THE GREENROOM SPOTLIGHT: JESSE DUKES
/Studio IX:
You’re currently based in Chicago but are originally from Charlottesville. You’re a writer, journalist and radio producer. Could you tell us a bit about how this came to be?
Jesse Dukes:
I grew up in Eastern Albemarle County, near Cobham. Sissy Spacek was my neighbor. We never hung out with her or anything. She never gave me Halloween candy.
We were out in Keswick between routes 222 and 231. That's where a lot of my dreams take place, out there with the Southwest mountain range. I went to Albemarle High School. And I went to UVA. I studied anthropology and history, and I graduated without much of a plan. I realized I was really interested in long form journalism and documentary. I really loved film documentaries, and long form New Yorker type magazine articles but I didn't really see a path to doing either of those. But then I started hearing This American Life and Scott Carrier and Sarah Vowell stories. This was in the early 2000s. And I thought, "Oh, I could do that."
I had been a rock DJ at WTJU in college. I had a 3:00 AM to 6:00 AM shift, so I liked radio and understood microphones and mixers. I used to collect old tapes you'd find on the ground and try to play them back. We would go to yard sales throughout Albemarle County and buy old records and old tapes. I thought that maybe I could do audio documentary because you could be a one person shop. All you need is a microphone, and a computer, and a recorder, and you could basically do the whole thing. Which is true, but it’s a lot harder to make GOOD audio documentaries than I thought.
In 2005, I went to the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and studied documentary radio. That year I started freelancing. And within a year I got a part-time job at With Good Reason, a show produced by Virginia Humanities. I was in my late twenties at this point. I worked that job, paid the rent, and was experimenting with, writing, multimedia documentary, and audio... and trying different things.
This was before podcasting really broke open. Along with many of my peers, I used to think about the possibility of documentary podcasts — things like Serial, or In the Dark, or even The Daily— but they didn’t exist before 2014, and I didn’t have the wherewithal to actually make one. I worked for the program Backstory for a while, wrote some articles and produced multimedia for VQR, but by 2013, I was feeling very stuck in my career.
In 2014 I applied for, and amazingly got, the This American Life fellowship. I would have been thrilled to get that a few years earlier, but at the time I just felt like an old intern. The fellowship really taught me where I had had some weak spots as an audio producer, a writer, a journalist. You think you’re pretty good at something, and then you spend some time with people who are REALLY good at that thing. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s a good way to learn. And coming out of that, I felt like I had a lot of momentum.
I wanted to find somebody who was doing documentary podcast work, as ambitious as This American Life, but locally oriented. I had this crazy idea to try and get funding to do an audio story about every county in Virginia, each idea voted on by the residents of the county.
But I needed a salary and benefits, so I took a job at WBEZ's Curious City, and I've been there for about five years. And while I was doing that, I also had this kind of nutty idea to document the Trump presidency in real time through a diverse group of people, inspired partly by this Seven Up series and Richard Linklater's film Boyhood. This idea of using time to tell a story rather than plot. Just sort of paying attention to the same story over time and seeing how it unfolds.
This was a collaborative project between a core group of 6 or 8 audio producers. We just started doing remote interviews with people across the country every few months, and we were able to produce two documentaries from that material, made in partnership with KCRW.
Very recently, I applied for and got a Senior Podcast Producer job at WBEZ. So I've actually kind of left Curious City, and my role now is developing new podcasts for WBEZ.
Studio IX:
Due to the events of August 2017, Charlottesville has come to be seen in a very particular light. As someone who was born and raised here, do you have any thoughts to share about that?
Jesse Dukes:
Well, I think to understand the history of Charlottesville, and what got us to August 2017 is to understand America.
I think Jamelle Bouie expressed this beautifully in his essay in VQR: “On the weekend of August 12, 2017, Charlottesville, Virginia, became a metonym, thus joining that select fraternity of cities whose meaning is tied to singular events.”
It’s like Nanking, Chernobyl, Mei Lei, Birmingham, Charlottesville. Weird. It’s very strange to be in Chicago and hear people say things like “And then Charlottesville happened”. I want to tell them: “Charlottesville has been happening a long time.”
I think what’s happened in Charlottesville SINCE August 2017 has been very important, and I’m trying to stay plugged in remotely. It’s not as if the legacy of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy has been hidden in C-ville exactly, but more people are engaging with it, I think. More white people certainly.
And there’s new public history: I’m thinking about the tours by Jalane Schmidt and Andrea Douglas, photography exhibits by John Edwin Mason, all the work Jordy Yager is doing to help understand how housing policy shaped and scarred the city.
I’ve felt for a long time you could tell a powerful story about America by looking at central Virginia. I think about growing up in Charlottesville and being a Boy Scout, where we had a mixture of UVA professor's kids, and rural white folks who grew up hunting and fishing. Some of their grandparents had been evicted from the Blue Ridge to make Shenandoah National Park. We played capture the flag under Robert E. Lee’s statue.
I remember my parents signed me up for the the City’s parks and rec summer school programs when I was 10 (I think it was free or cheap), and being one of a handful of white kids on the bus heading out to Mint Springs, 10 or 15 years after Massive Resistance to School Integration ended. That was a lesson in class and race.
I had a Black second grade math teacher who likely started his career in an integrated school. My elementary school was probably 90-95% white, the city schools in the 80s were majority Black. I think about being raised to admire Thomas Jeffferson and how I still find myself admiring some of his work, despite his embodiment of the worst of white supremacy.
Maybe there’s an audio documentary podcast to be had, just focusing on race, power, class, and central Virginia, amplifying all the tremendous scholarship that’s ongoing making sense of that story. I’d like to make that documentary podcast.