Music Credits: “NY” from the Cd  Soul Sand composed and performed by Kosta T. used courtesy of the Free Music Archive. 

“Trouble” performed by Jennifer Koh and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, “Asunder” and “Crisis Modes” all composed by Vijay Iyer the cd Vijay Iyer: Trouble and performed and released by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project led by Gil Rose.

“Combat Breathing” composed by Vijay Iyer and performed by the Vijay Iyer Trio from the album Uneasy released by ECM Records. 

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed. 

You’re listening to “Trouble” from the cd “Vijay Iyer: Trouble”  recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project with Jennifer Koh led by Gil Rose.  Vijay Iyer  is a pianist, composer, and MacArthur Fellow whose numerous collaborations and solo projects span a range of styles, he is probably best known as an innovative, versatile and prolific jazz artist with 23 acclaimed jazz albums to his name. But Vijay Iyer has had a parallel career: for years, he has also made significant contributions to the world of contemporary classical music through his many compositions.  And the recently released "Vijay Iyer: Trouble," is a great example of this—his first orchestral music CD, marking another milestone in his far-reaching career. From his groundbreaking collaborations to his innovative compositions, Vijay Iyer continually pushes the boundaries of multiple musical genres. And I’ll be talking  with Vijay about this. And We’ll also be exploring his background in classical music, his immersion into jazz, and the profound and lasting influence of Black music and Black musicians on his work. 

Vijay Iyer, Thank you for joining me. You actually remind me a little bit of Alexander Hamilton in Lin-Manuel Miranda's play. You are nonstop. I’m looking over <laughter> everything you've done. And I wonder “Does this man sleep?” <laughs> I don't understand. 

Vijay Iyer: I hope it ends less tragically for me. 

Jo Reed: <laughs> Yes, as do I. <laughs> Your CD, “Vijay Iyer: Trouble”, was just released by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, headed by Gil Rose. This marked your debut recording as an orchestral composer, which is both surprising and not. For those who only know your work in jazz, can you just share your background in classical music with us? 

Vijay Iyer: Well, I grew up playing violin as well as piano, but one was with lessons and the other wasn't. So, I had classical violin lessons growing up. I started when I was three years old on Suzuki, which many people do, on violin. Meanwhile, my sister started on piano at the same time. This is back in <laughs> 1974. So, it didn't take long for me to want to start banging on her piano. So those two things then kind of proceeded in parallel for my entire youth, both the kind of well-regulated and rigorous training in Western classical music. I played a lot of solo and chamber and orchestral repertoire, and I as a budding, I don't know, exploratory music maker, I just followed my ear on the piano and figured things out. Tried to imitate what I heard on the radio and elsewhere and started to learn music theory when I was 12 or something, 

Jo Reed: When did jazz come into the picture?

Vijay Iyer: I got into jazz when I was about 14 through our high school. Our high school had a nice music program, and it was a public high school in Fairport, New York, a suburb of Rochester. So I think being able to play music every day in school, starting the day as the concert master <laughs> for the high school orchestra and then ending the day as the pianist in the jazz ensemble. Also, I was in a youth orchestra,  a community-wide youth orchestra, and I was studying concertos, trying to learn Mendelssohn and Bruch and Mozart concertos, and “Introduction in Rondo Capriccioso” by Saint-Saëns, and also playing all this orchestral repertoire. So, I was exposed to this whole range of stuff.

Jo Reed: When did you focus on jazz?

Vijay Iyer:  In college, I really pursued Black music, basically. I was playing piano and writing music. I was trying to imitate anyone from Joe Henderson to McCoy Tyner to Cecil Taylor. <laughter> Sun Ra. Anybody I could hear. I used to go down in New York City to hear live music during college. When I was 20, I moved to Oakland, California for grad school and became kind of more fully in the jazz scene there pretty quickly. I had by then quit violin, and so I figured that was sort of done for me. I didn't imagine that I'd be coming back to so-called classical music in any way. I was already working with a huge range of people when I was in the Bay Area. I was in a hip-hop band. I was playing all this avant-garde, so-called <laughs> free improvisation. I was writing my own music, leading a band, touring with Steve Coleman, and I was starting to study electronic music and some of these academic, more like research disciplines around music perception and cognition. So I was just absorbing as much as I could from every direction. Then when I came to New York, I just was not afraid to go hang out with Imani Winds, and Ethel, the string quartet, and try some stuff that was very different in architecture from the typical jazz record. I was making albums by then, and they were called jazz albums. They featured improvisation and focused on rhythm and groove and spontaneity and solos and stuff. But they were structured in slightly different ways, I would say. It wasn't just like I was writing tunes and we're playing solos on tunes. It was a bit different, the way it was organized.

Jo Reed: Was there a record or project that you were involved with that opened up the classical world for you again.

Vijay Iyer: I think the first project of mine….because I was also working with a lot of poets. So actually, I'd say that the first project I made that was really kind of a different format and different scope or something than the albums I had made before was “In What Language?” which is a collaboration with the poet Mike Ladd that came out in 2003. That premiered here in New York at the Asia Society. We did three major works in that vein, I'd say.

Jo Reed: I don't mean to interrupt, but when you say major works in that vein—what do you mean—what is that vein 

Vijay Iyer: Right. I was making music that would accommodate these poems, and some of these poems had an underlining narrative, and some of them were just kind of impressionistic. But they're all sort of spoken from the perspective of these different characters. Some of the pieces were through-composed, some of them were almost ambient or environmental. So that, I think, put me on the radar in a different way for people who saw me as a kind of jazz weirdo. I was in the sort of jazz world, but I was definitely a weirdo in that world. I think when people heard that, they saw some other potential, and that's when I started getting some other people interested in working with me. 

Jo Reed: Who did you begin to work with?

Vijay Iyer:  Not long after that, I was commissioned to do this project with Ethel, which is “Mutations”.that premiered in 2005, and that was recorded finally in 2014.  I also got an orchestra commission not long after that, from ACO, American Composers Orchestra. So that was in 2007. It was step by step, kind of concurrent to my path in the jazz universe, I was doing these things that not only didn't fall into that category,but were completely invisible to people in that world. People didn't know I was doing that, and also weren't getting recorded, like these notated chamber and orchestral works were accumulating. 

Jo Reed: When did you begin composing for orchestra?

So, “Interventions” was the first orchestra piece. That was in 2007. Then I did this piece, “Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi”, in 2013, with the filmmaker Prashant Bhargava. That's for a large chamber ensemble and performed live with a film. We got to do that at BAM, here in New York, at Brooklyn Academy of Music. I remember Jennifer Koh came to that, and she said “Hey, I want to ask you something.” <laughs> By then, I had written a couple of pieces for her. 

Jo Reed: She's a violinist, for people who don't know. 

Vijay Iyer: Right. Once she saw that work, she asked me if I wanted to write a concerto for her, and that was at the end of 2014. Two years later, it was actually underway. “Trouble” which is the violin concerto  premiered at Ojai, in 2017, when I was the music director for Ojai. 

(music up)

Vijay Iyer So, little by little, I was suddenly in that world. It just kind of sprouted up from these different collaborations that happen and these different relationships that came about by virtue of being in New York. 

Jo Reed: How did you come together with Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, or BMOP? First of all, they're such a unique institution, because they really understand that recording new music is as vital as composing it and performing it. So, bless them and everything they do. 

Vijay Iyer: Yes. 

Jo Reed: How did you come together with them? 

Vijay Iyer: I think it was through Jenny, because actually, first they programmed “Trouble”, the violin concerto. They put it on a concert, and then they organized a recording session after the concert. So they got it up to speed to perform it, which is the best way to rehearse something, of course. They were well suited to record it. So that happened in, I want to say, December of 2019. 

Jo Reed: Well, let's talk about how the CD came together. Tell me that? Because it's three distinct pieces of music. “Trouble” is sort of the centerpiece, the 30-minute concerto. But let's talk about your process for putting this together?

Vijay Iyer: Yes. Once “Trouble” had been recorded, then Gil wanted to know what else there was to sort of round this out. He said “No rush. We'll figure it out.” In 2017, I'd also written this chamber orchestra piece for Orpheus, called “Asunder”. It was written for an orchestra that doesn't use a conductor. So I wanted it to have almost like a simplicity to it so that they could just groove and have some fun with it. Really that the rhythmic impulse had to come from within the ensemble. But then what I tend to do in these pieces is test out things that I often do with my bands. These rhythmic transformations that I'll do with a drummer like Marcus Gilmore, or Tyshawn Sorey, because we can. Because it's sort of like advancing the art of the rhythm section. But then I wanted to see can an orchestra do these things that we do? So, that's sort of been the impulse to a lot of these.  

