Oral history interview with Dr. Emily Edwards, 2017

Lacey Wilson: Okay. So it started, today is Friday, March the 3rd, 2017. I am interviewing Dr. Emily Edwards from the Media Studies Department.

Emily Edwards: That's right.

Lacey Wilson: All right, so we'll just sort of start at the beginning and work our way through. Where were you born?

Emily Edwards: Where?

Lacey Wilson: Where.

Emily Edwards: Where was I born? I was born in Florence, Alabama, which is near Muscle Shoals, Alabama which is famous for the recording studios, FAME and Muscle Shoals Sound. And it's on the Tennessee River, in the northwest corner of the state.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. And when were you born?

Emily Edwards: 1953.

Lacey Wilson: What did your parents do?

Emily Edwards: My mother, well, she bought various properties near the university there, it's now called the University of North Alabama, it used to be Florence State University. She had some houses that she turned into student 00:01:00apartments, and so she rented student apartments. My dad worked, was an engineer for the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. Wow. I'm going to close this door.

Emily Edwards: Okay.

Lacey Wilson: I forgot to lock out the door. And when you were in school, what kinds of subjects were you interested in?

Emily Edwards: Are you talking about undergraduate school?

Lacey Wilson: High school before you apply?

Emily Edwards: High school? I was always interested in Theater and Drama and English and History. Those are my favorite subjects. I liked science, I had an unfortunate experience with an Algebra teacher who was a retired army colonel or something. He wasn't very inspiring, he was really authoritarian, I didn't like him. So sometimes, I think for young people, whether or not you like someone is 00:02:00associated with whether or not you like the subject that they teach.

Lacey Wilson: Sometimes.

Emily Edwards: Sometimes, so in that case it was true for me. So math was never, well, math was not a problem but Algebra I didn't like until I got into college, and I had a professor and I cannot remember her name, a woman professor who taught Algebra and she was pretty amazing and really changed that topic for me entirely. It's like, yeah.

Lacey Wilson: If the other guy was authoritative, how would you describe her teaching style?

Emily Edwards: I would describe her teaching style as she was very energetic, she was very egalitarian, she didn't hate women. She was one, she didn't assume that because you were female that you were stupid. There was a lot of things 00:03:00about her that were... And I wish I could remember her name, but I remember the experience of, "Oh, that's what that guy was trying to teach me. Oh I get it now." But I was also older too, so by the time I was in college by the time I had that course.

Lacey Wilson: So it was both a combination of a better teacher and a bit of maturity as well?

Emily Edwards: Maybe some maturity on my part.

Lacey Wilson: Sure, sure. So when you were looking to apply to college, did you go to college right after high school? Or did you work first?

Emily Edwards: I did. Well I worked and went to college, but my high school counselor sort of discouraged me from applying to any place other than Florence State University, I think because my mother didn't want me to leave the area but she said, "You could be a small fish in a big pond by going to some place, a big school. An important school or you could be a big fish in a small pond and 00:04:00stay," and then she was just really, really discouraged me from applying anywhere else. So I applied to UN, it's UNA now was in Florence State and of course got in. It turned out to be not a challenge for me. I got through school in three years.

Lacey Wilson: Oh wow.

Emily Edwards: And I double majored and double minor, I took lots of hours. So I probably needed more of a challenge than it represented. But I will say that it's a delightful school. In the '70s, it was a very quirky place to go to undergraduate school, the President of the University ... our mascot was a lion and he bought live lion cub to live on campus that built a compound form. And they still have lions on campus there.

Lacey Wilson: Really?

Emily Edwards: It was like the Hippie era or maybe sort of the middle of the 00:05:00Hippie era. We had some very eccentric faculty, and really amazing faculty. Maybe that's why it was so easy for me. The faculty, they weren't all famous with lots of books under their belt but they were quirky and colorful. One of the faculty members played banjo in the classes. I had another faculty member from English who was rumored to have wrestled a bear. I mean it was just the faculty were different, they weren't at all stuffy, they were just characters.

Lacey Wilson: They sound very personable.

Emily Edwards: Yeah. Well, some of them were just, I mean, I will say they were all characters and I cannot remember a bad one, I don't remember ever having a bad classroom experience as a student at that school.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Emily Edwards: So having said that about maybe not being challenged as much as I should have been, it was a delightful period of my life and I enjoyed it.

Lacey Wilson: And what did you double major and double minor in?

Emily Edwards: I double majored in Communications and Art and minored in English and History, because there wasn't journalism, they didn't have a journalism program. And they didn't have other things that I was, well, I think journalism was the main thing I was really interested in. So the closest I could get was, and they didn't have filmmaking, so the closest I could get was Theater, which was in communicate, it was a Communication-Theater combo and English. And then I just had an interest in history.

Lacey Wilson: Sure, sure. But you minored in English and you also majored in it? Was there a difference between...

Emily Edwards: No, no, no. I'm sorry. I'm minoring in English and History and majored in Art.

Lacey Wilson: And Communications.

Emily Edwards: And Communications.

Lacey Wilson: Okay, what kind of art did you do?

Emily Edwards: I did all kinds of art, I did animation and I tried an I did an animation project in school, I did art on paper, I did sculpture. I still paint.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, wow.

Emily Edwards: You know, and of course I still make films. I still do animated animations.

Lacey Wilson: Okay, so you graduated in what year? For undergrad?

Emily Edwards: Undergraduate would have been '73.

Lacey Wilson: Okay, and what are you thinking at that point?

Emily Edwards: Well, I got a couple of jobs in the area, one was at a television station. I was the Art Director for WOWL, which is channel 15 in Florence, 00:08:00Alabama. It was a privately owned, they don't have that anymore, it was a privately owned station it was owned by a family. And I was hired to do their mostly commercial arts stuff. Back in those days you had to make supers so there were white letters on black background so that you could put them in front of the camera and it was like super impose text over the image.

Emily Edwards: Nowadays, it's all digital stuff, but I did that kind of work. I also did all the slides and those days we used to have slides, they'd call them slide Karch Commercials, and it was essentially a voice, recorded voice over and a series of slides, still images that you ran through. Well, they ran through a system where it turned it into a commercial.

Emily Edwards: So I did a lot of that kind of work until ... that TV station didn't have a real reporting ... they didn't have a real news room. They had a news announcer and they had a sports announcer, but they didn't have people that went out and got the news, which is kind of what I was interested in. Although I hadn't had any training at that point. I just could just write and didn't know how to run a camera. And they didn't really have, at that point that no one really, or at least that level of TV station didn't really have any videotape cameras, it was film cameras.

Emily Edwards: And they didn't have there, except for the slide, slide machine where you develop the slides, they didn't have the ability to develop film. So 00:10:00you would have to, if you were going to go shoot some film, you had the to go out of house, so it wasn't very good for fast breaking news, and they didn't really have reporters. One of the things I do remember ... and the station did a lot of barter work. So instead of getting paid to run an ad, for example, they would barter out time on the television for something.

Emily Edwards: So one of the things was, they had a big swimming pool in front of it, which we used in front of the station, which we had been a part of that barter advertising. People don't do any of that kind of stuff anymore. The owner and his sons live behind the station itself. It was Dick Biddle and well Duke Biddle was the station manager. I'm trying to think what was it? I can't remember that, it'll come to me later, the station owner's name. But that 00:11:00station, the station itself, I was recently back in Florence and it's just pretty much, there's nothing there. The swimming pool it's been filled up with concrete and it's just the tower. There's nobody working there as the stations all collapsed and kind of just...

Lacey Wilson: Just like empty space falling apart.

Emily Edwards: Empty space falling apart, and grown over with vines. But it was an exciting place to work and this, by the way, I will say was a dry county and my boss had an office with a bunch of mirrors on one wall that slid and behind the mirrors was a full bar, everybody drank. So that made an impression on me. My most recent book kind of goes back to that, the whole thing about Southern liquor laws and music and race relations and how those things intertwined.

Emily Edwards: So, about the music culture really in and a place where you can't go to a bar and we had these drink houses or house parties. And as I was going to say, as a youngster in the '70s, the lot of the parties I went to were illegal house parties, rent parties, sometimes people would throw rent parties and they were ... I found out late. It doesn't happen everywhere and I kind of thought maybe this might happen in more places in the South. But they were integrated parties, they were all kids, college kids or kids who were of that same age, and we were all doing something illegal, having these house parties.

Emily Edwards: And a lot of the times musicians would play for free at these house parties, they would jam. And anyway, you have to read the book.

Lacey Wilson: I'm interested. So you were doing the commercials for that station?

Emily Edwards: I did the commercial for it. And at one point, I think my most memorable strongest memory of that period was when I was working in my office. And I heard this really, really loud, mean argument going on in the hallway kind of outside. And it was my boss and the sports announcer, and they got into a kind of a fight and he got the sport... he fired the sports announcer. This was right before the five o'clock news. And he comes into my office and says, "You're doing the sports."

