That’s how we find out that there’s something in this town’s tap water.

It’s how NHPR climate change reporter Mara Hoplamazian brings us into this story: a scene that we can all clearly see in our mind’s eye and relate to.

There are moments like that throughout the series: either where we see a compelling visual, or there’s a lighthearted moment – like Mara apologizes for saying “parts per trillion” too many times, or playfully acknowledges that there are not one but two characters in this small town both named Lorene.

Safe to Drink is a four-part investigative podcast from the Pulitzer Prize finalist Document team at New Hampshire Public Radio that delves into PFAS “forever chemicals”. It’s obviously an incredibly serious and important topic — these compounds are in all of our bodies! — but Mara wanted to make this environmental story relatable, funny – even a little goofy.

In this conversation, Mara explains how they made the series visual; exactly when and how they used AI for the investigative aspects of reporting; and why they really had to trust their own instincts.

Tell me about the origins of this show – why were you interested in the story?

When I started working at NHPR about four years ago, I had never heard of PFAS chemicals. One of the first stories I was assigned was about a community on the New Hampshire coast that had these chemicals in their water who had been trying to get them out for many years.

As I worked as a daily reporter on the climate desk, I learned more about these communities, [including one] in Merrimack, southern New Hampshire, which was affected by contamination from a manufacturing plant.

I started talking to people who lived there, and learned about what was in their water. The company there, Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, then decided to pull out and close down operations, fired or reassigned all their employees, and tore down their whole building, which was this big building on the side of the highway.

Every time I drove past the building, I had all these questions, like: where did these chemicals come from in the first place? They’ve impacted so many people’s lives. Even though this company is pulling out, these chemicals are still everywhere. They’re called forever chemicals for a reason.

I was thinking about it so often that the newsroom let me make a podcast. It matters to me in part because so much of my reporting has focused on the communities that have been impacted by drinking water contamination, and I really wanted to dig in deeper into why that had happened.

Because, you know, these chemicals are in all of our bodies. They’re everywhere. They’re really widely used. They’re in almost half of the tap water in the US. But I kept talking to people who felt so confused about what they were and where they had come from and why they were dealing with this major problem in their home or in their community. It was a complicated, sciencey, regulatory story that had a lot of human impact, and I wanted to use the format of a podcast to make that clear.

Why did you feel this story would be a good one to tell through sound?

As I was talking to people about their experiences of contamination, the way that I came to care about these really dense, technical issues was through their stories and voices. I wanted to make sure other people could have that experience [of caring] too. Audio feels like a really personal medium, so I thought it would have a bigger impact when talking about this academic topic.

Also, I don’t have a chemistry background. I don’t have very much of a science background at all, but I think that the science behind these chemicals is really interesting and can be sort of goofy and relatable. There’s really interesting ways to describe it. The form of a podcast loosens up the constraints on how you can explain chemical bonds, for example, or the tiny amounts of these compounds, and how they get tested, and what that really means. So I just felt like there was room to be creative with explaining this thing in a way that might help people connect with it.

How did you approach the writing, and making sure it struck the right tone? Did it come naturally?

I think it really was a benefit that I don’t have a scientific background because when I was interviewing scientists, I had to be like, “All right, I don’t understand what you’re saying. Can you explain it to me as if I’m a smart middle schooler?”

The metaphors and the descriptive language you have to use when you’re describing science to a non-scientist: that’s the only way I can engage with it.

It was also really fun to be able to be goofy a little bit; it’s a very serious and somewhat bleak story, but generally speaking, I’m a pretty goofy person, and so it was nice to have a bit of room for humor in the writing, or like using a caterpillar as a metaphor for a chemical compound.

I worked with Jason Moon, who’s a producer on our long form audio documentary desk, and he is really good at finding simple and effective ways to say things conversationally. So that was really helpful.

I also love listening to science podcasts like Short Wave and Maintenance Phase, where folks are trying to describe scientific concepts in a conversational and approachable way. It was helpful to understand what I need as a listener, and I wanted to give that to listeners of this show.

How did you think about making the show visual?

It feels important to give people something to hold on to in their mind’s eye when they’re listening to a podcast. Visual writing is really important for audio producers. The thing I love about audio is that you can conjure more with your tone of voice than with the written word. It gives us the chance to give someone an image that sticks: I wanted to have moments that stuck.

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Tell me about the investigative aspect of the reporting.

We went through thousands of pages of documents. Part of what was challenging was that there were several different court cases. There are so many lawsuits [in this area] so we really had to go through all of them.

I spent the most time trying to iron out one particular issues, which is that employees in the Merrimack Saint-Gobain plant had told me they had their blood tested, but weren’t told what it was for, and never got the results. For the folks I talked to, [they saw it as a] sign that Saint-Gobain knew more about the contamination than they were letting on. This was years and years before the contamination became public.

Through court documents, it became clear that Saint-Gobain knew in 2004 that they were releasing PFOA into the environment. That was more than a decade before people in Merrimack understood that it was in their water.

