Afterword

WHEN I WAS SMALL, I was quiet. Not shy exactly, but not someone with a radio future either. My father, on the other hand, was a wonderful talker. A big man with a big personality, he was full of funny stuff and everyone enjoyed him, including me. There was no sense in trying to match his affable, amplified self. Instead, I watched and listened: a happy audience....

Adventurers in Sound

Some documentary makers talk of “giving voice.” Giving voice to the disadvantaged, the voiceless, one’s fellow man or woman. But what of the child? And what if giving voice means putting the tools of production in the hands of a teenager—all of the tools, including the director’s chair? Karen Michel is a talented and accomplished radio maker in her own right, but for Reality Radio we asked her to write about her years of work guiding teen radio makers. Teens really are different from you and me, Karen explains. And they can teach us aging radio makers a thing or two. But that’s not the reason to listen to them. Their priority, in any case, is not to educate grownups. They just want and deserve to be heard. Oh, to be heard. And to listen.

Unreality Radio

Another Australian feature maker, Natalie Kestecher records interviews and combines them with music—and sometimes mixes in fictional fables that she writes and narrates. It’s “easier for me to create characters than to find them,” she says. Any news director would (rightly) spew coffee across the newsroom if a reporter said such a thing. These pieces of Natalie’s are not strictly documentary—not everything in them is factually true—but we chose to include her in Reality Radio because she stirs her fables together with traditional interviews, thereby putting audio nonfiction to strikingly creative use. She is not trying to pass off fiction as fact. Her work is not fraud. It’s art.

That Jackie Kennedy Moment

Despite Scott Carrier’s initial urge to do cinema verité, Scott instead found himself in radio, relying mostly on his writing and his own arresting voice. “People liked my narration better than the tape,” he writes with a hint of resignation. Often, for Scott, the best way to create cinema verité in sound, to show the listener what he wants them to see, is to “narrate the part of the camera.”

Are We on the Air?

Chris Brookes conjures masterful features, mostly for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Feature, as the word is used in Canada, Australia, and Europe, refers to a radio genre more boldly artistic than anything regularly heard on the radio in the United States. Chris writes of trying “not to explain things but to give listeners bits of a puzzle that . . . come together later.” In that spirit, he makes dazzling use of the fluttering of a bird’s wings.

Crossing Borders

Maria Martin has things she wants you to know, people about whom she wants you to care. She produces documentaries about Americans and Latin Americans struggling with poverty, injustice, and the aftermath of war. But Maria infuses her documentaries with scenes and sounds and storytelling. Given that she’s often working with interviews recorded in Spanish, she takes special care to let her characters speak for more than the customary few seconds before fading their voices under the English translation. Maria not only wants you to understand the people in her stories, she also wants you to hear them.

The Voice and the Place

Sandy Tolan has traveled the globe recording voices that Americans rarely hear, from the Mexican border to the Amazon to the Israeli coastal plain. He’s determined to tell compelling human stories, those that have gotten under his skin and will get under yours. As a journalist, he also wants those stories to touch on broader issues that should demand our attention. That Introduction means that casting is an important part of Sandy’s work. He tells us how he does it.

Living History

Stephen Smith wants you to hear history. He’s made excellent work across a broad spectrum. He produced an aural portrait of the playwright August Wilson; he uncovered war crimes in Kosovo. Some of his best docs, and those he most loves to make, explore twentieth-century history. Stephen traces the short life story of recorded sound, this magic we take for granted. And through his own pieces, like “Song Catcher, Frances Densmore of Red Wing”; “Remembering Jim Crow”; and “White House Tapes: The President Calling,” Stephen shows how radio can blast us into another time, “past the rope-line of textbook history.”

Story Time at the Azteca Boxing Club

Daniel Alarcón is a gifted and celebrated novelist. His first novel was titled Lost City Radio. Perhaps there was a hint in that title. A few years after its publication, in 2012, Daniel and a few friends (one of them his wife) launched Radio Ambulante, a Spanish-language storytelling show, the first of its kind, serving Latin America and the Spanish-speaking United States. Daniel writes of the show’s beginnings, when, tellingly, he found himself drawn as an interviewer not to the famous Peruvian boxer but to the unknown clothing store proprietor with the raised eyebrow, the “nasal and confident and resolute” voice, and the trove of stories the man couldn’t wait to tell.

Harnessing Luck as an Industrial Product

The very notion of a radio documentary “fan” would have sounded weird at one time—back when the word documentary might have evoked thoughts of sonic Brussels sprouts. The producers who have done the most to change that, and to prompt talk of a new golden age, are the masters of the personal narrative. Several of our essayists have been at this since the 1980s or even the 1970s, but in the mid-1990s Ira Glass created a show devoted to the narrative and gave it a distinctly urban, and urbane, sensibility. As Ira makes clear, every story on This American Life has a point, a “moment of reflection,” a larger meaning of some sort. Some of those stories are tied to the news; many more are not. TAL stories tend to lead to epiphanies of the sort found in literature or the most cerebral standup comedy. In his essay, Ira tells the story of his evolution from NPR reporter to TAL impresario, and describes with detailed examples how he hears and reassembles stories.