Emily Edwards: It was baseball season and all those players, I didn't follow baseball and all the players had these Polish names with no vowels. And I had to 00:14:00go in there and read the sports and it was a complete, it was just a joke. But he kept me on as the sports announcer until like ... I did not like it. I essentially did two jobs, I did my old job as Art Director, which was a full time job.

Emily Edwards: And did the sports for several months and I was like, until I finally quit. It was like they were paying me for one job and I didn't have the skills do the other job because I didn't know, I didn't follow the sports. But he did say, "I was Alabama's first female sports announcer." I don't know if that's true. I have never tried to verify that, but he told me that.

Lacey Wilson: That's kind of nice if it's true.

Emily Edwards: If it's true, yeah, I don't care. I don't care. It was an embarrassing period for me. I did later on ... they moved me out of... I still 00:15:00did art directing but they got other people in there to help and they did move me into news. So I did news announcing, which I was much, much better at. One of the things that they didn't have the teleprompter and one of the skills, which is totally not a useful skill anymore really, was the ability to read copy on the page, read it, and read ahead and look up at the camera and remember what I just read.

Emily Edwards: So that was how I did that, but I eventually just, I've had enough of this. Well, I want you to go to graduate school too. So, I left and went to University of Tennessee, Knoxville in Theater. My Master's degree is in 00:16:00theater and then I stayed and got my PhD in Journalism and Mass Communication. To me, there was those two things worked together in my mind, not that... I just don't put the same kinds of boundaries around like things like Art, English, Theater, Communication, Journalism. They are ... History, I mean there's a lot of subject matters that we put that we have in different categories that my background, it was much more fluid.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. That explains why Theater and then Journalism isn't that as for the PhD. What was the difference when you moved from Alabama to Knoxville?

Emily Edwards: Big difference? Actually, after I left Florence, it went wet, but Knoxville was already a wet city, it was a bigger city. The University was huge. 00:17:00I had to work really, really hard in graduate school because I had some gaps in my education that I had to catch up to the other students in the program. It was exciting, it was really exciting. I loved Knoxville, I liked being that close to the mountains because it was, I think it was about an hour. It wasn't even an hour's drive to get to Gatlinburg from Knoxville. We could go to spend a weekend and real easy. And I love that part of the country. I love the Appalachian Mountains. It's one of things I like about Greensboro too, is that, you're not far from either the beach or the mountains either direction.

Emily Edwards: Plus, Greensboro is a beautiful place to live on its own. But 00:18:00Knoxville, I really enjoyed my time there. I was challenged in a lot of ways, I became an honest to God reporter in Knoxville. I was a police and dead body reporter.

Lacey Wilson: Was that during the Master's period or...?

Emily Edwards: No, that was, well, let's see. I was the Director for the Theater program, director of their publicity program for a while, I did public relations for Theater after I got my Master's degree in theater. And then I'm trying to remember, I think I moved into, I got a job at Channel 26 News right after then, maybe it was before then ... Anyway, I did a lot of media work and I really liked being a reporter when I was a general assignments reporter or when I did 00:19:00sort of special reports, you know, more feature type things.

Emily Edwards: But they moved me into police and dead body, which meant that I was, I had an unusual ... I went to work later in the day and it was working through the night because I was fast. I could get the story and get back and get it edited and ready to air really quickly. And we were, that was at a change between shooting film and then shooting tape. Shooting tape was really awkward and clunky and those days the equipment was really heavy and big and a lot of times I was by myself.

Emily Edwards: So it wasn't a whole lot of fun physically and it wasn't a whole lot of fun because of the kinds of stories I covered were really the tatters of 00:20:00somebody's life, somebody's life gone bad. Police and dead bodies. And eventually, that was before I got my PhD. So eventually I decided some people ... I was doing a lot of soul searching about, why is life so hard? Why do so many bad? And it seems like because you're covering those things, it seems like life is just not good for an awful lot of people. You have a tendency to ... I think, police also get depressed about humanity experience.

Emily Edwards: So I had a lot of questions and instead of looking into some sort of spiritual sort of guidance, I decided to go back and get a PhD in journalism. 00:21:00I didn't answer the questions that I wanted, but it was a really good experience to have. And I met a faculty member there named Jack Haskins who had gone through a sort of, or was going through a sort of similar problem and that he was very depressed by the amounts of bad news, personally, by the amounts of bad news that he was watching and had become a bad news adversive and tuning it out. And part of him felt really bad about that because in order to be an informed citizen, you need to know what's going on in the world.

Emily Edwards: And so he ended up starting this area of inquiry in the Journalism program it was the School of Journalism and Mass Communications that dealt with bad news or what he later called it, he expanded it into 00:22:00entertainment to called it "morbid curiosity in the mass media," which there it is see, morbid curiosity in the mass media.

Emily Edwards: And he was interested in why we pay so much attention to the worst possible things in the world and seem to neglect our own accomplishments. And he was especially interested in why people choose to go to watch a horror ... what I ended up studying for my PhD and what my research there was, was the question of why would most biological organisms try to avoid harm, so why would a human being willingly go plunk down money to see a horror movie where they know they might be traumatized?

Emily Edwards: And it was a very interesting area of inquiry. A side note is that, after I graduated and I went to Alabama, I went to University of Alabama, Birmingham and taught in that program before I came here. I don't know when this happened, but he and I kept up a correspondence and then at one point my letters came back to me. And I found out from another fellow student, fellow PhD student, that he had committed suicide. So in some ways, you study the things that have the greatest impact on your life and clearly he struggled with just the bad news of the world. I don't know what he would think about what's going on today.

Lacey Wilson: I was going to say, when was this? The mid '70s or late '70s?

Emily Edwards: Well, this would have been ... I came here in 1987 and it would 00:24:00have been after that because that was one of his letters, my letters didn't reach him anymore.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah, just a different tumultuous time.

Emily Edwards: Yeah, he was also sick and I don't know what, he was elderly at that point. He did come here, he came here for a program that we had, because I invited him to come here and he did go to UAB when I was teaching there. So I think this would have been in the '90s, which is actually more or less turbulent era. You know, it may have been other things.

Lacey Wilson: Maybe.

Emily Edwards: I don't know why he committed suicide so.

Lacey Wilson: Sure. And was that what your doctor was on? The sort of horror movie thing?

Emily Edwards: My dissertation studies was on horror movies. The work compels 00:25:00people, some people to go watch horror movies. And it turns out that there is somewhere, it ebbs and flows over the years, but there's a solid core of people that will always go to watch horror. It's about 10% of the population and when I was actively studying it, it tended to be young and male. Over the years, more women have become interested in that genre, and the genre's changed. So, we have our final girl now, I don't know if you're familiar with that concept, but the genre has changed, it's a very conservative genre too, the whole, especially the earliest earlier horror movies, the whole point of them seem to be, don't mess 00:26:00with the unknown or listen to... Don't mess with taboos, that kind of thing.

Lacey Wilson: I buy that given like how many of them, there's always the old trope where if the girl has sex, then she's going to die later on in the movie. And she seems to be just a very conservative thought.

Emily Edwards: Yeah. Horror movie characters, it's such a trope that people make. There's a commercial out or was a commercial out that made fun of horror movies where, the characters and the commercial do everything bad that the horror movie characters do. Oh yeah, let's go in, let's not jump in the car and leave, let's go down in the basement see what that sound is, that kind of thing.

Lacey Wilson: So you graduate with a PhD in Journalism, do you go work in 00:27:00journalism afterwards or do you teach after?

Emily Edwards: I continued to work off and on, it wasn't always full time. But I continued to work as a journalist, but I went to UAB. I was all but dissertation, I didn't finish my dissertation, so I was ABD. I finished it the first year I was down there, which I don't think people even higher that way anymore. But maybe a few places, there's so many people, there's so many PhDs now looking for jobs that already have a degree in hand that you'd have to be a pretty rare individual I think to get a tenure track job as an ABD. Higher education has really changed a lot over the years.

Emily Edwards: But yeah, I went down to Birmingham. I was still stayed active in journalism. I was a member of the press club down there, and also the Black 00:28:00Journalists. I'm not black, but I was a member of the Black Journalists Association.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, that's interesting.

Emily Edwards: Yeah, as far as I know. I'm Southern, so you know, who knows. Let's see, yeah, so I was there until 1987 when I came here.

Lacey Wilson: You were teaching there and being a journalist at the same time?

Emily Edwards: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lacey Wilson: So were you just like?

Emily Edwards: I was freelancing.

Lacey Wilson: Okay, that's what I was trying to get at. So you were just like, if something would come up...

