Making Connections: Community Radio In Appalachia

Making Connections reporter Sylvia Ryerson

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

This week from the Rural Arts and Culture Map, we bring a story that's floated to us on the airwaves from atop Mayking Peak in Letcher County, Kentucky: a service of Appalshop, WMMT is a radio station broadcasting a wide range of music and news throughout communities in Central Appalachia. The writing of this piece, for instance, is being fueled by volunteer DJ Old Red's early bluegrass and country show, "First Generation Bluegrass." 

One WMMT program, Making Connections: Diversifying our Future shares with its listeners stories and commentary promoting a self-sufficient, multifaceted Appalachia. Making Connections has been posting PlacesStories updates since 2010, giving voice to regional agriculturalists, artists and policy workers and exemplifying just what a group can do with the digital mapping tool. From the "About Us" website:

While coal mining will play a role in the central Appalachian economy for many years to come, the industry continues to mechanize creating a dramatic drop in jobs – it currently represents less than 2% of employment. Analysts also project that recoverable coal reserves in the region could run out in 20 years.

Now is the time to develop a more diversified and sustainable regional economy that supports the current generation of coal miners while creating new jobs in new fields. We have no shortage of strengths to build upon, including our rich cultural traditions, unparalleled natural landscape and strong sense of family and community. To move forward we must honor our past while focusing on a future that provides healthy and productive lives for our children and grandchildren.

 

Making Connections' coverage frequently highlights Appalachia's especially high rates of residents without high-speed Internet; a recent audio story entitled "Like A Car Sittin' on Bricks – Broadband in Appalachia" was created by Sylvia Ryerson and Mimi Pickering to further examine the problem. Reads the description:

The Federal Communications Commission's Eighth Broadband Progress Report finds approx. 19 million Americans, mostly rural, lack access to high-speed Internet. In Central Appalachia the digital divide is stark: in West Virginia's McDowell and Mingo Counties, upwards of three-quarters of the population do not have access; in East Kentucky over 50% in Leslie and Breathitt Counties are without it. So why is it so hard to get a good connection in the mountains? What will this mean for the future of our communities? And what can we do to change this situation?

 
An essential part of the answer is that, as with many disputes over political policy, there is significant disagreement between the haves and have-nots in a thing's true worth or function. In this case, access to high-speed Internet is still largely regarded by those who have it as an earned luxury, our heavy reliance on it an addiction by which we're jokingly embarrassed. But as Ms. Ryerson points out, quality Internet service is a vital utility of everyday information dispersal, not a superfluous iPhone app, whether combed for a student's homework assignment or used to relay local safety concerns.

As artists who try to push against traditional, institutionalized limitations on accessibility, education, and diversity of art, and who place our critiques, our manifestoes, and our subversive work onto the Web, "Like A Car Sittin' on Bricks" hits home and keeps this important issue on the table. We highly encourage readers to listen to Ms. Ryerson's reporting (if you are able), and to then expand on this conversation in your own communities. Please also explore Making Connections' other PlaceStories installments, as many fine productions come from these folks.

Weekly Feed: American Indian Heritage Month, Cross-Cultural Film, Preservation & Sustainability

Bruno Nanguka in Radio Tanzania's archives; Jonathan Kalan, NPR

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

• November is the 22nd annual American Indian Heritage Month! Follow Smithsonian Education to keep apprised of events and articles. Begin your celebration with "Deer Dance Song (medley)" from the 1965 Smithsonian Folkways album "Music of the Pawnee."

• Last week, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson declared the city "America's Farm-to-Work Capital," kicking off a campaign celebrating Sacramento's vibrant restaurant culture and the bounty of the surrounding farms and agriculturalists. "The mayor and others said their general goal is to brand Sacramento as a food capital the way Austin, Texas is known for its live music scene and annual Austin City Limits Music Festival," writes Ryan Lillis in The Sacramento Bee. 

• The Life of a Language, a documentary short directed by Paul Donatelli, is one of many new films screening at the American Indian Film Institute 2012 Film Festival:

• "Wendell Berry, the farmer/writer from Kentucky, is perhaps our nation's best-known advocate for small and mid-sized farms. In a recent lecture, Berry talked about how our rural landscapes have often been replaced 'with a heartless and sickening ugliness.' He offered what is needed to counter that ugliness: Affection." Here's the full op-ed written by Practical Farmers of Iowa Executive Director Teresa Opheim.

• PBS recently aired Rafea: Solar Mama, "a documentary funded by Sundance's Documentary Film Program and The Skoll Foundation's Stories of Change. This film is one of the first honored by the Hilton Worldwide LightStay Sustainability Award, an award created to acknowledge documentaries that showcase the connections between sustainability, economic growth and community development."

Brooke Shelby Biggs of the Independent Lens Blog discussed the making of Solar Mamas with producer Mette Heide; find the interview here.

