A night with Ira Glass

Last night I went into the city to hear Ira Glass give a talk as part of the Sydney Festival. You could be forgiven for having never heard of Ira Glass as he broadcasts a program on national public radio in the US called This American Life. The program usually has application far beyond America however. And if you frequent the reformed theological blogs you might have seen Justin Taylor post these links to Ira Glass talking about storytelling. Storytelling is what Ira does. He even studied semiotics at university. I didn’t know what semiotics till I looked up Ira, and now I think I’d quite like to study semiotics myself.

The evening’s talk was called Reinventing Radio, but essentially it was on storytelling. What it is that will keep people listening to even the most banal facts and plot when it comes to the telling of a story. In the end it came down, mostly, to the use of very simple elements – narrative suspense and meaning. He showed us how people do this when they verbally tell you are story: they will give you a run of events, and then pause and add some meaning, then another run of events. And yet, so rarely is information presented this way in the media. Ira even went on quite a spiel about sermons. He told us he was originally inspired to do what he does by the Rabbi in the synagogue he frequented as a child. He’d listen to this Rabbi preaching and think ‘he’s got the job’. And then he said that after years of research and thought and then thinking he’d invented this methodology of story telling, he realised that Jesus used it in the bible :). Fancy that. But then, curiously, he added that there was a satisfaction in knowing that even for the most important message ever told, that could save your life, this means of conveying it was most effective (yet he calls himself an atheist).

Near the end he started talking further about “story” as a way in the back door, to tap into our deepest feelings and thoughts, and to teach us. Using the story of the Arabian Nights he illustrated how story can teach us empathy. And it was powerful the way he was telling the story of a story, to show us the power of story – if that makes any sense.

It was a fascinating evening (and he said he was going to show us how to be ‘fascinatinger’ :) ). It started at 9:30 pm, and he went half an hour overtime till 11:30 pm, and yet you could have kept listening (though I was getting kind of uncomfortable and restless and tired of sitting in my seat, after having sat in my chair for hours at work already, and then caught one of the last buses home). After originally starting to talk in complete darkness, to make a point about the power of radio and of listening, he kept the house lights down all night, so it was pointless attempting notes, and the night was full of moments of music (lots of music - he's all into music) and humour and stories and examples of how to make a story all mixed in together, yet I am sure I learnt more than I realise from all those stories!