When HPR’s program manager, Nick Yee, approached me about creating short vignettes and a one-hour special featuring interviews with Hawaiʻi residents about their stories in and with the military, I was delighted. The material I was given had been recorded for the StoryCorps Military Voices Initiative. Interviews were conducted in a variety of locations, including the Lyman Museum in Hilo, HPR studios in Honolulu, and in some instances, via remote hook up where participants called in from far-flung locations.
When I opened the files, I was a bit overwhelmed. There were sixty interviews; each with a run-time of about forty minutes. It was a lot of material. How to take these conversations and distill them down to a few minutes, while preserving the essence of what each participant wanted to share? I had to find a way to begin. It seemed like a herculean task.
My love of storytelling began when I was about eight years old. I used to watch my journalist mother as she sat at our kitchen table typing newspaper stories in triplicate on her clacky, black Royal typewriter. Then, she would pull the pages from the machine and read them out loud. Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, people and things and places jumped off the pages and sprang to life.
Later, I became a producer and director of daytime drama TV series, including "The Young and the Restless," "The Bold and the Beautiful" and "One Life to Live." I worked for Lee and Bill Bell for fourteen years. Bill was the creator and head writer for "The Bold and the Beautiful" and "The Young and the Restless." He was one of the driving forces in daytime television for forty or more years. Quite frankly, he was a brilliant, demanding and exacting boss. Bill insisted that everyone on his team dig into the stories as deeply as he always did. “Play the subtext. Find the heartbeat of the story and the characters.” That was his mantra.
Find the heartbeat. That’s what we were taught to do. If we didn’t accomplish that task, we would hear about it immediately after an episode that he didn’t like went on the air.
So, that’s the approach I chose to take on this project: listening carefully to each story countless times, with the goal of discovering the heartbeat and connective tissue in what was being shared.
Assembling these stories, I was moved by the authenticity with which participants shared feelings and experiences. Some confessed that they had not talked about their military experiences in thirty or forty years. This project offered them an opportunity to unburden themselves in a cathartic, therapeutic way.
Listen to HPR's Military Voices Initiative.