• As the election loomed, Ray Ring of High Country News looked at the impact of the Latino/a electorate in the West: "When Sen. Jon.Kyl, R-Ariz., announced his retirement in 2011, pundits predicted the GOP would easily hold the seat this November. After all, Arizonans last chose a Democrat for Senate in 1988, when as The Wall Street Journal reminisced, 'gasoline cost less than 90 cents a gallon ... and stirrup pants were in.' Yet Democrat Richard Carmona – a former Surgeon General and Spanish-speaker of Peurto Rican descent – is running neck-and-neck with Tea Party Republican Jeff Flake, even though it's Carmona's first high-profile race and Flake is a six-term congressman."

• "Radio Tanzania was the country's only station from its birth in 1951 until the mid-1990s, when competing stations came on the air and state-controlled radio became irrelevant. The station's archives include poetry, drama, speeches and loads of the music now known as zillipendwa. The word translates literally to 'the ones that were loved'; a looser translation would be 'golden oldies.'" Listen to NPR's recent story about the Tanzania Heritage Project and its co-founder, Rebecca Corey of Dar es Salaam University, and the efforts to preserve some of Tanzania's most memorable sounds.

Where The Mountains And The Movies Meet

By Rachel Reynolds Luster, Contributing Editor

Batesville, Arkansas sits nestled in the Ozark foothills. The town is small with a population hovering between nine and ten thousand and is primarily known as the home of NASCAR driver, Mark Martin, and the nearly-famous alternative metal band Mutha’s Day Out. However, the town also hosts what Arkansas Times editor Lindsey Millar suggests “may very well be the best small festival in the country.”

With the slogan Where the Mountains and the Movies Meet, Ozark Foothills FilmFest offers five full days and nights of public screenings as well as workshops and forums on all aspects of the art form. Filmmakers and actors are often in attendance, and audience members are treated to lively question and answer sessions following each viewing. While festival organizers have used the event to encourage and promote a home-grown film industry, the festival is a bonafide international event with filmmakers coming from as far away as India. The festival hosts many films and filmmakers showcased at more recognized film festivals such as Cannes and at SXSW.

The Ozark Foothills FilmFest was the brainchild of husband and wife team Bob and Judy Pest. Bob had been working for AETN, Arkansas’s public television network, and the couple also worked with Arkansas’s other world-class film event: the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. They formed a local non-profit in 2001 and went to work, against all odds, as Bob Pest explained to me, to encourage and “grow their own” film community in the state. The pair partnered with the local colleges as well as other community partners including local banks to “float” the festival in those first years with a mission of supporting emerging young filmmakers in Arkansas and the surrounding area -- and creating a world-class event in the state.

The restored Landers Theater in Batesville, one of four Filmfest locations in town

In 2007, the festival received a crucial boost when it became one of the supported models for expansion for a creative economy study funded by the Arkansas Arts Council and the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation. The program offered additional funds to bring in consultants, including filmmakers and organizers from Appalshop, and to develop T-Tauri: a two-week camp for aspiring filmmakers, actors, editors, and screenwriters between the ages of 7 and 18. The organization also created a year-long presence for T-Tauri through the T-Tauri Galaxy, an online collaborative site where students can post their work and contribute to the work of their colleagues as well as a bank of public domain material that anyone can access through the online galaxy space. T-Tauri loosely translates as “new star.”

There’s a large contingent of young filmmakers present at the festival as well, a scene that’s been nurtured by both Bob and Judy. Not only has the festival supported young filmmakers by featuring their work, but it also offers funding to support their projects --  a unique opportunity for emerging artists,  especially those from rural places. In addition, there are sessions which deal directly with the challenges of making films in Arkansas, Texas, or Louisiana, for instance, rather than Los Angeles. There’s a young and devoted class of filmmakers dedicated to making the movies they want to make where they want to make them, knowing that this often means little distribution or support from investors.

Jonathan Hicks, Robyn Rebecca Lynn, Mandy Maxwell and Juli Jackson outside the Festival

The Ozark Foothills FilmFest offers two screenwriting awards for best short and feature length screenplay, and they offer three $30,000 production grants for films that are required to use at least 75% Arkansas cast and crew. This year's works in progress were all screened at the festival. Follow-up articles will highlight two of them: Witch Hazel Advent by Sarah K. Moore and 45 RPM by Juli Jackson, who not only was production grant recipient also has been an enthusiastic volunteer for the festival for the last few years. The FilmFest also partners with local arts agencies to support a competition for emerging visual artists to create the festival’s yearly poster design and exhibit their work in a local gallery during the festival. This year’s poster competition winner was Mandy Maxwell.

Bob and Judy Pest have proven masterful at not only having the vision to create such an event in a rural Arkansas town, but also at building the community partnerships that are necessary to maintain and expand the project. Despite hundreds of thousands of dollars of foundation funding, the FilmFest is still headquartered out of the couple's home; they have chosen to thrust the funding support back into the festival, their youth engagement programs, and the community. The Ozark Foothills FilmFest has encouraged a coalition of local cultural non-profits, and worked with their local Main Street program and regional tourist council, to demonstrate how film can serve as a significant tool for cultural (and economic) development in Batesville, the state, and the region.