Emily Edwards: Yeah, or somebody asked me to do something.

Lacey Wilson: Right.

Emily Edwards: I would do it. Sometimes, not every job, but some of them.

Lacey Wilson: Sure. What were you teaching at the time? Journalism?

Emily Edwards: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I taught Journalism, I was the Director of the Broadcast area. It was actually a Speech Communication ... I'm trying to remember the name of the... it was a program within Speech Communication. And so 00:29:00they had Print Journalism and then they had the Broadcast area included other things besides journalism. And I was like the faculty member, I was the Head of it. And it's interesting, it's a model that I don't agree with, but I see universities everywhere going back to that model because it's cheap but you have like a main tenure track faculty in running a program.

Emily Edwards: And then the faculty that help teach the courses tend to be adjuncts. It made sense to me in a way because when you're teaching journalism, if you could hire someone who's on the air to come in and teach a couple of classes, the students get excited because this guy's on the air and they can watch him on television, delivering the news and then he's coming in and he's teaching classes. We did that here too with local journalists coming in and 00:30:00teaching in our program in Media Studies. Back from the time I came here it was a program in a huge department, which was called Communication and Theater.

Emily Edwards: And it had like five programs which included Speech Communication, our program was called Broadcasting and Cinema, Communication Disorders, Education of Deaf Children, and Theater. And then at one point we split up and we became departments and went to different schools. So now I think Communication Disorders, I'm not sure where that is, but yeah, we split up into 00:31:00different schools. Theater is over and I kind of think this department belongs over there and it used to be, I don't know what the current name of it is, but it's a new performing arts, you know, in the performing arts.

Emily Edwards: But Art has gone over there now too, so I'm not sure if they've changed the name yet. That probably change the name of it.

Lacey Wilson: They may have.

Emily Edwards: But we've always been in the College of Arts and Sciences. We tried at one point when ... right after I first came to UNCG the huge department tried to become a school of communications, which would have been, I think a really smart move, a good way to advertise ourselves to potential students, and 00:32:00also just make us more manageable. We were just not manageable as a department. It was huge, a huge department. And we had things in common, but not, I don't know, we only had one meeting a month as a full department.

Emily Edwards: So I was a little unwieldy and the Dean at the time, which was Dean Creighton wouldn't let that happen because we would be taking a huge chunk of students out of the college, or maybe a huge chunk of resources out of the college, so that didn't happen. But we fought for it really, really hard.

Lacey Wilson: Sure. Okay. So when you were teaching at, I forgot the name of the first school.

Emily Edwards: UAB.

Lacey Wilson: UAB.

Emily Edwards: University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Lacey Wilson: Was that the first time you had taught?

Emily Edwards: No, I taught at University of Tennessee but as an adjunct and 00:33:00then as a graduate, well, first as a graduate student and later on as an adjunct.

Lacey Wilson: Okay, so what was your first time teaching like?

Emily Edwards: Actually, it was good. I enjoyed doing it, but I taught without having really any instruction and being a good teacher at the college level ... and I was really, about the same age as my students. The first class I taught was a huge class, I had 300 students in it, and it was like a televised lecture and then laboratories. And I was in charge of a laboratory. Later on I taught the lecture for a different course that had 300 students in it, these introductory classes. I enjoyed doing that, I learned the hard way how to be a 00:34:00lecturer and how to lecture to students. I guess I related to them because we were all the same age then, in those days, not anymore.

Emily Edwards: In those days we were ... As it turned out, the more the older I got, I happened to like that age period, 18 to 21. It's a really special time in someone's life where a lot of times you're doing, you're really becoming an adult and you're making decisions for yourself, and you're being confronted with lots of ideas and it's just - eyes get opened and it's an exciting part of your life. So I've always enjoyed teaching that age group, no matter how old I am or 00:35:00young I am, that age group stays the same.

Emily Edwards: Essentially, I've had adult, older adult students and I enjoy that too. It's especially fun to have a really diverse class. I don't see that much diversity. I see more of that diversity at UAB than I do here, it's really rare for me to get a really mature student unless it was, I taught in the BLS program briefly and I would run across more diversity in student ages in that program.

Lacey Wilson: Okay, and then what made you go from UAB to Greensboro?

Emily Edwards: Well, interestingly enough, before I went to UAB I had, you know, sent out feelers, looking for a job, knowing that I was going to be finishing my degree in a year or whenever I finished my dissertation and I was going to need 00:36:00to find a job. So I started looking at the chronicle of higher education, everybody does this, it's going to be a teacher in university. And I started sending, looking to see what positions were out there and there was a position here then. And I apply or actually I didn't apply, but John Lee Jellicorse was the Department Head at that time and he was good friends with one of the faculty that had been pretty seminal in my life, and a woman named Lorraine Lester, she was the Head of the department, the Speech Department at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She's passed now. Amazing woman, really, really powerful woman.

Lacey Wilson: What's her name again?

Emily Edwards: Lorraine Lester. I guess somehow she had told him about me and so 00:37:00he was in Knoxville, he interviewed me in Knoxville. At that time, I was really interested in getting back to Alabama. I thought, you know, I really want to be closer to my family and my family all lived in Alabama. And I went down and I actually interviewed at a lot of different schools and I interviewed in Atlanta and a lot of big places that have a lot of big media going on.

Emily Edwards: And Birmingham was a big media town and it was close to, it was only a three hour drive from my hometown and I still had parents at that time. They were living, alive, and I have three brothers, so I have visited there often. So it would be more convenient for me to visit with family and friends if I moved back to Alabama. And so I took that job, but when I was in Birmingham I 00:38:00got married and my husband are both living in Birmingham and I had a baby who was premature, very sick.

Emily Edwards: And so there was a period where I still taught my classes but I was being a caregiver. Come up and being a caregiver right now. But I was being a caregiver and I finished my dissertation that first year. I had published, I think I published two articles. I had something in the pipeline but I was worried about getting tenure because I had given up my time, devoted to this sick baby.

Emily Edwards: And I was not, they didn't have anything like stop the tenure clock like we have here now. So I was worried that I wouldn't have five 00:39:00publications, the rule was, you need to publish something every single year. And I had three publications and I was looking ahead going, will I be able to catch up. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to catch up. So I started kind of looking at what else was out there and there was still this job here or else it had come back around.

Emily Edwards: And so I sent Dr. Jellicorse my application and he invited me to come up and it seemed like a real good fit because there was, Theater was part of the, it was an associated program. I didn't expect, I have taught Drama classes in the past at UT. I didn't really expect to teach Drama classes, but I just thought, you know, it would be nice to have that relationship if I wanted 00:40:00to make a narrative film. There was this resource of talent, of design, and acting talent and there that I could tap into that didn't work out quite the way I had envisioned.

Emily Edwards: And John Lee is just, I remember really liking him, and then when I came here for the first time to interview, it was in April I think. And the city was in complete bloom, it was just gorgeous. That was before this campus looked as good as it looked too. But the city itself looked amazing. And there was a little bit of a salary hike and I kept thinking, "You know what? Well, just, I would maybe even if I, even if tenure looked pretty solid for me at UAB 00:41:00there's a lot about Greensboro that I ... it was progressive, whereas Alabama, even in Birmingham, Birmingham has his pockets of really progressive artistic people." But it seemed like there was, I mean there's five colleges here, five colleges. There's a lot of bright, smart, creative people and I just fell in love. And so here I am.

Lacey Wilson: So you came here in what year?

Emily Edwards: '87.

Lacey Wilson: '87, and you started teaching journalism classes off the bat?

Emily Edwards: Well, no, I didn't teach journalism classes because this school, and I agree with this premise, it did the same thing that UAB did which is hire as an adjunct. Someone like, what's his name? They named a street for him right out here. Kannard. Starts with a K. He was the anchor at Channel two forever. 00:42:00He's retired now. But he came and taught for us, we had other people from stations in this area come and teach as adjuncts.

Emily Edwards: And that's, I think, important for students because there's a professional connection and, an internship connection, and I agree with that principle, that at least you ought to have that relationship with the local media. But I taught production courses, I taught directing, I taught studio. One of the things that I liked about, although that the faculty complain about this, but I used to teach at UAB, I used to teach directing and we would do our newscasts and stuff in a classroom.

Emily Edwards: We have a studio, which was part of the UN - the public 00:43:00television system here at one point in the history. Right over here, the Carmichael Studio. And it's got the big, the ceiling height, you need to hang lights without worrying about catching something on fire. We had real studio cameras, we could do a newscast, we could do a cooking show, we could do a lot of things in that studio that were just really awkward to do in the classroom.

Emily Edwards: So that was another thing that attracted me. It felt like, you know. I thought also, thought that there was more of a relationship between the universities and the public television, North Carolina public television, than there actually was. I was kind of misled about that, but the studio, and we had an engineer who was full time. So it seemed like a good move.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. And what was the department like when you came in here?

