The Voices of the People – –

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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

The Problem of Pain–

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Jack gets in just over the line again – –

The title of this post is also the title of a book by CS Lewis based on a lecture he presented. In both he tried to explain why a nurturing God would allow people to experience sometimes terrible pain. He likened it to a sculptor chiseling at a piece of stone to eventually reveal the perfect person inside. The pain is the chiseling, and it has to be endured before you can emerge from inside.

I know some people who have chronic pain and who might question that analogy!

However, I am an admirer of Lewis, and this post is on a simpler level. I have often said that you can’t enjoy the lack of pain until you have first experienced it. I’ve been mostly lucky with my health over the years, so my brushes with pain have tended to be fairly short lived, but when it goes away, there is an almost indescribable feeling of relief – almost euphoria.

A recent example –

A couple or so months ago I bought a new pair of shoes and immediately felt as if they were pinching one of my toes. So I swapped back to the old pair, but that didn’t help. I even went to a pair of soft slippers but still felt the same pain with them. So I made an appointment with the local podiatrist. This very nice guy had a close look and found that I had an ingrown toenail that had caused a callous to develop. Half an hour later I walked out to my car with no pain at all.

There’s another side to all this, which is, of course the opioid crisis sweeping America. Originating in the overprescribing of painkillers and then spreading to wider communities experiencing both physical and emotional pain. But that’s Wendy’s area of expertise and research – –

I certainly don’t mean to denigrate Lewis or any others who have tried to theorize about this subject. I’m not particularly religious, although I am a believer in He She or It. But I struggle to understand how a truly nurturing Deity would not intervene to prevent the worst pain. Something worse than an ingrown toenail, I mean.

Maybe opioids are the answer, and we as humans have screwed that up, too.

Come back next Wednesday for more from Jack