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After the Dumpster
by Elizabeth Chur
About "After the Dumpster "
 I've always been a bit of a packrat. Yet when I recently moved across the country for a few months, I discovered I could live with the bare essentials. Even more surprising, I liked the expansiveness of living with less.
When I returned home to San Francisco, I spent six weeks clearing out the apartment where I'd lived—and accumulated—for more than a decade. I gave away bags of clothes that no longer fit. I put little-used chairs out on the sidewalk, where urban scavengers whisked them away. When I tried to return books to an ex, he e-mailed back, "Consider them abandoned property." (The public library happily accepted that donation.)
Ironically, I started working on this story just as I was finishing my own downsizing. A colleague at the social service agency where I used to work told me about Melodie, a woman who had developed some ingenious ways to deal with her hoarding problem.
Melodie has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder, and a traumatic brain injury that interferes with her short-term memory. Those disabilities contribute to her hoarding condition. They also made it particularly challenging to piece together a narrative. I learned to hold my followup questions longer than I normally do, since questions often derailed Melodie's train of thought.
She also found it difficult to summarize, whether relating a series of events or describing a section of her apartment. For example, when I asked her to describe the contents of a tall bookshelf, she read it like a page of text—starting at the top shelf and describing each item from left to right.
 For months, she declined to talk about the day that most of her belongings were hauled out to a dumpster because it was too traumatic. She knew it would be impossible to tell me the story briefly. When she finally agreed to discuss it, we recorded for three days.
By contrast, I last spoke with Melodie the day after she was mugged while rummaging through neighborhood garbage cans. Even though her lip was swollen from being kicked in the face, she was almost sanguine about it. Laughing, she said, "Any story I can tell you in five minutes, you know I'll get over it! This was easy compared to the dumpster."
Melodie often described the difficulties of communicating with various social workers. They usually don't have time to listen to her whole story, and pepper her with questions that leave her disoriented. In fact, Melodie said this was her motivation for participating in the documentary. If she can play the finished piece for people, then just fill in what is missing, she thinks she might be a step closer to getting the help she needs. It's my hope that the piece might be able to say what she herself cannot.
 As my first piece out of school (I recently studied radio at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies), I considered this my second year of grad school, with lots of flailing about and lessons learned. I tried telling the story from different angles. I discovered that a non-narrated approach didn't work, since I needed to summarize events and describe Melodie's apartment for the listener.
I had lots of scenes I never used—Melodie in her rented storage unit, working with one of her three paid assistants, attending a hoarding and cluttering conference. As I cut 35 hours of tape down to 12 minutes, I could relate all too keenly to Melodie's difficulty with letting go of things.
Over the months I worked on this story, almost every person I talked to about it would confide that they had a friend, relative, or acquaintance who also had hoarding tendencies. I think Melodie's attachment to the material world differs from other people's more in degree than in spirit.
Tech Info
I recorded this story using a Sony MZ-NF810 minidisc and an Audio-Technica 835b shotgun mic. I edited and mixed with an Mbox and Pro Tools. Many thanks to Jay Allison for his brilliant suggestions as I wrestled with the piece, and to Jay and Viki Merrick for coaching me as I recorded the narration in Woods Hole.
About Elizabeth Chur
 Elizabeth has always been intrigued by the interweavings of sound and story. She taped her first interviews with her grandmother and great-aunts, hearing their tales of growing up in the early 1900s as children of Japanese and Korean immigrants to Hawaii. At Oberlin College, she studied English and music history/theory.
Elizabeth interned at The Seattle Times and the Chicago Tribune as a print reporter. As a Thomas J. Watson Fellow in 1992-93, Elizabeth interviewed 150 journalists about the development of free press in Eastern Europe. They ranged from editors of a newspaper for young right-wing Germans to a Czech feminist who began translating Harlequin romance novels.
Back in the States, Elizabeth worked for ten years at St. Anthony Foundation, a social service agency in San Francisco. She developed an interest in oral history, and documented stories of formerly homeless guests at St. Anthony's. Elizabeth also recorded interviews with her first piano teacher that culminated in an "88 Years/88 Keys" birthday extravaganza of music and tributes from dozens of former students.
Elizabeth studied radio at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, ME, and currently works as an independent radio producer and grantwriter in San Francisco.
Additional Support for this work provided by
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