Emily Edwards: Well, it was a program of a huge, huge, huge department that I described earlier with five different programs, we were all big. I mean we had more faculty. I believe this is right. We had more faculty, full time faculty, on staff as a program than we now do as a standalone department.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Emily Edwards: We have about the same number of students, although I think at one time we had like 300 undergraduates and we had a graduate program, that was it. We don't have a graduate program anymore. We lost that recently. We lost it to Wilmington, we had a 30-year MFA program. That was another reason why I came, the opportunity to teach in the MFA program. And I actually Directed the MFA 00:45:00program for a while.

Lacey Wilson: Sure. What were your favorite classes to teach?

Emily Edwards: That's a hard question to answer.

Lacey Wilson: Some of them.

Emily Edwards: I like teaching, but I wasn't able to do this until more recently about, I like teaching screenwriting. Again, it's different from journalism. I like teaching. I teach a course called script analysis right now, which is a whole lot of fun. I developed a course called gender and media culture, which I really enjoy teaching. I enjoy teaching production classes. A top field production, which I love that class, that class doesn't exist anymore in the same configuration, but we would go out and we do field reports or it was mostly 00:46:00field reports.

Emily Edwards: I taught editing. I've taught ... never taught cinematography. I taught news analysis, I taught a course called the ghost film which-

Lacey Wilson: Films about ghosts?

Emily Edwards: Yeah. It's a sub-genre of horror, although not all ghost films are horror films like Casper, for example.

Lacey Wilson: Right, not a horror film.

Emily Edwards: Yeah, so I taught that, we have a course that can be ... the subject matter can change from time to time. I've taught like screenwriting, the short script. I've taught introduction to graduate studies, I've taught really a fair number of courses. And right now I generally teach screenwriting, media 00:47:00writing, which includes a unit on journalism. I teach gender and media culture and script analysis, those are the courses I generally teach. And I like teaching all of them. Some semesters are better than others but I generally have really, really good students. I can't really complain about the students that I get, that consistently pretty decent.

Emily Edwards: Every once in a while you'll get some who are lazy, some who prioritize other things. I can kind of understand that because this is where you're maybe doing a lot of serious dating and having to deal on your own with things like a broken car. Well, you know, where usually parents took care of stuff like that or having to deal with things like dealing with an apartment for 00:48:00the first time and roommates and just the complications of living that living at home with parents who dealt with that for you.

Emily Edwards: And this is the first time that a lot of people are having to really learn a whole lot of stuff that ... outside of just what they're learning in their classes. And sometimes I think faculty forget that, that's that period of, that's a really important period of your life.

Lacey Wilson: It really is. So were you freelancing here at the same time?

Emily Edwards: I don't know if you'd call it freelancing because a lot of it ... this program unlike UAB because of the nature of this program, which is another thing I liked about it, faculty are allowed to do, in addition to publication, you are allowed to do what we call creative scholarship. So I was able to, I've made four feature films, and I've made documentaries. Early in my career in 00:49:001989, I had the opportunity to go to collaborate with Dr. Rebecca Adams.

Emily Edwards: She was then in the Sociology Department and we went on tour following the Grateful Dead and I did a documentary, which became a pretty big deal. For a while it was called Deadheads: An American Subculture. It was distributed by films for the humanities. And I did some, a couple of other shorter films that were not as widely distributed based on that teaching on tour is one of them. It was hitting more about what it's like, because we took students with us. You want to talk about something really dangerous? Take college students into an environment where there's lots of drugs. It went really 00:50:00well though.

Emily Edwards: The students were really mindful, I think, of the risk they would put us in as faculty if they didn't be serious about why they were on this thing. They were studying a sociological subculture and the students that went with me were studying film making, documentary film making, and we were on tour all summer long.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Emily Edwards: And it was really a seminal experience. It had its real rough moments, real rough moments. My engineer, the engineer that went with us got real sick. Had to go to the hospital while we were on the road-

Lacey Wilson: Oh boy.

Emily Edwards: ... we had a storm that came up while we were in tents with electronic equipment, lots of rain, I was with hairdryers, I dried out these videotapes, hoping that I would be able to come home with something that I could 00:51:00edit it and make a movie with. I had students who got overheated and passed out. I had a student that got overheated and passed out. But it ended up, I got my documentary made. Rebecca Adams, her students, she helped, she published a book, she edited a book with some, I think some of the articles that her student, her graduate students wrote.

Emily Edwards: So it was really, really successful. And that film, not only was it went to public television stations all over the country and it's been distributed all of the... It's my widely distributed work and it was really early in my tenure here. It's one of the important parts of my tenure file. I published in addition to that. But I mean, it was a pretty significant piece of 00:52:00work for me, and so yeah.

Lacey Wilson: When did you start directing?

Emily Edwards: I directed things when I was at Alabama. Alabama, the UAB has a large medical school and I did things like videotape surgeries.

Lacey Wilson: For what purpose?

Emily Edwards: To document the surgery and helping it was you... Again, these were more in-house kinds of things that were used to help instruct future surgeon, surgeons or other surgeons, about process.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Emily Edwards: So I mean, I remember one where they took, I think it was the big toe off a guy's foot and put it and made it into his thumb, so that he could 00:53:00have a thumb on his hand.

Lacey Wilson: Good.

Emily Edwards: I mean, it just, yeah.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. And then like you're directing with students in the Deadheads one.

Emily Edwards: All of my stuff.

Lacey Wilson: All of your-

Emily Edwards: I could not make a feature film on the amount of money that I can get with a grant without students, without student creativity and labor. They serve in all the below the line positions, they're laying track there. When I started making feature films, I was already of an age where I'm hauling stuff around was starting to get to me. I mean equipment started to get less bulky, video equipment it's always been ... you have to have physical ability to climb 00:54:00up a ladder with a pretty heavy camera or if you're going to get ...

Emily Edwards: And I never had a crane, I mean, until, well I did have cranes on one of the features, but a lot of times I was making do with, instead of having a nice dolly, you've got a wheelchair, you know. So I've always needed student help. The challenge is, is that sometimes students don't understand what it is they're doing. And the rule for me was that you can always, when we're doing something, you can always raise your hand and we'll stop production to answer your question. But you cannot raise your hand after I've said roll camera and you can't raise your hand until after I say cut.

Emily Edwards: So in between those you have to just shut up and hold on to your question, and hopefully it's not a question that the answer to is important to 00:55:00that shot, that we were trying to get. But yeah, so that, I mean, and that is a challenge because you have people who make a lot of mistakes. The good thing about doing what I do is that, especially on a feature film, mistakes can be really costly to a career, but mistakes on my set are not going to cost you your career, and not going to blackball you from getting another job.

Emily Edwards: So it can hurt me or it can hurt the final outcome of the movie and make it less, make it not as good as it might have been, but it's not going to kill your career and you're going to learn valuable lessons.

Lacey Wilson: It's a learning process instead of just like a job, job.

Emily Edwards: Every production is different. I don't care how many seasoned professionals you've got working on a project, the challenges are always going 00:56:00to be different, and that's one of the things that it really takes creative people to problem solve. And what's nice about having young, energetic, curious people on your crew is sometimes they can figure out how to solve something. What's a creative way to, how are we going to get this particular shot? We don't have the equipment we need to get that shot, is there another, can somebody - gee, I really would like to have this shot. Let's figure it out. Put our heads together. How can we get it? And somebody will come up with an answer.

Lacey Wilson: Is it difficult to sort of like do feature films as well as teaching, like as a balancing thing for a career? Because they seem very-

Emily Edwards: Usually when I have actively been in production, there's three different phases to making a feature film, there's pre-production where you plan everything and your script is written, it's broken down. You've figured out 00:57:00where you're going to shoot everything, how much money you actually need, how much money you have, how are you going to figure out your schedule, all of that. You do casting, you have your read throughs, so all that's pre-production.

Emily Edwards: When you're in production, you're actually capturing sight and sound. And usually, I think for all my features, during that period I had had a research leave. So I think I may not have been true for all, I may have been one that I didn't have a research leave on. And we just did all our productions. I think all our actual filming was like Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I had worked my schedule so that I didn't have a Friday class.

Emily Edwards: I think that's what happened. So you have your production and it's best if you're not teaching or doing a lecture on campus. Now, you're always teaching because you're teaching in production, you're teaching on the set, or if it's on location.

Lacey Wilson: On the ground teaching.

