Listening Closely: An interview with David Isay
By Sean O'Neill

If year-end, Top 10 lists were made for radio documentaries, those made by David Isay, an independent producer in New York, would routinely top the list. Perhaps Isay's most famous work was created in March 1993, when he enlisted the help of two boys — LeAlan Jones, 13, and Lloyd Newman, 14 — from Chicago's South Side. The boys used a small tape recorder to create an audio diary, recording the shouts, mutterings, songs and kind words of their families, teachers and neighbors over the course of two weeks. Isay edited their recordings, making sure the boys liked the half-hour documentary that resulted. Their audio diary won most every American journalism award and was translated into a dozen languages. (Listen to it here.)

Documentaries such as that, portraying life on society's margins, are why the now-35-year old Isay (pronounced EYE-say) won a MacArthur Genius Grant Award last year. His first breakthrough came in 1989, when he produced the first documentary in any medium about the Stonewall riots in New York, an event now recognized as a watershed in gay rights history. A year later, his documentary about the inmates of the Louisiana State Penitentiary helped several unjustly imprisoned men regain their freedom. Since then, Isay has crafted many similar projects.

Today, Isay is finishing up a profile of Henry Sapozink, who started the kletzmer revival, salvaging Yiddish music that was played by Eastern European immigrants during the Great Depression. These latest programs will air this spring on National Public Radio.

Surprisingly, Isay didn't listen to public radio while growing up, not even during his college years at New York University. Instead of discovering the medium by falling in love with a particular show, Isay serendipitously discovered the audio art form during three days in 1988.

Isay had just graduated with a bachelor's degree in psychology, having expected for years to become a doctor, but he was suddenly uncertain whether he really wanted to go to medical school. He deferred his decision for a year, and, in the meantime, tutored children. One day he was wandering around his neighborhood in the East Village when he came across a tiny storefront shop decorated with folk art, which intrigued him, and brought him inside. The shop was run by a Puerto Rican couple, who revealed they were recovering heroin addicts and had contracted the AIDS virus.

"This was in 1988, when you didn't have long to live with AIDS because treatments hadn't been developed yet," recalled Isay. "They took me to the back of their store. They showed me models for a 10-story museum that they were planning that would detail the destructive powers of addiction. They showed me letters they had received from famous rich New Yorkers from whom they had solicited funds through a letter campaign. They had letters from Donald Trump and Ed Koch saying, more or less, 'No thanks, but good luck.'"

Isay says he found the couple's tale very poignant. "I went through the Yellow Pages to find radio stations to send a reporter to get this couple's story out. I eventually called WBAI-FM, which told me to go out and record the story myself and send it in. I borrowed a tape recorder, I taped their story, edited it as best I could, and sent it in. As it happens, a producer from NPR was driving through New York the day it was broadcast, and decided to rebroadcast the story on Weekend "All Things Considered," a national program I had never listened to before."

Isay abandoned his med school plans, saved money by moving in with his parents (his mother, a book publisher; his father, a psychiatrist), and applied for, and received, grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Grants are essential money because public radio usually pays by the minute of actual air time. Given how Isay says he whittles down 2,100 hours of tape to make an hour-long show, he would have made an average of $2,000 a year for the few minutes that were actually aired.

Over time, Isay perfected what he calls his "anti-People magazine" approach to reportage, in a process resembling how Krusty the Clown sweeps the cartoon spotlight and narrows the spotlight focus. "I learned to make myself disappear and let the people tell their own stories."

In 1993, he co-founded a nonprofit production company called Sound Portraits with a transcriber he had worked with, Stacy Abramson. Together, they edited tapes on donated Macintosh computers. At the time, he says, "there were really only four or five other people doing radio documentaries in the United States." The company finally broke even last year, thanks to the half-million dollar MacArthur Award. He says he now has a perfect life. "I wake up happy every day."

His advice to others: "Figure out what it is that you do best and make sure that that is exactly what you do."

E-mail Sean O'Neill at NewsFromDC@cs.com.