Anna's NPR Interview: A Thank You to Megan Sukys of KUOW

On Friday (Oct.17th.) we received a visitor at the Aerie. Her name is Megan Sukys, and she is Senior Host for “Sound Focus” on KUOW 94.9 on your FM dial. When I looked her up on their website, this following line stood out to me:

As Senior Host for Sound Focus, Megan explores the Northwest culture through conversation. She believes that the stories we tell guide our future actions.

I like that approach and I was thrilled when Megan contacted me, after the TNT (thank you!) ran my blog post on the first Seattle screening of Under Our Skin. She was interested in my daughter Anna’s story. After years of typing my wee fingers to nubs, someone in the west coast media was interested in talking to us about Lyme disease and Anna’s decade-long struggle for both respect and treatment in the State of Washington!

Megan pulled into our driveway in a very cool, funky beetle-bug that runs on alternate fuel. With her own flair she had a few, very tasteful, red and blue stripes with stars painted on the bug’s white background, going from stem to stern. She stepped out of her car and locked her eyes into mine as she introduced herself with a warm handshake. That gave her a second check-mark in my tally of esteem.

She was just a little early, so I had a chance to show her our wee corner of Northwest paradise and began telling her a bit about my twenty-seven year-old incredible daughter, before Anna came slowly walking down the hall to greet us. It was immediately apparent why Megan makes a good interviewer. She was warm and interested, without it being a media mask. When I looked-up her biography on the website, it told the story of a little girl who loved to talk and ask questions…so much so that her mother bought her a little tape-recorder and microphone! She is, as Joseph Campbell would say, following her bliss.

We set up comfortably in the living room, having tea and just talking for about an hour, all three of us. She explained that this segment of the program would be just over eighteen minutes. We knew she was more interested in the human story than the long, complicated story of Lyme disease and its surrounding politics, so I suggested she do the actual interview with just Anna. Time for Mum to be…mum! I can hear my fellow Blog-Squadders laughing, knowing how hard that might be for me.

I was amazed at the tiny piece of equipment she carried for recording, dwarfed by the microphone. The Digital Age is amazing. Megan (with that lovely broadcasting voice) led Anna gently through with her questions, stopping and starting as my daughter’s short-term memory, and abstract-thinking, waxed and waned with Lyme.

We’d like to thank Ms. Sukys for her time and interest in Anna’s story. We’d like to thank her for following her bliss and being excellent at her job, as well as being a warm and wonderful guest at the Aerie, our home. Thank you so much Megan!

If you would like to hear this interview, tune-in to Sound Focus this coming Tuesday, Oct. 21st., at 2pm. That’s KUOW 94.9FM…or you can tune-in through cyberspace….

http://www.kuow.org/program.php?current=SF

Let’s hear it for National Public Radio!

BBC Radio

Seeing Ourselves As Others See Us

I am an NPR devotee. At home in Gig Harbor KUOW, 94.9 FM is the background of my life, meeting most of my needs for news and entertainment. Prairie Home Companion is a sort of religion for our family and the Weekend Puzzler is my husband’s touchstone of the week. I could go on and on about the NPR programming, but that’s not why I’ve come.

Overnight KUOW broadcast’s BBC’s Americanized World News Service. Originally they included the cricket scores which I enjoyed even though I cannot make heads nor tails of the game, but if I shut my eyes and listened I could imagine that I was not in my bed in Gig Harbor, but in an English country inn listening to the radio.

Listening to the BBC Radio gives Americans an opportunity to view ourselves from an outside point of view, from the view of cousins surely, but without some of the emotional attachment we feel to institutions and policies. Seeing ourselves as others see us is an important exercise personally and nationally. Not only that, but it’s a good idea to find out what is happening in the rest of the world from a source other than our networks and cable news. Listen to BBC and you’ll discover that although our dollar has not been faring well in comparison to the British pound or the Euro, Britain has economic problems of its own and banks like Bradford and Bingley are in as much trouble as WaMu.

It is true that American politics and economics effects the health of countries around the world, but there’s something insufferably conceited in the rest of the world being familiar with our culture and institutions and Americans’ complete oblivion when it comes to the lives and concerns of the rest of the world.

When I am away from home getting my BBC fix via NPR can be dodgy, but BBC Radio can be streamed in a myriad of languages. For fun you might try listening in Persian. It’s a lovely sounding language, but personally, I think that anything sounds lovely when communicated in a British accent.