Emily Edwards: And so there's I mean, there's that, and it's hard because it's not like a Hollywood director comes onto the set and everybody is there to support them. I don't have that luxury. I don't have that support. I have people who need support, who need answers to questions or who don't understand what they're doing or the worst case. Well, when I did my feature films, I was collaborating with Piedmont Community College and I also had students from Bennett College, Duke, High Point, Guilford, I'm trying to think, Elon, who 00:59:00would come and they were either getting credit through their university as an independent study or as an internship to work on these things with me. I actually had two students, three students who were friends of my daughter from... Anyway, I've had a lot of students from different colleges who've been on the set, but the majority of where UNCG and Piedmont Community College students.

Emily Edwards: Guilford Technical Community College. So yeah, a lot of different students and there was a really strong effort when I was doing this, and this has been almost 10 years ago, we were determined that we would have an 01:00:00indigenous film, you know, the "New Hollywood." And at that point there was a lot of support, there was a lot of political support to have a film, we were like the third nationwide in terms of just media production. So it's not just feature films but North Carolina was doing a lot of commercial work, documentary work was being made here. It was just very, very active. And one of the things that we thought was the better trained our students are, and the better mix, the more they know each other from different campuses, the stronger the indigenous film making community would be.

Emily Edwards: And so if there was an outside group coming in and to make a movie or a documentary or commercial, they could tap right into the local 01:01:00resources, the local talent ,and it would be really good for the state. Somehow I think it was. I don't want to blame this, I don't want to lay this all at the feet of the GOP in this state, but a lot of it is their fault that they kept cutting and cutting and cutting into the point where we can do that kind of work where it just, there wasn't the money there to do it and they weren't very supportive of the film industry.

Emily Edwards: So there were not incentives to bring projects into the state. The film making is not like, it is like manufacturing and not like manufacturing. If you have a company that's making, let's say, tables or furniture, there's those jobs there, there's a building there and it's there, you pay rent on that building. Well, film is, you had your production period and 01:02:00then you go into pre-production and then the product is made. But the way it work, so you work, so if you're below the line and, and what you do is design work, you design sets or something like that. Once that film is, once your set is designed, those sets are designed for that film you're done. Except that people know you, they like your work and you tend to get hired on more and more projects.

Emily Edwards: So it's a job to job kind of thing but it isn't, it's not as, I don't know. I think there's a fault sort of way of looking at that kind of production industry. There's people here who worked in this state and film their whole lives, and they worked for different companies, they always find jobs 01:03:00because their skills are needed, but they're not needed if Georgia is giving away big incentives to go there and make your commercial.

Lacey Wilson: Or Louisiana.

Emily Edwards: Or Louisiana or someplace else, so that's the reality of it. And it's hard, I think for some lawmakers, to see how much money is actually made during the production process. Because when you bring a crew in or when you bring a project in, you hire local people, but then there's always you have to buy things, you have to feed people. So one of the things that I spent the most money on was what we call craft services. And you know what that is?

Lacey Wilson: I think that's what you feed the actors and the crew.

Emily Edwards: You feed people, yeah, you'd have to. If you are going to be on set all day long, the full day.

Lacey Wilson: They need to eat something.

Emily Edwards: And if you follow union rules, you have to feed them a hot meal, you have to have snacks there available all day. And we're talking 18 to 21-year-olds eat a lot, you know?

Lacey Wilson: They do.

Emily Edwards: Growing.

Lacey Wilson: And they get cranky when they don't.

Emily Edwards: They get cranky when they don't, so you want them happy, you want them fed. So they're spending money on things. You're buying wood, you're buying materials, you're buying... It's a big endeavor, it's a big endeavor. You're renting port-a-potties.

Lacey Wilson: All that money is going places.

Emily Edwards: Is going places, yeah.

Lacey Wilson: They just don't see it.

Emily Edwards: And you're paying a lawyer, you got lawyers-

Lacey Wilson: To make sure it's all legal.

Emily Edwards: ... you're paying police.

Lacey Wilson: To make sure everyone's safe.

Emily Edwards: Yeah. Or to block a road or whatever. So there's a lot of things that people who don't understand the industry, they don't see it as really, it's 01:05:00not the same thing as a manufacturing industry that's here, making-

Lacey Wilson: Tables.

Emily Edwards: ... tables, yeah.

Lacey Wilson: Can you talk to me about the films that you've made with your students here?

Emily Edwards: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lacey Wilson: I don't know if we're going to go through them all as we can.

Emily Edwards: There's only four feature films, but there's been several documentaries that I've made. Like I say, I was a journalist, so making documentaries was kind of second nature to me. The feature film wasn't, even though I have a theater background and it was a little bit more of a struggle to make a feature film. It's a big struggle, because of the aesthetics that people are used to, they're used to continuity editing, you have to think through all that. A documentary you can get away with ... is cheaper, honestly, a lot 01:06:00cheaper to maybe you have fewer people, people involved. You can make a documentary by yourself. But a feature film, you need actors and you need assistant directors and you need cinematographers and you need gaffers and you need craft services people and you need these lots of stunts.

Emily Edwards: And I had to actually pay to ... one of my movies, this one, this one right here. This one.

Lacey Wilson: So concrete.

Emily Edwards: Had a cat in it, and I had to pay $400 a day for a professional cat and the cat wrangler for that one.

Lacey Wilson: Professional cat.

Emily Edwards: A professional cat, yeah, right.

Lacey Wilson: Not just-

Emily Edwards: Just a beautiful cat, but no, that cat was not, that cat was an amateur.

Lacey Wilson: Amateur cat?

Emily Edwards: Yeah. It was the one of, what they say about not being able to 01:07:00herd cats, you can't direct the meter. You have to have someone, you have to trick them. And shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, and hope that you can get something out of the day that you can get use-

Lacey Wilson: Can edit together to look like this was what you wanted to.

Emily Edwards: It's looks like he's doing what you want me to do.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah. So, what's the first feature film you made here?

Emily Edwards: The first feature film was Dead Right.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Emily Edwards: Which was, it's a feature by the way, is anything over 30 minutes. And that one's 50 minutes, the shortest. The rest of them are full features two-hour features. But that one was, yeah, that was my experiment. You know, I thought, well, and I was actually ... The reason it all happened is I was approached by the director of the Piedmont Community College Film Program, 01:08:00who wanted to train his students below the line, make them really, really technically smart. He didn't have in his program screenwriting and thought and dadada. And he approached me, I had started writing screenplays and I don't remember why.

Emily Edwards: Oh, well, maybe it was because it was one of the areas that I was interested in and I could actually get, it was actually considered creative scholarship here. And so if I wrote a screenplay, even if I didn't get it produced, if it won an award, it would count toward my annual evaluation as an activity that a ... scholarship activity. So Dead Right, I had just won an award for that script and I was at UFDA and he came to hear the table reading and then 01:09:00he approached me afterwards and asked if I would be interested in directing that script so that his students could work on it.

Emily Edwards: And I said, yeah, yeah. And so we collaborated on that. I didn't have very many students on that because I wasn't sure how that was, how it was going to work out. I had a couple but not many and I had another faculty member actually from the Theater program who was in it, and actually advise me about casting. There was not many roles and it was a smaller confined, it was a script about a hoarder. Yes. It was about a hoarder, she hoarded, she saved everything 01:10:00including a dead body. But yeah, that's why it's called Dead Right. She was a writer and she was a hoarder, that character.

Emily Edwards: So that went really, really well. And then after the thing was produced, I entered it into festivals and it won awards and was shown screen, a lot of different festivals, and he wanted to do it again. And the rule was though, no script, unless the script had won, it had already been vetted and it won an award. So I had another one and that was Root Doctor. And so we did that one and that went really well. And again, I had more students involved with that one, I didn't have the Theater Department, wasn't as much involved in that one 01:11:00though. Then I did Scripture Cake, which was really, really a great experience.

Emily Edwards: That was shot ... these were all shot on film and we had gotten a Kodak grant for that one. So we had that was when Kodak was still very viable, I think we've got a Kodak grant for this one too. So we had free film and we got some other little tiny external grants here and there and one of the things I learned is that if you had different ages actresses or actors or, if you need an older actor, there's a large, there's a lot of community actors that are really excited about and some of them are really talented and professionals who are in between jobs will come and give away their talent and work with students.

Emily Edwards: So that was a really good experience and then the last feature was Bone Creek. So the actress, the lead actress from that, well, Logie Meachum was in that one and he was in an Academy Award Winning Short, really talented actor. And the actress, Alison Walls is a talented actress from New Zealand. And Jane Holstrom has also done professional work. And the man up there, whose I can't remember. Let's see. Scott Parker has done professional work. But yeah, so they were working right alongside students that were cast in there.

Emily Edwards: But that one was shot on digital, was shot digitally on a red camera. So Kodak was no longer giving out that grant but in some ways, I really liked the digital stuff better than the film. You're less restricted. I mean, it's not as expensive at all, I mean, there's a lot less expensive to do that movie, and I didn't have a big, big grant to do that movie. But we, as much fun, that was a whole lot of fun. We wrote original music for the soundtrack.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, that's cool.

