© 2024 University of Missouri - KBIA
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Intersection - From Music to Tornadoes, Students Tell Their Stories With Sound

Patrick Breitenbach
/
Flickr

This week on Intersection we talk with three students from the University of Missouri. Last fall Autumn Gholston, Daniel Litwin, Nora Thiemann and about 20 other students spent the semester exploring how to tell stories using sound in a digital storytelling class.

In this episode we hear audio essays these three students produced about everything from friendship to surviving a tornado, and talk with them about stepping outside their comfort zones, writing in new ways and putting their storytelling skills to work.

Listen to the whole show here: 

Autumn Gholston  created and gathered sound for her story in some unexpected ways. 

I'm out on this golf course while people are trying to golf just breaking sticks and I’m like, ‘Don't mind me, I just have me and my recorder breaking sticks on this golf course.’ People were just driving by like 'What's going on?' But I didn't feel  weird recording the tornado siren because I feel like on campus, people just don't mind things that happen on this campus. There is someone with a recorder just holding it up in the air, they are just like,"Yeah, that's normal on this kind of campus.”

Autumn's audio essay is about a close encounter with a tornado. 

autumn_essay.mp3
Listen

Daniel Litwin studies Broadcast Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism. He says that this class challenged him to approach storytelling in a different way.

We've been hammered in, “You've got to use this kind of AP Style, and you have to write this way for the ear. This, this, this.” We were practicing scripting and all this kind of stuff, and at the same time I had to write a creative story about auditioning for an a cappella group. It was two different spectrums of that storytelling life. 

Daniel's piece takes us through his a cappella audition.

daniel_essay_01.mp3

Nora Thiemann says new ways of telling stories are opening up new career ideas. 

 I'm not necessarily writing news, but I’m still writing stories. Some of it's real and some of it's not real, but I'm learning the components of how to tell stories either digitally or handwritten and hand drawn. I think career wise, it has definitely opened up a bunch of options that I didn't see at all.

Nora's story is a profile of a friend whose whole life revolves around music.

thiemann_44100_1_.mp3

Intersection's producers are Claire Banderas, Kelly Palecek and Abby Ivory-Ganja

Sara Shahriari was the assistant news director at KBIA-FM, and she holds a master's degree from the Missouri School of Journalism. Sara hosted and was executive producer of the PRNDI award-winning weekly public affairs talk show Intersection. She also worked with many of KBIA’s talented student reporters and teaches an advanced radio reporting lab. She previously worked as a freelance journalist in Bolivia for six years, where she contributed print, radio and multimedia stories to outlets including Al Jazeera America, Bloomberg News, the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor, Deutsche Welle and Indian Country Today. Sara’s work has focused on mental health, civic issues, women’s and children’s rights, policies affecting indigenous peoples and their lands and the environment. While earning her MA at the Missouri School of Journalism, Sara produced the weekly Spanish-language radio show Radio Adelante. Her work with the KBIA team has been recognized with awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and PRNDI, among others, and she is a two-time recipient of funding from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Related Content