This weekend I am going to Burr Oak in Gloucester, Ohio to attend the Inside Appalachia Folkways reporters annual retreat.

We’re going to play with soundboards, learning how to make people’s voices mesh with the soundtrack of their stories. We’re going to get advice on fading in and fading out and when to tell the story in our own words and when to use our informants’ voices.

It’s fascinating. I’ve been involved in storytelling as a profession or job skill since high school. I always knew the sound of a human voice (or the flying fingers of someone telling in sign language) was one of the most powerful forces on the planet. Get the right voice in the right accent onto the right public platform and you can change the world—for good or ill, so be careful. In the last ten years or so I’ve taught a lot of health officials and students how misinformation flows through astroturfing, and how to distinguish between honest voices and agenda pushers.

Storytelling with a soundscape is awesome. It gives you a new palette of tools. The human voice needs to be enhanced–but not overwhelmed–by sounds that support the story. A pottery wheel spinning beneath a woman talking about the joy of clay creations. The slide of yarn over a crochet hook is so slight a sound we don’t tend to hear it in the noise of our day. There’s a metaphor in there. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by pointing it out.

So I look forward to a glorious weekend of relax-and-learn with fellow storytellers in the soundscape world. And I feel so lucky. It’s a great gig, finding interesting concepts and amplifying them to other people who can hear themselves described in the Appalachian voices (and pottery wheels, and crochet hooks et al) and say “that’s like me!” It is a powerful thing to affirm people’s identities in a big way by finding and producing a story that might have gotten subsumed in the larger noises of the world.

More from Wendy next week