(music up)

Vijay Iyer: I think the thing about trying to make an orchestra groove is that it basically-- this piece became a series of dances. They're all invitations to move. So, that's what that piece is, the opening piece on the album, “Asunder”, also written in 2017. In 2019, I was invited by LA Philharmonic. They have this “Green Umbrellas” new music series. They invited me to write something. So I did this piece for strings and percussion. I started with something I do at the piano, which is almost this impromptu, spontaneous creation, that generated this harmonic progression. I'd never done this before, but I transcribed that and orchestrated it <laughs> for strings. I wanted to hear what that would sound like. So that's the center movement of this other piece that's called “Crisis Modes.” 

Jo Reed: So the three pieces that comprise the CD recorded by BMOP are “Asunder”, the violin concerto “Trouble” and “Crisis Mode”. 

(music up)

Jo Reed:  I'm curious how you view your role as a composer in contemporary music? Do you see yourself as a storyteller, as a commentator, or just something else entirely? 

Vijay Iyer: It's an interesting question, because that keeps evolving for me. In particular, I think I even say this in the album notes. All these pieces were   kind of caught up with an idea of Americanness. I think coming of age, especially as a South Asian American, the child of non-Western immigrants, so much of my life was about proving that I was American. So much of my artistic life has been about that, has been about claiming a seat at the table, claiming a right to be an artist in public in this country, in particular. It couldn't be taken for granted. It had to be built, it had to be claimed, it had to be seized, <laughs> in a way. It had to be defined, it had to be articulated in those years, in the ‘90s and early 2000s, what is it to be an artist of color, and particularly someone with roots outside the West, in a time when there hadn't been very many such people visible in public, except for, of course, the vast legacy of Black music and Black musicians, who have been the backbone of American culture for as long as there's been American culture. So, part of it for me was like “What is my relationship to all of that? What do I have to offer it? What does it mean for me to say I'm a jazz musician?” For example. “Can I earn the trust of that community? Can I find space for myself and be welcomed in that community?” And I have. I mean, that was earned, it took time, and I am still vastly indebted to Black artists and Black mentors, Black love <laughs> that I've received over many years. So my relationship, then, to Americanness is sort of not so straightforward, I would say, and particularly because what I've learned from especially elders like Wadada Leo Smith and Amiri Baraka, both of whom I was mentored by, and continue to be with Wadada. Nation is not what holds us. Basically, having a kind of internationalist perspective on what we do, and who we are, which is to say we speak from this place, but we need not be of it. Our community is larger than that, and it's not defined by that. So all of that is to say I think being an artist in public has helped me ask and answer these questions for myself. I hope it's also offered, for others, a kind of space of affirmation, or a space of where they feel seen and heard, as where others feel seen and heard, where people who don't necessarily feel like they belong anywhere might find a space where they can be held, where they can be understood, where they might find the strength to carry on. 

Jo Reed: I don't mean to be reductive, but that's so much what jazz is. 

Vijay Iyer: That’s right.

Jo Reed: I know the word jazz is problematic. I've never talked to a jazz musician who liked the word. 

Vijay Iyer: That's right, yeah. 

Jo Reed: It's an extraordinary music that has such a deep history--

Vijay Iyer: Yes. 

Jo Reed: -and at its best, is always pushing forward. 

Vijay Iyer: Right, it's a music with no limits. That's the thing. The reason that so many people in the history of that music have rejected that word is because it's a word that delimits what they are capable of. It’s a narrow frame. So, understanding that that word has always been contentious, and that artists have not always been on the same page about it, even. But I was mentored by a series of musicians who had very little use for that term, even as we found ourselves playing at jazz festivals and in jazz clubs and being written about in jazz magazines. 

Jo Reed: And getting jazz awards. 

Vijay Iyer: Yes, <laughs> indeed. I got a few of those, it's true. 

Jo Reed: <laughs> I would love to have you talk about the distinction between composition and improvisation? As you think about your music. 

Vijay Iyer: Well, it's a question that comes up a lot. I think it's a distinction that's unique to the West. So, part of it is to ask why that question is there, and part of why the question is there is because the entire economy of Western music is constructed to support composition and to revoke the value of improvisation. So it created that distinction, which otherwise was not a distinction, <laughs> before the idea of, say, copyright, or before the idea of royalties. All of which depends on the “Fixity” of a work. This is a legal term that gets used. Like, is this work a thing? <laughs> Is it repeatable? Does it exist <laughs> in this way that I can point to it, I can look at it on a piece of paper, for example. Whereas what it is as an artist, as a person who makes music, is like there's ideas, and then there's ideas I write down, and then there's ideas I don't write down. The only reason it's useful is for posterity. It's not really a useful distinction in the present. I will say that there is a benefit to writing things down. For example, what if you want 80 musicians to play together in an organized way? Then maybe writing something down will help them <laughs> do that. So that is where the plotting of an event, or the planning out of a series of musical events is meaningful and necessary. But it doesn't have to be the distinction that defines anything.

Jo Reed: Yeah, I hear what you're saying. I'm wondering for you as a creator, when you're writing something for Ethel, say, or Silk Road, you have to present them with something, and you're not going to be on the stage with them playing, most of the time, I would think. So there has to be a specificity in the score that you present them  whereas the kind of collaborativeness and flow that can happen when you're performing your own music with jazz musicians. 

Vijay Iyer:  Well, when I first started working with string quartets, I mean, I worked with Ethel, I worked with Brentano String Quartet. They commissioned a couple of works for me as well. Actually, in all those pieces, I played in them. So then it was actually about trying to figure out what we could do together, knowing that they had a very different skill set and operating procedure than I did. Basically, with me, it's like give me four bars of notated music, and I'll spin 15 minutes of music out of <laughs> it. As a player, that's what we do, we do stuff like that. With them, you have to specify everything about every sound. They do have interpretive skills. If you look at Bach scores, they're, what in contemporary terms, you would describe as indeterminate. <laughs> There's stuff there that's not specified. How do you play it? How fast do you play it? How loud? Can you vary the tempo? That's totally up to the performer. That's a skill that is then cultivated in that world, is like how to interpret notation. You make a choice about that. So that's where the same creative impulse dwells in these players, is in the how, not in the what. So it's sort of about tapping into that “How?” for them. How fast? How loud? Also, how do you play together? So I decided to write pieces that tapped into and pushed the limits of what they already knew how to do, by just incorporating some processes, some real-time kind of processes into the works. But then they have to bring the kind of attunement and listening strategies that they bring to chamber music, which is how do you play together? So, it's not just cacophony, it's actually very relational choices they're making and when musicians find themselves having to make a choice in the moment of performance, that really pins them to the present. So then we're really in it together. 

 Jo Reed: Well, you yourself play in sextets and duos, solo and trios, and your trio has had a few iterations. But currently it's bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who you've played with for 20-something years. This is a powerhouse trio. Two CDs, “Uneasy” and “Compassion”, both are wonderful. 

Vijay Iyer: Well, thank you. 

Jo Reed: Can you describe a little bit what happens when the three of you play together? Because it feels like magic <laughs> when you're listening. 

Vijay Iyer: It felt that way when we first played together as a trio,actually. It was like “Wow, this has a kind of electricity to it.” I mean, we'd all played before in different configurations. Obviously, like you said, I've worked kind of non-stop with Tyshawn <laughs> since he was 20 years old. So we have a bond that's pretty unbreakable at this point. It's like family, musically. So that means that we can move very quickly. In particular, Tyshawn has these unparalleled gifts. Just the way he hears is virtuosic. He immediately knows everything about it. In an instant, he knows all the pitches, and he can relate to it immediately. He starts co-creating with you immediately. And then I found out that Linda’s also like that. She has these top-notch listening skills that makes her able to perceive everything that's happening in the moment. So then, I guess what I'm saying is that it's really easy to play with them because they have these gifts of perception that they have then cultivated and channeled into their musicianship and musicality. They're also just both fearless. And then, lastly, they're also both composers themselves, which means that they have a composerly perspective on music. It's not just about playing to show off. It's actually about sculpting and shaping what's happening so that it goes somewhere, and so that it matters. All of that, it makes it very, very easy and joyous, whenever we're able to come together, which is, nowadays, pretty hard to do, because they are so in demand. Their own careers have really taken off, obviously. But we do get to come together several times a year and it's always a thrill. 

