Transom Podcast
Transom’s tasty little audio morsels to go.
To download from the downloadable links:
- Mac: Ctrl-Click and ‘Download Linked File’
- PC: Right-Click and ‘Save Target As’
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Jennie's Secret
For Memorial Day, Transom is featuring an unusual veteran's story. "Jennie's Secret" is about a woman who posed as a man during the Civil War and went on to live most of her life as a man in the tiny town of Saunemin, Illinois. Over the years the town has been ambivalent about their most famous citizen and is struggling to figure out how to honor the memory of Jennie Hodgers/Albert Cashier. Producer Linda Paul became "obsessed" with this story and tracked down all sorts of interesting people to talk to. It's the kind of piece that was once easy to place in a public radio magazine show, but it's eighteen minutes long and it's not news. That makes it an orphan these days. It's worth pondering what we should do with stories like this--when an obsessed producer and a fascinating story converge, and the story isn't news and doesn't fit the mold.
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Prostate Diaries
If this piece were about blood or bones or lungs, it would have aired on NPR. But because it is about the prostate, and includes a talking penis, it presented problems for broadcast. There’s no equal time for body parts. Barrett Golding of HearingVoices asked us if we at Transom would be interested. Yes. Cancer is cancer and it makes sense to talk about it openly and personally, wherever in the body it occurs. The piece also presents complex challenges of interest to radio producers. It is based on a stage presentation written by the patient himself, Jeff Metcalf, and performed by Paul Kiernan. It was recorded and produced for radio by the estimable Scott Carrier and Larry Massett. They are present on Transom to talk about this work, its style and content.
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Killer Whales
Ari Daniel Shapiro is following that well-worn career path from Killer Whale Biologist to Public Radio Producer. This piece is an homage to his former profession--a gentle paean to the passion field biologists feel for their work, and, in this case, for whales. It also confronts the quandary that plagues both journalists and biologists: What if your quarry doesn't show up? How do you still tell its story? Ari has been working with us at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, and we're also featuring a bunch of the "Science Minutes" he's made, and an amazing ninety-second video tribute to cell division, with an unexpected musical soundtrack.
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After The Forgetting
This is a delicate story about love and dementia. It weaves memory and moments through the intertwined lives of Greg Sharrow, his mother Marj, and his husband Bob. And, if you’re wrestling with a tricky emotional story, producer Erica Heilman has written usefully on Transom about the process of making this meditation. As she says, she wanted to “offer people a picture of how one family is managing dementia in a really graceful, loving way. I wanted to achieve this without ever using words like ‘loving’ or ‘graceful’."
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Curtis Fox
Curtis Fox produces podcasts for The New Yorker, The Poetry Foundation, Parents Magazine and others. He got his start in public radio and it still resonates in what he does. In this issue of The Transom Review, Curtis lays out his podcast philosophy, plays samples, and answers all sorts of practical questions too. Come download the PDF of Curtis’s dispatch from this edge of the multi-dimensional new world of audio distribution.
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Love & Radio
Somewhere between NPR and a shockumentary special on Fox is alt.NPR’s Love & Radio–a surreal journey into a confusing world of ex-lovers, ex-cult members, and fruit. Lots of fruit. Love & Radio is what Ira Glass might make if he showed up to work drunk.
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Dial-A-Stranger
Dial-A-Stranger takes questions from random strangers (like you), and poses them to other strangers (like you) on the telephone. It’s a source of communication, assistance and entertainment. It is a community project, an anthology, and a hobby.
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Studs Terkel 1912-2008
Transom is again featuring Studs Terkel's Manifesto from 2001, his conversation with Sydney Lewis on radio, improvisation, fireside chats, ineptitude, jazz, Vox Humana, and dozens of other notions his mind leapt to. Studs remains an inspiration to us--always listening, sending out stories. When asked what his ideal broadcast day would be, he said, "I'd want the human voice. Expressing grievances, or delight, or whatever it might be. But something real." Something Real.
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Frickin Circus
Part audio blog, part travel show, and part behind-the-scenes at the circus.
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Fake City, Real Dreams
Zak Rosen is a radio producer. Neil Greenberg is a map-maker. They're both from Detroit, but their hearts are in a different city, a city they think is possible--at least in the imagination and maybe in reality. The radio piece they made together treats this place as if it were real. It is a creative exercise that hints at a plausible future. Fake City, Real Dreams is unlike any "arts feature" you've heard before.
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