The Sound and the Story
My own experience as a writer started with a need to document the world around me, and find a voice for what I saw. This was an urgency which began even before I could write. I had my first neighborhood newspaper at seven, and my first radio essay for “School of the Air,” a Wisconsin public radio project dating back to the 1930's for rural kids' classrooms. The show “Let’s Write” came in over the dizzying Rimsky-Korsakov classic “Flight of the Bumblee” and we were given half an hour to write on a prompt or topic or concern. I wrote about Johnny Appleseed.. spreading seeds to the pioneers. When I look back, what astonishes me isn’t that things are so different, but how similar they are. In that half hour, I felt we could travel the world—a true magic carpet of experience, and I grew up feeling much the same thing. Listening to learn -- that was always, for me over 36 years, the best thing about NPR. We write for many reasons—to document, to persuade, to illuminate. We write sentences as strong as we can make them. But primarily we write to tell ourselves who we are, and then, turn round and tell the world who we are, too.
By now, I’ve reported and written thousands of stories, the vast majority of them for NPR, but also print. I’ve written a memoir called Daughter the Queen of Sheba and am writing another, Tell me Something Good. I’ve been a Middle East correspondent, an NPR program host, an agriculture correspondent, a prison reporter, and love the flight of imagination. What all of these things have in common is a need to tell stories, and to depend upon the fact that people live all kinds of lives. What is always needed, though, is a narrative about who we are and how we got here.
As a memoirist, I’ve had the chance to examine a myriad of experiences ranging from domestic conflict to war zones. I’m the oldest daughter of a mentally ill mother, a beautiful woman who inspires my need to make sense of the world even when that is extremely difficult. (And who is still with us.) I married a photojournalist. I’ve taught writing workshops in the US and Ireland since 2017. I joined NPR in 1979. The writers I admire know the world to be a complex, brutal and beautiful place. With a kind of radical confidence, let’s work together to create narratives that compel our personal histories and discoveries to weave a common good.
