Telling Stories of Humanity On Air

Name: John Biewen Position: Audio program director, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke Years at Duke: 10What I do at Duke: I produce audio/radio documentary work as part of my job. Through me, the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) is a production house for the public radio system, and I’ve (launched a) CDS podcast called “Scene on Radio.” It is the new work that I do, the very best of our student work, both continuing ed and undergraduate and graduate student work, and even the best stuff that’s been done over the years. We’ll bring stuff out of the archives (for the podcast). Fifty or 60 percent of my time is spent on the production side, and the rest of my time is spent teaching, and I teach one course each semester, an audio documentary class, for undergrads and graduate students, and I teach two weeklong intensives in the summer. If I had $5 million, I would: Give a bunch of it away, I really would, but I would also maybe take a year off and travel the world with my sweetheart and see if my kids want to come along.My first ever job: Paper boy (for the Minneapolis Tribune), when I was 11, in Mankato, Minnesota, where I grew up.What I love about Duke: I have a background working for public radio newsrooms, Minnesota Public Radio, NPR news, but as I got further into my career, I increasingly wanted to do more creative work, more narrative work, as opposed to newsy work. CDS is really a place that embraces documentary work from the very issue-oriented to the much more narrative and even innovative and artsy. It gives me free reign to do all the kind of work I like to do. If I could have one superpower, it would be: There’s a famous public radio piece about that on “This American Life”, where they talk about that, of people who want to be invisible and people who want to fly, and I don’t know if this is true, but the general notion was psychologists say people who want to be invisible are evil and people who want to fly are good. Flying would be nice, just being able to get from here to there. Something most people don’t know about me: I grew up a jock. I played basketball in high school and small-time college basketball. I lived in Japan in the ‘80s, and at one time, spoke Japanese pretty well. An interesting/memorable day at work for me: When we have these courses and end up having a listening session where 24 newly minted radio producers play their pieces for the first time for each other and for some other people who come to listen… there’s a spirit and sort of excitement about what they’ve accomplished, but very often there’s just an undertone of the humanity of the process of documentary work and that ultimately it ends up all being about what it’s like to be alive in this world. People laugh and people cry, and it feels a little bit like church. Podcasts I like: “This American Life”; “Radiolab”; I did like the first season of “Serial” – I got caught up in it like a lot of other people; “Love + Radio”; “The Heart.”