a couple of times just to be sure. I read through the information I was sent about the other participants (now my friends) and then had to go back and read the email again, just to be sure.

So, I spent October and November in Woods Hole, Massachusetts learning how to make radio. My very first piece was a story about The Suspenders Juggling Troupe, a group of jugglers from Falmouth, Massachusetts. I just posted in on PRX.org. If you’d like, you can listen to it: http://www.prx.org/p/70961