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Comments Julia peering at the goat. Photo: Vanessa Clay |
Notes From the Producer
In June, as you’ll hear, everyone in rural Appalachia is out — the birds, the
hounds, the children from school — and the mountains are at their most luxurious.
Summer’s alchemy has a way of disguising how lean the coalfields of eastern Kentucky
can feel when what you’re trying to do is make a living. Summer emphasizes fullness,
possibility, a resurrection of sorts.
This piece chronicles one family doing their part for that resurrection. In a place centered hungrily and for too long on the harvest of timber and coal, the Fraziers are carving out a new way of making a living that doesn’t destroy the homeplace, and even chimes into its imaginative renewal. Their small-scale meat goat operation aligns the Fraziers with a whole movement of rural families cobbling visionary livelihoods into new economies by marrying local knowledge with the global tide. Their work is sustainable and rooted. What they mine is ingenuity
 Maggie |
Its Genesis
Last summer this old batch of footage started beckoning. It was recorded two years prior on mini disc with an old microphone and wobbly cables and adaptors, all very quickly scooped up and thrown in the car when some of us at Appalshop learned a goat killing was underway at the Fraziers’. Its sounds drew me — the little bleats, the gunshot, knives at work — and every time I listened something new rose to its surface. I liked the children going and coming. I liked the very practical matter of where our food comes from. And I liked how it made me wonder about there being something better and more peaceable we’ll do one day, but not yet.
 Dylan |
I tried hard to cut gems — sparkly and short — because of everything I’d read on Transom and because of Neenah Ellis telling me: “There is no better way to get better than to do a lotta things fast. Through short pieces — crisp and muscular — you learn how to really quickly focus a story and to differentiate between topic and story.” But in summer, especially summer in the heart of the Appalachian mountains, things felt too rich to go about editing in a disciplined way.
Is crisp radio possible where all the roads are curvy?
I wanted to present the Fraziers’ work within its tapestry of sounds, with a feel that is savory and fun. I read about the documentary filmmaker Nicolas Philibert saying, “it helps that I don’t make films about people but with them. It’s different,” so with this in mind corralled my friend’s children into narrating, and dipped into the goat slaughtering’s ubiquitous religious sentiments. I wanted to honor their beauty and also softly investigate the contradictions I heard in them.
At its end, what I hands-down love about this piece:
1.Hearing Maggie laughing, and Dylan, clear as a little bell.
2. The way people get all crinkly while listening, they wriggle around, look away. Someone asked, after our community station premiered the piece, did you mean to leave all that stuff in there?’
3. The men working gently, breathing heavily, to the rhythm of not giving up.
 Maggie & Dylan |
About Julia DeBruicker
Julia DeBruicker grew up in Indiana and lives on the southeasternmost edge of
Kentucky. Her work blends the local voice into public health research through
the medium of audio. She is currently linked up with the University of Kentucky
investigating the nature of cancer in the mountains of Virginia, Kentucky
and Tennessee.
As soon as this piece begins, you know you are listening to a voice from a place. Then you realize that the story, which might have been a simple local business feature, is much more than that. Yes, it’s about goat slaughtering, but it’s also about god and home and generations to come. Julia DeBruicker’s work is a model of what local radio can be–emphatically connected to place in such a way that carries it well beyond.
Congratulations, Julia, on your first piece on Transom. Makes me miss being down there with you, and I loved hearing the familiar voices, especially Maggie and Dylan’s (the wonderful Dollarhide kids .. um .. children, not goats) You have a clear talent for picking out the little bits of conversation which say so much.
I would really love to hear you do another version of this piece, expanding on the commonalities between everyone’s faith and the slaughter of the goats. It’s there .. but I was distracted by the more "practical" information about goat raising. Interesting in itself but it detracts from the religious theme you established so well at the beginning. The most compelling part for me was where you cut from talking about the slaughter of the goats to the crucifixion … you started to develop a metaphor then backed away from it.
Very good start … now how about accepting the challenge to get more meat out of it (okay, pun intended). This piece is good, but there are ingredients which beg to be developed. Especially since religion in Appalachia is so complex and multidimensional. Be brave and go for it!
Victoria
Thanks for transporting me to a place I could only imagine now made real by your work.
Please keep making more !
It’s as though you captured an entire corner of the world in nine minutes: the how and why of goat slaughtering; the resilience of a people who are both practical and philosophic; the shape of the land; a sense of community; the religious underpinning; a refreshing generational mix…and you helped them tell THEIR story rather than your own (which, I think, is much more difficult to do than most reporters/writers/journalists/researchers realize).
thanks so much for sharing this. it is a wonderful wonderful piece with an overwhelming sense of atmosphere.
