On Aug. 5, longtime educator and audio producer Will Davis began his helm at the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices at WYSO 91.3. (Photo courtesy of WYSO)
Will Davis named director of WYSO’s Eichelberger Center
- Published: August 7, 2024
On Monday, Aug. 5, the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices at WYSO 91.3 gained a new — but familiar — voice at its helm.
Last week, WYSO announced that it has hired Will Davis to lead the Eichelberger Center, where up-and-coming audio storytellers from around the Miami Valley learn audio production and digital storytelling.
An educator and audio producer, Davis has a long connection with WYSO, having produced the “Veteran’s Voices” series and other pieces. He also helped launch the New Media incubator at Wright State University. For the past seven years, he’s worked for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he created the school’s podcasting program.
Davis spoke with the News last week, and said embarking on his new position at the Eichelberger Center feels like “a homecoming.” That’s true, he said, not only of WYSO and its “Community Voices” program, where he was trained in 2012 as part of its second class, but also of Yellow Springs as a community.
“I just got back 24 hours ago,” Davis said, sipping coffee at the Emporium and radiating excitement. “This is the first time I’ve been downtown [since returning], and I feel like my head is exploding!”
Like any good journalist, Davis’ first inclination was not to answer questions about himself, but to begin asking this reporter questions about Yellow Springs — about what’s been going on since he and his partner, Steve Rumbaugh, left the village for Tennessee in 2017.
“I’ve been so curious, especially since I’ve been away from the community,” Davis said. “In seven years, what’s changed? What did I miss?”
That curiosity, Davis said, was at the root of the journey that took him from an initial foray into filmmaking to his eventual career as an educator and an audio storyteller.
“I really was curious about how films were made; I was fascinated as a kid that there would be, for example, a fade out and a fade in, and I understood what it meant — people call that ‘film grammar’ — but how and why do we understand that?” Davis said. “That was part of the reason I wanted to study filmmaking, to find out, how does that work?”
Davis studied film at Columbia College Chicago on a director track, but said he soon realized being a film director was akin to being a film’s manager. He preferred the parts of the filmmaking process that involved shaping a story from its component parts, such as writing, editing or building a soundtrack.
“So I graduated and I realized I didn’t want to do filmmaking — but what I loved about filmmaking was really the storytelling,” he said.
Cut to 2012, and Davis, by this time a resident of Yellow Springs, kept hearing about WYSO’s “Community Voices” class, which had launched the previous year.
“I was curious, and friends with people from the first class who said to me, ‘You should do this’ — I heard that over and over,” he said. “So I took the class, and it really brought back all of what I had loved when I was studying film: character, writing, structure, all of that.
Compared with filmmaking — which, even at its most bare-bones, can be prohibitively expensive for independent artists — Davis said he found a relative freedom in audio storytelling. He likened that freedom to being a kind of “mad scientist,” collecting sound and tinkering on a story with a devoted drive and focus.
Davis stayed involved with WYSO, not only through continuing to produce stories after he finished his training course, but also by helping to train later classes of burgeoning storytellers — including this reporter. Though he was employed elsewhere for his proverbial day job, Davis said he “just kept going back” to WYSO.
“I just loved the work, and I loved the people [at WYSO],” he said. “It was always my favorite thing.”
In 2017, Davis and his partner moved to Tennessee, with both working for the University of Tennessee. While implementing and leading the school’s “PodLab” podcasting program, Davis contributed to a number of NPR series, including the acclaimed oral history series “StoryCorps,” and oversaw the creation of “Tennessee Valley Across the Table” and “Tennessee Valley Crossroads,” two student-led podcasts inspired by the “One Small Step” initiative produced by “StoryCorps.”
Having moved from the Midwest, where he grew up and lived for most of his life, to the South — a part of the country he described as “haunted, both literally and figuratively” — Davis said he felt, at times, isolated in his new home. His storytelling work, however, helped alleviate some of that sense of isolation.
In particular, Davis pointed to editing 150 oral histories for “StoryCorps,” and later even more for “Tennessee Valley Across the Table.” The latter program paired up strangers with differing views and encouraged conversation about who they were, as opposed to debate about the things on which they might disagree.
“I felt alone a lot of the time — but when I was hearing people’s stories, and hearing people who were different talk about their lives, I felt an empathy for these people who I thought were different from me, and so I started to build these connections through these oral history projects,” he said. “That’s the power of stories.”
He added: “I’m a production person and I like to edit, so I have a pretty pragmatic view of what I do — but putting that aside for a minute, and being kind of grand, what we’re doing is important.”
Davis said he relished both teaching and learning about storytelling at the University of Tennessee — but he never stopped feeling an affinity toward WYSO. From Tennessee, he said he kept tabs on the growth of WYSO as it became an independent radio station and gave equal focus to news, music and storytelling.
“It’s not uncommon for a public radio station to have a hybrid approach — either news and music, or news and storytelling — but to have all three is really great, and WYSO has just been killing it,” he said.
When the opportunity came to head up the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices, Davis said he jumped at the chance to continue teaching and telling stories in the place where it all started for him.
“If I were to look at my life and my work history and pick out the things I love to do, this job is it,” he said. “I feel very fortunate.”
Looking ahead, Davis said he intends to focus on a “refresh” of the Eichelberger Center’s instruction around audio production, noting that the center is likely “training the next generation of podcasters.” At the same time, Davis said he looks forward to what tomorrow’s storytellers have to teach him.
“I’m always learning, and I think that’s what I love about the work and why it’s always kept me engaged,” he said, noting that the “thousands of students” he’s taught over the years have shown him new ways of both telling and consuming stories.
“There may be a right and wrong way to get a level or mix sound — but there’s no right or wrong way to tell a story.”
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