About my project
2010: 1 year, 3 Attempts
All my life I’ve had a serious love for the stories of human lives. Nestled among every X-Men and Lord of the Rings fantasy I imagined was the desire to connect and find something real among the magic. My favorite mutant in the X-Men series was always Storm because she kept her narrative to her self: it was hard to see her thoughts. The same could be said of my love for Gandalf from J.R.R. Tolkien’s works: The Grey Pilgrim always had a secret agenda, and that made his personal story far more complex.
To that end, I have become pretty much obsessed with Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life.
TAL started as a radio show hosted by Ira Glass in 1995, and it has since grown to be broadcast on over 500 radio stations nationwide (USA). They have also expanded into a really excellent television show on Showtime that ran two seasons and won an Emmy before going on hiatus. It is difficult to describe just what TAL is, so I’ll just cheat and nab a passage from their website (a passage I’ve read repeatedly over the past five years):
We think of the show as journalism. [...]what we’re doing is applying the tools of journalism to everyday lives, personal lives. Which is true. It’s also true that the journalism we do tends to use a lot of the techniques of fiction: scenes and characters and narrative threads.
Meanwhile, the fiction we have on the show functions like journalism: it’s fiction that describes what it’s like to be here, now, in America. What we like are stories that are both funny and sad. Personal and sort of epic at the same time.
We sometimes think of our program as a documentary show for people who normally hate documentaries. A public radio show for people who don’t necessarily care for public radio.
In my personal quest as an artist, I’ve lived in St. Louis, Chicago and Southern Illinois. I’ve worked at a college, an environmental advocacy agency, restaurants and bars, theaters and office buildings. I’ve written for several websites. I’ve had numerous plays produced. I’ve made lists of goals and outlined them and achieved them. I’m normally a go-out-there-and-grab-life-by-the-throat kind of person, but certain aspirations scare me. I’m going to try to tackle one of my fears here: the final possibility of total rejection.
Over the past five years, I’ve submitted stories to TAL three times, and, my friends, I don’t take rejection from anyone more than six times, so this year (Twenty-Ten!) marks my Final Attempts to Make The Cut. My past efforts have been recordings of me reading my own stories about my life, but this year I will create three new audio pieces for submission that will each focus on other people’s lives and approach this thing from a more journalistic angle.
I’m taking this very seriously, and I’ll be documenting my efforts here. I’m no amateur at sound recording, mixing and editing, but I’m certainly no pro. I generally can get people to talk to me, but I’ve never interviewed anyone in my life. I don’t have any idea how to go about structuring audio interview clips into something cohesive and strong.
I’m American. I have a life. It is this one: the one I am living right now. I’m perfect for the show! I hope Ira Glass feels the same way.
Thus begins My American Life Experience.
To read more about the timetable, schedule and flow of this process, check out this blog entry.
Culling my Attempts « My American Life Experience said,
January 17, 2010 at 2:54 pm
[...] in Progress tagged This American Life at 2:25 pm by Kyle Kratky As this blog enumerates elsewhere, Twenty-Ten (2010) marks my year-long quest to make the cut on This American Life. I will execute [...]