Place, Story, and the Machines We Built

On the Shifting Role of the Storyteller

The following keynote was delivered June 7, 2025 at the Southern Documentary Convening in Durham, North Carolina. It’s being shared here at the request of attendees. Please share and consider subscribing.

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Good morning.

It’s an honor to be here. Thank you to SDF for creating a space where we can reflect on the stories that matter to us.

I’d like to talk about the evolving role of nonfiction—especially stories rooted in place and imagination.

For over a decade, I’ve been listening and learning from my Appalachian community—not just to document, but to understand. And in that process, I’ve learned a lot. Every film has changed me.

Any filmmaker in this room knows: if you hang around long enough with your camera, you realize that stories don’t follow tidy arcs. 

They meander. They contradict themselves. They resist closure.

And yet—it’s in that tension, that truth reveals itself…and I keep dreaming for another chance to tell another story.

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It might be an understatement to say this year has been one of upheaval. But it has.

The upheaval in some places, has meant deportations, family trauma, or book bans. In many, a tightening—budgets cut, schools shuttered, healthcare stripped away, housing harder to afford, lives harder to live.

Upheaval doesn’t always come in the form of breaking news. Sometimes it arrives as a slow burn. A family packing their car. A library cutting hours. A missing bus route.

I’ve felt the upheaval in our field too—especially in the spaces where storytelling and public good intersect. Higher ed, nonprofits, public broadcasting—many of the institutions that champion storytellers are being downsized, defunded, or dismantled.

These are the places that helped my work—and the work of so many others—exist in the first place. 

I live in a small town in West Virginia, a place built around the Monongahela National Forest. Nearly half of our county is national forest land—held in trust. My neighbors depend on the forest—not just for jobs, though many work as foresters, scientists, or trail builders—but for a sense of belonging.

So when federal layoffs and cuts began, I saw something I’ll never forget:
People stepped up.

Some took second jobs. Some started apprenticeships as plumbers and electricians—doing the kind of work we forget how much we rely on. Some hosted neighborhood meetings where people could just let out their tears. Some took advantage of a city program that gives away fruit trees to start building backyard food forests. Some rallied at the courthouse, singing protest songs loud enough to compete with the roar of logging trucks barreling through town. Others got serious about starting their garden seeds indoors. I heard young folks talking to old timers at the hardware store about canning and harvest schedules before the last frost had even passed. A few families made the hard choice to leave for work elsewhere. 

And then—there was the soup.

Every year, the town hosts a free soup night. Main Street is closed off. Restaurants, churches, and local businesses all make a pot of something warm. Tables lined the street, and anyone can walk up and fill their bowl - and go back for seconds.

I don’t tell the story of free soup to romanticize resilience. I’m tired of resilience being the only story told about rural places. We shouldn’t have to be so good at surviving systems that forget us over and over.

But I share it because learning how to wire a house, plant a tree, share soup, start a garden—that was imagination. It was people working with what they had. Reaching back for older ways. Coming up with new ones.

It was community—not as a slogan, but as a lived reality. And it’s happening everywhere, if you know how to look.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it actually means to look. To really see.

In a world where we’re saturated with images—of ourselves, of others. Where the image often replaces the person. Where the headline becomes the truth. Where livestreams turn into performance. 

Some say we document to preserve. To collect data. To inform. 

But I think we document not because we know, but because we don’t.
Because memory is slippery. Because time is short. Because we want to sit with something longer.

The world of documentary is changing. Platforms and algorithms shape what gets seen. Streamers with ballooning budgets are serving up increasingly degraded forms of nonfiction—celebrity confessionals, true crime frenzies, trauma as entertainment. 

Even as I’ve grown skeptical of the industry—of what gets rewarded and who gets left behind—I’ve never stopped making work. I’ve just had to change how I make it. And that’s when I started looking to my own imagination.

A viewer once told me she was surprised by how hopeful King Coal felt. She commended me for finding that hope in a story of destruction and bitterness. I responded—almost without thinking—“Hope is sometimes hard to see. I found it most when I closed my eyes.”

That moment stayed with me. After all, I make documentaries…films about real people today. So how did I find hope with my eyes closed?

