Story Trees by Don Hill

STORY TREES is an interactive installation by longtime Canadian radio veteran Don Hill that is on exhibit at the NAISA North Media Arts Centre in South River from January 14 to March 29, 2021. NAISA is open Monday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10 am to 4 pm.

The installation serves as a tool for listening & learning — how we listen — to echoes from an era that is open to reinterpretation.

While digitizing old reel-to-reel oral history interviews, Don Hill was surprised by how things were said at the time in northern Ontario, and how many gestures of speech are no longer heard in common day-to-day parlance. It wasn’t the content of the conversations that first caught his ear; it was the little asides, the nuanced bits of intonation, inflections of speech, as if northern Ontario had a different dialect way back when. As the towns and the province grew, he heard a shift in the patter. He also heard something – an emergent literary voice, a kind of wisdom – that wasn’t accounted for by words alone.