(music up)

Jo Reed: For us as well. I wonder how you introduce new songs into the trio? Since so much of the music you make is that “Spontaneous composition,” to quote Roscoe Mitchell. <laughter> What's the process by which you sort of introduce new music and how you come together to flesh it out? 

Vijay Iyer: I've made a bunch of trio music over the years, as you know. The funny thing about it is that it's hard to write <laughter> for a trio. 

Jo Reed: You sure do it <laughs>. 

Vijay Iyer: Thank you. I mean, I guess what's hard about it is when you have a larger group, or even a quartet, you can kind of hear that there are these things that people are doing together, like in unison, for example, that then signals to the ear that “Oh yeah, this was planned.” Some part of this must be written down. If they're playing in unison for like 16 bars, that's probably written down, <laughter> right? It's not a coincidence. With a piano trio, it's generally less evident what the distinction is between the beginning, middle, and end, because it all has the same ingredients, essentially. So, because of that, it's hard to say “This is me, the composer, and now it's me, the player.” It's actually always the same. So, because of that, I've done a lot of covers, actually, in the trio, recasting music from the past in a way that was kind of activating, for us, giving it a different rhythmic shape or something like that, or rhythmic impulse. So that's been useful, is having something else to work off of and work with or against. But I guess in terms of what is it like to bring pieces into them, they grasp it in less time. Actually, Tyshawn’s always been like this. I'll never forget the first time he came over to my place. It was in 2001, and I handed him-- it was one page of music, but it had a lot of intricate-- to me, anyway, <laughs> information on it. He held it in his hand for about 15 seconds, and then he gave it back to me. <laughs> He still remembers that piece to this day. That's <laughs> how he is. So these are the people I'm dealing with, is people who can really instantaneously absorb that kind of information and then start building with it. So that makes it, again, really smooth sailing. So, I guess the combination of these things means that actually what I often do is underspecify what's on the page, because it doesn't need to be super intricate. Because all the details will emerge from how we all play together.

Jo Reed: Well, collaboration, obviously, is so important to you, and you’ve had many extraordinary collaborators. I mentioned Roscoe Mitchell previously, and I know he was important to you. I'd love to have you share a little bit about your time with him?  He’s an NEA Jazz Master and I think he's an extraordinary musician. 

Vijay Iyer: <laughs> I think so too. I think about him all the time. I mean, he's still such a major figure in this music, and such a major force in my life, in terms of everything I learned working with him. I was just thinking about this. <laughs> I was just remembering that the first time I went there was my first gig with <laughs> Roscoe. That was such a trial by fire, because actually I got called at the last minute to replace someone else who had to cancel on him. This was in the year 2000, I think? Anyway, I just got flown in and went straight to soundcheck. It was in Switaly, as we call it, the Italian part of Switzerland. I'd been recommended to him, and I kind of thought I had something to offer. I was like “Okay, this is going to be great. I'm playing with my hero.” Because by then I'd seen him play many times, both with the Art Ensemble in the ‘90s, and solo and duo with Malachi Favors. I was just a fan of everything he had done, and it was always transformative for me. It was always this life-changing moment, where he would reveal something you didn't know was possible about yourself, or about the world, or about music, or about life. In the course of a 12-minute alto solo, <laughs> something like that, he would just somehow reorganize your relationship to the world, and to sound, and to space, <laughs> everything. It sounds mystical, but he would do it basically without fail every time I saw him. So I already had this kind of awe when I got there, and we were playing with three musicians who had been playing with him for 30 years. It was Jaribu Shahid, Tani Tabbal, and Spencer Barefield, and then me. I was new to the family <laughter>. He gave me some guidelines, and there was a bunch of notated music that was very difficult to play. It was very complicated. There was a lot of detail in it, and it wasn't obvious how to play it. It took a while for me to get it together, and it was still like piece by piece. I had just gotten it, and I was trying to catch up because the gig was in a couple of hours or something. At the soundcheck, I don't know, I was trying to play in the way that I thought I knew how to play in these sort of more open, improvised contexts, and he kept telling me to stop playing. And then on the gig, he kept, again, telling me to stop playing, <laughs> and I was like “Oh, well, I hope that something works out.” The next night, that kept happening. He gave me some guidelines, things to listen for, and he kept saying “Please don't follow me. You don't know where I'm going.” Basically, the implication was “Don't play my stuff back at me. Don't try to imitate me. Don't do this call and response thing with me that you think you're supposed to do. Don't do that.” So then I was like “Well, what do I do?” Also, he didn't want me to play chords <laughs>. I’m like “Okay, I'm a piano player who can't play chords. All right, so what’s left? I don't know.” The third night, I remember we were in Firenze, and I guess I just felt like this cornered animal. I just was in some sort of survival mode. It's like my brain left my body or something, and then something else started happening at the piano. It was like I had an out-of-body experience, because I just was watching myself do something that I didn't think I knew how to do, and I didn't know what it was. I couldn't account for it, and I couldn't even really follow it, but it just kept happening. It's like something just burst forth from me, in a way. I didn't know I had it. I didn't know how I could’ve found it. But that was the time he didn't tell me to stop. That was it, actually. <laughs> That was what I was supposed to be doing.

Jo Reed: That’s what he was looking for. Yeah, interesting. 

Vijay Iyer: He helped me find that in myself. He helped me relate to everything in a very different way. So, it really changed me in that way. It opened this whole other vista for me. It was like I found a new room in my house or something. It was really weird. <laughter> It was like “Oh, I never knew this was here. This is a part of me. I have this whole other set of limbs,” or something like that. It was like that. It was like suddenly I could fly, or <laughs> something. So, I will never be the same because of that, and I still kind of get chills thinking about it. I just feel so blessed to have had all these years of music making with him, and to just be on the same planet with him at the same time. 

Jo Reed: We're going to be closing because I know I'm keeping you, but you've quoted Muhal Richard Abrams, saying “When you create music together, you create a bond that can never be broken.” I’d just like you to speak to that a little bit, because it sounds obviously like that's true with Roscoe. It's obviously true with your trio, and with so many other people. 

Vijay Iyer: Yeah, I think it's that experience of building something together. It's not just reading the same page of music, <laughs> or something like that, but actually the experience of interdependence, where everything you do depends on what everyone else does, and the kind of attunement that's required of that in order to be a part of something like that. Then you find yourself caring about each other, in a way that might catch you off guard, even. You realize that you're involved in someone's life. It's what Wadada calls “Divine love.” 

Jo Reed: I think that's a good place to leave it. Vijay, thank you so much. I really appreciate you giving me your time. And the music is beautiful. 

Vijay Iyer: Well, thanks so much. Thanks for listening and for giving it your time. 

Jo Reed: That was pianist, composer and MacArthur Fellow Vijay Iyer. His first his first orchestral music CD, “Vijay Iyer: Trouble” has just been recorded and released by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project with Jennifer Koh led by Gil Rose. You can keep up with Vijay’s many projects at Vijay-iyer.com. We’ll also have a link to the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and to my interview with its founder and conductor Gil Rose in our show notes.

You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating, it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Vijay Iyer: I think coming of age, especially as a South Asian American, the child of non-Western immigrants, so much of my life was about proving that I was American. So much of my artistic life has been about that, has been about claiming a seat at the table, claiming a right to be an artist in public in this country, in particular. It couldn't be taken for granted. It had to be built, it had to be claimed, it had to be seized, in a way. It had to be defined, it had to be articulated in those years, in the ‘90s and early 2000s, what is it to be an artist of color, and particularly someone with roots outside the West, in a time when there hadn't been very many such people visible in public, except for, of course, the vast legacy of black music and black musicians, who have been the backbone of American culture for as long as there's been American culture. So, part of it for me was like “What is my relationship to all of that? What do I have to offer it?

Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the album Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts—this is Art Works—I’m Josephine Reed. Today, we’re marking Disability Pride Month by revisiting a very special and informative interview.
Joel Snyder: Audio description is a way of making the visual verbal. And what I mean by that, of course, is using words, using language, that is succinct, vivid, imaginative, to convey the visual image that's not fully accessible to a significant segment of the population: people who are blind or have low vision. And it's a separate audio track that is accessible to people who want to access it.
Jo Reed: That was educator, advocate, and pioneer in audio description Dr. Joel Snyder.  You just heard Dr. Snyder’s brief definition of audio description—let me fill it out a bit: as captioning or signing gives people who are deaf or hard of hearing access to media and performing arts, audio description provides a similar service to people who are blind or have low vision. 
Audio description provides a narration of what a show is depicting visually, and it must do so without stepping on dialogue or musical cues. And the use of AD is removing barriers to culture for blind people. It was first used in theater and then moved to public television in the 1980s. Now AD is being heard throughout artistic disciplines from theater to film to streaming, from museums to dance to opera--- And Joel Snyder has been there from the beginning: wearing many hats—as an audio describer, voice talent, innovator, and educator--  running  the Audio Description Project, for American Council of the Blind. And in the interests of full disclosure, Joel Snyder also worked here at the arts endowment from 1982 to 2002.  It’s not every day you get to talk to a real pioneer, someone who helped create a new way of making the arts accessible—so I was interested in how Joel Snyder began in audio description. 
Joel Snyder: Oh, goodness. Well, my background is in theater and voicework, going back into the '70s, so that gives you an idea of how old I am. I began recording talking books for the Library of Congress. And also during that time, I became a volunteer reader for a group right here in Washington, D.C., the Washington Ear, which provides readings over a subcarrier of an FM frequency. It provides readings of the daily newspaper, magazines, novels, that sort of thing. So, one of my assignments was the Washington Post on Sundays, and, of course, a newspaper is full of all kinds of images and graphics and photographs, so we would describe images in an informal sense, and there was really nothing called "audio description" at that point. But then, in 1981, it just happened that that same organization, the Washington Ear, its founder and director-- Margaret Pfanstiehl, who was a blind woman, and a fellow named Chet Avery, who was a blind gentleman working at the Department of Education, both of them were on an access committee at Arena Stage, right here in Washington, and Arena was a really-- a forward-thinking entity. In those days, there wasn't that much thought given to accessibility to people with disabilities, but they had just installed an assistive listening system, which is ubiquitous now, of course. It helps people here, who are hard of hearing. Well, when Chet and Margaret heard about that, they could see the value, and they wondered, "Hmm. If that's just a matter of a microphone on stage, amplifying the lines, couldn't someone offstage hold that microphone and describe images, using the pauses between bits and pieces of dialogue or critical sound elements; describe the elements of action, of costumes, of scenery, for folks who are blind or have low vision?" And Arena Stage, to their credit, gave it the go-ahead. And Margaret Pfanstiehl went back to the studio and grabbed me and about three others, and we began to hammer this out. Well, what would we do? How would we do this? What would we call it? And we came up with "audio description." And that summer, summer of '81, the first instance of audio description for live theater happened. That was a production of Major Barbara, at Arena Stage. And I do want to add, though, just to tie this off, Jo, at the same time-- just about the same time, in the late '70s-- a wonderful fellow named Gregory Frazier, the late Gregory Frazier-- he also had the same kind of idea. And he wrote, as part of a master's thesis at San Francisco State University, the very first published material research on how you would do this. So he published the first research material, and then later went on to develop something called AudioVision, in San Francisco, which exists to this day-- very much like the Washington Ear-- providing description for performances in the Bay Area. So it was almost simultaneous on the two coasts, when this began percolating.
Jo Reed: Okay. And before we go on, about what percentage of the population are we talking about here?
Joel Snyder: The numbers I use come from the American Foundation for the Blind, saying that there are over 32 million Americans who are, quote, "either blind or have trouble seeing, even with correction," unquote. And that's significant. That's upwards of eight to ten percent of the population. And then, of course, add to that, Jo, people with learning disabilities, people on the autism spectrum, people who are learning a different language; in this case, learning English, for instance. They're able to hear the language, just as with captions they're able to see language. It helps build literacy. It raises the level of sophistication, I think, with regard to language.
Jo Reed: I know this isn't the point. This is done for people who are blind or who are sight-impaired, but nonetheless, for those who can see, it raises visual literacy, too, I would think.
Joel Snyder: It really does. I'm so glad you mention that, Jo, and that you're tuned in to that, because sighted folks, we see, but we rarely really observe. How many times do you go to a movie, you like it, so you go to see it again, and then, "Oh, my gosh, I didn't see that the first time"? Had they had the audio description on, perhaps, they would have noticed it, because it's our job, as audio describers, to bring out those critical elements that oftentimes are just missed by, certainly, somebody who's blind. But it's also great for a sighted person. If you're in the kitchen making a sandwich, and the television is on in the living room, you don't miss a beat, <laughs> because you can hear what you can't see.  
Jo Reed: I'm interested in the process of creating audio description. Let's take media, for example, for television and film.  there's the description, and somebody needs to write that but then it needs to be voiced. Is this typically done by the same person? Are these two separate entities?
Joel Snyder: Again, Jo, that's a great question. You're right: For media, it has to be written, and then it's voiced; and almost always, those are two different people. It involves careful analysis and research, involving the particular video being shown. We are in service to the people listening, but also to the artist and the art form that we're describing, so we need to understand what a director is doing, what a cinematographer is doing, and first, observe everything that we can possibly see. We learn to become active seers, not passively letting the world wash over us. No, really look; really look, and then edit from that what's most critical to an understanding and an appreciation of the image. Because there's not time to describe everything. The eye takes in far mare than the voice can recount, so we have to be selective. And actually, that makes for better writing, better description, anyway, if we're zeroing in on the essence. And then-- and yes, then it's voiced by a separate person.
Jo Reed: Is there training for this? Do you work with the production team?
Joel Snyder: It's a very involved and a very professional service; it needs to be, especially for media. It's akin to captioning or subtitling, it's akin to sign interpretation, and people that do those kinds of things study it. You know, my PhD is in audio description from the University in Barcelona, because audio description is studied as a kind of subtitling, as a kind of translation; audiovisual translation. So, yes, there's training. And, in fact, I founded, about 12 years ago, the Audio Description Project of the American Council of the Blind, and one of our initiatives is, twice yearly, an Audio Description Institute where we train describers, principally focused on the writing, but we work with the voicing, as well, certainly; the writing of description and what's involved: observation, editing from what you see, the language. How do you come up with the words? What's the best way to come up with the words? So we do those-- at least twice a year, we do a major Audio Description Institute to train describers in the writing, and we're building a certification program, so that just like sign interpreters-- they can be certified by the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf-- we want to have a similar kind of process for audio describers.
Jo Reed: Perfect. You’ve been on the stage. You were an actor. You are an actor. I would imagine that when you're the voice talent, recording audio description, it's a different skill set. I've listened to audio description, and it's quite different from being the voiceover on a commercial, for example.
Joel Snyder: Oh, my. It is, and it's quite different from being an actor. You know, actors on stage, they tend to want to be in the spotlight. With audio description, the voice talent is in service to the people listening, and in service to the art form. We're very much in the background. We are not in the production; we are of the production, if you will. Our voices need to be consonant with what's happening on stage, but we cannot be interpreted as being a part of the play. The best compliment a describer can get after a show-- a performing arts piece, or even in media-- is that, "I forgot you were there. You disappeared, because you were seamless with the production." Years and years ago, when all this began, there was so much focus on-- and rightly so, perhaps-- on objectivity; that we not influence, in the writing or the voicing, what the listener will experience. Let them interpret what we objectively describe. And with regard to voicing, that meant everybody sounded like a golf announcer: "Now he moves here, now she moves there. Now they do this, and now they do that." Which unfortunately, goes too far the other way. It renders a track that's just uninteresting to listen to, and is somewhat disconnected from that happy scene, or that sober scene, what have you. So, I talk about "consonance" when I train audio describers, in the voicing, especially.
Jo Reed: Well, why don't we hear an example? You sent me a clip from the film Color of Paradise.
Joel Snyder: The Color of Paradise, yeah.
Jo Reed:  Why don't we just listen to you doing a bit of audio description for us?
Joel Snyder: Well, you know, I'm wondering if it might be even more interesting to hear a bit of the original soundtrack from this movie, The Color of Paradise, 1999-- a marvelous film; but what I do in training is, I let people listen to it and experience it as a blind person would have in the movie theater, with no description. It's a professional film. It has a professional soundtrack. You know, do you get anything from it? It might be fun to just listen to it that way, for as long as you can tolerate it, and then listen to it with the description, if that makes sense.
Jo Reed: Sure. We'll listen to a little bit of both.
Joel Snyder: Okay.
Audio: Nature sounds, water, birds…..
Jo Reed: Okay, so we just heard the one without the description, and you're right: I have no idea what's going on.
Joel Snyder: <laughs> Right. Exactly. Exactly. You know, you hear people say, "Well, there are birds," and people think there's water. They think this, that, the other. "Is that a body being carried? What's going on?"
Jo Reed: Yeah, exactly.
Joel Snyder: And if you were a blind person in the movie theater, you probably would be gone. You would've left the movie theater, because I'm not getting this at all, or you would've been poking your elbow against the-- into the ribs of the person next to you, going, "What's going on? What's going on? What's going"-- and, of course, then everybody around you is going, "Shh, shh, shh, shh! Shh!" You know, so, no description, then it means that that person ends up without access to an important cultural element of our society: film, television, and such. But now, let's add the description track. If we add the description, does it make a bit more sense?
Jo Reed: And here we go.
Audio with Description: Mohammed kneels and taps his hand through the cover of curled brown leaves. A scrawny nestling struggles on the ground near Mohammed’s hand. His palm hovers above the baby bird. He lays his hand lightly over the tiny creature. Smiling, Mohammed curls his fingers around the chick and scoops it into his hands. He stands and strokes its nearly featherless head with a fingertip.
Jo Reed: Indeed, it does make more sense.
Joel Snyder: I think it does. I think it does. That clip, especially-- obviously, there's no dialogue there. Now, that doesn't mean that the describer is free to simply talk and talk and talk. No, they need to let the sounds come through.
Jo Reed: We also get a sense of how rich, visually, this is.
Joel Snyder: Yes, absolutely. And most film these days really is, and we have to be sensitive to that. We don't want to cover any dialogue. We don't want to cover critical sound elements. But I like that example from The Color of Paradise. It didn't have description when it was first screened in movie theaters, but I wrote and voiced the description when it was later broadcast on television.
Jo Reed: Let me ask you this: Are blind people part of the process, at any point, of audio descriptions?
Joel Snyder: They are, and they should be, and they should be more frequently, because this was-- the old phrase, "Nothing about us without us," you know? This was begun by a person who's blind, by people who are blind. It's by people who are blind, for people who are blind. And people who are consumers of audio description, they are oftentimes used as quality control specialists, as consultants on the writing. There's absolutely no reason why a person who's congenitally blind can't be a marvelous master of language, and working with the describer, come up with ways in which to express the visual image with words. Some of the best voice talents in the industry are people who are blind. Some of the best audio editors are people who are blind. So, it's not as frequent as it should be, but I think it definitely enhances the whole process when the consumers of description are integrally involved in the production of description, and in its advocacy.