Emily Edwards: And got a lot of local musicians involved. You gave away their talent.

Lacey Wilson: For a good cause, for a cool movie and some students, yeah. What's 01:14:00Root Doctor about?

Emily Edwards: Route? Do you know what a root doctor is?

Lacey Wilson: No.

Emily Edwards: You don't know what a root doctor is?

Lacey Wilson: I do not know what the root doctor is.

Emily Edwards: Growing up in North Alabama, there were people who would do things like I had a relative who my mother hated because she was like a black sheep of the family. But you could call her up if something happened. For example, when I was 10 years old, I was bitten by horse fly on my leg, and it got ... and somehow infected, it just swelled and it was really painful. My mom didn't like to take us to the doctor unless it was serious.

Emily Edwards: So she called this relative of ours and over the phone, this relative told her how to mix a poltis out of, I think it was like tobacco and 01:15:00onions and garlic and some other stuff. And then you heat it up and I just remember how painful it was, and then my mom stuck it on top of that and it just was like instant relief, it was amazing. And she got rid of my brother's warts and she bought them off of him. I know. So, it's kind of like a combination of folk, medicine, and magic.

Emily Edwards: Now, it depends on the, like my relative, her root doctoring comes from a Germanic-African-Indian kind of combination. There's more African dominance where you might find social problems being dealt with. So let's say you're having problems with your wife or your husband, you might go to a root 01:16:00doctor and a root doctor might talk to you for a long time about things and then might give you a powder or a blessing. Let's see if I still have some of the stuff. I mean, you can get, oh shoot. You've never seen stuff like this?

Lacey Wilson: I haven't. I'm not from here. I don't think I've ever heard it called root doctor though.

Emily Edwards: If you go down to New Orleans, they call it Voodoo or Hoodoo.

Lacey Wilson: That I've heard of.

Emily Edwards: It's the same thing.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Emily Edwards: These are bad crystals. So yeah, different, different stuff. I mean, these are not the real thing. These are for my set.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Emily Edwards: This is stuff that was actually on-

Lacey Wilson: For the movie.

Emily Edwards: Yeah, for the movie. So this is not the real deal. I have been in shops that sold that stuff and I do know root doctors have been to root doctors for research. I've interviewed people for a documentary called Wondrous Healing. And another documentary called one Wondrous Events that looked into, well Wondrous Gealing is the one that, and then I did a documentary called Folk Medicine which dealt with this.

Emily Edwards: So that research led to that script, which won an award and then led to production. So that's how that worked.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. Cool. Cool. What's the Spiritual Cake?

Emily Edwards: The Scripture Cake?

Lacey Wilson: Scripture Cake, about?

Emily Edwards: I'll give you a copy of that. You might like it. Actually, that is about anti-miscegenation law.

Lacey Wilson: Oh.

Emily Edwards: In Alabama, one of the things that was really kind of, one of the things that was really interesting, to me, was that anti-miscegenation laws were still on the books until 2000. So it was against the law, of course, the federal law Loving-

Lacey Wilson: and Virginia.

Emily Edwards: Yeah. Changed that. But it was against the law to love or try to marry someone outside your race. And that was federal, that was a federal law up until Loving versus Virginia. And so what this story is about, and this story is about a family where the husband lost his widower with young children and he's 01:19:00hired I guess, a woman to come in and help with that, this is the backstory. This is not actually the script, but the backstory and she is there loving and taking care of his children and he falls in love with our earth. She falls in love with him, they married, they have children, two children.

Emily Edwards: So then when he dies, his family, she's not allowed to inherit anything. And essentially his family comes in to take that estate and kicks them out and she's goes to prison.

Lacey Wilson: Oh wow.

Emily Edwards: I mean, the judge drags her off. So this is about this divided family and that's the backstory. Many, many years later, the descendant of the 01:20:00African American side has become curious and has found one of his cousins, who is a hippie, they meet, and she's going to take him to a family reunion and the guy, he's a foreign exchange student.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, that's sound interesting.

Emily Edwards: So yeah, she takes him to the family reunion. So it was supposed to be a cuisine movie, I had to cut a lot, that was one of the film, one of the ones made on film. You could tell by the aspect ratio.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Emily Edwards: It's the older style aspect ratio, but I had to cut it and cut it and cut it because I just didn't have the money to make the full script, all of the cooking and all of the family coming and bunch of the scenes I had to get cut. But I still think that you can follow the story, even though what's going 01:21:00on there. But it turns out that, it's got a happy ending. I mean they find out who he is and then we learn that this guy, that the family member that kept the mother and her children out, he was supposed to be a righteous man. He was actually a bully to the kids that, to the white kids too. And I don't know, anyways, that's the story.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. Well I'm looking forward to watching that.

Emily Edwards: And Bone Creek is a story about moonshine and these are all very southern stories, really southern stories. But I was raised in North Alabama, what do you want to write?

Lacey Wilson: Write what you know.

Emily Edwards: Yeah, write what you know.

Lacey Wilson: Okay, so we're going to venture a little further in. Do you 01:22:00remember anything about, I think you came in during Moran?

Emily Edwards: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lacey Wilson: Yeah. Did you meet Moran?

Emily Edwards: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lacey Wilson: What'd you think of Moran?

Emily Edwards: I don't really have any strong memories of him. He's kind of a top-down kind of guy, and at that point in my life I was struggling with trying to get all the things done that I had to do, raise a kid, do my research, do my creative scholarship, teach my classes. So I wasn't as mindful of the campus politics at that point.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Emily Edwards: Now, I will tell you that in 1990 when I had the first sort of, I 01:23:00think it was the 30th anniversary of the sit-ins downtown. There was something called the "all college read" and I'm not sure how much he was involved with. I do know, our Dean was involved with it and it was the "all college read." So maybe it was just the college was Dean Creighton, and the book that was assigned was Civilities and Civil Rights. Have you ever read that?

Lacey Wilson: No, it's not really familiar.

Emily Edwards: It's really good, it's really good. Chafe, is that right? But anyway, I was teaching the documentary production class, it's a class that I developed, I don't teach that class anymore, but I had developed, already developed that class and I decided that, "You know, my class will read this book 01:24:00and we'll find something in there on which to base a documentary idea," and then we'll make a documentary.

Emily Edwards: So my class read the book, there was about three lines in that book that mentioned women from Women's College who went down and joined A&T students at the sit-ins. No names, just admit that that happened. My students go, "Woo, who are they? Why did they do this?" And so we hunted around. One of my students found, I didn't find, my students found this. They went to the Carolinian at the time this was happening. And they found letters to editor, like the Carolinian, written by one of the women who had been involved in the sit-ins. There was her name and so they all got excited about this, we were 01:25:00given press passes to go and cover the event, the celebration event. I think all four of the guys from A&T were still alive for that one.

Lacey Wilson: Probably. 1990, yeah.

Emily Edwards: Yeah, and then we found all of the women that were involved. And what was interesting it was Women's College then had been integrated, you know and two of the women we interviewed, well, one of them had attended the sit-ins, but back then they wore jackets, they wore-

Lacey Wilson: Women's College jackets.

Emily Edwards: Women's College jackets and the African American woman had gone to the sit-ins, everybody just assumed she was from Bennett College, she didn't wear a jacket. The three white women from women's college wore their jackets and 01:26:00their story is really, really powerful. They were spat at, well, once the crowd figured out why they were there, there was the way it was explained to me as it was kind of a turf war going on.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Emily Edwards: Where at the lunch counter white people were just sitting there and hogging the seats. And if a white person got up then an A&T would or Bennet College student would sit in there and sit down and of course not get served. So it meant that the more black kids were sitting there, the fewer, they didn't serve, they weren't selling many lunches, but there was a big crowd ... by the time they... I think it was like the third day that they actually joined the sit-in and they had decided that they didn't understand why they could not sit down at a cafeteria with one of their fellow students who happened to be African 01:27:00American and have a cup of coffee and discuss world events, or whatever, art-

Lacey Wilson: Whatever.

Emily Edwards: ... you know, poetry, whatever they wanted to talk about. And it just made no sense to them. This is not the world we want to live in, so we're going to help change it. And they walked from this campus down to the Woolworths, that's kind of an effort.

Lacey Wilson: A bit of a walk.

Emily Edwards: There's a little bit of a walk. And when they got there, it was already crowded, but when they went up to the lunch counter, some white guys were sitting there and they saw these three white girls, they said they'd let them have their seats because they weren't really eating they were just-

Lacey Wilson: Blocking.

