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Writing center puts age-old craft of literature on high-tech stage

Posted on | November 4, 2009 | 207 views |

By Julia Harris

Doug Dangler may well be Ohio State’s most well-kept secret. Not only is he the associate director of the university’s Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing, but he also has his own radio and television show about writing — complete with a Facebook page and more than 210 fans.

He’s also very funny and more than a little irreverent. “Those 200 fans are mostly paid, and let me tell you I lost a lot of money on that deal,” he said, looking furtively at the big blue microphone pointed at him across his desk.

His tongue-in-cheek comments belie a genuine passion for the craft and pursuit of writing. For more than a year now, he has been the creative force behind Writers Talk, broadcast on WCBE 90.5 FM and on the Ohio Channel.

The show features a different writer every week and examines issues related to writing, publishing and surviving in a literary world. Past guests have included Don Pollock, a recent creative writing graduate with a highly successful book, and award-winning novelist Julia Glass.

“OSU is such a magnet for talent, but it seemed to me that these people were simply passing through and no one was archiving these visits in ways that would allow us to gain knowledge from them,” Dangler said.

“I’d always wanted to bring these folks into the classroom, but that isn’t always possible. So instead, we take them into the studio and create a high-quality educational artifact that we can then spin off into any number of places.”

So far, Dangler estimates he’s done more than 70 interviews, 30 of them on video. He has produced over 50 five-minute radio segments for WCBE and is pleased to note that Writers Talk has never missed a week of airtime, even though the production end of the broadcast is pretty much a one-man show.

“We’ve had technical issues with mikes and sound, but we’ve gotten some better equipment as we’ve moved forward — by hook or by crook, or by me holding bake sales,” he said with a grin.

Even on his shoestring budget, Dangler takes pride in creating high-quality broadcasts that don’t adhere to the grainy, do-it-yourself aesthetic popular on video-sharing sites like YouTube. Drawing on the expertise and knowledge of faculty across the university, from English to creative writing to theatre, Dangler wants to create valuable resources that can be used by a wide range of people.

“I want to build this partnership and leverage it so that the highly talented faculty we have here on campus can be displayed to the world, to show that Ohio State is moving from excellence to eminence,” he said.

He has specific visions of enlisting faculty experts to do some of the on-camera interviews of visiting writers, since he’s the first to admit he doesn’t quite know everything about everything.

He’s also quick to admit that going in front of the camera is not a job for everyone. “It basically takes someone with no self-esteem, who’s willing to be degraded on camera,” he said.

Someone Dangler would like to see conduct an interview — and be interviewed herself — is Kathy Fagan, poet and professor of creative writing. He might have his work cut out for him, though, when it comes to convincing Fagan to appear on camera.

“Radio is bad enough,” she said with a laugh. “Middle-aged people, we’re a bit shy of the camera. The idea of being videotaped is just horrifying, but I suppose we’ll have to get used to it.”

Part of the reason she’s so game about change is her realization that Dangler’s doing the university — and literature — a major service in his attempt to capture some of the stories that have thus far been allowed to trickle into silence.

“We’ve had poet laureates, we’ve had Nobel laureates, and it’s just unbelievable to me that we have no archive of those readings,” Fagan said.

“It’s such important but quiet front-line work for the arts and the literary world at the university. I wish we could make him and people who do this kind of work as popular as the football team.”

For more info …

Writers Talk, giving the inside scoop on writers and artists at Ohio State, is broadcast Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on WCBE (90.5 FM), with podcasts at cstw.osu.edu/podcasts, on Facebook.com/writerstalk and on YouTube.

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