Audio School

Audio SchoolProducer Erin Mishkin has begun developing a with youth, for youth series of audio guides to the art of radio. Transom and PRX are featuring three pilot pieces. Erin wants your thoughts about these modules. Are they instructional, inspirational? What others would you want to hear? Let us know what you need, and we’ll work with Erin and PRX to create more.

Road Trip Radio

Lisa TharpeLisa Tharpe is on a journey. She's taking a year's leavefrom her teaching job to make her own "personal independent study in radio...making it up as I go along, traveling around the country visiting friends and family and random interesting places, interviewing anyone who will let me." As part of our "Beginnings" series, Transom will follow Lisa's progress. She'll post along the way; you can ask her questions and travel with her vicariously.

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The Pen is Easier than the Mic

Bill McKibbenFrom time to time, Transom features articles on How to Begin. This time, writer Bill McKibben (The New Yorker, The Atlantic, "The End of Nature," etc.) picks up a microphone and begins making a radio piece. He tells us what it was like. His article links to both the radio and the print pieces that came from his reporting. For anyone considering the switch from print to radio, this will be edifying.

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Enter The White Stripes
by Whitney Pastorek

Enter The White Stripes
w/ Whitney PastorekThe conclusion of Whitney Pastorek's chronicle of her inaugural adventure in broadcasting. With zero experience, she produced a feature about the "White Stripes" for Morning Edition, start to finish. In these final chapters, Whitney, in her honest and expansive way, tells how she made order from chaos and what an edit is like. In fact, she called her editor, Alyne Ellis formerly of NPR, and interviewed her about it. We hope Whitney's story of beginning will inspire others to jump in and do whatever it is you've been thinking about doing...

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Unbidden Radio
by Jim Metzner

Unbidden Radio w/ Jim Metzner"Beginnings are scary, exhilirating - a step into the unknown. A fresh canvas, a grey screen, a virgin minidisc, the germ of an idea."

Jim Metzner shares with us his moment of beginning, which also includes false starts, momentary revelations, and the continual process of rediscovering one's voice. Also, have a listen to one Jim's earlier works about searching for that "perfect" story.

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About Beginnings...

This section of Transom presents stories of beginnings -- from experienced producers and from brand new ones. They'll talk about starting out... the things they wish they'd known, or what they still have to learn, or the stupid and edifying things they did. All kinds of advice, parables, and homilies.

We also have a discussion topic connected to these stories, so feel free to converse about them there.

Speaking of Beginnings... here is a radio piece from Jay Allison's 1980 series Living in the Arts, a collage of artists' voices talking about how they began.

Beginnings

Real Audio

And, for balance, here's another piece from the series on the enemy of beginning, rejection.

Rejection

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