whitney a jones

honesty and the personal narrative

Back in February one of my stories was featured on podcast HowSound: The Backstory to (in this case, a decent try for your first time out) Radio Storytelling. A couple of days ago Rob forwarded me a comment that had been posted on the story page and suggested that I might want to respond privately rather than publicly on the blog. I’ve been thinking over the last couple of days exactly how to respond or whether to respond at all.

The comment was mostly complimentary and even included a smiley face. But it also questioned whether I was being completely honest in the story. If it was anything else I probably would have been grateful for the compliment and ignored the rest it, but honesty is something that I think about a lot, particularly in the context of writing and producing first-person narrative stories. 

Thanks to Mike Daisey there have been no shortage of articles over the last few months about what honesty means in the context of a personal narrative and whether that’s different from what honesty means in the context of journalism. 

I think part of the problem for first-person narratives/memoir/creative non-fiction/whatever we’re calling these things this week is that there is no consistant definition for what constitutes “being honest.” It reminds me a little of Justice Potter Stewart’s famous “I know it when I see it” description of pornography. The problem is one person’s porn is another’s Aphrodite of Cnidus. Can something contain David-Sederisian exaggeration and still be honest? What about changing people’s names, is that ok? Composite characters? Re-arranging timelines? How do you recreate dialogue from years ago that only exists in the memories of those who were there? How accurate must that dialogue be?

Memory can be unreliable. There is a story I heard many times growing up. It has to do with my older brother getting hit by a car when I was just a couple months old. I was in a writing class during my final year of college and we were free-writing about our earliest memory. I started writing about that and then realized it would be impossible for me to have an actual memory of that event. But there it was in my head, clear as day. I had built a memory by hearing the story told over and over again until my mind convinced me that I remembered it. But the details, I realized, were all wrong. There’s no way I could have been standing at the window. In my memory it took place at the wrong house, in the wrong driveway, in the wrong city.

These are not new problems. Thucydides, the second of the two great Ancient Greek historians wrote about some of them 2,400 years ago in the introduction to his history of the Peloponnesian War:

With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 1.22

Should we regard Thucydides work as honest? Obviously these methods would be suspect if Thucydides were publishing his history today, but this same problem confronts anyone telling a personal story about the past where anyone says anything. Most of the time, for unrecorded events, getting as close to the general sense of what someone really said is as good as I can do. And, to me, it seems honest. Obviously making people up or making someone say something that would be unrecognizable to the speaker is a problem.

My story doesn’t contain any dialogue as far as I can remember, so that wasn’t an issue. But, this story posed some challenges which forced me to think about honesty through the entire process.

First, I had to be careful not to say anything that I didn’t actually believe. I didn’t want to go further than I honestly felt because I didn’t want to feel boxed into opinions that I didn’t actually hold after I made the story public.

Second, during the two weeks of writing, editing, and producing the story I was very aware of everything I did. Some of the scenes in this story were taking place in the present tense as I was writing it. This made me scrutinize every decision I made that could have had an affect on the action of the story. Numerous times during those two weeks I had to question whether I was doing or not doing a certain thing because that’s what I would actually do under normal non-story-production circumstances or if I was doing something in order to have an affect on the story. And if I decided that I would do thing x under normal circumstances there was always the question of whether to record it or not. Sometimes I did record and that felt honest. Other times I didn’t, because it felt too much like I was creating an artificial scene for the sake of my story.

During one of the early edits, Rob asked me whether I was planning to call my parents and if so whether I was planning to record or not record the conversation. I thought about it and decided that under normal circumstances there was very little chance that I would have called up my parents and had the conversation. I thought that doing it for the sake of heightened drama in the story would have been dishonest. So I didn’t do it. As a result the high point of the story became this frozen moment where I had come to terms with where I was personally but faced the uncertainty of what would happen when they found out.

So, the story ends with that uncertainty.

Once I figured out that that was my ending I had another challenge. At that point, the letter had been written and was sitting my my bag, I had finished writing the story, I had done the voicing for the piece and I had a few days left to produce it. During that production time I didn’t want real-life circumstances to move past the ending of the story. So I held onto the letter a couple more days. This was the one part of the entire process that felt unnatural, but I think I’m ok with it.

I finished producing the story the morning of November 18th. I had decided that I wanted to let my parents know about the story before it went out into the world. I had a window of a few hours before the start of the public listening event. In that window between finishing the story and sharing it publicly, I emailed them a copy of the letter.

We’ve had some good conversations since then.

Finally, let me address the actual point of skepticism by saying the Mormons are not a monolithic group. While the smiling, nuclear family has largely become of the image of the Mormon church, divorce rates among Mormons are basically the same as the rest of the country. There are plenty of practicing Mormons who are divorced and I guess I reject the notion that a Mormon divorcing equals leaving the church or that it would even naturally send off those alarm bells. For me divorce and losing faith were not causally linked.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet?

In July of 2010, I sat at my job listening to CSPAN Radio. I ended up listening to nearly all of the Elena Kagan Senate confirmation hearings, you know, as one does. As the Senate went through all of her public data, academic papers, memos, emails, etc. I amused myself by thinking about what this process will be like a few decades from now when people from my age group (Gen Y, Millennials, people born in the ‘80s, whatever the hell older generations are calling us these days) are being confirmed Supreme Court justices. 

