After spending most of spring break working on finishing the draft of the Five Points podcast, my computer died. And I had less than a week to remake the podcast all over again. I mean, it can’t be that hard, I did it before. I just have to do all the same stuff again. How hard could it be?
First I tried putting it all on a flash drive, but it wasn’t big enough to hold the data I needed for the new draft. My next attempt was hooking up an external drive, but it’s not formatted correctly for an Audacity file. Finally, I transferred everything but the project off of my computer onto an old(er) laptop to free up enough space. And with enough storage on my creaking, ancient laptop to finally host the file, I was able to start work on my podcast draft. Again. From scratch.
In the weeks prior, I’d spent a lot of time listening to our raw interview file over and over again, finding little “ums” and false starts to cut out, unrelated conversations to excise, and all the while looking for a thematic throughline for the whole interview to serve as a guiding principle in determining what of the more than 30 minutes of raw interview to remove to get us down to something closer to 20 for a finished product. Obviously in our interview with Tayari Jones, we’d want to keep the teaser for her new book, the segments detailing insider tips on the craft and process of writing fiction, and the bits of local Atlanta flair that kept cropping up. But beyond that, I noticed one word found its way into almost every twist and turn Jones’s conversation with Dr. Holman took: love. Be it the practice of writing with love, the familial love that binds her characters together, the comparison of writing a novel to falling in love, and by extension, trying to work on the screenplay to her last book while writing a new one as looking for love while your ex stays on your couch. It’s this transformative process that influences all of Jones’s work, both as a writer and a teacher. I won’t get into too much detail–you’ll have to listen to the podcast at the end of the semester–but I’m so excited to share it with you. All I had to do was retrace my steps, following that same throughline of teaching, craft, and love, and it was back. I even recorded little placeholder intro and outro segments that I could easily replace with Dr. Sexton’s professional voice over, and some placeholder music.
What I’m most proud of here is my moody little cold open. We come in on the sounds of MARTA heading towards Five Points station, which I recorded on my way into school a few weeks ago. And then Tayari Jones’s voice opens up on a description of perfectly crispy pancakes served at 1am at the Beautiful Restaurant, a local culinary icon that features prominently in An American Marriage. I even added some local Atlanta music (albeit as a placeholder until we get our actual theme song in) to tie it all together. Even with my fake intro and outtro (hastily recorded on a pair of off-brand airpods), when I listened back, I was a little shocked at how cool everything sounded. I can’t wait for you to hear it.
Once I had everything ready, making triple-sure I saved my project (multiple times), I exported an mp3 (of which I have several backups) and dropped it in the Five Points Google drive in time for our next web meeting. From what I heard from Dr. Sexton and my partner Christelle, everything was perfect.
Or it would be. Once I edit out the constant hum of a ventilation fan in the background of the multimedia studio. Which, all things considered, was quite the improvement over last week’s disaster. So I’ll take it.
