The toughest thing to convey in radio is a picture. Susan Stamberg does it better than anyone: She throws out a few phrases like brush strokes and gives the mind's eye enough to work with and follow a conversation about something we cannot actually see (I am speaking, of course, of the radio-paleolithic era, when there was no Web site to direct people to).
I find stories about visual subjects forbidding, but a few years ago, I did a story about appearances, expressions and paintings that someone dubbed "A Conversation of Faces," a story that I'm proud of to this day. It grew out of a longstanding desire to find variations of the straight-ahead book interview, something my co-host in those days, Noah Adams, and I talked about several times. Perhaps we could take just one scene in a book and make a radio piece out of that.
The book that prompted this story was They Can't Hide Us Anymore, by the folk singer Richie Havens. I had always loved Havens' music, and the book contained several good anecdotes but -- as memoirs go -- the Pulitzer judges could safely skip this one without fear of committing any literary injustice. There was one story in the book that fascinated me and that I could only bring to life on the radio if Carol Klinger, the indefatigable All Things Considered booker, could locate a man whom Havens had met once in Tel Aviv, more than 20 years earlier, and neither seen nor heard from ever again. She did. The result is a meditation on expression, communication and friendship that Havens spontaneously wraps up with a song.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.