Emily Edwards: ... blocking. And they thought, "Well, maybe they are here to eat lunch." Well, they sat down and I thanked them, they sat down in the three chairs and the waitress comes up and say, "How can I help you?" And they pointed to the African American students from A&T and Bennett College. There's people 01:28:00here ahead of us, and the crowd behind them went crazy when they realized what they were there to do. And they were threatened, they were spat on, they were called all kind of names. At 5:00 o'clock, and this still, I still get chills thinking about this, and it wasn't my experience, I just heard it relayed to me.

Emily Edwards: At 5:00 o'clock when it was closing time, there was the way it was laid out, the counters were kind of toward the back of the store. I actually ate there when they still had the, when it was still-

Lacey Wilson: Woolworths, it's not a museum.

Emily Edwards: I ate there because of this.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Emily Edwards: It's a store, bad eggs, but still... But anyway, it was crowded and we're going to have to walk through this angry crowd to get to the sidewalk and be able to go home and they were scared, they were actually scared. What 01:29:00happened was the A&T and Bennett College kids made a chain around these three women, they were actually getting more of the anger.

Lacey Wilson: They would be, yeah.

Emily Edwards: And so they made it human chain around these women, they walked through the crowd, out to the sidewalk. Someone had called them a cab and they got out there on the sidewalk and said the Lord's prayer. And that made them into all of them became activists.

Lacey Wilson: Of course.

Emily Edwards: And it was a moving story. Now the documentary, it's a student documentary and then you can really tell it, it's got a lot of problems. It's bad lighting, bad blah, blah, blah. But what I will say is that every one of the students in that class told me that it was a seminal moment in their lives.

Lacey Wilson: I bet it was.

Emily Edwards: I remember, well, we interviewed, what's her name? Drain. She didn't attend the sit-ins, but the woman Charlotte, oh God, I'm having such 01:30:00senior moments here. The woman who, she was actually became a political figure. Anyway, she told us that as a student at Women's College that the amount of ignorance that girls had in the dorm, of course they had segregated dorms but that some of the girls thought that she would have a tail. That was the level of ignorance. So you have to think about that time period. It was incredibly stupid and she was able to see how important it was to have integration, what it meant about how it could help change humanity and change the way people look at the world.

Lacey Wilson: Wow. That is powerful stuff.

Emily Edwards: Yeah.

Lacey Wilson: I don't know where you got that. I've got Moran from that.

Emily Edwards: Oh, well, I think he was, we did talk to Blackwell. We interviewed by phone because he was the Chancellor of Women's College at the time of that incident occurred I think Moran was, I think where it came from was I thought Moran was involved in getting that all college read, but maybe that was not, maybe that was Creighton, I think it was Creighton. But anyway, yeah, I think sometimes my point is I guess sometimes things that a Chancellor or a Dean does thinking that we'll have this activity.

Emily Edwards: It can have, it ripples down into something that then inspires students to have kind of an experience. So the all college read, I don't think 01:32:00anybody expected that we were going to go and uncover these women and make this documentary and these kids would have this experience. But we did and it was all because of the all college rate and that particular book. And the vagueness, those three-

Lacey Wilson: Three lines.

Emily Edwards: ... three little lines in my book, yeah.

Lacey Wilson: Okay, do you have any memories of Pat Sullivan?

Emily Edwards: I do. She, I thought was just amazing. I think the University had some of its most growth under her leadership. She was not a top-down administrator. I mean, she actually came to department meetings, she seemed to know who you were. I mean, there's a lot of faculty on, I mean, I think she knew who I was and there were a lot of faculty on this campus. But yeah, I have really, really strong fond memories of her. I could say, I think some of what 01:33:00you see and the aesthetics of this campus I think have improved so much in recent years.

Emily Edwards: And some of that, a large bit of that I think, is her doing her leadership, the growth of the campus, but the growth in the right kind of ways.

Lacey Wilson: So not just physical is what you mean.

Emily Edwards: Yeah. Not just physical growth, but some of that was physical growth too, it's a better looking campus, it's a bigger campus.

Lacey Wilson: What did it look like before?

Emily Edwards: There were a lot of buildings that we have now we didn't have. The Chancellor's house got moved, I'm not sure if that was under. Yeah, that was under her, that she moved out off campus and the chancellor's house that we're 01:34:00going to tear that down. I think she was originally on board, we're tearing it down, but then they ended up moving it down the street and I'm really glad they did. It's just the way it's laid out, I think the campus is laid out better, things started to deteriorate and they just... She improved a lot of things. We moved here to this building, they built the School of Music. I mean a lot of important things happen under her leadership.

Lacey Wilson: Any memories of Linda Brady?

Emily Edwards: Yeah. That was a really sad time and it's not her fault, but she got hit with the big sort of economic meltdown and I think the beginning campaigns against education and the steady slow cuts. And I remember the kind of 01:35:00discussion we would have, well they're going to cut 20% and then they'd come in, oh we're only going to cut 10%, and we're like, "Ssshwww!" But then maybe it was like cut, cut, cut, cut under her when she was our leader. She was also kind of top-down, I think she made decisions without really doing a whole lot of consulting with faculty or at least faculty didn't feel like that they were part of that process as much.

Lacey Wilson: Got you.

Emily Edwards: But she really did come, she really did come on into power during a really, really rough period. And when the powers that tell you, "were cutting your budget." Now, the interesting thing was this also during that time there was a lot of growth in enrollment. So for a few years, the cuts weren't as deep 01:36:00because we had more students coming in and they had to, because of the number of students, they over halfed it.

Emily Edwards: So your budget, we're just doing more with less but you weren't actually, that wasn't actually less or there was a little less, but it wasn't as it ... and then as it progressed, it got worse and worse. To the point where we've lost five tenure track positions in this department and none of them have been-

Lacey Wilson: Restored.

Emily Edwards: Yeah, we have adjuncts and instructor, well, we have instructors and adjuncts.

Lacey Wilson: Okay, and our new Chancellor Franklin?

Emily Edwards: I'm real encouraged by him. I mean, again, he has been dealt a 01:37:00pretty hard hand. But he is, I think he's dedicated to protecting our students. I've met him a couple of times, I listened to him speak. I went to the celebration for him when you know, I forget what they call that, they had over here at the Taylor, not Taylor the-

Lacey Wilson: Aycock?

Emily Edwards: Aycock.

Lacey Wilson: What was formerly Aycock?

Emily Edwards: Yeah. Formerly Aycock. What is it?

Lacey Wilson: UNCG Auditorium.

Emily Edwards: Yeah, UNCG Auditorium, that celebration they had where I guess he was installed even though he'd been here a year, it was only in-

Lacey Wilson: His interim first.

Emily Edwards: Yeah. And I'm impressed with him. I think, I don't know. No, we haven't lived with him long enough to know, but I'm really encouraged when I see his communications that I think his heart is in the right place. I think he 01:38:00really cares about students and about protecting students who ... We may be entering some pretty rough times. I think some elements of our population that I didn't even realize were there. The last eight years lived in a kind of just gone along about my life, thinking that the world was going to work out.

Emily Edwards: We had good strong leadership and at the very top of, and then lately we've had a lot of kind of scary things happen. And I think he's shown that, shown us that UNCG is going to be welcoming of all of its students and protective of all of its students, and I appreciate that sentiment.

Lacey Wilson: Do you have any other administrators you'd think you want to talk about that made an impression on you?

Emily Edwards: No, not really.

Lacey Wilson: You don't want to brag about your colleagues in the Media Department?

Emily Edwards: What have they done? I will say that John Lee was an effect, a really effective Department Head.

Lacey Wilson: Jellicorse?

Emily Edwards: Yeah, Jellicorse when he was Department Head. Some faculty, he was, ... Some faculty I think didn't like his style but he had an ambition for the department and a vision. And some faculty didn't share that, but he wanted to have this. We had a film festival here. We don't anymore, but we had a film festival that had been limping along for like 30 years.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Emily Edwards: And he wanted it to be what River Run is now. That didn't happen. We didn't have the resources, we didn't have faculty who were behind it or who 01:40:00would support it, who understood what the ambition was to get on board with that. And there were several other things. He had very high ideas about what could happen with this department. And we had and still have an older faculty that are not, they are not really I think looking big picture.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. How would you describe campus culture at UNCG?

Emily Edwards: Well, it used to be with a call a suitcase campus. You know what that means?

Lacey Wilson: Vaguely. Yes, but you should explain it for the recording.

Emily Edwards: Okay. Well, it meant that we had a lot of commuter students who they came for classes and then it went home. So there wasn't that sense of 01:41:00community that ... now that wasn't true for my department because when you make a movie or a documentary, it's a collaborative venture. And you can do that as a commuter student. So there was some solidarity at least in that regard, but I think one of the frustrations in terms of campus community from... Let's say Women's College to UNCG was that it became a commuter campus, and people tended to leave on the weekends.

