Showcase Show Showcase: The Local Option

An Interview with Kerry Seed

A former PRX Editorial Board member and one of the many wonderful things to come out of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, Kerry Seed has a busy schedule split between his role as Assistant Director for Blunt Youth Radio in Portland, ME, producing independent work aired on numerous national and local shows, and curating WMPG's The Local Option, a PRX Showcase Show.

PRX:
What does local mean when we're talking about Portland. What do people in Portland care about?

Kerry:
I made a list of about ten issues that I really wanted to focus on that I thought were going to be big in Portland 2006. One that I've already done a couple shows about is cultural identity because there are a large number of new immigrants coming into Portland, and there have been for some time now. People from Central Africa, people from Asia--there's something like fifty different languages spoken in Portland public schools. I wanted to really illustrate how the city is changing as a result or not changing as a result and the tension that exists there. I also want to focus on housing. We're going through a big condo opening here and affordable housing is a big issue. Jobs are a big issue.

I laid out all of these issues that are present in our community and my goal is to focus on where parts of Portland life that are in flux right now and tell stories about those. Not necessarily news, but in depth stories, personal takes on the issues, things of that nature. And one sort of challenges is kind of matching that stuff with PRX stories because in a big way most of the stuff on the site is not really topical. There's a lot of evergreen features or things that sound like news, which are not what I'm doing. But it's forced me to really dig deep and actually kind of rethink how I'm going to do the local angle, and it's helped me to be really creative with how I'm addressing these issues and telling new stories.

PRX:
So if you don't consider it a news show then how do the stories that you feature on the show help inform people about or help them think about the issues that they're facing?

Kerry:
I think it's the difference between listening to a typical action track story about an event or an issue and listening to a short fictional story about that issue. While I haven't gone into fiction yet, I'm really trying to bring that tone of really good story telling without a lot of explication or analysis.

So, for instance, we just did a show, Poverty on Trial. A local group here called "Power" organized a human rights commission in which all these poor people testified to different power brokers in our community about what their lives are like and how injust it is. Jessica Lockheart, who's a producer at our station, went to the event and got tape. But then what I did was I interviewed her about her experience of going and what it was like for her, then cut the two things together and added music. It became this dramatic reenactment of the even. If you've ever been to a public meeting the last thing you want to do is listen to a tape of that meeting. So in a lot of ways those meetings become ineffectual for media outlets. But what I'm really trying to do is re-envision how I can engage with listeners around really interesting topics. And how to make that interesting, I think, is to have a strong narrative, a creative narrative, a dramatic narrative with this tension present. The Local Option seeks to give the listener some credit and let them analyze what's happening by themselves without the host making a lot of, or the reporter making a lot of, giving a lot of analysis.

PRX:
What is the process like for finding things for PRX? What do you look for?

Kerry:
I've plotted out these themes and I've got the show scheduled six weeks in advance kind of what I want to do. I'll search for key words, like "poverty" or whatever, and see what comes up. Then I may search by links. I may search by a particular producer I like. I'm just searching the site in all different ways. I'm doing a lot of listening, which has been really instructive and has given me a lot of great ideas. It's just a luxury to have an excuse to listen to so much radio.

Then it becomes a challenge of how to work that into the narrative of the show. I've got a half an hour and I might have three to four different styles of pieces on the show. What I'm trying to do in terms of hosting, is just really set it up, set the scene, set the table, put the listener in the position where they can see where the story is about to begin, then play the story, and then reset it at the end of the story and go into the next without a lot of "This is how this is connected." It really just runs together like a mix tape. You're going to hear different artists ripping on a similar issue.

PRX:
So how much radio do you listen to before you find anything?

Kerry:
Not as much as I thought. When I first started this I thought, "I'm going to spend a lot of hours listening to stuff." And in reality it's just like a DJ might program a music show. Often times I'm just listening to the first couple of minutes of the piece and I know right away, obviously, whether or not it's going to fit with the tone I'm trying to get. And so while I might, I'll download fifteen mp3 files for auditions from PRX. I'll take a first pass at them and right away throw out like ten. And then I might really actively listen to like five of them.

PRX:
Barrett Golding said he thinks of his show The Plan as music show, and even does back-announcing much as a DJ would. Do you think of The Local Option in that same way? As a sort of music show? I notice that you use a lot of music. Just straight up music.

Kerry:
Yeah. Well, there are a couple of things at work there. One is that I'm at a community station, not a public station. The bulk of our programming is music. And I really wanted to find a way to appeal to the people who are regularly listening to the station and want to hear something they like. So the show is not really tightly scripted like I have an outline of what I'm going to say, and I use a lot of music and I try to make it musical and engaging in that way. However, I don't really think of the pieces as music. I do think of them like produced radio pieces. I'm really focused on the story and the setting, and the setting is Portland 2006. So I'm always trying to tie it back to that. So, no, the answer's no. [Laughs]

PRX:
OK, but you have an arc for them. There's a lot of similarity, right?

Kerry:
Well when I listen to music, I listen differently than when I listen to a radio feature for the most part. When I listen to a radio feature I'm much more listening to the words and the tone and the characters and the narrative arch than I am when I listen to music, which I respond to really viscerally and it's maybe not even necessary that I hear the words or understand what they're saying. I'm just into it because something in my brain says, "This sounds good." So, I think I'm a little bit more of an engaged listener when it comes to the type of radio that I'm doing now. I'm not saying anything about the plan but I'm just responding like that's my philosophy of radio versus music. Or stories versus music, rather.

PRX:
Talk a little bit about the episode Identity is King. Why did you pick the pieces you did for that show?

