Annie told me her story over dinner. Her father was kidnapped in Colombia by the FARC guerillas. He was held in the jungle for months. He was rescued in a military raid. It was an amazing story, made more so by the fact that it was so common. Except perhaps for the Rescue part. Thousands of people are still missing down there, and there’s a radio station that broadcasts to them—messages from their loved ones. Shows like “Voices of Kidnapping” have been doing this for years and years. I asked if Annie would want to go back and tell the story of her father, and also of those who are still missing and those who love them. This is Annie’s first piece for radio and it’s a good one.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 21:41 — 9.9MB)

Transom sometimes provides a home for things that don’t fit anywhere else, things we’d like to hear out of the blue on public radio, but probably never will. Cat Lady is one of those. It’s a portrait, a reading, a vocal impression, a story, a performance, etc. Artist Joseph Keckler says, “I had struggled for a year, trying to write a piece about my mother, about myself, about what I observed to be an awkward, even incompatible relationship between the roles of artist and mother, about a child’s inheritance of his parents’ pain and desire. I had a long and unfocused essay, which I put aside.” Instead, he made Cat Lady.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 24:05 — 11.0MB)

This week we’re featuring the co-winner of our Self Portrait competition. It comes from the comedy collective “Mortified” who encourage people to read out loud the most embarrassing things they wrote as children. “I Hate Drake” is an hysterical and heartfelt entry from Will Nolan’s childhood diary about an archetypal bullying episode. Like most of the multi-media pieces on Transom, it’s story-driven and works fine without the images, but the animation deepens the story and makes it even funnier. Producer David Nadelberg says, “I had a specific visual aesthetic in mind for what a Mortified animation should look like. It should have the raggedy, moody, frenetic energy of a teen notebook. Innocent at the core but frayed on the surface. We called this aesthetic: punk meets Punky Brewster.” If you’re feeling a little battered by life today, take a few minutes to let “I Hate Drake” make you feel better. As ever, the producers will be at Transom to take your questions.

Podcast: Download (89.9MB)

Last year, Transom and the FLIK International Film festival put out a call for multi-media self portraits. We have our two winners. Soon, we’ll be featuring “I Hate Drake” from Mortified, but right now Transom is hosting James Barany’s poignant and powerful piece about his own obesity called, “My Most Important Self Portrait.” The animated images of James’s body and the sounds of his voice work together in a dark and elegant duet. We urge you to come take a look and listen. James is available to talk about his process.

Podcast: Download (19.4MB)

Jesse Hardman and Maura O’Connor recently drove around the southwestern United States visiting some of the 33 Native American reservations that have their own radio stations. They said it became clear that “radio, often dismissed as outdated for the Web 2.0 era, was the most essential medium of communication in Indian country.” Airchecks from these stations sound alive and connected, peopled by a real range of characters. On Transom, Jesse and Maura put together a report, full of photos and audio, and we also created two radio pieces. One is an NPR-style news magazine piece. The other is a Transom-style collage. Listen to both. Tell us what you think. On our discussion board, we’ll be joined by some of the staff of the tribal stations and they’d like to hear from you.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 25:18 — 23.2MB)

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.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 20:17 — 9.3MB)

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.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 54:37 — 25.0MB)

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.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 9:30 — 4.4MB)

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’.”

Podcast: Download (Duration: 26:29 — 24.2MB)

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.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 9:37 — 4.4MB)