Emily Edwards: I think that's changed in the last, maybe the last decade. There's more stuff on campus now, more reason to stay to hang out for the weekend. There's also way more stuff going on in Greensboro. When I first moved to Greensboro, Downtown was almost dead.

Lacey Wilson: Really?

Emily Edwards: There was almost nothing. I mean, the lots of empty buildings and stuff, Downtown has become this place where lots of things go on. We have first Friday, for example. Arts Greensboro has been really, really active. We have now have the Folk Festival, which is a big deal. This is the last year, the Folk Festival but after that, we're going to have the North Carolina Folk Festival. I'm involved, heavily involved with the Piedmont Blues Society. And so there's all kinds of music events, there's arts events, there's galleries, there's museums. I mean we have Civil Rights Museum, we have the Weatherspoon on campus, we have galleries Downtown, we have the community centers that, you know, it's just gotten bigger and better and there's always something to do, whether it's 01:43:00on campus or off campus.

Emily Edwards: We have the Tate Street Festival. I don't know how many years that's been going. So there's a lot more stuff going on, and then of course there's the theatrical, the Theater Department has his plays, we have a radio station as... Is that my phone?

Lacey Wilson: I think so.

Emily Edwards: I'll turn it off. I'm sorry.

Lacey Wilson: That's okay. Just check, see what time it was.

Lacey Wilson: 1:43.

Emily Edwards: I missed my daughter, but I'll call her back. Hold on. I'm sorry. I'll call her back later. Okay, sorry.

Lacey Wilson: It's okay.

Emily Edwards: I hope you're editing this.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah, just picking out stuff that interrupt like that. So I can edit this out later today. We're actually about to hit up on wrap up questions anyway.

Emily Edwards: Okay, all right.

Lacey Wilson: So how do you think you've served beyond UNCG and professional organizations or the community of Greensboro?

Emily Edwards: Well, in professional organizations, I'm a member of the University of Film and Video Association. I've been on the board of that and I'm an editor of their journal, I served by helping with other universities, P&T, I review articles and books. So yeah, I'm pretty active as ... professionally that way. In the community, I was the Director of the Center for Creative Writing and the Arts and we did a lot of community outreach. That center was closed during the lean years when the GOP closed all the centers, even though we cost next to 01:45:00nothing. But one of the things we did was a lot of literacy things using creativity to help with literacy and students.

Emily Edwards: I think the English Department is still doing this, I'm not sure 100%, but they said that they would continue that work. I think it's really important. I've continued to do literacy work. I actually go down, my daughter is a second grade teacher in Fayetteville and I actually go down and work with elementary age students, working with them and their literacy. I think actually adults are better suited to adult. I'm amazed at the work that she does. It's just really hard. I mean, you're dealing with everything from hunger to head lice.

Lacey Wilson: Right, really.

Emily Edwards: So, once you get pass all that, then that's when you can get to 01:46:00literacy and creativity and her school actually uses arts, incorporates arts and teaching as a teaching methodology, which is something I really strongly believe in. One of the things, and this is skipping out of-

Lacey Wilson: Well, go ahead.

Emily Edwards: ... my - But one of the things I really think I like about UNCG is the Jackson Library. I mean, and it may be I'm prejudice because someone wants compared libraries to grocery stores, you get used to your grocery store, you know what aisle something is located on. Well, the Jackson Library, when I first got here, it was kind of quirky and it had that basement. But the Jackson Library is an amazing sort of resource and now they're really firmly on board with information literacy. Something that I think I would like to see for the 01:47:00future of UNCG that we get really serious with all our students, not just media studies but all students need to be information literate because too many people were caught up with really, truly fake news by fake but people. And I hate to say this from my Alma Mater, from a UT Knoxville, to students the graduates from there went on to just sit on their couch and create click bait, fake news.

Emily Edwards: But I'm really proud of the kind of things that Jackson Library has done that sort of combat and help people take control of their own information literacy. I think one of the things that I'm really passionate about is that every citizen needs to understand and not get lazy about it, you can't 01:48:00be lazy. We're living in times when you can't just kind of skate through and float through and not pay attention.

Emily Edwards: So the work that they're doing in that regard is really, really important. And I'd like to see UNCG become a center for, I can't use the word center, let's say, a network for information literacy, of all kinds, whether it's visual literacy or internet literacy, to become social media literate, to become aware and know how to find the resources that you need and how to judge the resources when you get there.

Emily Edwards: I wanted to put in a plug for Jackson Library. I love going over there, I just like walking in there and I like their, that they have that commons now. The Media Studies Department was, and Ken Terres our engineer, was 01:49:00really instrumental in developing the Media Commons. Everybody needs to know how cameras work, right? Everybody. Not just media studies. Everybody. All citizens need to understand what a bit, how you can manipulate a visual image.

Lacey Wilson: Absolutely. What do you think makes our Media Studies Department stand out?

Emily Edwards: Well, I would say that in the past it was our MFA program. We had a really strong MFA program. A lot of our graduates went on to teach in other programs. And I've been really proud of the students whose thesis I was involved with. So that made us stand out. I don't know what the future is for our 01:50:00department, to be honest with you.

Emily Edwards: I'm hoping ... we went into a slump, we lost our MFA, we've lost faculty, we've lost resources. And I don't know that the college really cares, I was really committed to having a Media Studies program. I hope the college he is, because I think that it is important. I think, you know, and I don't want to be a downer about it, but I haven't seen anything that's encouraged me to think that it's central. But maybe if economics turnaround and some thinking turns around, maybe we will be able to rise again. I don't think we'll ever get another MFA. We might at some point get it unless we can do it in some sort of partnership with Theater, which is where our MFA was actually. It was partnered 01:51:00with Theater or another partnership somewhere.

Emily Edwards: And I would be all on board with that, because graduate students really did bring a lot into this program as teaching assistants, as collaborators on projects, as media makers. I've been really, really proud of, in fact, I'm still collaborating with one of my former students from many, many years ago. Brian Fuller, a fabulous filmmaker, he's just really great, and Jim Goodman, who teachers over at High Point now in their program and his movies are phenomenal. And well, I haven't collaborated with him, but we have quite a few students that have gone out and done really amazing work.

Lacey Wilson: Brian Fuller is a name that's familiar to me.

Emily Edwards: He was teaching at Calvin College which was a kind of a... but he would take students to like El Salvador and places and make these incredible, incredible documentaries.

Lacey Wilson: Okay, very cool. You may have touched on this, what a social and academic events stand out in your mind here at UNCG?

Emily Edwards: I think I covered that.

Lacey Wilson: You covered it, okay. Then we'll just move on. What do you think your proudest accomplishments?

Emily Edwards: I think covered that. I think I would say my movies, I would say Deadheads and Bone Creek and my book.

Lacey Wilson: Okay, we're hitting the last two then and these are reflection stuff. So tell me how UNCG is affected your life and what it means to you.

Emily Edwards: Well, it's been a really huge part, I've been here a long, almost 30 years, so it's been a huge part of my life. I think one of the things, if I 01:53:00had been in a more traditional program, like ... I wouldn't have been able to do the creative scholarship, I wouldn't have been able to make movies. I might not have even been able to write a book and this style, this book is written, it's a book, but I use the same techniques as for making a documentary, you know, interviewing people and transcribing interviews putting them into context.

Lacey Wilson: Got you.

Emily Edwards: So, that's the same research style as you do for a documentary. So in like at UAB they wanted to see traditional quantitative research, more sort of social science style research. And I can do it but it didn't serve my creative spirit. It also was a bit of a disconnect. Some of that research was a 01:54:00little bit of a disconnect between me and my students, whereas I'm making a movie like Bone Creek, that my students have their sleeves rolled up and they're right down in it with me.

Emily Edwards: So, I mean, it's kind of like you can equate it to a faculty member who has a chemistry lab and involved in research and their students are a big part of that, and they're learning, you know, it's an important part of their learning. But the faculty members learning too and it's exciting. That kind of collaboration is really exciting.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. Here's our last one here then. So we're doing these interviews are for the 125th anniversary, which is an excellent opportunity for reflection, but also have to think about where we're going to go in the future. What do you think is the future for UNCG? Where do you think we're going to be as an institution in the next 25 to 50 years?

Emily Edwards: Ooh, yeah. You know, I would like to see us become a hub for sort 01:55:00of digital information literacy. I think we have the talent for that. I mean, that's my own little area.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Emily Edwards: But so many different fields rely on that. I mean, it's where you have lot a lot of crossover. So I would like to see us build on the unfortunate things that have happened in the last year and create, make UNCG a hub to really develop students and faculty that are smart, and forward thinking and digitally clever.

Lacey Wilson: All right. That's it then.

Emily Edwards: That's it for me.

Lacey Wilson: All right. Thank you very much.