From Rob Rosenthal ~ Director, Salt Radio Program.

Radio Director Rob Rosenthal explains ProTools. Listening intently, Diane Cook tweaks the Mackie mixer. Diane now works at This American Life. David Welch highlights and deletes with vigor. David now freelances after gigs with the Savvy Traveler and Oregon Public Broadcasting. Patty Wight pegs the meters in the mic booth. Patty teaches karate, freelances, and is currently interning at Salt.

I'm throwing down the gauntlet. Right here. Right now. I challenge anyone to find a better place to teach and learn than the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine.

Yup, I work there. I'm biased. Still, the fact remains.

Each semester, six geniuses arrive at the doorstep of the radio studio at Salt to embark on an "outward bound" experience in documentary work. I mean it. Salt attracts the best and the brightest locally, nationally, and internationally. And, along with those six radio graduate and undergraduate students are some twenty-five other gifted folks in the writing and photography tracks. All produce photo essays, written narratives, and radio features documenting Maine people, culture, and landscape.

The Radio Program at Salt stands at the crossroads of several disciplines: journalism, oral history, documentary studies, story telling, audio art, maybe even a bit of anthropology. We believe that humans are hardwired to be storytellers, homo narrens as communication theorist Walter Fisher suggests, and radio is the best medium for storytelling, tapping into our biology and our history like no other means of mass communication. We stir all of this together over high heat and the results are what you hear on Transom.

Actually, these audio pieces represent only one aspect of the results of a Salt semester. Many students tell us how Salt has transformed them. We often hear that Salt is the most amazing, intensive, challenging experience they've ever had. And, because of it, they search for the deeper meaning in all that they do after, whether they continue on as documentarians, or become lawyers, social workers or bartenders. They realize it's a luxury to spend a semester learning how to tell people's stories in a compelling, honorable way. To be surrounded by peers and faculty just as passionate is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Salt radio students have gone on to work or intern at: Sound Portraits, Radio Rookies, Radio Diaries, The Kitchen Sisters, This American Life, Studio 360, WHYY, Pacifica Radio, Living On Earth, Marketplace, Homelands Productions, Maine Public Radio, and American Radio Works.

If I had to concretely explain why Salt has worked so successfully for the last thirty years and the radio program for the last four, I'm not sure I could do it. It's amorphous and ultimately indescribable. I suspect, though, that it has something to do with our "bottom-up" approach to teaching where students are not considered empty vessels in need of filling but, rather, bright, capable, equals with their own set of skills and expertise. And there's also the collaborative environment where writers, photographers, radio producers, faculty and staff work in a kind of system of, well here's a .50 cent word, "mutual aid."

Enough words. Just listen. You'll hear.

From Sara Paul

During my first week of Salt it was the one year anniversary of September 11th. Without much thought into the details of our assignment, the students all went out on the street in groups of three, a photographer, a writer, and a radio producer with a tape recorder. We were supposed to get people's reactions on the anniversary. I didn't want to. I wanted to do something else, like something easier, like get breakfast. What, we were just supposed to go up to people and and ask what? "Do you think the world has changed since 9/11?" "Have you changed since 9/11?" "What? How?" It seemed awkward and invasive. I had this Marantz deck dangling from the strap in one hand, a mic in the other, headphones wrapped around my neck. I think I honestly felt like this fraud. I'M going to ask YOU the questions. And you will answer them?

No one's going to want to talk. And there's this kid standing on the corner with a big wool hat, scratching the pavement with the tip of his shoe, looking like he wouldn't have a thought in his head. We went up to him and asked him, "Where were you on September 11th last year?" And he started talking. And kept talking. And we kept asking him questions and the tape was rolling and when it was all done I thanked him. And then he thanked me. He hadn't judged me. And after 30 seconds, I stopped judging him. Just listened.

And quite honestly, that was it for me. That's what I wanted to do. Which was good, because that's mostly what we did do, for four months.

For four months, the six of us in the radio room (five students and Rob) embarked on this -- now I'm going to sound dramatic here -- journey. But that's the only way I can describe our relationship to each other and to story. Our group talked and listened and sometimes got frustrated and helped edit and walked behind each other if only to pat them on the back, and we still do it now. It's the same language and the same all knowing frustrations but ultimately the same passion that has us continue to work with each other and help each other. Even if we're all apart and it's just from email.