Jo Reed: Now, you talked about how audio description is different in different art forms, and you began in theaters. So, in theater, what is the process there? How do you prepare the script when it's theater, and it's live?
Joel Snyder: Yeah, yeah. Well, Jo, I like that you used the word "script." And this is a prejudice or a bias of mine, but I think it takes time to really find the right language, and that requires then, ideally, working with the production throughout rehearsals, developing a script that can be voiced. And it shouldn't sound read. When you get to the performance stage, and you're offering the description, I often say half an eye is on the script, and one and a half eyes are on the stage, because it's live, and anything can happen, and you need to be ready for that. Most description in performing arts, still, these days, isn't quite like that. First of all, most is volunteer effort. It's based on, maybe, one or two viewings of the show, and then a few notes are taken, and then the description is offered, essentially extemporaneously, at only one or two performances out of a six-week run. And it's offered via either an infrared system or an FM radio system. So the individual using description receives a little headset and an FM or infrared receiver, and the person doing the voicing is doing so with a Stenomask microphone or a headset, and they have a transmitter, and so it's only heard by the people using the service. Some performances, some videos, have open description. And again, I like to think it can be appreciated by all, really. So, now, with television and film, it's a little different, because with television, this was the marvelous contribution of WGBH and Barry Cronin, in those days in the '80s. They heard about what we were doing at the Ear, and they had us do a pilot project for them. They realized that, for television broadcast, there's a secondary audio program channel -- SAP channel-- whereby a secondary track, audio track, can be delivered. You turn it on or turn it off. It was there, really, for the transmission of Spanish translation, and it's still used for that today, but it's also used for audio description, and that's how folks access description on television these days. And by the way, I mentioned the Audio Description Project of the American Council of the Blind. The website there, that's another great initiative of ours.  You could actually find out, "What's on television right now with description?" Because it's still just a small percentage of the whole...
Jo Reed: And we'll have that website in our show notes, so people can access it.
Joel Snyder: That's great. Thanks, Jo.
Jo Reed: How widespread is the use of audio description throughout the arts?
Joel Snyder: Well, it is growing rapidly. It began with performing arts, but then, once it became more prevalent on television and with film-- with film nowadays, Jo, just about every feature film that comes out has an audio description track, which is accessed in the movie theater. Remember those days when we all went to movie theaters?
Jo Reed: No. <laughs>
Joel Snyder: Yeah. <laughs> You can go to the movies...
Jo Reed: It's been a long time. <laughs>
Joel Snyder: Yeah. You get a headset, similar to what you do in a legitimate theater, if you will, and you hear the description along with the audio track of the film. So it's done that way in the movie theater, but most movies-- most feature films, I should say now, come with an audio description track. So it has grown-- the field has grown, exponentially. There are more and more people, and oftentimes it's captioning companies, who are already providing captions. I started the audio description program for the National Captioning Institute, back in 2002. Captioning companies already have the contacts with the film producers, the television producers, and so it's akin to that kind of postproduction work. In addition to the captions, we would provide the audio description.
Jo Reed: Is there a federal mandate, an FCC ruling, that says X percentage of programming-- and I'm talking about media now-- need to be accessible through AD?
Joel Snyder: Yes, there is. Yes, there is. In 2010, the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act was passed, which, for the first time, mandated audio description on television broadcasts; very small amount. At the time, it was only about four or five hours per week, and only for the top nine broadcasters. Now it's increased to just about seven hours per week, for those top nine broadcasters, in about 70 markets. But you know, there's so much television out there, if you add all that up, it doesn't even come to one percent, is my understanding, my estimation, whereas in the U.K., fully 10 percent of all broadcasts must have audio description. My hope is that, at some point, we're going to be akin to captioning in this country. Captioning, when it was mandated some 40, 50 years ago, the law said, each year, it should go up by a certain percentage. We don't have that yet. Hopefully, we will. So, captioning is at 100 percent now 
Jo Reed: So many of us access film and television through streaming services. Is there a mandate for them to provide audio descriptions?
Joel Snyder: There is no mandate on streaming services to provide description. But what's great is that entities like-- well, Netflix, for instance, probably does more description than any other streaming service. They're right up there with the others, certainly, and in a variety of languages. Initially, they weren't sure. How would this work? Because this is a whole other process. Well, they've learned to embrace it. They really have run with it, So it's not mandated. It doesn't come under the FCC rule; that's only for broadcast television. Even movie theaters, by the way, and performing arts spaces, they are, to a certain extent, covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that's why movie theaters have become more and more accessible. Obviously, if you're a person who uses a wheelchair, you have to be able to get into the space. But once you're in the space, it's got to be programmatically accessible. And that's why, beginning about 10, 15 years ago, movie theaters began to realize, "We're going to have to get films with description, with the captions, because we're going to have to provide those services."
Jo Reed: It would just seem to me that, as media becomes more digital, it's a much easier process to add AD.
Joel Snyder:, I think you're right. I think it is easier in one sense, certainly. There are parameters involved in digital production, as there were in analog production days, certainly. You know, when we all went to digital broadcast of television, the hope was that we could expand beyond just one secondary audio program channel. You know, if a program is being broadcast in Spanish, there's no description, because there's only the one channel. Well, the hope is that, because we're digital now, we can have up to-- I think it's a dozen separate audio channels. It has to do with how the different services access the audio.  Hopefully, that's another way in which audio description will grow.
Jo Reed: And I would also think, given the technology that we have-- that we literally carry around in our pockets now-- I think that really opens so many doors...
Joel Snyder: You know, you're right. In fact, I do many different presentations about audio description. One that I do fairly frequently these days is with a blind man, Petr Kucheryavyy, who works for Charter Communications. They now have a service called Spectrum Access, and it's an app. It's an app that folks download to their phone. The app-- it is actually able to listen to a movie being broadcast in a movie theater, or at home. Once you have that app, you download to it the audio description track that accompanies that film, and the app miraculously pairs the audio description track with the sound of the film. It does it automatically, and it's available to you through your own smartphone then, in your own earbuds. And you can listen to it. The description doesn't have to be on for anybody else in your home. You listen to it, independently. And I see that growing by leaps and bounds, and especially as the Congress and the FCC begins to realize the need for the expansion of the 21st Century Communication and Video Accessibility Act. Really, like I say, captioning is at 100 percent. Why shouldn't description be at 100 percent, as well? And so I see a lot of growth in the future.
Jo Reed: I've heard you discuss, and I'd like you to share, the potential that you've said audio description can offer, when it's part of the creative process from the beginning.
Joel Snyder: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. You know, there are good examples of that. Foremost, perhaps, is Stevie Wonder's one of his music videos became one of the first with audio description built in. It's called So What the Fuss, and it's easily accessible on YouTube. The description is a part of the whole. It was written that way.  And he had the rapper Busta Rhymes voice it, so it was really a part of the whole. I think that I'd love to see that happen more and more in media; certainly, in performing arts. There's a company in New York; used to be called Theater by the Blind. Now it's called Theater Breaking Through Barriers. They've experimented with taking a play; maybe adding a narrator, or adding lines that are descriptive in nature, so that the description is built in. Their every performance is described, basically, right? You don't need to have an added-on layer. It's a little bit like shadow-signing, if you've ever been to a production that's being made accessible with sign language, with the signers on stage with the different characters. Every performance is accessible, with the signer right there in front of you, as opposed to off on the side, on the left or the right.
Jo Reed: Has AD grown with other art forms? And I'm thinking, actually, of dance, which on one hand seems unlikely, but then again, maybe not.
Joel Snyder: <laughs>
Jo Reed: Are we seeing AD offered in live dance performances, for example?
Joel Snyder: We are. We are, and that goes back a little ways, actually. One of the first groups to experiment with audio description-- and I'm proud that I worked with them on this-- is AXIS Dance Company, out of Oakland, California. That's a company that-- they speak of "integrated dance." They have dancers who are all shapes and sizes: dancers with one leg, dancers with no arms, dancers who use wheelchairs. They wanted to make sure their performances are accessible to everybody who are potential audience members, including people who are blind. And developing description for dance is somewhat dependent on, are we talking about a story ballet, which is like theater, in a sense; or are we talking about a more abstract form, where it's about levels and lighting and the directorial intent, that sort of thing? So that certainly makes a difference. Certainly, don't want to step on music. Opera is described, and we're careful to preserve the experience of the sound, to a great extent. But even in dance, too, we oftentimes will have, in theater and in dance, "touch tours," where people who are using the service can actually be on stage after the show, and actually touch props, touch costumes; touch the dancers, if you will-- in an appropriate manner, of course. But even more importantly, the people using the audio description service could move like the dancers, with the dancers, and really get a sense in their bodies of what was happening, visually. And that was just a marvelous way to help make dance accessible
Jo Reed: Okay, tell me about your time at the Arts Endowment.
Joel Snyder: Oh! Sure.
Jo Reed: When were you here, and tell me what you did. It was before I started working here.
Joel Snyder: Yeah! Well, it was a whole other time I was on the staff from 1982 to 2002, always working with arts presenters and multidisciplinary arts. In those days, it was called the Inter-Arts Program, and I was its acting director two or three different times, and working with, principally, arts presenters. And I remember that whole period so fondly. It was a time of tremendous growth for me. But all during that time, I was still working with description, and I became, in a sense, an unofficial member of the staff of what was called, in those days, the Special Constituencies program, and now, of course, led by Paula Terry, working with accessibility and the arts. Now the program is called Accessibility, ably led by Beth Bienvenu, and you know, and everybody that accepts a grant from the NEA, agrees to follow the regulations put forward in Title 504 and in the Americans with Disabilities Act, but sometimes there's much more that people could do to make their programs accessible to people with disabilities, and there's money available to do that--- money to help you do that can be built into a grant application. But it was a wonderful time, and I'm glad and pleased about what I was able to contribute to the funding of presenters, certainly, and other multidisciplinary arts endeavors, but certainly helping Paula, and getting the word out about accessibility.
Jo Reed: And what do you see for AD in the future?
Joel Snyder: Oh, I think it's going to continue to grow.  I think we need to be better at spreading the word about the abilities of people who have, quote/unquote, "disabilities." Everybody has abilities, and we're all using them to the best of our capacity, and folks who are blind, they're doing that, too. They simply need the art form, the culture, to be accessible to them. You know, the social model of disability dictates that a person is disabled only to the extent to which society doesn't accommodate their individual needs, so that if a building doesn't have a ramp, well, it's inaccessible, isn't it, to somebody who uses a wheelchair. But as soon as that ramp is there, or the building is designed with the ramp, the disability goes away. So there's really no good reason why a person with a physical disability must also be culturally disadvantaged. I don't think so. I think it's beholden on all of us who run public institutions, and certainly funded with public money, to be as inclusive as possible, to involve all of the public to a greatest extent as possible.
Jo Reed: Okay. And I think, Joel, that is a great place to leave it. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.
Joel Snyder: Thank you, Jo.
Jo Reed:  You just heard my 2022 interview with educator, advocate, and pioneer in audio description Dr. Joel Snyder.  Check out some of resources that are available at the Audio Description Project, at the American Council of the Blind.
You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating, it really helps people to find us. I’m Josephine  Reed, thanks for listening.

