Julie Shapiro was a music junkie, a perpetual record shop employee interested in music that pushed the limits of "normal" noise. Like many other artist-types, it took going on a months-long road trip with public radio blaring for Julie to realize her creative calling. And in her case, her travel companion—the radio—ended up being her life companion. She landed an internship at WUNC in North Carolina, and—fast-forward over a few professional pauses—found herself producing a radio show about short stories from the Southeast.
Come 2000, she made her way to Chicago; home of The Baffler, This American Life and Thrill Jockey, "it was the cornerstone for the way that [I] thought culture should look." A short two years later, she has a strong foothold as a culture-shaper and maker in her position as the managing director of the Third Coast Festival, an offshoot of WBEZ dedicated to promoting new forms and voices in the field of radio documentary, a term which she and her colleagues are actively redefining. She describes herself and her Third Coast colleagues (Johanna Zorn, Gwen Macsai and Roman Mars) as curators, culling new and archived sound for an hour-long weekly radio show, Re:sound; the Third Coast Festival website; live listening rooms and the annual Third Coast conference held in Chicago.
What do you love about radio that is unique to the medium?
For me it's a very respectful medium in that it does allow you to bring your own pictures. It doesn't exploit. It doesn't bombard. It's more subtle. It's an efficient medium...I think it can be very private and personal although we also argue that it doesn't have to be. It comes down to the generic answer for the generic question. You know it when you hear it. There are times when I'll literally get shivers from something and think, 'This is exactly why I'm involved in this medium.'
Is everything on the Third Coast Festival documentary?
One of our firm beliefs is that something doesn't have to be true to be real or to teach you something that's real about the world...we do consider everything [produced for the Third Coast] documentary in some ways, which can be confusing because we have had some pieces that are purely fictional pieces. The documentary field isn't full of these half-truth pieces but when you occasionally stumble on them, we think you can say a lot through allusion and metaphor and a sort of unreality, too...If there's anything we hope for it would be to redefine people's ideas about what documentary means.
Do you produce your own pieces?
I'll be producing a piece for The Dollar Store next month. I've done six or eight pieces...art for public installation pieces. The last big project I did was about model horse-collecting.
Is there a radio story or experience you hearken back to as most memorable?
Well, this wasn't my earliest radio memory, but I think it's where the proverbial light bulb went off for me. [During] the first year I worked for Third Coast I got this crazily good opportunity to go to a conference in Australia...I was sitting there and hearing a particular piece by a producer who now we know very well. It was called Containers, and it was about a port in Sydney. The sound was so intense, and it was sort of about the people at the port who'd been there all their lives...There was this moment where you had the sound of huge metal containers that were responsible for all the importing and exporting and I started understanding that this is what the country existed on to some degree. There were these ruffled old men and all of a sudden there was a little kitten that happened to be there. My ears just popped open and I started realizing how three-dimensional the medium is and how much information I was getting from this little bit that was given to me...That kind of opened my own ears to the less narrative side of things.
What else should we check out in the world of sound?
Transom.org. The alt NPR podcasts. I'd encourage people to look beyond what they're used to hearing. Hearingvoices.com. PRX…talk about a buffet of audio to listen to and anyone can comment on it.
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