The Hidden World of Girls

 

The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, are award-winning independent producers who have been working together in the Bay Area for more than 25 years. During that time, they've created more than 200 stories about the lives, histories, art, and rituals of people who have shaped our diverse cultural heritage.

They are now hard at work on a new year-long multimedia series exploring the hidden world of girls—the aptly named Hidden World of Girls airs on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered. In the tradition of their previous series, Hidden Kitchens and Lost & Found Sound, the sisters have once again opened up an NPR phone line and are asking listeners to call with their stories, leads, and suggestions. Davia answered some questions from the Kitchen Sisters office in San Francisco.

How many calls have come to the NPR listener storyline so far?
Several hundred messages have come in as of late May, and we expect many more. We see it going in the direction of Hidden Kitchens, a project that gathered some 2,789 minutes of messages on the listener line and Lost & Found Sound, where some 1,117 people collaborated with us. But what is different about The Hidden World of Girls is that people aren't just calling in their stories. Ideas and suggestions are coming in every format you can imagine—emails, photographs, videos, graphics, and poems. Even ring tones.

Who listens to the messages?
We do. Here in the Kitchen Sisters office in North Beach and at Nikki's studio in Santa Cruz. Our interns also check the Hidden World of Girls phone line, transcribe the messages, and help us cut them to a size that fits on our website. Some get woven into stories that are heard on KQED Radio. Others live online only.

Have you collected data on where, specifically, calls are coming from?
So far about 10 percent of the calls and 20 percent of the email notes and suggestions have come from the Bay Area. After we were on Forum, http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R201004011000 our email just exploded with suggestions from KQED listeners.

Although messages have mostly from the United States, a piece about a mother and son in Nigeria triggered a call from Cairo. We've also received calls and letters from England, India, Ireland, Mauritania, Jamaica, and Madagascar.

Are there any local stories we should listen for?
There are several upcoming stories from the Bay Area. A story centered around the life of Theresa Sparks will be heard in the coming months. Also, a story we call "The Blond in the Village: The Hidden World of Natasha Pruss," and a local Korean American story.

 

More instructions on how to participate

Follow the Kitchen Sisters on Twitter by going to @kitchensisters

Join them on Facebook.

Also on KQED.org this week ...