1: Voices: Journal of the New York Folklore Society

Interview with Ellen McHale, Executive Director of the New York Folklore Society, October 2006

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Welcome to Periodical Radio, the program about magazines and journals. I’m your host, Steve Black, Librarian at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, and author of the book Serials in Libraries: Issues and Practices.

Our program today is about Voices: Journal of the New York Folklore Society. This semi-annual periodical is a membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. Quoting from a recent issue of Voices, “The NY State Folklore society is a nonprofit statewide organization dedicated to furthering cultural equity and cross cultural understanding through programs that nurture folk cultural expressions within communities where they originate, share these traditions across cultural boundaries, and enhance the understanding and appreciation of folk culture.”

Voices’ mix of research articles and stories, interviews, and other informal content is unusual for a periodical. The Spring/Summer 2006 issue has seven feature articles and 12 departments and columns in 48 pages. The longest article is seven pages; many are one page. The design is simple but attractive, with black & white photos and subtle use of two tones of yellow to highlight titles and sidebars, and text is divided into three columns per page. It’s printed on heavy weight glossy paper, and the text and photos are sharp and easy to read.

The content of Voices is remarkable in the broad diversity of topics addressed in the articles and columns. For example, in one recent issue, there are scholarly pieces about a community quilt and about college students’ trips to spooky places. One article is about folklore literature in subscription full-text databases. Another is about cab drivers in NY City, and one about “Michigans,” a type of chili dog popular in Plattsburg. There’s a piece about filming the creation of a Buddhist sand mandala, and one that reminiscences about a Grandma, and an obituary of a folk musician.

Regular columns include Upstate, Downstate, Foodways, Bookshelf Essentials, Good Spirits, NY Folklore Society News, Eye of the Camera, and Book Reviews.

The NY Folklore society’s web site at www.nyfolklore.org contains a wealth of information that complements their journal. Their web site includes an index of the journal and its predecessors, New York Folklore (1975-1998) and New York Folklore Quarterly (1945-1974). Some full text content from the journals is available on their web site, but they do not have cover-to-cover full text online.

My guest today is Ellen McHale, Executive Director of the New York Folklore Society. Ellen holds a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. She’s a native New Yorker, she has worked for the last seventeen years as a consulting folklorist in many areas of upstate New York and western Massachusetts. Her past positions include director of the Schoharie County Historical Society/Old Stone Fort Museum (1990-1994), director of the Shaker Heritage Society (1986-1987), and assistant director of the Folklife Center of the International House of Philadelphia (1983-1985). She was a Fulbright Scholar in Sweden, and has taught folklore courses at Empire State College and for Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, New York.

Steve: Ellen, welcome to the show.

Ellen: Thank you.

Steve: First of all, our show is about Voices, Journal of the New York Folklore Society.   What is Voices about?

Ellen: The mission of the magazine is to include the voices of people with New York state and their traditional arts and culture. We try to bring in articles that have to do with first person use of folklore material. That is in looking at it from the outside, looking in and making an evaluation or scholarly pieces on the folklore. That’s included in the articles, but in a downplayed sense. We really want to hear the voices of the folklore itself coming through.

Steve: I guess now’s a good time to talk for a moment about just what folklore is.

Ellen: Depending on who you ask, the definition can be more or less expansive. But folklore is the artistic ways people make sense of everyday life. So they take their experiences and alliances and allegiances they have and create a way to share that knowledge together within a group. So groups are important in folklore. People share folklore from person to person, sometimes it’s historical. Sometimes things are passed down through families or communities. Folklore is emergent, is coming all of the time. If there’s a catastrophic event, there’s folklore that happens after that, stories that are told that are passed from one person to another to help make sense of that event.

Steve: And Voices records that and preserves it?

Ellen: Yes. It’s a peer reviewed journal. We solicit some articles, but for the most part we have people who send things to us. So the content for each issue is somewhat dependent on what people submit to us. But yes, we do have articles that deal with historical material, but we also have many articles that deal with contemporary life in New York state.

Steve: How long as Voices been published?

Ellen: Well, Voices itself is relatively new, since 2000. But it actually is a continuation of a much older journal. We’ve been publishing for 60 years. We started out as the New York Folklore Quarterly, four times a year. Then it slowly was collapsed into one issue per year for several years. In 1999, we decided to create Voices to try to bring it back to the quarterly. When the Quarterly was founded in 1945, people wanted to have a lot of solicitations from the field. They wanted ordinary people in New York state, not scholars, submit materials about their own history and background and communities. That was the mission of the first journal. When it moved to an annual, it became more scholarly. In 2000 we decided to move it back to the intent of the original New York Folklore Quarterly. So that’s when Voices was born.

Steve: One of the questions I had was, Voices is an unusual publication in that it is a mix of popular, first-person narratives and scholarly material. What makes that mix work?

Ellen: I think the scholarly material works because it’s good scholarship, it’s peer reviewed, so we make sure the scholarship is good. But we also demand—maybe that’s a little to strong—we ask authors to keep the language jargon free, so people can read it if you don’t have any background in folklore, or a just little background, you should be able to follow along with what the author is trying to convey. We also want to preserve the voices of people who posses a folklore, or who have the folklore and write it down, for example people who write pieces about their own background. That is just so rich in its content. We think those two things really work well together. Whatever level you come at the subject, it should be able to speak to you.

