‘American Life’ host to teach story-telling

NPR star Ira Glass talks about the hardships of being a young journalist.

By Jedd Rosche

Published March 4, 2008

Despite being enjoyed by many, Ira Glass still calls the hour he records his show This American Life “the least interesting and least pleasant hour of the week.”

After the show has been on the air for more than 12 years, Glass still feels far from at home behind the microphone.

“Performing the show is a weird thing,” Glass said. “I’m not somebody who had a dream of performing on the radio.”

This Saturday, the stage lights shine down on Glass, host and producer for “This American Life,” the NPR radio show and the Showtime television series by the same name. Glass is also the author of The New Kings of Nonfiction, a collection of print journalism that came out last year, and several other books.

Glass said his show at MU would be for all story tellers: journalists, writers, broadcasters or anyone interested in being creative.

“It’s a seminar on how to make your stories more gripping,” he said.

Glass said the plan for Saturday is for him to sit on stage with a mixing console and present some of the greatest hits from the show, sharing sound clips from more than a decade of being on the air. He said he will use the time as an opportunity to share some hard-learned lessons from moving through the ranks at NPR.

“I wish that when I was in college someone told me how to make creative stuff,” Glass said.

If you’ve never heard of “This American Life,” you’re not one of the 1.7 million people a week who do, including the 400,000 listeners that download its podcast every week, according to the show’s Web site, and the site of their parent radio station WBEZ-Chicago. This makes it iTunes’ most popular podcast.

The television version of “This American Life” is entering its second season on Showtime.

Describing the show isn’t as easy as counting the numbers. The formula for the show appears relatively simple, but it’s as flexible as it is deceptive.

In each episode, either on TV or on the radio, the producers create a show that follows a theme or an idea.

Sometimes it’s a phrase (“Tough Room”). Sometimes it’s a concept (“Pandora’s Box”). The cast of nonfiction characters involved has loose boundaries ranging from patrons at a 24-hour diner to Iraq civilian casualties to a cloned bull named Second Chance.

According to Ira Glass, This American Life came out of a void.

Before the show, he and the other producers had limited options for entertaining radio.

“We make shows the way we do because most radio is terrible and not interesting to us,” Glass said.

To them, they had to choose between shows for serious people or fun shows that weren’t as thought provoking.

“We want a show that would be really super fun to listen to but also occasionally have a thought going through its head,” Glass said.

Thus, in November 1995 the show was born, starting in Chicago and going national the following year.

More than a decade later, the show has racked up an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Awards, an Edward R. Murrow award and two Peabody Awards.

They’ve hosted some of the most well respected writers still alive and helped make NPR a prime destination for hip ears, while other radio stations scramble for attention from the youth market.

Glass said though he doesn’t mind the hosting job, he considers himself mostly an editor.

“I’m fine with it, I got no complaints about it but it’s sort of like all you can do is screw it up,” Glass said. “All you can do is go down hill with performing the show.”

Glass got his start in public radio in Washington when he was 19.

He said he was looking for something to do the summer after his freshman year at college, and “talked his way” into an internship.

From there he worked odd jobs for NPR and ran the gamut collecting journalistic skills.

In 1989, he moved to Chicago where he worked with “All Things Considered” and WBEZ until the start of “This American Life.” He was 36 when the show started.

As for what the audience members will experience this weekend, Glass said he’ll make it a “funny” evening, discussing all things he wished he knew when he started telling stories, particularly the amount of time it takes to find ideas.

“I had no idea that part of doing creative work is part of it you’re going to spending time searching,” Glass said.

Comparatively, he said he thinks it’s an exciting time to be creative when it’s so easy to publish work, whether on your own podcast or producing stories for the Web.

“It’s a really nice moment if you want to be making work and getting it out to an audience,” he said.