SmArts
April 24-30, 2017
On the brilliance of S-Town
By Molly Rector
Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to share my work at two separate readings – one on Friday night hosted by the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and one on Saturday hosted by Impossible Language, a fabulous reading series in Memphis, TN.
There’s much to say about reading and reading series, of course, but I’ll forgo it in favor of writing about the five-hour journey from Fayetteville to Memphis. Specifically: the podcast my partner and I listened to on our way down.
For anyone out there who hasn’t yet listened to S-Town, I hope you will take me seriously when I say: I strongly recommend doing so. Hosted by Brian Reed, and produced by the makers of This American Life and Serial, S-Town is a seven-episode exploration of a town in rural Alabama and the life of a probably crazy clock-making genius; who cares too much about the world.
I love podcasts in general. I think they are doing some of the most meaningful journalistic work being done in the United States right now. But S-Town, simply, breaks the mold. In my opinion, it is a beautiful illustration of boundary blurring in art forms – it’s nonfiction, it’s poetry, it’s elegy, it’s politics, it’s a collage of experience sewn together with subtle meditations on the nature of time and what it means to live well. It deals with tough subjects, but the way it deals with them is tender and delicate.
My partner said, discussing it with Ashley Roach-Freiman (host of Impossible Language), “it’s my new favorite novel.” Despite the fact that S-Town is not fictional, it does feel like a novel, perhaps because the writing is so beautiful – it uses time as a narrative device, in a way that gradually builds in weight. The more the listener finds out about the subject, John B. McLemore, the more meaningful it feels to hear that he spent 3 or 4 or 6 hours on the phone with one friend or another – because as much as anything, this is a podcast that asks us to look at what we get out of the hours we spend.
The story is heavy and at times a bit dark, but it comes, I think, at exactly the right moment in our history. And I’m serious when I say that I think it has the possibility to heal interpersonal divides, to put the world into perspective a bit. I hope readers of this podcast will give it a listen. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Molly Rector is a staff writer for the Daily Record. Contact her at mrector@gm.slc.edu.