Steve: I was struck when looking at a recent issue by the variety of things that were covered. There was a scholarly piece on trips to spooky places, an obituary, stories about hot dogs, and grandmothers, and ponds, and quilts, and cab drivers. Is that what makes folklore interesting?

Ellen: I think so. That’s why I’m interested in it. You can really look at everything around you, and draw out of that the variety in life that I find fascinating. That shows up in Voices. We have articles from urban environments, from rural environments. There is a commonality of what folklore and folk traditions are within someone’s functioning life.

Steve: Who are your readers?

Ellen: We’re actually world wide. We have subscribers who are libraries in academic institutions throughout the world. We send it to India, Turkey, Sweden. So that’s our core, academic libraries. Then we have individual members who receive the journal, probably 65% are based in New York State, but we have people subscribing from other states within the union and Canada. Sometimes people join the New York Folklore Society to get the journal because they’re native New Yorkers and they’ve moved to Florida, for example, and they want to keep in touch with what is happening in New York state. It’s a mix between about half academic libraries and half individual subscribers.

Steve: To be a subscriber, though, you’re a member, is that correct?

Ellen: Yes.

Steve: How did you come to the decision that you wanted to do it that way, and what are the benefits to the society of having the journal subscription tied directly to being a member?

Ellen: That’s a hard question, because it’s a little bit debatable. I’m not sure we ever really discussed it, and it’s something that could be discussed. Since the journal was formed in 1945, it has always been a benefit of membership. When you joined the New York Folklore Society in 1944 you got the journal. We’ve had people that we know joined just because they like the journal. Now it’s a little iffier, because we do other things as a society. In 1990 we moved from being a solely academic organization to one that has a service component. We serve traditional artists in the state, we serve people are academic folklorists and people who are working in what we call the public sector—applied anthropologists, ethnomusicologists and other folklorists. So you can join the Folklore Society for those service reasons, and not even really care about the journal, but you do get it. It’s a mixed group, and I don’t actually know the answer to the question. If people do join and don’t want the journal, we don’t really know. But it’s a benefit of membership and always has been.

Steve: I see, thank you. Voices has an acquisitions editor, a managing editor, a photography editor and an editorial board. What do these folks do, and how do you coordinate all the work?

Ellen: Well, everybody has a specific job. When we designed Voices in 1999, it actually took us a whole year examining what we wanted to have happen and what we thought was important. We felt first of that photography was important. Our journal was never heavily photographic, and we felt photos needed to be highlighted, and they had to be good. So that’s when we decided to have a photography editor, so that person actually is the quality control person for the photos, and also helps us choose the images that might be in an article. We do like to have photos in every article. The acquisitions editor is a folklorist. She has a Ph.D. in folklore, and her job is to find articles, to vet the originals. If people send submissions unsolicited, she makes the first decision of whether this is appropriate for the journal. After all that work is done, she sends it to our managing editor, who basically does all the copyediting. I’m actually as the executive director of the Folklore Society a little bit out of the picture until I see the final issue. I usually get a table of contents, so I know everybody’s done their job. Then I see the first proof. So it’s always a surprise when it comes in, even though I know what the articles are going to be. To see them all laid out and what photos are there is kind of fun. But it is a group effort, and everybody works well together, and they meet. We also have a designer who is involved in the early stages of putting each issue together. They all live in central New York, so they all meet without me and do their thing.

Steve: And it works.

Ellen: And it works.

Steve: Very good. Do have a personal all time favorite piece, article that was published in Voices?

Ellen: I don’t myself, but I can tell you that there are certain issues, because what happens after the journal is published, we put it on the web. We actually don’t put the whole articles on the web. We haven’t made that leap yet. But we have almost whole articles. So someone reads it and sometimes comes back to us and asks for the whole thing. We have abstracts and excerpts on the web, and I can tell you which ones have been popular, because I get responses all the time. We had an article several years ago about the Quinceañera, the sweet fifteen birthday party that happens in the Latino, mostly Puerto Rican, community, when a girl reaches fifteen. I still receive several requests in a month for that article, or requests for me to give information on how to make a Quinceañera for somebody’s daughter. So that’s one that has struck a really responding chord. The other one that comes to mind is, we had an article maybe in the first issue or the second issue about a man who makes guiros, which is a musical instrument. This person was from I think the Dominican Republic. He plays merengue music, and it’s a scraper instrument that’s made out of tin and has holes in the design, but it’s a rhythm instrument. To make a long story short, we get requests through our web site about where to buy a guiro. So that’s another story we know people read a lot. There are certain articles that come to mind that have really struck some chord some place.

Steve: So you have a record on your web site of all the articles that have been published in the three publications since 1945?

Ellen: Yes, since 1945. We have an index, actually. You can go to the New York Folklore Society web site and search on a topic or subject, and it will pop up all the articles that we’ve ever published. Some of the back issues we still have, so we can access them. If we don’t have them, we can help you find them.