Kerry:
The identity show was a little bit of a surprise. The NAACP Portland branch put on a gospel concert in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and and I went there hoping to record the Silver Leaf Gospel Singers. It's an octet of octogenarians who sing really an old style gospel; I think they call it jubilee gospel. I had seen them perform before and knew they would be good characters, and I thought, "Wouldn't it be great to use this music bed as a closer for the show, one of there songs?" That's all I intended to do, and it was a pretty cool event; there were over a thousand people and all these gospel groups from all over southern Maine there. The event lasted for well over two hours. The first people who came out was this group of Sudanese and Congolese from the African International Christian Fellowship Church.

This guy who had come--who knows what crisis he's lived through in his life to come around the world to resettle in the United States as a refugee--he started talking about how in school in Congo they did a lot of memorization and the first text they memorized that he remembers as a small child is the "I Have a Dream" speech.

All of the sudden, I really felt like, "This is a powerful image." So, I was able to use that to lead off the show to illustrate both this person's identity changing as he moved to the United States, and the global reach of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision. And also to bring the group's music in their native language, performed for residents of Portland who may or may not speak that language.

All I did was set it up, describe the scene, and say, "Here's this group on stage; this is what they look like; this is what he said," and played a little bit of his introduction and played some of their song. And for me that captured the tone of the whole show.

Then I was able to segue that into that really nice Outfront piece. Outfront is just awesome. If I could just run that series every week it would be great; every single piece on PRX, I don't want to be like a commercial, but it's just very, very well done stuff.

PRX:
What do you like about it so much?

Kerry:
It's personal. It's detailed. The way they weave in and out of narration and tape. The way they use music. Sometimes I listen to radio and I think "Well, I would do this differently here" or "I would do that differently there." and in this case usually I think, "Wow. I will try to do that next time." [Laughs]

From the African chorus, I went into Peter Lee's piece, Tiger Balm and Batman Comics. It deals with the concept of being Chinese-Canadian and how that's evolved over his lifetime from a little bit of self-hatred early in his life to more of an acceptance at this stage in his life. It's just beautiful. It really illustrates all kinds of complicated issues about identity and culture and the global culture that we live in and I just loved it.

Then out of that I went back to the gospel concert and played a clip of the Silver Leaf Gospel Singers, the octogenarian octet singing jubilee gospel. I started off with the Deacon Randy Green talking about his life growing up and the life changes he's seen in his 84 years and how that can be attributed to Martin Luther King. I cut that with just a few short interview snippets to add some depth to what he was saying and I went out with them playing a full song. So there was really only one tightly produced radio story, what we think of radio story.

With a half-hour show, I'm really able to stretch out the narrative and really go for a lot of tone and color within the show and just. I was going for imagery, basically.

PRX:
Is it kind of an instinctual process of feeling out the right tone?

Kerry:
I guess so cause I'm working totally by myself. [Laughs] So what you're hearing is whatever I felt worked. Of course, keep in mind I work with our program director, Dave Bunker. We talk about the show and he gives me feedback about what he thinks our listeners are interested in and what kind of style they might like and so I've really tried to be the voice of the show to that.

PRX:
How do you strike the balance between the global and the local?

Kerry:
It's hard but my instinct is to go more local because there are less local options, quite frankly, for, for really local stories about regular people. Our local newspaper, The Portland Press Herald, does a very mediocre job of covering what's going on here. There are some weekly local papers that do a pretty good job of covering what's going on here, and, but they're, you know, really newsy. And public radio is here is also very newsy. So there's a big gap for me to fill with local stories that are different and interesting and exciting to listen to. That's my focus and far that's how I've been envisioning the show. I think about "Okay what's going on in Portland? What story do I want to tell? Can I tell that story? And then can PRX support the telling of that story? Can I get another piece from PRX?"

With issues like Iraq, no problem. There's plenty of stuff on PRX from all different angles to talk about the war in Iraq. With stuff about housing and affordable housing, it's not so easy. So my vision of the show will probably change week by week depending on what story I want to tell and what's available on PRX.

PRX:
What's the biggest frustration you've had with the show so far?

Kerry:
The issue I just described has been a challenge. Striking a good balance between the locally produced stuff and the stuff available on PRX and making those two work together. But that's also what's really exciting about the show. The whole thing feels kind of experimental and who knows what you'll get each week when you tune in. But my goal is that it'll be consistently good and interesting to listen to, that all the pieces will fit together. So that just involves doing a lot of homework on my end and finding the right writing, the right timing, the right tone, the right music to accompany the show.

Kerry:
Actually, it's been going a lot smoother than I thought.

PRX:
You thought it was going to be really rough?

Kerry:
Well, I'm just doing this by myself and I have fairly high standards for myself. I want to do something that's great, not just like okay. And so I was really concerned about having a weekly deadline where I have to have stuff every week. And when this opportunity became available I called Roman Mars who works at Third Coast now but used to have this great show called Invisible Ink on KALW in San Francisco. It's a half an hour long and he produced segments for each week. He did a ton more work than I do cause he had the full half-hour to fill. He wasn't using PRX for the most part. So I called him just to see what type of time investment he was making on the show and if he had any advice. It sounded like it just about killed him to do the show. He never got paid for it. He was up till like three in the morning every night working on it.

So I felt nervous. I didn't want to sacrifice the good things about my life to make the show. But in the month preceding the first broadcast that was in the first week of January I spent a lot of time really getting the format together, really thinking through a lot of issues, establishing a regular work routine for myself, and kind of making a template for how it would work for this coming year. And that has really served me well. I feel like I'm organized. I'm much more on the ball than I thought I would be able to be. I'm on schedule. I've got stuff planned out. I have the website basically ready to plug stuff into. And because of this advanced planning, I've been able to relax and enjoy it and put less pressure on myself for time and more pressure on myself to tell good stories.

© 2006, The Public Radio Exchange