Joel Snyder: Stevie Wonder-- one of his music videos became one of the first with audio description built in. It's called So What the Fuss, and it's easily accessible on YouTube. The description is a part of the whole. It was written that way. And he had the rapper Busta Rhymes voice it, so it was really a part of the whole. I'd love to see that happen more and more in media; certainly, in performing arts. There's a company in New York; used to be called Theater by the Blind. Now it's called Theater Breaking Through Barriers. They've experimented with taking a play; maybe adding a narrator, or adding lines that are descriptive in nature, so that the description is built in.

Music Credit:  “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd  Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

“The Waters,” written by Bonnie Jo Campbell, narrated by Lili Taylor. Used courtesy of Recorded Books.

Jo Reed:  From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works. I’m Josephine Reed.

(Audio book excerpt)

You just heard Lili Taylor read an excerpt from the audio book “The Waters” by Bonnie Jo Campbell.

Bonnie is an author celebrated for her profound connection to the Midwest and her evocative portrayal of place. Her latest novel, "The Waters," follows three generations of women living on an island in a swamp in Southwest Michigan who find themselves grappling with their place in a shifting world.  While at the periphery of the island across the bridge on the mainland are the men of the town, who struggle with their own sense of displacement and masculinity. Campbell’s work masterfully explores themes of identity and community, blending fairytale tropes with gritty realism. Bonnie Jo Campbell joined me to talk about  the themes of her novel, her writing process, and the challenges of creating this immersive story over the course of eight years.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Oh, well, it's a pleasure.

Jo Reed:  And I would like to begin by having you just tell us a little bit about "The Waters." How would you describe the book?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Well, I never have a way of doing it, and I always wing it, and it's always different, but I would say The Waters is a fictional place that would be in Southwest Michigan. And the book "The Waters" takes place there in a swamp, basically, that is filled with every kind of wildlife imaginable in a Michigan swamp, and there's a group of women--  a family who lives in the swamp and has always lived there in a very traditional way.  And as times are changing in the community surrounding them, the women are becoming scapegoats for all the troubles of the community, and I wanted to explore what was happening in the three generations of the family: Hermine, who is the old grandma of the family, whose job it is to create herbal medicines from the plants in the swamp, and her granddaughter, whose name is Dorothy, but they call her Donkey, and she's an aspiring mathematician, though she doesn't go to school, and she's 11, and in between those two is Donkey's mother, who is kind of a wild woman who can't stay put and finds the need to roam around. And in the surrounding town, which is a farming community, there are some of the struggles that we're seeing in rural American communities today.

Jo Reed:  Okay, I think that's a good summary to get us going. I do not know a better scene-setter than you, because the landscape is so central to the story and to its characters, and I love that the first chapter you really establish place. This is where we are, and I'm so happy there's a map.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  <laughs> Even though it's a very local map, but because everything takes place really within the equivalent of a few blocks, a square mile, it's all about juxtaposition, and anyway maps are fun.

Jo Reed: I love maps. I really do.  By the time I was finished with the book, I really had it geographically set in my mind.  Talk about how place is just so central to all of your work.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, I guess you could almost say I'm a landscape writer. Midwest writing is sort of a mixed bag. We don't necessarily have an identity as Midwestern writers. We have a lot of what the Southern writers have, but we also have what the Western writers have, which is landscape, and I find that once I figure out exactly where my story takes place -- I usually begin with a few characters in a story, but then once I realize where these people live, then I can understand really who they are. I do set my stories in Southwest Michigan or someplace in Michigan most of the time, and that's just because it's the place I know the best, and I think I can write most authentically about it. And because I'm so involved in connecting people to their landscape, writing about a landscape I know so well really works. The truths of the human heart exist everywhere. You can find them in any place, so I think it's wise for a writer like me to locate the action in a place where I know every plant, I know every tree, I know every bird that's making a noise, I know what frogs are out, and it really helps me, and I do believe that people-- at least in my fiction, I completely believe that people are who they are because of the landscape in which they're embedded.