Steve: Is that an important mission of the publication, to make the archival information available?

Ellen: I think so, yes. We’ve thought, and probably will down the line as the quarterlies, our back issues disappear, and some issues we don’t have any more of, we’ll begin to put whole articles on the web site so people can actually get them online. But we haven’t made that leap yet. We do feel it is important to have all this material available.

Steve: Have you discussed whether you’ll continue having a print publication once you’ve done that?

Ellen: Not seriously. I know that’s that wave of the future.

Steve: Maybe.

Ellen: [laughs] We haven’t made that leap yet. I personally like something in my hands. Who knows? Eventually maybe that will become what happens and everything will be electronic.

Steve: So you see that as a conversation down the road, but it hasn’t been a topic that you’ve seriously looked at yet.

Ellen: Right. It’s been a small conversation, and not a serious conversation. So down the road it might become more serious.

Steve: We librarians still like the print, but who knows what will happen in the future. What are the most important or urgent issues for folklorists?

Ellen: Right now?

Steve: Yes.

Ellen: I’m seeing in the last ten years a real shrinking of our field. For me, that’s an urgent issue. I see universities with folklore programs that grew up in the 1970’s. I was actually a child of that era, when folklore was burgeoning. It was the tail end of the folk revival, and people were interested in folklore and folk music and folk art. There was a different feeling on campuses, too. Those programs that started at that point I see now, those professors retiring and not being replaced. So within New York state, that’s a real issue. There are fewer programs than there were, and so I feel that for undergraduates, if you don’t get exposed to the subject and the discipline at the undergraduate level, it makes it more difficult to enter into the graduate level of inquiry. That’s the biggest issue. I’m not sure that’s what you expected, but for me that’s the issue in folklore, is a real shrinking of the field. I don’t know whether it’s cyclical and that will change, but academic institutions are moving away from, maybe this is a broad overstatement, but the issues in folklore are being at this point not in the forefront.

Steve: What issues would those be?

Ellen: Certainly not multiculturalism, because that’s an issue that is in the forefront. But I don’t know, maybe going back to basics, much more a focus on the classics, and the canon of western literature, for example. The Great Books approach to learning as opposed to looking at folklore which is really coming from the people, from a much less lofty and higher echelon of socioeconomic status.

Steve: What do you like best about being executive director of the Society?

Ellen: I like being able to be in the place where I look at the trends, and that’s happening nationally. The New York Folklore Society, because we’re a state organization, but not a governmental state organization, but because we are the New York folklore society we actually in several ways represent New York state. There are similar organizations in other states. I like being in the position where I can see what’s happening nationally, but also see what’s happening within our state, and try to figure out what the trends are and where we can as a service organization develop programs that assist and help people in their work, whatever that is. For example, we’re working right now to put together a forum on immigrant and ethnic artists in the state. There are lots of issues with immigration right now. We had a forum in Brooklyn, we’re doing another one in Syracuse to really bring together people who work with immigrants and know those immigration issues and how it’s affecting their lives, their art, and their ability to do art, and get people together to talk about what kind of solutions we can come up with. I like the activist part of things.

Steve: That sounds like it leads right to my next question of what are the greatest challenges in your position directing the New York Folklore Society?

Ellen: The greatest challenge for any non-profit is financial. At this point we operate with a lot of grant support, and some earned income. That’s our biggest challenge, probably for me, is to keep an organization solvent and running and vibrant. Also, marketing and getting the word out. That’s the other biggest issue, is to get the New York Folklore Society known. We’re sort of a niche, and to find out where that niche is and to get our word out to people who really are interested, that’s the other biggest challenge.

Steve: Does you journal Voices bring in some income? I know it’s tied to membership, but is that a significant portion?

Ellen: Yes, I think so, it is. If you say the membership the journal subscription, then it is a significant part of our operating budget.

Steve: How do you see the future of Voices? Is it a healthy future?

Ellen: I think so. We certainly have no scarcity of articles. We’re never in the position since Voices started in 2000 of looking at an issue, and saying “Oh, no, we have holes in that.” So that’s a good thing. We always have enough material, and we certainly see our subscription base growing. That’s the other good thing. So yes, I see it as a healthy publication.

Steve: Excellent. Is there anything you’d like add? Any comments on anything we haven’t discussed yet?

Ellen: No, I don’t think so. Well, actually, I can just say we welcome writing. When we celebrated our 60^th anniversary last year, we had a whole issue devoted to writing, and we had a conference about it. If anybody is listening to this and would like to submit to us, we welcome submissions all the time.

Steve: Very good. Thank you, Ellen.

Ellen: Sure, thank you.

Steve:  To become a member of the New York Folklore Society and receive your own subscription to Voices, you may send a check for $35 payable to the New York Folklore Society, P.O. Box 764, Schenectady, NY 12301. As mentioned at the top of our show, the Society’s web site at http://www.nyfolklore.org contains a wealth of information about folklore and the Society. Many thanks to Ellen McHale for taking the time to visit with me. Thank you for listening to Periodical Radio. I’m your host, Steve Black.