I have to agree wholeheartedly with victoria, though. you establish some extremely rich themes of sacrifice, bloodshed, and cycles of life that are fleshed out extremely well by the religious structure they are stretched on. talking openly about especially the christian religion is pretty taboo in most media spheres, and in public radio- but I would thank you for being as brave and honest as you were, and I would love to see a longer version of this that explored these themes of religion as expressed in the everyday living of these Appalachian people. think, perhaps, of bergman’s religious films (winter light especially).
I know the last thing you want to hear after completeing a story is to make another version of it, so please forgive my havign the gall to suggest it. and dont forget, that I htink this a brilliant piece. truly a joy to listen to in the truest sense.
thanks!
…to argue that Julia’s story should not be changed one iota! I like it when the audience gets to connect the dots. I like it when the very best stuff is "between the lines". I was bowled over by the metaphors, faith-and-goat-slaughter commonalities, etc, just the way they were presented. I thought they were pushed just the optimum amount. Any more, for me, would have been less. And any less would have been less, as well.
And, as I alluded to in my earlier post, this version seems to be more THEIR story, rather than "their-story-filtered-through-all-of-Julia’s-interests", which seems most appropriate to me, especially for this story.
The aspects that we all appreciated so much are certainly deserving of more attention…but maybe in ANOTHER story, a different one, the next in a series, something like that…
A lovely, lovely piece. The voices are great; the sound is great; it’s all so natural I feel like I should be swatting away flies or something. And utterly guileless: Julia’s lovely voice saying "slaughtering goats," all without irony. I love the credits and the suggestion that you go to the county extension for more information.
But what I really love here is the way all these different elements simply join together all of a piece — like vines on a tree.
And while I see Victoria’s point about how one can pursue the different elements in the story — like the religion — you really don’t need to. We hear about it in their own terms and in their own time.
Julia: is there anything not here that you got on tape but couldn’t fit in?
All I cut were some passages where the men talk about the mechanics of raising goats, how to get a good yield, and how their lifelong experience raising hogs and hunting deer for meat informs their practice now, with the goats.
This version presents basically all the religious material I collected that day, plus a lot more woven in through subsequent edits. Earlier drafts gave Dock far less rein – I would whisk him in and out in an attempt to establish the connections I wanted while avoiding too much religion. But in time I heard how Dock’s soliloquies gave the footage such momentum – it didn’t work to deny how much he drove its pace and content. Also, pragmatically, Dock talks pretty quickly, and listeners would get lost when he flashed in and out of the piece, without the time necessary to get accustomed to his voice. Similarly, people didn’t like having religious sentiments just dropped on them – they wanted them brought nicely full-circle. And I had questions, too. So I gave the piece much more Dock, added some surprising footage of Maggie and wound it up with the scripture.
It is interesting to read requests for STILL MORE religion. Goodness’ sakes! I need more guidance: what openings would you dive into? What questions would you ask and how tactically would you peek into them? It’s a suggestion I am by no means opposed to – though I confess I am a little worn thin on goats so it may have to be through a different lens …
I wonder how the folks in the story feel about the way it was presented. Have you heard some honest (as opposed to "polite") feedback from them? After all, it is their religion, their goats, their story, their lives. They were kind enough to share it, and it seems to me (I guess I can’t really know for sure) that you presented all these facets in approximate proportion to their way of life (regardless of how or when the sound was gathered). I’m curious to if the folks in the story think you underplayed or overplayed any of the aspects.
I really enjoyed your piece, especially because it involved two great kids that I know, Maggie and Dylan. It was wonderful, to me it explained the value of goat to society and the cruel sort of killing each goat must go through to both benefit society and to survive. From Live farm animal to Hamburgers. It was also really great how the narrators of each situation were children and experienced adults, I loved the ending were everyone was saying apart of a quotation, it was really great.
Was the purpose of the story to make people more aware of the situation?, or to just investigate the situation? Again it was a great piece I felt as if I was there, from the sounds of cutting meet to the sounds of Dylan asking can he re-say his name again. Great Job!
i dont like the narrators voice. it’s not good for radio. not much she can do about that though.
i liked the story. it was pretty well done.
Personally, I thought it was brilliant. I liked the way it was seemingly not edited…the words of wisdom that come from children…love the narrator’s voice…it was for me a great contrast to the content of the piece…and well planned.