Telling Stories With Audio Slideshows

Michael Werner and I are giving a workshop today at the Society of Professional Journalists' Building at Better Journalist Conference in Eugene, Oregon.

For those of you who can't be here or those who did attend but want some resources to refer back to later, I've uploaded a quicktime movie file of our powerpoint presentation.


As we explained in the workshop, Soundslides (downloadable from the link) is a handy tool for compiling photos and audio (but not for editing photos or audio). You must prepare your photos (save as jpgs) and audio (save as mp3s) in other programs. Uploading them to Soundslides is the easy part.

Here are links to more info helpful in producing slideshows.

Check out the Audio Journalist's Toolkit for info on audio gear, editing software and handy guides to using Audacity. Here are sites where you can download free music and sounds: Freeplaymusic.com, CreativeCommons.org, CCmixter.org and the Free Sound Project. Be aware, however, that just because they're free to download, doesn't necessarily mean they are copyright free. If you're making a sideshow for journalistic or commercial uses especially, read the fine print.

Check out the Photojournalist's Toolkit for info on basic photo composition rules and Photoshop basics.

Here's a workflow map of how to use the Soundslides software. If you click on this, you'll open a larger version to print. Let me know if there are problems. I can email you a pdf.

After you finish compiling your slideshow, you'll want to "export" it. This is one of the fussy aspects of Soundslides. It doesn't export a neat, compact file. It creates a folder called "publish_to_web" and that entire folder is what you need to publish. If you're working with a web team, just hand them over the folder, they'll know what to do. If you want to email it or publish it to your own personal website or blog, follow these instructions on the Soundslides online manual under "exporting and publishing."

Pre's Rock Pilgrimage

In the hills above Eugene, Ore. there's a roadside memorial that draws hundreds of people each year from around the country, people who pay homage to a long-distance runner that went by the name Pre.

Steve Prefontaine died in 1975, but the track star's legend continues to flourish.

During the 2008 Olympic Trials, which were held in runner's mecca of Eugene, more than 3,000 people visited the rock -- Pre's Rock -- which commemorates the location of the car crash that caused his death. These pilgrims brought offerings of sorts: old running shoes, jerseys, socks, flowers, letters, track metals. Some treated the memorial almost like a sepulcher.

A team of graduate students from the University of Oregon Folklore Department documented this pilgrimage, gathering more than 10 hours of raw video.

It was my job (at Cascade magazine) to decide how to tell a story with the footage.

Here's what I came up with ...




I got the idea to do time lapse on split screens from a multimedia piece I saw a this spring in the New Yorker. Check it out.

I remember thinking, gee what a simple yet perfect use of raw video to tell a story. Ever since I came across it, I've been watching for an opportunity to use that technique.

What do you think? Does it work?

Telling Stories Nonfiction Writing Contest

I decided recently there aren’t enough short nonfiction writing contests. Take a look. A quick google search will turn up oodles of “short story contests,” but by “short story” they mean fiction. I mean nonfiction.

In response to this realization, we at Telling Stories have decided to host a short nonfiction story contest to encourage those of us compelled to tell true stories.

Beyond those two rules—true and short—anything else goes.

Submissions could take the form of a compact narrative, a mini essay, or simply the description of a person, a moment or a memory. Submissions can blend genres, be experimental, be creative, be humorous. It could be the type of story you tell your mom when she calls. Or the type your inappropriate uncle tells on Thanksgiving when he thinks only the guys are listening.

Really, anything goes. We at Telling Stories just love a good story and aren’t persnickety about the form.

Need more motivation? How about this—winners will receive their very own copy of the recently published The Best Creative Nonfiction, vol. 2 (autographed if you like).

Now I know you’re excited. Okay, go to it. Ready, set, write!

Rules
1. It must be true.
2. Keep it short. (As my editor Dave Schwartz used to tell me, Write it as long as it needs to be and not a syllable more. You decide what that means.)

Prizes
1. The top five will receive a copy of The Best Creative Nonfiction, vol. 2 (W.W. Norton), 2008.
2. The top five stories will be published here on Telling Stories with the author’s bio.
3. The winners can add the following title to their resumes: “Winner of the 2008 Telling Stories Nonfiction Writing Contest”

Deadline
Email your story to katie.ann.campbell [at] gmail.com by Dec. 1, 2008.

Judging
Submissions will be judged by myself and narrative nonfiction writer Michael Werner, who is a visiting professor of journalism at the University of Oregon.

Books gone bust?

I’ve been hearing lately that unless you’re Tina Fey, it’s not a good time to be selling a book.

You may have seen the New York Post report that one publisher right off the bat offered our beloved Sarah Palin look-a-like a $5 million advance (and that the subsequent bidding war likely raised that to $6 million). Hmmm… Hardly seems like a sign that the financial crisis has hit the book business. Unless you view it from the perspective that publishing houses aren’t gambling on anything but the sure bestseller.

So how is this global financial crisis affecting publishing?


Here’s an anecdote I can offer: Last week a writer friend lost a book deal. After two years of perfecting a book proposal and securing a publisher, this writer was sent back to the drawing board. No more deal.

I’ve also recently talked to other authors who shared concerns about their chances of securing their next contracts. These aren’t folks looking to break into the industry. These are proven, multi-book authors.

Beyond the anecdotal, what’s the word from industry insiders?

I haven’t seen too much yet.

Victoria Barnsley, CEO of HarperCollins UK, told thebookseller.com this week: "People always say books are the last thing to be affected by an economic slowdown, but the magnitude of this crisis is surely making everyone nervous. However, publishing is a gambling business and, as usual, I’m sure we’ll see a couple of fairly insane offers being made next week—if they haven’t already been made."

