Deseret News | Radio host tells stories from 'Heart'

Radio host tells stories from 'Heart'

By Elaine Jarvik
Deseret Morning News

Published: Friday, Feb. 29, 2008 12:18 a.m. MST

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The name of radio producer Jay Allison's latest project could have included those politically charged, eye-glazing words "the environment." Instead it's called "Stories From the Heart of the Land."

And there, in a nutshell, you have Allison's radio style: less interested in science and politics, more interested in the essence of place and belief.

Allison, who is also known by public radio devotees as the curator of the "This I Believe" series, will be in Salt Lake City Monday as guest of the Nature Conservancy. He'll appear at a live 7 p.m. broadcast of KUER's "RadioWest," at the Rose Wagner Center. Patrons must be seated by 6:30 p.m.

The news is increasingly abbreviated and up-to-the minute, but Allison is interested more in "the things that happen over a lifetime and that you learn over a lifetime," he said recently in a phone interview. So "This I Believe" invites listeners to write essays about their philosophy of life. In "Stories From the Heart of the Land," the experiences are about a connection to a particular spot of landscape.

"I think people act when their hearts are stirred," he says. Many of the creeks and woods where he played as a child in Delaware have been replaced by condos, the kinds of fish he once caught are no longer safe to eat, and some of the creatures he studied no longer exist. "I think it's key for people to simply reflect on the fact that this pace of change through a single lifetime is probably not going to abate, unless we give more serious thought to how important this is to us."

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Over the years, Allison has won five Peabody Awards and the Edward R. Murrow Award. He is also the curator for "Lost and Found Sound," "Hidden Kitchens" and the post-9/11 "Sonic Memorial Project." He currently runs transom.org, dedicated to "citizen storytelling."

Sometimes his two current projects overlap. Last week, astronaut Dan Tani wrote and recorded a "This I Believe" piece about his four months in space, looking down on the planet from 200 miles above. "I believe in optimism," says Tani in a voice that seems to rattle around inside the space station. "My own optimism is rooted in two very different ideas: statistical probability and trust."

From space, says Tani, the Earth's landscape is "a thing of stunning beauty." It may be full of pain and war and poverty, "but from here, I can only see the whole."

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