Until I've Written About It with Jane Durrell

Host Jenny Stanton welcomes Jane Durrell, journalist, PR professional and art critic to the Podcast Edition.

Jane Durrell was a PR person, working at the Cincinnati Art Museum for almost twenty years in public relations. She is a journalist as well, a career that she practices today writing for City Beat and many art magazines. She defined the difference between two professions:  A PR person is saying to the public from the inside, "See what is here."  A journalist, reporting from the outside, says, "This is what I see."  Today we hear her read three pieces of her writing, all very different from each other.

The first piece is a letter to Henry James, the American writer who spent most of his life in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Jane, a traveler in the 21st century, tells Mr. James what has changed and what has not in Florence and Siena since he published Italian Hours in 1909. Her second piece is a November 2011 article in City Beat about her trip to Egypt. What started as a trip to see antiquities turned into a trip to report the unrest and upheaval in Egypt. Because Jane is a journalist, she was able to talk to many Egyptians, not just the people on the barricades. Her third reading is from an interview she conducted with Katie Laur, a well-known jazz and blue grass singer in Cincinnati.

Her own writing is often inspired by a lifetime of reading. Jane Austen, Joan Didion and Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for The New Yorker, are three of her favorites.

Photo courtesy of Connie Springer.