Jo Reed:  Well, as you say, the landscape is so precisely drawn. It feels very real and very gritty. And yet at the same time you begin your book with "Once upon a time," and there really are fairytale tropes throughout the book. Take the premise: here's an old woman who's a healer-slash-witch with three daughters who live on an island without men. It’s wonderous and yet it is also grounded.  

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Well, it's fun that I enjoy fairytale tropes and elements of fairytales, and I've used them in a lot of my work, but I never start with them. I always start trying to write the most absolutely realistic story I can write. I really try to write a gritty, on-the-ground story of what really happens when people are in a place, and what happens is it takes me so long to write. I'm a very slow writer. This book took me eight and a half years, and as I write and rewrite and rewrite, the book begins to become more true and more authentic.  I think for me anyway, and I think this would happen for others if they chose to be as slow as I am, that what eventually emerges if you're really pursuing the truth in a given story, in a body of material, is that you find your way back to the old eternal stories, and those eternal stories often are fairytales. I never intend to do this, but what I find is that as I make the story more true, I find myself telling an old story.

Jo Reed:  Yeah, I think often the more precise one gets, the more universal at the same time. It's like the paradox of art.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, it's great. Yes, it really is the great mystery of fiction anyway that the more precisely located a story is-- something happens when we're very particular.For me it's that connection between character and landscape often.

Jo Reed:  I'd like to flesh out just a little bit more about our three main female characters, our three generations, and beginning with Hermine, who is also known as Herself. As we said, she's a healer. She's an intensely strong woman who is also very, very determined.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  And she's old and she's angry at the changes that she's seeing in the community. She knows that even though everyone in the community uses her medicines, she kind of taken for granted. Because she's a strong female and she's feared, she is also kind of reviled by a lot of people in the community, and she understands that even though she's very powerful personally as a character and a human being, she's very vulnerable. She has no way to defend herself, and a bullet is a powerful thing, and there's plenty of them in this community, and so she's at kind of a turning point where her job that she's done all this time is kind of in question. I mean, the swamp is changing. She relies on herbs that may not be growing in the future because of the pollution, and the way the community is kind of turning against her she's herself at a kind of turning point.  It was fun to make a character called Herself, because I come from an Irish family where we had a Himself, <laughs> and, you know, "Does Himself want another cup of coffee?" And so I thought it was fun to do a matriarch instead of a patriarch.

Jo Reed:  And then there's Rosie, Rose Thorn, her daughter, who you describe and show within the story as someone who  brings this lightness of spirit and joy that attracts everyone around her. And yet, she is still judged by that town. 

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, again, like her mother, she's integral to the community in a lot of ways, in a different way than her mother. She's almost socially integral to the community. Everyone wants to know what she's doing. Everyone is curious about her. She's very beautiful. And I've always been interested in beauty as a characteristic of characters. I actually think beauty is a curse. I know it's a cliché, but I am very serious about that. And so Rose Thorn is beautiful. She's fascinating to other people. She looks very lazy. She looks like she's not doing anything, and this is a hardworking community that very much prides itself on being hardworking, so when they see Rose Thorn appearing to just be lounging around-- she likes to read books and drink beer and smoke cigarettes, but she's rather exhausted with the social implications of who she is, that everyone's in her business. Everyone is constantly projecting something onto her. And I've known people like this in communities where they appear to be doing nothing, but socially they're doing something very important. And in this community, she's the one who's best able to bridge the gap between the family of women who wants to live an old-fashioned kind of life and this new community, and so she's kind of the key to figuring out how everyone can live together.

Jo Reed:  And then Dorothy or Donkey, Rose's child, who's being raised by Herself because Rose is not to be bound by anyone, including her child-- I mean, and then there are certainly circumstances around the conception of that child that's fraught, but Donkey is such an interesting character. How old is she when we meet her?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, she's 11. And I often write about sexual violation and about teenage girls and sexual issues, and so I was enjoying writing about a preteen who was very involved in her mathematics. In her soul she's a mathematician, and I really enjoyed that here we are in a very natural environment, and mathematics can seem on the surface very much at odds with that, but I wanted to show the ways in which she can love both, and I guess I love both as well. I studied mathematics for a long time, and I think that there are ways that her experience in nature is enriched by her love of mathematics. It's putting the wildness that she sees-- it's putting that into a kind of order.

Jo Reed:  Yeah, when I was reading the book, I felt like, well, what math gave her was certainty and safety. When her mother returns, she has a hard time saying "I missed you. Where were you?" but she can say "You were 4,187 miles away."

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, exactly.

Jo Reed:  That's the safe thing to say. <laughs>

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah. And I mean, nature can be overwhelming, I mean, if you've ever spent time in nature where you're really at the mercy of natural forces, and I created an environment-- the environment of the swamp very much is in flux all the time. It's vulnerable to the weather. It's very foggy. Often you can't see well there. And so, yeah, she's hungering for some kind of certainty, and it provides that for her.

Jo Reed:  Yeah. And then we have this almost Greek chorus of men.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah. Thank you. That's what I was trying for.

Jo Reed:  And they are literally-- they're kept off the island. There is a literal bridge that goes from the island to the mainland, and the women on the island can kind of hear the men on the mainland. There's a recklessness. They will shoot on occasion, but they are a very interesting bunch in this town of Whiteheart, Michigan. So who are these people? Who are the people in this town?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, it's meant to be a Midwestern town, very Michigan-ish, as I say. These are the kind of people I-- the kind of men I grew up with. They know how to fix things. They all came from a farming background, but the farms have been lost. I mean, the way that farming happens now it's not small farmers. Everyone sold out to the big farm. And these men have a troubled masculinity. It's kind of hard to talk about. It's almost as though you can only talk about it in fiction. And my book "American Salvage"-- I really explored this. We're seeing a kind of discontent in men in rural communities, especially white communities and I'm exploring where this comes from, I guess. And the men from this community were of farmers. One of them still is a farmer. Another one is a farmhand, but the others have had to move on. They have the old farmhouse, but the land's gone, and they have to work in factories and machine shops. And that doesn't engender in their souls the kind of meaning that farming did, and the men feel it generations later. These men feel it. There are plenty of men who can move on and move into-- what do we call it? Are we still in the information society? I'm not sure. But certain men are still connected to a kind of masculinity that's not really working for peaceable communities. I think that's safe to say.

Jo Reed:  Or a frustration of being denied something intrinsic to their nature, working that land. And I'm not romanticizing it at all. It's hard work. We all know that.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Right. And that's the challenge, is in the book there's one section where I do romanticize it a little bit just to make the point to show what's missing.

Jo Reed:  Whiteheart, as the name implies, is a town of white people. There are no indigenous people. There are no African American people. Why did you come to that decision to place a story in a white town?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, I know. That was a big decision, and it worried me a lot. This is another thing. When I answer this question, I'm still pondering how it works, but I think it's safe to say that this all-white community makes clear within itself what the problems are. It's that very lack of diversity that calls attention to itself. That lack of diversity is a big part of the problem of the community, and you can see that they still find a way to scapegoat anyone who is different than they are, and in this case it's this group of women. I wanted to actually show this community-- rather than presenting maybe an idealized version of it that would be more diverse, I wanted to show it in all of its problematic nature. I think we're very aware of the Native American element that lies below the surface of this town. I mean, Hermine is not Native American by blood, but she was raised by a Native American woman who was the last of the Native American herbalists of this town. And some of the names of the places are Native American, and we're very much aware that Native Americans are not there and that their traditions, which are only barely holding on-- when those traditions are gone, the town is really going to miss it. Even those last vestiges that exist in these women in the swamp are critical to the way the town works., and I think you could say to some extent the book is about whiteness. And I don't even know what that means, but it is.

Jo Reed:  Well, you named the town Whiteheart. 

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  I'm not pretending it's anything other than that.