Imagining the confirmation process was fun: “Whitney, on March 25, 2011, you tweeted the following: ‘Howard Schultz has doubts about #hcr. What’s his solution? Turn it over to OKC businessmen and let them fix it? #Notreadytoforgive.’ How can you assure us that this tweet is not indicative of a deeper anti-business philosophy?” Ok, so, I’m never going to be in a Senate Confirmation hearing, but someone is. And someday, one of those people is going to have a social media past. And what will we do with that? If I had to guess right now, I would say everyone will pour over her timeline and feign scandalization at anything that indicates any amount of personality.

I don’t think me and my peers necessarily have more opinions than previous generations. We just have better ways of broadcasting them. In the old days people would gather around the water cooler and give their opinions: some interesting, some not, some well informed, some not, some funny, some not. Some would tell what they had for breakfast. Anyway, that’s how it happened in the movies. I’ve never worked at a place where people gathered around a water cooler to talk. But the point is no future employers or Senate committees could go back and search the text of those conversations. What will we do when all of sudden a nominee, who is supposed to be a passionless blob (read: “umpire who calls balls and strikes”), suddenly has a searchable history of opinions offered on various issues via their twitter feed, or their blog or any other social media? What will we do when someone 20-30 years from now has NOT expressed an opinion via any of these media? Should we view that person as hopelessly out of touch with the culture? Should we trust that person’s judgment to make decisions on any cases that involve technology?

Just so you know, I haven’t been sitting around for the last two years waiting for the perfect time to write about the Justice Kagan confirmation hearings. This all came back to me a couple days ago after I had this short conversation with my friend @jillianjfoster: 

Here, the question is not whether anyone is being confirmed to the judicial branch, but I think at its heart this is about the same issue. What are our cultural expectations with respect to people and their opinions? Do we/employers/members of the Senate Judiciary Committee expect people not to have them? Or not to express them? What are the real world consequences for expressing an opinion in a public setting? And as a culture are we ok with those consequences?

Jillian was suggesting, I think, that if she shared everything she thinks in a public space that is easily searchable (as opposed to, I don’t know, going to a local park and standing on a soapbox…which, come to think of it, would probably get you tweeted about and would end up on YouTube anyway…so, bad example) that it could have a negative effect on her future employment opportunities, that potential employers would read what she thinks about a given topic and decide not to hire her because of what she wrote at some point in the past. Should this be the way it is? At some point is there going to need to be a shift, where everybody sort of recognizes that we all have opinions floating around in public and someone’s ability to do a job well is maybe not connected to how that person thinks about, oh, I don’t know, gun control, or reproductive rights, or government funding of public media (by the way, it’s pledge drive season, support your local public radio station)?

As for my own social media involvement, a lot of what I have been writing and retweeting about for the last year is related to public radio, because that’s what I do now. The two most useful pieces of advice I’ve heard are: 1. Don’t tweet about the people you’re interviewing and 2. Assume that anybody you write about will eventually see what you wrote. The first piece doesn’t really apply generally, but I think the second one does. And I don’t think it means never right anything negative, but just to be fair when you do. If you’re going to take someone down, make sure it’s a fair 140-character take down.

I don’t have any particular comedic gifts, but I’ve watched funny people, and I’ve studied them and it appears that if you’re good at that sort of thing, you can get away with opining in ways that unfunny people can’t. What definitely doesn’t work, again, just my own observation, is going around being an asshole and then after being called out on it saying something like “Oh, come on, it was just a joke. Lighten up. #takeajoke #lol.”

Finally, having family lurking around I’ve found is a pretty effective deterrent. My dad recently discovered Twitter. I do have mixed feelings about this. I sometimes wonder if I self-censor too much because I know that he reads every single tweet I send out. I have younger siblings that are internet savvy. This keeps my language a little cleaner, probably. I don’t have any real exploits to document, but if I did, the fact that I have family members around my social media spaces would make me think before posting anything remotely compromising. So maybe that’s something. Pretend you like your family and that they follow you on Twitter.

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.

Monmouth Prohibition: 10 Years Later

In January, I started working on a radio story about my hometown of Monmouth, Oregon and its history as the the last dry town on the West Coast. Its status as a dry town ended back in 2002 when residents voted for the first time to allow beer and wine sales.

Election day 2012 will mark 10 years since this vote. I wanted to see how the arguments had held up. The nice sit-down restaurants that people imagined back in 2002, did any of those come to town? Did the town finally have its own grocery store again? Had drunks taken over downtown? Had crime rates gone up?

Here is my story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=150382869&ft=3&f=150382869

Re:sound

“First Love and 27 Other Firsts” got picked up by Re:sound, which is a show done by the folks over at the Third Coast International Audio Festival and airs on WBEZ in Chicago. Their most recent episode, The List Show, ends with “First Love.” The other stories in this episode are great, they include:

The List - by Sean Cole, Ashley Ahearn, and Nick van der Kolk 

World’s Longest Diary - by David Isay

The Feltron Annual Report - by Roman Mars and Nate Berg

They Didn’t Get Along - by Rick Moody and Michael Hearst

I highly recommend listening to all of them, you will be a better person for it. 

First Love and 27 Other Firsts

I did short little story last week and posted it over on the Cowbird website. Cowbird is a place where people tell stories using photos, words, and sound. When I was invited to the site at the beginning of the month, the email mentioned that they were starting to collect “First Love” stories for Valentine’s Day. My immediate thought was, well, I don’t want to do that. But the idea started to grow on me and I started to write. Last week at 2:30 in the morning I found myself huddled in my closet with my recording gear voicing what I had written. I produced the piece the next day and posted it. Have a listen and a look. Also, check out the rest of the “First Love” stories. Happy Valentine’s Day.

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