I Can Write a River: An interview with Jo Carson

Jo Carson is an award-winning playwright who has written 20 performance projects with communities all over America, based on their own life stories, including "Swamp Gravy" in Colquitt, Ga., and "Cross Tides" in Newport News, Va. She's also written short stories, books for children, essays and poems, and been a regular commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered." Carson, who hails from East Tennessee, has won numerous prestigious writing awards, including the Kesserling Award in 1989 for "Daytrips," her hilarious and compassionate play about a family dealing with Alzheimer's Disease. She is a quintessential community artist, with a true ear for the way people talk and what they really mean to say. Just as important is her determination to include everybody who wants to participate in her projects. I first met Carson in the North Carolina mountains at an annual meeting of Alternate ROOTS, of which she was a founder more than 20 years ago, and it has been her founding watchword, "Who comes, is," that has kept the door open to that enlightened multicultural organization. Her work has inspired innumerable young artists to take up work with their own communities.

A Mennonite parishioner ministers to Captain Jack in "Cross Tides." Photo by John Corriere

Linda Burnham: What do you find valuable in these storytelling projects?

Jo Carson: What happens in the communities that do them ...

There are different ways to think about art of any kind (music, visual, theater): One has to do with those people who are, in whatever way, gifted practitioners of an art form, and the products they produce. That is usually how this culture tends to think of art. The only person who can make art is an artist who, somehow in their suffering, is pure. And it is true that amazing things are made and done.

The other way to think about art is, if anything, harder to accomplish, always messy, always imperfect, but much more inclusive and sometimes life-changing for those who participate. It involves anybody who wants to participate: Who comes, is. (Heard that from me before?) Sometimes that means a child who is so shy their mother thinks having a line to say would be good for them, sometimes that means someone who is convinced there is reincarnation of Sarah Bernhardt in them just waiting to be discovered

What is different about these projects is that they are about and out of the place they are being produced. So it is monumentally different from just choosing a script from the canon and producing it. These projects are home grown, they have real relevance in a community from the get-go, and people become invested because they feel some collective ownership. These are projects close to the tradition of storytelling (not what has come of storytelling these days with a professional storyteller) (not that I am opposed to that), in that the common stuff of life in a place is revisited/revisioned in a way that gives it some other meaning than just a hard day at work, or a hard life at farming, or the hard luck of being moved off of land because of revised zoning laws and strip-mall development. And because people participate, it is not just "meaning" applied from the outside. They really do have ownership. Now, it is true, I am a professional writer, Richard [Geer] is a professional director, Joe Varga is a professional designer, but without us (or somebody else who understands the process and endeavor), the stuff of life just stays the stuff of life and doesn't get transformed. Art is, always has been, that sort of alchemy, and what we are doing with these projects is opening a good part of the alchemist's laboratory to anyone who wants to participate.

LB: What are your most successful techniques for gathering oral histories?

JC: OK. I send a community to gather their own oral histories (I actually prefer to call them "life stories" because "oral history" has a specific academic application). I do that because I have been accused of trying to steal stories (how do you steal stories?) and I don't want that load going into a project. If a community collects its own stories, I am not suspect in the same way. I do try to help a community understand how to collect stories, from one-on-one interviewing techniques to running story circles. I ask some specific questions of story takers early on in the process: What stories have to be in a play about this place to make it a play about this place and not some other place? And I send people to get as many versions/visions/variations of those specific stories as possible. Same line of questioning: What people can we not do a play about this place without talking about, what events? Examples of answers: Captain Jack and Preacher Taylor in the Mennonite's "Cross Tides," which is a collection of river stories; the hurricane of 1922 in Belle Glade, Florida's "Pot Luck in the Muck"; the coming (and going) of the railroad in Etowah, Tenn., a piece they are currently collecting life stories for. This line of thinking is sometimes more successful than others. The Mennonites are wonderful at this kind of story circle, and my thinking about story gathering comes a lot out of what I have learned from Ester Mable Yoder [Newport News].

I have had one near failure, 1500 pages of "oral histories" in which people talked about events but never narrated the events themselves (a problem north of the Mason-Dixon line. After that experience, I try to stay south of it; the South knows how to narrate a story, there are other places that don't). I spent A LOT of time there trying to get stories, I did do the play and the Fulton Opera House did produce it (audiences loved it) but it was very, very hard to write. On the bottom line with that piece, my best sources of stories were immigrants, so I made the play about the diversity of the place.

And one plain old flat-out failure: It was a top-down project, and the major players will remain nameless, but the funding agency wanted to do stories about the KKK because the place was significant in that organization, and the town itself wanted NOTHING to do with it. So money was awarded and the story gatherers avoided any controversial questions, and the whole oral-history collection had nothing—no mention at all—of what the project was supposed to be about. It was, one after the other, sweet memories of growing up in a rural place. And when the theater there told me they weren't sure they would ever do the script I was busting my rear end to scrape together, I finally just gave up. Quit. Kept half my fee for the work I had done, a couple of years worth, several visits, and turned in half a play, and ruined my name with the funding agency, never mind that I had completed several other projects for them in the past, and they knew the problems with this one.