Coming Home, Coming Back To Your Senses

Film still of Emily Vortuba of The Elberta Alert community newspaper; Back To Your Senses

This week's look into the work of the emerging farmers at the Stone Barns Center For Food And Agriculture and the community architects of Studio H leads naturally to news of an artist and filmmaker who's proposing a television series to feature the stories of such folks who've managed to turn their work into their passion. 

In her Back To Your Senses project, Andrea Maio has also taken a leap of faith herself, leaving the confines of the academy, as well as the comforts of urban art scenes, to return back to her roots in northern Michigan. Ms. Maio has produced work for This American Life (the much-loved piece about a girl from small-town Michigan who was pen pals with Manuel Noriega) as well as her own documentaries which have been widely screened across the country: Burn This Boat (a journey with boat punks down the Mississippi River) and Sleeper Lake Fire (a film made of one night with "a philosophical crew leader on one of Michigan's largest wilderness fires"). 

Ms. Maio has turned to Mobcaster, a new crowd-funding source created especially for television projects, to both reach potential viewers and appeal for their support to help bring this series into the world:

Please travel to the Back To Your Senses site to learn more about the stories Ms. Maio will bring to light - and to find out how to help support this project. You'll also find there a blog that links the philosophies of BTYS to her experiences filming, and a series of regular updates on the project. For instance, in her most recent update, we learn of her shoots at Northern Latitudes Distillery and The Elberta Alert community newspaper, both headed by folks who came back to rural Michigan to live in a place that they loved, and make their work their life's work.

With Ms. Maio's permission, I'd also like to share a portion from our correspondence - as I feel that her situation is indicative of what many young artists are facing at this particular moment. As everyone from small towns to policy groups are working to reverse "the rural brain drain" and revitalize a sense of place, we find here a creative and inspired individual looking beyond the city and the university -- and wanting to find a way, much like her subjects, to do something she loves in a place that is meaningful to her. We need people like Andrea Maio in our communities.

"I kept lurching along, never managing to become financially stable or finish artistic projects. My parents shelled out tens of thousands of dollars for an arts education that exposed me to a lot of wonderful stuff and beautiful people, but didn't help a lick with the practicalities of being a professional independent artist during a time of economic uncertainty. The institutions that cared so much about me as a student, aren't in the position to care about me as a working adult. They've employed me part time, without benefits, they have asked me to sign contracts that protect them, but take away my rights, they've (I hope inadvertently, but I fear not) asked me to work for free, and often at my own expense to develop curriculum for their students, with little or no community support.

So, I, like the people I am trying to feature with this series, have lost trust in the ability of organizations and institutions to provide me sustenance, and I want to figure out how to provide that for myself. What are my primary needs? How can I meet them on a day to day basis without depending on a system that probably doesn't have my back? But without becoming a separatist whack-nut either? What does sustenance mean to me? I believe that paying attention to what really gives us pleasure (a kind of savoring a bite of the chocolate as opposed to eating the whole box, or really tasting the crisp early winter air on your walk instead of staying inside for days in front of your heater) can lead us to these sources of sustenance."

Studio H: Designing & Building Skills For Rural Youth

Studio H students, at the grand opening of the Windsor Farms Market

Today we feature an "In Brief" report on an inspiring project that we will discuss in far greater depth at the start of 2012: Studio H.

When Contributing Editor Rachel Reynolds Luster passed along news of Studio H, she mentioned something to the effect of "this is like The Rural Studio for high school students" - which is a helpful point of comparison for folks familiar with that group's work in Alabama. The spirit of Samuel Mockbee can be found here, as can the unique vision of Studio H's directors: Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller. Both are extraordinarily accomplished architects, designers, and writers who, through their Project H Design organization, have made a commitment to bring their expertise out of the university grounds and into the lives of teenagers in Bertie County, North Carolina. 

This is such a rich and vibrant project that only a much more in-depth article can do justice to the work of these students and visionaries, but, for now, we encourage folks to visit Studio H, meander through their excellent blog, and learn more about their projects.

In addition to this, we were very excited to learn that a documentary film project is in the works on Studio H, led by the creative team of Christine O'Malley and Patrick Creadon and writer Neal Baer. They are currently seeking funders through Kickstarter to bring the story of Studio H to viewers across the country. Please find their campaign introduction below:

Here is a selection from the Studio H mission statement:

Studio H is a high school design/build curriculum for rural community benefit. The one-year program is offered to Junior-year students of the Bertie County school district in North Carolina, providing college credit, a summer job, and a hands-on opportunity to build real-world projects for the community (in this, our first year, we’ll build chicken coops and a farmer’s market in downtown Windsor!). By learning through a design sensibility and “dirt-under-your-fingernails” construction skills, we’re developing creativity, critical thinking, citizenship, and capital to give students the skills they need to succeed, while building the assets the community needs to survive. Given the opportunity to engage within a public education system, we believe the next generation will be the greatest asset and untapped resource in rural communities’ futures.

Related Articles:
Rural Studio and the 20K House
Striking the Epicenter in Rural America
Filming the Land Arts of the American West
M12: A New Vision for the High Plains
Richard Saxton's Vernacular Landscapes