Julia peering at the goat. Photo: Vanessa Clay |
For the Blood is Life
Produced by Julia DeBruicker
Notes From the Producer
In June, as you'll hear, everyone in rural Appalachia is out -- the birds, the
hounds, the children from school -- and the mountains are at their most luxurious.
Summer's alchemy has a way of disguising how lean the coalfields of eastern Kentucky
can feel when what you're trying to do is make a living. Summer emphasizes fullness,
possibility, a resurrection of sorts.
This piece chronicles one family doing their part for that resurrection. In a place centered hungrily and for too long on the harvest of timber and coal, the Fraziers are carving out a new way of making a living that doesn't destroy the homeplace, and even chimes into its imaginative renewal. Their small-scale meat goat operation aligns the Fraziers with a whole movement of rural families cobbling visionary livelihoods into new economies by marrying local knowledge with the global tide. Their work is sustainable and rooted. What they mine is ingenuity
Maggie |
Its Genesis
Last summer this old batch of footage started beckoning. It was recorded two years prior on mini disc with an old microphone and wobbly cables and adaptors, all very quickly scooped up and thrown in the car when some of us at Appalshop learned a goat killing was underway at the Fraziers'. Its sounds drew me -- the little bleats, the gunshot, knives at work -- and every time I listened something new rose to its surface. I liked the children going and coming. I liked the very practical matter of where our food comes from. And I liked how it made me wonder about there being something better and more peaceable we'll do one day, but not yet.
Dylan |
I tried hard to cut gems -- sparkly and short -- because of everything I'd read on Transom and because of Neenah Ellis telling me: "There is no better way to get better than to do a lotta things fast. Through short pieces -- crisp and muscular -- you learn how to really quickly focus a story and to differentiate between topic and story." But in summer, especially summer in the heart of the Appalachian mountains, things felt too rich to go about editing in a disciplined way.
Is crisp radio possible where all the roads are curvy?
I wanted to present the Fraziers' work within its tapestry of sounds, with a feel that is savory and fun. I read about the documentary filmmaker Nicolas Philibert saying, "it helps that I don't make films about people but with them. It's different," so with this in mind corralled my friend's children into narrating, and dipped into the goat slaughtering's ubiquitous religious sentiments. I wanted to honor their beauty and also softly investigate the contradictions I heard in them.
At its end, what I hands-down love about this piece:
1. Hearing Maggie laughing, and Dylan, clear as a little bell.
2. The way people get all crinkly while listening, they wriggle around, look away. Someone asked, after our community station premiered the piece, did you mean to leave all that stuff in there?'
3. The men working gently, breathing heavily, to the rhythm of not giving up.
Maggie & Dylan |
About Julia DeBruicker
Julia DeBruicker grew up in Indiana and lives on the southeasternmost edge of
Kentucky. Her work blends the local voice into public health research through
the medium of audio. She is currently linked up with the University of Kentucky
investigating the nature of cancer in the mountains of Virginia, Kentucky
and Tennessee.
Related Links
Center for the Study of Local Knowledge at the University of Virginia,
Charlottesville:
www.virginia.edu/cslk/
WMMT-FM Mountain Community Radio in Whitesburg, Kentucky:
www.appalshop.org/wmmt/index.php
Appalshop Incorporated in Whitesburg, Kentucky:
www.appalshop.org/
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