LB: Telling secrets in a small town can be tricky. What if you hear a great story, but it's "too dangerous" to include?

JC: I do it anyway. Or try. I change details, names, put it in a different time frame. I hold very strongly that if a community (same goes for me) isn't a little bit afraid of what we are about to do, it won't have any heat in it. We can come onto failures of courage, but we don't very often. I talk a lot in a community about the structure of the piece I write for them, how if it doesn't go to someplace hard somewhere in it, we've done no better than the sitcoms, and life is hard, there is nobody sitting in the audience who doesn't already know life is hard, no light without the dark, etc.

LB: How do you pursue cultural diversity in a project?

JC: On my end of it, the writing end, at the source. I try to get a collection of oral histories that represents approximately the cultural diversity of the town, which means sometimes I end up insisting on more oral histories from one or another communities. Sometimes this works better than others, sometimes it doesn't work very well at all. Sometimes I end up writing out of what I know and not out of any specific oral history—a damning statement if ever there was one for the purists in the audience but....

Lots of these are ongoing projects, even if they didn't start out that way, people do one and, hard as it was, they don't want to quit, so they do another, and if I can be true enough, especially with the hard stuff, the project and I earn a small measure of trust, and once that happens, all the oral histories get better, people tell more, and the hard-to-get ones come easier. And eventually people seek me out to tell me stories they think should be used. Sometimes they are right. I should also say, in the writing, except in special circumstances (Captain Jack and Preacher Taylor in "Cross Tides"), I do not use people's real names, and if the story is hard or uncomfortable, I change details or combine two stories so the teller/s keep/s some anonymity. So, the bottom line is that I see the whole endeavor as process. Achieving one production is very often a step, not an end, and given that, I can work towards real cultural diversity without whipping myself or becoming mute over the moment's shortcomings. Don't know what else to do, how else to work.

Sometimes, even that fails, or the circumstances are different, and I do something else. My favorite something else story came out of the place with 1500 pages of oral histories and so few stories... there were some ethnic stories, Greek, Cambodian, Italian, Puerto Rican, but the town was 20 percent African American, and NO STORIES in the black oral histories. None. There were pages and pages of comments about how whites seemed to perceive blacks in that place, how hard it was, the racism, some radical people spoke into a tape recorder and I liked what they had to say, especially one young preacher, but it wasn't story, and it is very hard in this work to use something that is not a story. It was strange and hard, not that I blame people, they had no reason to trust me with their stories. I could have legitimately said I didn't have any stories and just skipped it, but the very lack of stories was telling. So I wrote a comic/hard piece out of the young preacher, not things he had said, but things I extrapolated he could have said. It was a piece that listed (a gentle list, given what could be listed) black myths about white people, with the final line being, "That make you uncomfortable? Think about that next time you call the 7th District in this town The Ward." Seventh District is the black neighborhood, and it is common for whites to call it the ward, and I knew the audience would be primarily white. It wasn't anything anybody in that place had said, it was stuff I could write out of own previous experience, but it was in the style of this preacher, and it seemed to fit with how he felt in that place. And it was funny. I felt like maybe I managed to use the lack of stories in a constructive way.

And just to say it, the ongoing conversation out of that play is actually with the black community; there were oral histories taken 20 years ago out of the Civil Rights Movement, and they are interested in doing a show out of them.

LB: Can art really change a community?

The cast of "Cross Tides" onstage in Yoder Barn. Photo by John Corriere

JC: A community has to be pretty desperate to try art. It is usually an economic desperation, but sometimes it is a sort of sickness of soul and the desperation is just as urgent. These projects will not turn economics around, but they may give people a reason to try to stay in a place instead of looking for a way to leave it. In other words, they may change how people feel about a community or a place, and that can change the economics and restore soul at the same time. They do that by being inclusive instead of exclusive, but giving everybody's experience equal weight, by letting people develop the courage to do it and the skills necessary to stand in front of strangers and tell a story, and by having some relationship with the stories that are told, especially when audiences find value in them. The short answer to the question: yes, I think so, I think communities do change. I know this work changes lives, and I can get you testimonials if you want.

LB: What are you most excited about in your work right now?

JC: With this work, I love that I get to see the affect it has in people's lives. How many artists can say that? "Cross Tides" was my 20th of these things, I'm booked for my 21st and 22nd, with the 23rd coming up. And I'm the only playwright I know of really writing for large casts. 60-100 is the norm. I can write a river and have enough people to make it work. And just to say it, advertisements for myself, as many of these as I have done, I have a collection of the best stories I know, amazing stories, and I am doing reading/performances of them.

LB: What would you like to do as an artist that you haven't done so far?

JC: Economic: Make enough money not to have to worry about those times when the writing doesn't work for awhile, and to be able to pay for good self-employed health insurance.

Artistic: Keep evolving. At the moment, the oral history work is sort of a niche, like an ecological niche, something an organism can live inside but not out of, and with the current funding climate, it seems to be a niche I'm going to be in for awhile. I don't mind that, but it is scary to think about getting stuck in it for ever and ever, amen. So I do keep looking for potential evolutions.

Linda Frye Burnham is a codirector of Art in the Public Interest

Original CAN/API publication: December 1999