Would the Fey book deal be one of those insane offers?

But as media fellow Peter Osnos pointed out in a Sept. 30th column for The Century Foundation, people have been proclaiming for decades that the end of the publishing is nigh. And many have said for years that it’s an industry that ought to die. For example, The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan recently decried, “If any industry deserves oblivion, it’s book publishing.”

Yet somehow books and publishers remain. How? Why?

Lauren Kessler recently took a closer look at the question of the death of books (which was written before the stock market tanked). Her piece, called “R.I.P” was published this summer in Etude. Here’s how it starts:

"The book is dead.

That’s the title of the book I’m currently reading. Of course the fact that this book was written and published, that I bought it and am reading it would seem a powerful argument against its main premise.

In fact, 172,000 books were published in the U.S. last year. If you count vanity press and print-on-demand, a new book of fiction is right now being published every 30 minutes in America. How can the book be dead?"

So dear readers, can any of you offer any evidence of the health of the publishing industry? Or thoughts on the future of books? Or advice on how an author who doesn’t have her own TV show gets a book deal?

The Boundaries of Memoir

Memoir inhabits a nebulous place in the literary world.

In memoir, fact and fiction aren’t always black and white, emotional truth may not match historical truth and ethics and aesthetics often collide.

A few months ago I moderated a live roundtable discussion on the topic for Cascade magazine.

On the panel were three writer/professors from the University of Oregon, one who writes memoir, one who analyzes and writes autobiography and one who refuses to write memoir. The fraud memoirist and former UO student Peggy Seltzer (a.k.a. Margaret B. Jones) was the inspiration for the debate.



Here’s a link to the magazine where you can read highlights from the discussion and listen to some of the most interesting parts. [Photo info: Laurie Drummond, Gordon Sayre, David Bradley and me. Photos by Jack Liu.]

One thing is clear: Memoirs continue to be wildly popular. The “memoir craze,” as its called, is still going strong. Here are a few memoirs on the New York Times best seller list this week:

• The Year of Living Biblically, by A. J. Jacobs, a memoir of his attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible;
• A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah, about his life as a child soldier from Sierra Leone and his drug-crazed killing spree;
• Through the Storm, by Lynne Spears, you can imagine what it’s about;
• and don’t forget Stori Telling, the actress’s memoir.

We could argue whether the last two are actually memoirs. The label memoir usually implies that we’re going to learn part of the life story of a relative nobody. (And the fact that the Spelling book has been on the list for 18 weeks kind of freaks me out. How interesting could it actually be?)

The more memoirs that are published, the more dramatic they seem to be. Entertainment Weekly this summer put together a list of the types of lives captured in recent memoirs: A child of a woman who left the convent and assumed a false identity. A man who double dates with his recently widowed father. A woman who survived an unhealthy religious fixation (on top of having an eating disorder).

Every potential memoirist should check this list first to see if their life story has already been done. It’s a long (and quite hilarious) list.

Published!

The Best Creative Nonfiction vol. 2, is now in bookstores, marking my initiation into the book world. (That is if we don’t count my appearance in Rupert Sheldrake’s book, The Sense of Being Stared At, for my powers of telepathy — if you ask, I just might tell).

As soon as my personal copy of the Norton anthology arrived in my mailbox, I tore open the package and turned the pages until I saw the title of my story about egg donation called, “The Egg and I” on page number 131, sandwiched between a piece that appeared in Harper’s last year about the amazing oceanic journey of thousands of plastic floatable toys and a previously unpublished essay that shed light on the challenges of being a part of a 21st century multiracial family.

I’ve been reading the pieces slowly, enjoying them immensely. My copy is already feathered with post-its, noting favorite phrases, poignant real-life observations and well-told dramatic moments. The opening piece by Anne Trumbore is gripping—I don’t want to say more for fear of spoiling the read. David Bradley’s essay about the death of the N-word is at once hilarious, reflective and instructive. And Laura Sewell Matter’s story called, “Pursuing the Great Bad Novelist” is the ultimate example of the kind of down-the-rabbit-hole adventures we writers often send ourselves on when we're avoiding writing. Only in this rabbit hole, she found a story worth telling.

Critics have given high praise to the anthology. Here’s what Publisher's Weekly said in a starred review:

From Publishers Weekly
In his follow-up to last year's volume, the first in a re-launched, annual version of his journal Creative Nonfiction, Lee Gutkind gathers another fresh collection of exemplary essays from a wide range of authors and sources, tackling everything from multiracial love and familial exile to the connection between memory and digital photo manipulation. Relatable situations and eccentric writers keep the stories intelligent but accessible, and often poignant; especially resonant is Gwendolyn Knapp's attempt to rehabilitate her mom's terminal case of pack-rat fever. Sarah Miller-Davenport provides some levity in a piece on guilty (and expensive) pleasures called "Here I Am in Bergdorf Goodman." Many accounts run up the old stranger-than-fiction flag, most notably Sewell Matter's piece regarding her discovery, on an Icelandic beach, of a page torn from a book; captivated by the "amazingly, almost unbelievably, bad" excerpt, she sets off on a global search for the complete novel. Proving again his chops as an anthologist, Gutkind's latest collection-which also includes Heidi Julavits, Pagan Kennedy, William deBuys and the guy behind IAmGettingFat.blogspot.com-is a 30-run homer, a whirlwind of moods and thoughts captured by some of the biggest talents on the essay and blog beat.

You can The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 2 at any bookstore. Here's a link to Powells Books where you can order it from for $15.

I'm have a number of copies to give as prizes ... I just waiting for inspiration on what the contest should be. Any ideas?