Blunt Youth Radio At Transom, we often feature work by and about young people. We are in a kind of golden age of youth radio these days, with groups working all over the country, many of them offering a chance to be heard to people who don't usually have it. That's good for them and for the rest of us. These programs are often more than just simple training; they capitalize on radio's therapuetic qualities of talking and listening, and determining what's true. Since 1994, Blunt Youth Radio has been working with kids in Maine. As founder Claire Holman says, Blunt is about, "youth empowerment through direct media access. The key is for our members to take responsibility for creating the show—from the first idea, to the features, to the live broadcast. It's their show."
	Not Guilty: Life After Exoneration Joining Final Sale from Samantha Broun and Neal Menschel is Not Guilty an audio-slide-show made by photographer Vance Jacobs and radio producer Evan Roberts. It tells the story of Rick Walker, falsely accused of murder and held in maximum security prison for 12 years. The story covers a six month period of Walker's life as a free man. The blend of images and sound is simple and delicate, an invitation to listen and see.
	Final Sale In the coming weeks, we're pairing some new radio/visual pieces with Ben Shapiro's Guide to Multimedia production on Transom. The first comes from Transoms own Samantha Broun, working with photographer Neal Menschel. It's a quiet, loving portrait of the last working day at a perfectly old-timey general store in Massachusetts. It's a bit uncanny, because after its done, you feel like you were there. The way the sound plays around the images feels almost like memory. Come see and hear for yourself. It's called Final Sale.
	Shortlists Remember Shortlists? It was a project we started a couple of years ago, described like this: A Shortlist is made from your experience or research or daily life. You read it out loud for about 60 seconds and then tell us at the end what the list WAS. It's a story, with the title at the end. The grace is in the mystery.
	Not All Bad Things The audio diary is a tricky form. Story and teller are merged in the moment, bound by voice. The voice of 12-year-old Payton Smith is disarming in its spirit and honesty. Payton recorded during a two-year separation from her incarcerated mother. Hear her voice in this collaboration between Payton and producer Chana Joffe-Walt, with help from Viki Merrick.
	Pacific Drift For about a year, Ben Adair and co-producers Queena Sook Kim and Ayala Ben-Yehuda created a show in LA called Pacific Drift. Southern California Public Radio took a chance investing in a local project so adventurous and highly-produced. The series has ended its run, but we at Transom think this work deserves a national hearing and an extended life for audiences beyond LA. The producers have put some of the series up on PRX, and will be adding more. We invite you here at Transom to hear a few selected stories and talk about the ways creative local radio can thrive.
	"Street Fantasy" and "Baby Mama Drama" You're probably not going to hear these pieces on public radio. Not only are the premises touchy--like considering a job as a prostitute-- but the approach is not distanced or polite. It's connected and sharp- edged. It makes you think about how we talk and what we choose to talk about. Natalie Edwards studied radio at Brooklyn College with Dr. Martin Spinelli and independent producer Ann Heppermann and made these pieces there. Now, she's working at 1010WINS News Radio.
	Just Tryin' to Get Back to Abnormal: After Katrina Anniversaries draw our attention to what we should be paying attention to all along, but life is crowded after all. After Katrina, we began to hear more and more at Transom about grassroots stories of the storm and its aftermath. One of our editors, Sarah Yahm, decided to compile them, because they were being told anyway, regardless of who was listening. We hope you'll take a moment, now or later, to listen to a few more stories from people who needed to tell them.
	A Body in Motion Jesse's Father: When I would lay my hands on peoples' heads and have a prayer of healing, my little finger would shake. It's kind of ironic that you are at a healing service and you are discovering the first signs of Parkinson's. Sound: Trembling noise. Jesse: The sound you are hearing right now is my dad, Bob, holding my microphone. He can't keep it steady because he has Parkinson's, a brain disease that affects peoples' motor skills, and muscle movement, sometimes rendering them with massive tremors, like these.
	Duplex Planet - At Transom, we sometimes work to bring artists into radio. For more than 25 years, David Greenberger has been talking to old people in nursing homes and senior centers. He takes those conversations, transcribes them and renders them to music, so the lyrics seem like found poems. We asked David to come to Cape Cod and the Islands where we live and do his work here. We also helped him on a project called Growing Old in East LA, collaborating with musicians from Los Lobos.
	After the Dumpster - Melodie is an obsessive hoarder, trying hard not to be. This story about her is the kind of thing you don't hear much on the radio anymore. It's not exactly a narrative, there's no news peg, it's just a portrait of a person. It's Elizabeth Chur's first piece since getting out of school. She spent a lot of time on it, gathering 35 hours of tape for a twelve-minute portrait. Like Melodie, she had a hard time letting it go. These are efforts worth knowing about.
	An Evening of 75 Laughs with Jonathan Katz - When we first featured Jonathan Katz's audio work, he was making funny little pieces in his attic studio. Then, we helped him produce a fake call-in show. Now, we've produced a radio hour from Jonathan's stand-up performance.
	Voice of Youth - We listen to a lot of public radio, god bless it, but certainly it sometimes rolls on in a predictable flow. It's good to remember that there are other ways of sounding. What we like about these pieces is that they defy the usual tone, subject and source of public radio, yet each is thoughtful, authentic and memorable... just what public radio aspires to be.
	Twenty One - This piece by Katie Thomas and Nubar Alexanian is an audio-visual self-interview around the question: "What would you do if somebody told you to make a movie about your life?" It ponders this from the vantage point of being twenty-one years old, the age that, by law in this country, we are loosed upon the world and may be expected to answer for ourselves. What will we say?
	Here There is No Moon - Producer Susan Stone has been working on this for a long time, inspired, as she says, by the Lethal Beauty of the Golden Gate Bridge. It's a complicated weave, challenging to listen to, full of stories and hints of much larger stories, all spinning around a single moment, a choice.
	The Mayor of Nichols - Gwen Macsai began this piece seeking out an old friend from Middle School. When she discovers he had been killed in 2000, supposedly homeless, by a Chicago policeman, the inevitable question arose... What happened?
	I Wish - Part audio, part mail art. Samantha Broun's idea was to collaborate with people - through the mail - by asking them to record responses to the question, "What do you wish for?"
	The Little Gray Book Lectures - It would be better if you could go to wherever The Little Gray Book Lecture is being held this month, order a beer, and enjoy the show. But you can't — So we turned it into radio and put it on the Internet.
	Chasing Love - Our Transom Valentine's Day feature by Miguel Macias. It is no mere confection. It's a long and intricate montage, that tricky form. Miguel pulls it off - scored with his own music, no less.
	The Biography of 100,000 Square Feet - Benjamin Temchine's carefully-crafted portrait of place, his master's project at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.
	Family Sentence - "My dad spent 23 years in prison. He started off as a Cuban Revolutionary and later ended up a convicted felon in the United States. We only talked once in the last 16 years. Then, out of the blue I got an email from him. He wrote, 'I'm home. Your biological father, Hector.''"
	Craziest - A Flash story about a highly obsessive Scrabble player. We think you'll get an excited feeling watching it, because you can feel the care and control of the makers working at the edge of something new.

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