Famed NPR voice resonates with students

Eight years ago, in one of Middlebury’s many attempts to bring the outside world to campus, Scholar-in-Residence in English and American Literatures Sue Halpern established “Meet the Press,” a program designed to bring members of the media to campus. Middlebury students have heard lectures from reporters, authors, editors and producers of publications and programs including  British Broadcasting Corporation, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone and The Washington Post. This past Wednesday, March 16, for its third speaker of the year, Middlebury welcomed Jay Allison, producer of NPR’s “This I Believe” to discuss the “the power of telling something true.”

Allison attracted a crowd too large for the planned venue, Bi Hall 220, so to accommodate the groups of people gathering in the aisles, faculty and students of all ages were ushered into a larger room, still barely big enough to seat the crowd.

Schumann Distinguished Scholar Bill McKibben, a longtime friend of Allison’s, introduced the discussion by highlighting, along with Allison’s many accomplishments and talents, his unique ability to “bring other people’s voices into the public realm.”

“As with all professions, the people who go on to do great things at the highest levels of them, at root share in common the fantastic ability to do the basic thing right, the basic thing of communicating, in this case with your voice invisibly across the ether,” said McKibben.
Allison’s talk was, in essence, an homage to the communicative abilities and emotional capacity of the human voice.

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what gets my attention anymore,” Allison said. “My god, it is such a flurry and it’s worth thinking about and I wish I could ask all of you what captures your attention, what makes you stop and what makes you stop for more than a minute. One thing that still does for me is the voice and it’s partly its strange power of our senses; we are vulnerable to sound because it can pass directly into us. We can’t shield ourselves, we don’t have earlids. A voice can get inside and slip right past our brains and touch our hearts, which is an astonishing kind of power.”

Allison relayed an example of this kind of power in a program he used to run called “Lost and Found Sound,” where people would call in to a voicemail line and tell what sounds they had saved. People would call in with all kinds of sounds, examples went from lacquer discs to sounds saved on paper that could only be played with cactus needles. Oftentimes, people also called in to discuss voices they had saved of ones who had died.

“They would say, ‘It’s all I have left’ and it was as if it was an actual part of the person that was gone. They wouldn’t talk about [the voice] the way they’d talk about a photograph,” said Allison. “They’d talk about it like it was a ghost.”

Allison lamented that the tendency for radio nowadays to focus on news, headlines and concision has resulted even in the cutting of sighs and pauses from story recordings.

“To me that’s the human being,” said Allison. “The playwright Marsha Norman talks about how her husband died, going to a closet some months later and finding a balloon and realizing it contained his breath. It feels like that to me.”

As he has done his whole life, Allison left much of the speaking to others by playing recordings of “This I Believe” essays and clips from other programs he has worked on in this past.

“I tend to hide behind other people’s voices,” said Allison. “I also champion them but I am also in some sense hiding and discovering my own voice through theirs.”

One of his favorite projects was what he referred to as “filling the broadcast day with clean slices of life.” Every hour the broadcast would cut from a news story to a 30- to 60-second clip of a local saying something about his or her life.

“It is so unsettling because it’s so real,” said Allison.

Allison explained how much of what he finds comforting about real life and truth through local radio is the sense of intimacy and neighborliness conveyed through the idea of an immediate community connected through air waves.

“The lovely thing about having a local public radio station is that that’s the one thing that ties us together — that we’re here and that we’re fundamentally neighbors,” said Allison, “I do a lot of international work and I still think of it in the sense of trying to create a sense of neighborliness. I’m working on a project now that I’m hoping to get started sharing stories around the world and making big spaces feel small.”

An essential characteristic of the Meet the Press lecture series is the extensive question and answer session,  which allows students to truly interact with the speaker.

One relevant issue raised was language barriers in international radio. Allison conceded that it is nearly impossible to express and embody the voice and essence of someone delivering a story through translation.

“It would be an interesting task at a school like [Middlebury], which is known for its languages, to figure out how to inhabit the vocal space of a primary speaker and translate it for something like this,” said Allison.

Allison’s poignancy and obvious devotion to his work touched a chord with much of his audience.

“It was really inspiring to listen to Jay’s talk. His work is a testament to the power of good listening and good storytelling,” said Sarah Harris ’11.

“It was one of the best talks I have been to at Middlebury,” said Logan Brown ’11. “His voice and the voices of others he played for us certainly made me stop and reflect long after he was finished speaking.”

Some, however, felt Allison was too enthusiastic about the recordings and the idea of the human voice and did not address the key issue of the talk — not simply the power of telling but the power of telling something true.

“I loved listening to him play sound bytes that resonated with him, but I didn’t feel like he connected them all under one overarching theme,” said Astrid Schanz-Garbassi ’12. “The talk was titled ‘The Power of Telling Something True’, and I think I was expecting to come away with some sense of how to harness that power, or at least what that power is.”