I definitively admit you don't need to go to J school, or Salt, or have an internship to do any of this work. That's quite obvious and Transom points that up in every page on the site. Just do it, grab the mic, find a story and tape. Dump it onto your computer, play around with it and get telling stories with sound. But, I have to say, there's something quite magical about that place in Portland. I spent a good portion of the time alone, and then a good portion of the time debating story. There's listening, understanding, not understanding, critiquing... But mostly, it's about going into other people's lives and telling the story the way we hoped they'd like it to be heard. I had this love affair up there, the audio, the stories.

Since leaving I interned at Radio Diaries for Joe Richman and Teal Krech for only a few months, but I certainly got a taste for what it takes for a non-profit radio documentary production house to keep afloat. And now I'm just trying to do the Salt thing, find stories and help tell them. Salt is a place to start, but the radio world opens up just as soon as you leave. Transom, Third Coast Audio Festival, Sound Portraits, Radio Diaries, AIR, the Kitchen Sisters, Gregory Whitehead, This American Life - all huge influences and now more and more stories are being done by newer documentarians and sound artists. It's all a beginning.

From Jamie York

My biggest reservation about Salt was the money. I'd flirted with the place for years, stopping by whenever I was home. I struck a friendship with the admissions director years before I applied based on my biannual tour, I walked around like a claims adjuster unable to stop examining the place, trying, I think, to be dissuaded. I liked that the place was of Maine (where I'm from) and unvarnished, the photography unapologetically black and white, the writing printed in an austere journal. Everything implied that the training was decidedly utilitarian. At the time it was in a different building and taught only writers and photographers. It's now in a beautiful old union hall, which only adds to the air of industry.

In 2000 I was doing legal work with prisoners in New York, a job that involved visiting and talking all day to inmates and their families. I started to sense that the legal aspect of the work was secondary to the talking, the inmates anxious for anyone to actually listen to them and give a shit. After two years of this work I finally found an extra pound of flesh, and applied to Salt. I applied as a writer and to demonstrate my need for help I did an oral history of my neighborhood in Brooklyn. The demonstration was a huge success and culminated in an interview that I tried, and failed to record. When I arrived at Salt I was told that a radio program was beginning and that my lack of ability would be rewarded with a spot in the new program. Seven of us would be enrolled in both the writing and radio programs.

So we all learned how to get tape and tell a basic story and we made the requisite mistakes and got to clean them up before they were of much consequence. Salt introduced me to a whole world of radio-making that sidestepped the polite-old-white-man-in-love-with-his-own-voice-NPR I thought I knew. We got to ask questions of people who interested us. My class was full of terribly well spoken people who I wanted to drink beer with. And this proved to be the first step in a seduction by radio that was near-total. We'd all had radio sprung on us and like most recent converts we were a bit drunk on what we'd found. Perhaps best of all, we had no expectations that we could get a job. For four months we were able to experiment without a fear of growing too lean. (This would come soon enough.) And that feeling, of discovery and four months to indulge it was worth the debt. Mostly worth the debt.

Rob Rosenthal brought a kind of whip-smart humanity to the whole exercise that made us all want to impress him. Hell, 3 years on I still want to impress him. The radio room at Salt is really small and I still think about conversations and critiques in that room that were aided greatly by the lack of a place to hide. I never wanted to play anything in there that I wasn't proud of. Rob subtly redirected our worst instincts and left us to figure out for ourselves why something didn't work. The person with the most interesting voice I could remember in Portland, a woman named Jaz, agreed to be interviewed and I spent late nights and early mornings with her as she cleaned office buildings and told me stories. I did my best to get out of her way and earn her respect and in trying to tell her story got close enough to something I liked so that I wanted to try again.

So I finished and used my "contacts" to secure a place on my friend Diane's floor. Not long after, in what seemed the 7th month of winter I wrote an entreaty to Sound Portraits and a few months later moved to New York to start an internship there. Sound Portraits made the work at Salt seem part of something larger and viable. I've been doing radio ever since, in almost exactly the same way that I did it at Salt. Work with Sound Portraits, The Kitchen Sisters, American Radio Works and Radio Rookies has all been some version of a Salt project. Painstaking and wholly interesting and aspiring to a kind of honesty. I spent the morning interviewing a woman via phone from Namibia about her college boyfriend who died recently, and yesterday I worked on an oral history of a 94 year-old black cowboy who now lives in Harlem. That's a decent sample of my post-Salt career path and I couldn't be more pleased. And without overemphasizing the Skull and Bones like nature of being an alumnus of Salt, it's been a group from which I've mined many of the folks who keep me sane.

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