I think I realized that my role wasn’t just to seek answers—but to ask different questions. Questions that give us a set of ideas we haven’t yet considered. And that requires imagination.

Our lives, like our places, are layered with what lies beneath—minerals, rivers, memories, myths. Often, the most important stories aren’t visible. They’re felt. Which is why they require more listening—and more dreaming—than explanation.

So with King Coal I began asking: What if coal wasn’t just industry, but mythology? What if the pageants and parades were rituals in a fading kingdom?

That question opened a new way of seeing—and storytelling.

While King Coal started as a film about an industry and the culture that surrounds it, it quickly became a film about imagination. About ritual. About the emotional inheritance of people who’ve been told their best days are behind them.

That was the narrative I wanted to challenge. Because when the rest of the world sees darkness, storytellers often see a crack. And it’s our job to make that light visible.

So I went looking for inspiration - outside of traditional nonfiction. I sought out the poets, the fables, the performance artists. To ask - how can I expand my notion of what nonfiction can do?

Because I truly believe we don’t just need stories about what’s been lost. We need stories that make room—for healing, for new beginnings.

And that starts with asking better questions:

Alright so let’s start here - turn to the next person and ask one of these questions:

• Ask if they slept well—and if they didn’t, ask why?

• Ask who they turn to when they cry.

GO AHEAD

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When we ask questions we need to remember to leave room for silence.
To let the quiet gather weight.

When you don’t know what to ask, ask the question you wish someone would ask you.

Ask not because you know—but because you don’t.
Ask like someone who still believes people can surprise you.

All of this—this curiosity, attention, care—must not be lost in our age of machines and algorithms. 

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We’re not just living through political and ecological upheaval. We are living through a technological shift that will change our role entirely.

If you haven’t seen Google’s Veo 3—its AI video generator—it’s getting good. And it’s coming for anyone who works with language, image, memory, meaning.

To be sure, there is good in technology - in the highways and planes that brought you here, and medicine that keeps us alive, and so much more. But I don’t believe this AI race will lift all of us up. Not without cost.

The other day I was served a YouTube ad that said:
“The AI revolution is here. You can either cry about it, or cash out.”

That about sums it up.

The tools we once built to serve us are now trying to become us. They mine our data—our films, faces, voices—to train themselves. They build a humming mirror, always reflecting back what they’ve learned from us.

But who is this technology for? What purpose does it serve?

It certainly wasn’t built for rural and southern communities—unless we’re talking about the minerals and land being extracted to power these hungry systems.

We used to say: knowledge is power.
But now we know, and assume everything.
We learn very little.
Machines learn for us, remember for us, speak for us, organize us.

In outsourcing all that knowing, we risk forgetting what makes us worth remembering in the first place.

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So what’s our role—as storytellers in 2025?

It’s not just to entertain. Or preserve. Or even inform.
It’s to be deeply, undeniably human.

Machines can mimic memory—but not meaning.
They can generate content—but not context.
They can remix the past—but they cannot long for the future.
At least yet…

To dream is to want something we've never known.
To dream is to be vulnerable, illogical, flawed, and deeply human.

In a world that automates our desires, dreaming is resistance. Imagination becomes a radical act.

We resist by slowing down.
By telling stories that don’t trend—but stay.
That are rooted in place—and still dare to imagine beyond it.

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Place should be more than backdrop.
It’s our greatest teacher, our greatest challenge.

Place is what I return to—it keeps me honest. 

Place can also become a crutch, something we rely on when we’re unsure what else to say. 

There’s a danger in using a place—The South, Appalachia—without interrogating it. In turning it into a costume.

But when handled with care, place isn’t a pitch or aesthetic—it’s soil.
Soil that demands tending.

And the soil we stand on is complicated—with songs, joy, stories, violence, memories, persistence and struggle. With dreams realized and many lost. With traditions rooted not in performance or commerce, but in connection.

And that connection—that soil—is perhaps our greatest offering.
The thing that needs our attention more than the machines.

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So let’s aim to make stories that aren’t perfect.
That aren’t polished.
That aren’t efficient.
But that are deeply felt.

Because in a world obsessed with speed and spectacle, to tell a place-based story is an act of quiet revolution.

Stories remind us we belong to each other.
That we’re still learning, changing.
That we’re still alive.

Thank you.