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Kara Westerman doesn’t tell stories about the Hamptons, she tells stories about the un-Hamptons. About, as she calls them, “the 99 percent surviving in a 1 percent neighborhood.”
Ms. Westerman is the producer behind the podcast series “Phantom Hampton,” a sort of East End version of public radio’s “This American Life.” Her subjects range from a story that found her climbing into an attic with wildlife rescue savant Dell Cullum, to the tale of a local doctor who found himself in Lhasa in 1987 helping civilians suffering under the Chinese military occupation of Tibet.
Asked what the connecting thread is in these stories, she pondered for a moment. “The common thread is that these are all people who live on the East End. Other than that, it’s whatever I’m fascinated with, which could be just about anything.
“I went and hung out with director Josh Gladstone at Guild Hall and recorded their rehearsal of ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ They hired all these young teenagers, just out of high school, and they’re amazing. Next I’m going to talk to a photographer who’s a Shinnecock, Camille Seaman. She photographs weather. Right now she’s traveling on these ships through the Antarctic, photographing ice and penguins and seals. We’re going to talk via Skype and do a podcast and an article for the [East End] Beacon.”
Ms. Westerman came to her podcast project by a circuitous route. A fiction writer, photographer and journalist, Ms. Westerman moved to the East End from California, via New York City, more than 20 years ago. She bought a house in Springs, went off to earn a degree in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, then came back and sold the house so she could live off the proceeds while she pursued literary success.
Like many before her, she found a community of like-minded people on our little spit of sand. “I feel like there’s only a few kinds of people in the world anymore, and people who don’t follow a certain path, who are writers or artists, we kind of all get to know each other out here.”
What she didn’t find was roaring financial success. She cobbled together a living as a writer and a writing teacher, a pet sitter and proprietor of an Etsy online shop. She teaches a narrative class to recovering drug addicts and alcoholics at The Dunes East Hampton, and holds weekly writing workshops at her home in East Hampton Village.
In 2015, just as podcasts were going mainstream, Ms. Westerman took a course at the Oral History Summer School in Hudson, then followed that up with YouTube-based self-training in podcast production.
“It was a really steep learning curve,” she said, explaining that in addition to the art of storytelling, podcast production requires a bevy of technical skills. Her first podcast project—and the first episode of “Phantom Hampton”—was “Four Stationary Walls, Nearly Homeless in the Hamptons.”
“I decided to make the stories I wanted to make, so I made this podcast about friends of mine who were in the same position I was. Intelligent, educated, creative women who were living hand to mouth. One woman was living in a camper, another had a degree from Yale and she was moving every six months. All of the interviews were anonymous, because these women are embarrassed that they have to live this way.”
Ms. Westerman herself has years of experience moving from rental to rental as affordable living spaces became scarcer and scarcer. Her luck changed three years ago. “The amazing thing that happened is I fell in love with a guy who has this house his great-grandfather built, so I don’t have to keep moving.
“It’s almost impossible to live out here if you’re trying to make art. I have really come to the end of what I can handle about people thinking we should do work for free because we’re not in the pocket of corporations. This is crazy.”
Shortly after that first podcast went live, East End Beacon editor Beth Young asked her to write a print version of the story. Since then, she has paired each of her podcasts with a companion print feature for the paper. To date, she has released nine podcast episodes, with five or six more in various stages of production.
“Unfortunately, there’s a lag between the print publication and the podcast, because I’m a perfectionist, and I want to tell a really good story.”
Podcasts already released include stories about East Hampton journalist Joanne Pilgrim, who traveled to Greece last November to help Syrian refugees; columnist, cartoonist and Marxist Ted Rall, whom Westerman called “virulent and amazing;” and writer and cartoonist Jules Feiffer on his adaptation of “The Man in the Ceiling,” a musical production based on his 1993 book of the same name.
Asked whether she worries about running out of material, Ms. Westerman laughed. “Stories are just everywhere, there are way too many of them! I went to talk to the people on line at the Grey Gardens estate sale a couple of months ago, and went up and down the line for a few hours just asking people questions. I spoke with one little girl in a faux leopard jacket whose name in her family is Little Edie.
“I have the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ story. I have the story that’s in the Beacon this week about Dr. Blake Kerr, from Wainscott. He made a documentary film about a trip he and his friend took in 1987. He’s a mountain climber, and they decided to climb Mount Everest in tennis shoes. They got as far as they could with no equipment, and then when they came down from Everest and went into Lhasa they found themselves in the middle of a revolution, and people were dying in his arms.
“I’ve got another one that I started on my boyfriend’s friend Julia, who’s 93 years old. She asked me to record her, but when I started listening to her stories, she’s just fascinating. She grew up in the Bronx; she sings old Communist songs. She’s totally radicalized. I like radicalized people. That will be the next one coming out.”
The challenge for Ms. Westerman isn’t finding subject matter, it’s finding a way to make podcasting pay the bills. Toward that end she’s developed a presence on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, and recently launched a page on Patreon, a site dedicated to helping writers, artists and other creative professionals connect with fans who pay a subscription amount of their choice in exchange for exclusive content—and the satisfaction of supporting the arts. You can find her podcasts at patreon.com/phantomhampton.
on Feb 20, 2018