Jo Reed:  Yeah. Animals figure so prominently throughout this book, dogs, of course, but also donkeys. Was this informed by your own connection with donkeys? I mean, Dorothy's nickname is Donkey. There are two wonderful donkeys in this book.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, I love donkeys. I've often tried to put them in stories, and it never worked before. So when I put them in, I said "Let's just try this. What would be the animals that these people would have?" And it made sense. And I really enjoy the behavior of donkeys, and it just made perfect sense on this farm that the only domestic animals are donkeys and chickens, and all the other animals around are wild animals. Actually Titus has some cows, but for these women the wild animals are more important.

Jo Reed:  Well, let's talk about rattlesnakes, shall we?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  <laughs> 

Jo Reed:  They cover that island, and Dorothy becomes convinced she's related to one in particular. Talk about her fascination with these snakes.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, well, Dorothy is of an age, 11, where she's very interested specifically in the things she's told to leave alone and to stay away from. And I enjoy, first of all, writing about snakes very much, as I've written quite a bit about snakes in my stories. Snakes are wonderful because they stand in as a symbol for everything. They represent evil in the Bible. They're also on the staff of Asclepius. I probably said that wrong, Asclepius. And they represent healing, and the rattlesnake is dangerous and poisonous, and the snakes are also the most grounded of creatures. And I'm very interested in the level to which people are grounded in this story. The women of the island are very grounded, and often the people of the community have become ungrounded, and that's maybe part of the problem. So I really enjoy working with snakes, but it's very important to me that if I work with an animal it's really got to be-- it isn't just a symbol. It's really got to absolutely behave like the animal it is, and this particular rattlesnake is very reclusive and only lives in certain areas. It's almost been wiped out. It's been wiped out in most of its terrain, most of the places it used to exist, but I imagined it could still be at full force in the swamp, and I really enjoyed that. And if you've ever known about creating rattlesnake venom, it's really an interesting process, because it does involve milking these rattlesnakes. So once you introduce something like a snake to which everyone has a strong response, then you have a way of putting characters together and having them not just react to each other but react powerfully to something in the story. So everyone has a reaction. Some of the men want to shoot the snake. Others of them want to catch it. Hermine wants to milk it and then eat it. So Donkey-- naturally she's a vegetarian, and she wants to befriend this snake, which is probably one of the more challenging things to do with a rattlesnake.

Jo Reed:  Yeah. You have an omniscient narrator, so our point of view is shifting throughout the book, and it's shifting from minor characters to the major ones. How did you arrive at that decision? And I wonder what were some of the challenges and opportunities in writing it this way?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  I know it was a crazy thing to do, because I started out telling the story just from Donkey's point of view, and I liked it. I'm really a fan of "True Grit," and that book is just a marvel of using a powerful young person's voice to drive a story forward. When you're reading "True Grit" by Charles Portis, you are just driven forward. I mean, that's why it makes such a good movie. And I wanted to do that initially. I thought that was going to be my project, but material has a way of becoming what it will become, and I realized that I had a stronger story to tell. I had a more powerful use of the material that became available to me when I expanded. Okay, so initially I was going to just use Donkey's point of view, and then I thought "Well, no, actually these other women-- their point of view is very interesting." Rose Thorn really is somebody who I wanted to explore and to show to people in really all her humanity. I had been writing these men from the outside without including their points of view, and I had a terrible realization that they were absolutely integral to the story and that they weren't two-dimensional characters. They absolutely needed to be three-dimensional characters. And it gave gravity to the situation if I treated them as full characters and really-- because that's what I found myself doing anyway, was really sympathizing with these troubled men. And it made it kind of more of a symphonic book, I guess, with all these different voices and the narration forcing the reader to not settle with one point of view but to keep exploring.

Jo Reed:  Now, just a little bit about you. You were born and raised in rural Michigan?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah. Well, just outside Kalamazoo. It's just a small town. My mom decided at a young age to become a farmer when she got divorced from my father. And she had five kids, not much child support, and decided to be a farmer. It was just a funny thing to do, and suddenly we were a farm. <laughs> We had eight acres, and suddenly we had milk cow and chickens and a whole different crew of people around, and it was a wild kind of life. I grew up on kind of a little swamp beside our property, and just everything was always-- including my mother, everything was oozing with fertility and having farm animals and hearing frog song and lots of kids around. I grew up with lots of neighbors and kids, and it was a very rich way to grow up. I should confess. One thing that seems most fairytale-ish about the book is to have a small island with a bridge to the mainland, but my grandparents actually lived on a tiny island in a river, in the Saint Joe River, and they had just a walking bridge to their house. So that fantastical element of the story is kind of based on reality. And we as kids spent a lot of time in the water, and we were very aware of all the nature and fertility around us.

Jo Reed:  And what about writing? Did you know you wanted to write when you were a kid? Did you write when you were a kid?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  No, I wasn't really a reader or a writer as a kid, but I very much was a philosophical child or a psychologically oriented child. I just wanted to watch people. I didn't really want attention on me. I just wanted-- I used to hide behind the couch, and I would listen to people talk. And to me that was just endlessly pleasurable. I was running around with the kids as well, but I was very interested in adults even as a kid.

Jo Reed:  You went to graduate school for both math and writing. Did you flip a coin? How did you come to writing?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  I know. I always wanted to write. I mean, I was the editor of my high school paper. I wanted to write, but I never had any confidence, and nobody else in my family went to school. My grandparents had gone to college, but nobody else around me went to college, and I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do. I didn't even know where to go to college. I didn't know about applying for financial aid. All that stuff was very confusing. And then I thought "Oh, you've got to be practical," and writing-- especially because I knew I wasn't brilliant. I'll tell you. I'm not actually a very good writer. I'm just a really good rewriter. I'm a really good reviser, I should say. So my early drafts of books are no better than anybody else's that-- I just try my hardest. I should say it took me many years to learn this. So I was trying to write. Meanwhile, I was studying math to be practical, because I knew I could always get a job if I with a math degree. I studied math education as an undergrad, and then I studied pure math as a graduate student, and I knew that I could get a job at that, but all the time I kept writing. I was in a PhD program for mathematics, and finally my PhD advisor, he told me-- he said "I think you're doing fine, but I think you should go take a writing class just to see what happens." And so Dr. Art White was my PhD advisor, and he said he felt kind of bad, because once I took a graduate-level writing course, I never came back.

Jo Reed:  <laughs> Bonnie, in putting "The Waters" together and writing "The Waters" over all these years, what character or what aspect of the book was the most challenging for you to write and get right?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, I mean, it's all challenging.  I find male characters a lot easier to write because I think I can write them with a singleness of focus, but I think for my female characters they're always thinking about 20 things at the same time. And it's very hard for me to get a through line for the women characters to get the plot element for the female characters because there's so many possibilities with my female characters. They can go so many different ways, and also they're so vulnerable. And I never want to write characters who are victims, but at the same time I see how vulnerable these women characters are.  So I try to get that balance right, where women are empowered, but I can't be unrealistic about it. I can't write a superhero woman, because I need to write it realistically. And the truth about writing is it's just a matter in those final drafts of getting every single thing to be authentic and to feel true and right and I want to give dignity to really complex feelings.

Jo Reed:  Finally—what is next for you, which is really a terrible question because you just spent eight years on this and I’m asking, “okay, what’s next?”

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  <laughs> No, it's an okay question, because I don't want to take eight and a half years to write my next book.

Jo Reed:  <laughs> But I do think you should have some time to sit on your laurels for a while after eight years.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  No, not even a minute. I'm not going to sit on any-- and that's the thing, is that's why writers can never become full of-- well, I can never become full of myself, because immediately I'm immersed in something new that is a mess and is not anywhere near being finished, and so that allows me to be very humble at every moment about being a writer. So I'm working on a story-- well, one aspect of it sort of bloomed out of this novel. I have a dinner scene in this novel, and it's long. It's about 45 pages, but it initially was 110 pages, and I really wanted to write a long dinner scene, but I realized I had to cut it back for this book. So I'm writing a book that's one long dinner scene basically, so that should be interesting.

Jo Reed:  And that will be great. I look forward to it. Bonnie, thank you so much, and thank you for this book. I really loved it. I love your work, and I was so immersed in this book. I was telling a friend "I swear to you you can smell the landscape and feel the air when you're reading it."

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate you saying that. It makes it all worthwhile when I hear from readers who really could find themselves in the book in some way.

Jo Reed:  That was Bonnie Jo Campbell talking about her recent novel The Waters. You can keep up with Bonnie at Bonnie Jo Campbell.net. My thanks to Recorded Books for allowing us to use an excerpt from the audiobook The Waters, narrated by Lili Taylor.

You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts—leave us a rating! I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.