Anita Rao: Journalist, Podcaster and Storyteller
Creatives in Conversation: I believe that we can learn so much from each other and I am fascinated by the ways in which artists of all media move through the creative process. Each month I feature a different local artist as we discuss the challenges and joys that come from accessing and living with their creativity.
Photo: Sandra Davidson
Anita Rao is a journalist, podcaster and storyteller based in Durham, North Carolina. In her day job, she is the managing editor and regular host of The State of Things, North Carolina Public Radio WUNC's flagship daily, live talk show. On that program she launched and hosts the recurring series "Embodied: Conversations about Sex, Relationships & Your Health." She began her radio career at WUNC as an intern for the nationally distributed public radio program The Story. From 2011 to 2014, she worked for the Peabody Award-winning StoryCorps production department. She was born in a small coal-mining town in Northeast England but spent most of her life growing up in Iowa and has a fond affection for the Midwest! In her spare time she co-hosts and produces a podcast and radio show about millennial feminism called "She and Her."
You believe very much in the art of storytelling. Tell me a little bit about how you think radio is uniquely positioned to tell stories.
I came into radio in a roundabout way. I went to college thinking that I wanted to do magazine journalism, [but when I] started taking some journalism classes I started to lose my inspiration a little bit. So I let myself wander and happened to take a Women's Studies 101 class and really fell in love with the kind of learning I was doing there and the way my brain was working. And through pursuing that, I started doing a lot of oral history interviews and kind of turned every project for any class into an oral history project.
For my senior thesis, I spent time interviewing women who were formerly incarcerated, who had participated in creative writing workshops while they were in prison and who were now out. And I was curious if there was anything about the creative process or practicing telling your story or learning how to articulate your narrative while you were in prison that translated into adjusting into the outside world.
It was a really fun project – really, really hard. I don't think I knew what I was getting into. At the end of all that, I had all of these rich narratives, but the audio was really crappy. And I felt kind of disappointed because I had collected these rich stories and no one was going to read them or see them. And so I began to think that maybe the academic world wasn't for me.
I was starting to turn back to journalism and I took an audio documentary class at the Center for Documentary Studies. I began to realize that radio was the place where longform storytelling and interviews were still really happening. [The] print and multimedia and journalism classes were all about how [to] become well-rounded as journalists so we can capture the attention of people in a really quick way. But in radio the podcasting revolution was beginning to happen and people were actually slowing down the storytelling process and feeling excited about longer form interviews.
What does living a creative life mean to you?
I think it means a couple of things. I think it means letting my curiosity really guide me through the world and giving myself space for that curiosity to live and breathe and grow. And I feel like I'm living creatively the most when I'm living much less in my head and more in my body or in my sensory self. And I'm very much a heady person. So I think living a creative life requires a lot of intention and balance. It's really about taking stuff away versus putting more stuff in -- like taking away structure or taking away to do lists or taking away busy-ness to give myself space and energy to wonder and wander.
I took a class in college called Women and Creativity. And one of the primary takeaways I had from that class was that there are gender forces at play where women tend to take on the emotional labor as well as the mental checklist. And being embroiled in the mental checklist takes you away from a mindset that could allow for creativity. So my teacher would recommend going to a toy store and giving yourself thirty minutes – leave your phone in the car and just wander through and allow yourself to be in spaces that encourage you to think differently and get you out of that productivity mindset. So I feel like [living a creative life] also has a lot to do with making myself not be productive.
What do you think the role of the artist is within their community?
I think the role of the artist in the community is to be a connector and to find ways to show other parts of the community to one another. Finding spaces where people overlap or finding ways to thread things together promotes empathy and understanding. In my role, I see it as holding space for people to be in conversation and figure out where there are points of connection and points of disconnection [in order] to grow or create something different.
What are some creative challenges that you've come up against and how have you moved through them? Or are you still moving through?
I think I'm still moving through many. The most recent one is launching this new series on WUNC called Embodied. I believe in it so much and I'm so excited about it, but the challenge for me is letting it grow and evolve on its own and releasing some control. Especially because it's a collaborative project and its strength will be in letting producers and other people really take ownership.
I feel like it's so easy with creative projects to become so focused on perfecting or publicizing it that you lose the heart. So when I find myself getting frustrated or overwhelmed I try to connect back to the heart and the root of the idea.
“I think living a creative life requires a lot of intention and balance. It’s really about taking stuff away versus putting more stuff in — like taking away structure or taking away to do lists or taking away busy-ness to give myself space and energy to wonder and wander.”
In your professional roles you have been both behind the scenes and front and center, both in production, and as a host of She and Her and now The State of Things. How are production and hosting different?
They're very different. I guess one thing they have in common that I'm realizing more and more now is the release of control. Because as a producer, you craft and you create up to a point and then you give it over to a host and what they do with it is not in your control anymore. And as a host, things are not really in your control. Even if you think they're under control, they're not.
As a producer, you really want to be as prepared as possible and get all the information, figure out the best ways to craft it, figure out how everything comes together. And as a host you really have to just be as in the moment as you can and trust your instincts as much as you can, trust your gut as much as you can. And that is not something I'm very practiced at. I'm a planner, so producing is a much more natural fit for my personality type. [Being a] host is a big challenge for me, but when I'm in the flow, I feel so much more satisfaction from that than I tend to do with producing. But it feels much riskier. Much more anxiety.
How do you think that we can get this country and also the world to value art and creativity more highly?
I guess what comes to mind is a few things. First of all, once you know the effort and energy that it takes [to create art], you have a much greater respect for and a much different relationship toward it. When I talk to people about StoryCorps, for example, I tell them that it took probably 60 hours of work per StoryCorps snippet, and some people hear that and they're like, wow. [So we should be transparent with] the intricacies of the art making process for various kinds of art.
I [also] feel like we devalue play so much in our society and we have become so content and consumption oriented. And if your primary concern is consuming the thing, the value of it gets lost because the value of it then becomes about you consuming it versus interacting with it and seeing [how it came to be]. I wish we could put greater value on play and interaction to get people's frame of mind shifted.
What advice would you give to someone of any age who wants to be more creative?
It's important to create opportunities for time away from your phone and away from structure to see what you naturally tend toward. I think a big part of it too is just broadening how we think about what creativity is. There's a lot of value in having respect for art making and helping people understand how these things come together, but also valuing the creative processes behind chemistry experiments and cooking and things that people may not think of immediately as creative. As cliché as it sounds - create time to practice your craft. Being creative does require attention and work, it's not something that just happens.
This interview has been edited and condensed.