As we were trying to iron out this timeline, we had to do a lot of work to figure out whether that blood testing had happened – trying to corroborate the stories that folks were telling us. It was really complicated. Saint-Gobain wouldn’t respond to questions about the blood testing. Trying to find this one piece of information took us many weeks to track down.

One of the things that I was really excited about was talking to people who had worked at the Saint-Gobain plant – many of whom had never talked to reporters before. I even talked to one person who basically had been trying to blow the whistle on the company for more than a decade, and had stood at public meetings, trying to say things, and had not been really heard by regulators.

I had a really good experience of finding folks on Facebook or Reddit who had tried to make something public about their experiences working there, but had never really gotten traction, or never been listened to by a regulator or by a reporter. So having the chance to have some of those conversations with people who wanted to talk was really meaningful for me.

In general when you’re reporting, what are you looking for – like a thread to pull, or an alarm bell that goes off – that tells you there could be an investigative story there?

Something I’ve been noticing recently is [that] companies make a lot of sustainability claims, and I’m always curious about the data that backs that up, and where that exists.

With Saint-Gobain, for example, I followed a lot of stories about when the company had put an emissions control device on their building, but then there was a bypass stack written into the architectural drawings that nobody had ever caught at the state regulatory level, and obviously the company didn’t disclose it.

So that’s one thing: instances where companies or people in power are making claims about sustainability where there should be data to back them up. And I’m looking for where that data exists or doesn’t exist.

A lot of the reporting I do is on water quality and air quality, and often people will write to me and say that they’re noticing something weird. I’ve had several instances where people will say “I just have a feeling that something is off”. Probably less than half the time, that leads to a real story. But when it does, those are really valuable. Because I think people are good observers of their own realities.

In terms of toxic substances in particular, there’s so much publicly available data that the EPA holds about companies disclosing testing that they’re doing on employees or on animals as it relates to their chemicals. It’s like this treasure trove – I spent so much time in this database online. It requires a level of either scientific knowledge or willingness to sift through a lot of acronyms that you need to Google every time you see a new one.

So it can feel really daunting, but I do think there’s a lot of under-reported stories in the environmental and toxin world.

Speaking of sifting through databases and acronyms, did you use AI in making this show?

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The idea that stuck with me was that with a podcast, the audience can close both eyes and follow along. With a video podcast, they can use two ears and one eye.

Nick’s class is running again next month — I highly recommend it — and there’s loads of other similar workshops in this issue, if you’re video pod curious right now.

Thanks for reading and supporting the newsletter,

C

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Dennis wanted to make a story about this—and he decided to focus on clinic escorts, volunteers who accompany patients to their appointments. Over the course of a year and a half, Dennis clipped lav mics on willing escorts, and recorded what they heard.

The result is Holding the Line, a short audio piece that brings listeners inside the experience of those escorts. You are there, outside the clinics, witnessing the hostility and fear, but also care and compassion.

Now… where does a story like that end up these days? How do you pitch a story like that?

Dennis did pitch it around traditional outlets, without any luck. So now you can hear Holding the Line in Dennis’ audio magazine. Yes, an actual print magazine that comes with a digital version on BandCamp and even a cassette. It’s called Written in Air, and the first issue launched last summer. You can buy and listen here – which I strongly encourage you to do. Alongside Holding the Line, there are five brilliant audio gems by other producers, spanning collage, field recordings, essay, sound art and more.

In this conversation, Dennis shared why we need hopeful, creative audio right now; how to pitch your more abstract or conceptual ideas; and common mistakes that producers make when pitching him stories for the BBC.

Dennis is a producer, showrunner, sound designer and composer, whose work has featured in The 11th, Short Cuts, and the BBC World Service. His production studio, Written In Air, has collaborated with Pushkin Industries, Pineapple Street Studios, iHeartMedia and more.

How did the Written in Air magazine come to be? Where did the kernel of the idea come from?

[I was thinking about] where do stories like that live anymore? I love one-offs. Over time, I’ve grown to like podcasting and the idea of a show less and less, because of the parameters that start to exist. I wanted to make something that felt kind of formless.

I want people to be able to make what they want to make. So the magazine was about building a space where I was a cheerleader for producers, giving them guidance or the right connections. Most of the time, it’s just like, ‘hey I need money so I can spend time on this’.

It creates interesting, different types of work that can all live under this bigger thing. I also intentionally made the decision that this wouldn’t be a podcast at all. It would exist in a completely different format.

Talk to me about that decision: why did you choose to make it as a magazine?

I mean, the idea of audio magazines exists, obviously. This American Life is technically a magazine. I wanted to do something that could, if you wanted, completely remove you from your phone, from that eco-system.

[The magazine comes with] cassette tapes. They’re like a collectors item. It’s like the potential of, ‘oh I could go out into a field with a tape player, put this on, and sit there with this magazine and have a two-hour experience of listening to audio without some sort of internet-connected device’.

That’s something people used to do, but we don’t do anymore. I felt there was value in it.

[An added benefit of a print magazine] is that I wanted listeners to be more exposed to audio cultures from around the world – so it has a printed transcript [translated into English] that you can read along with. I like that way of listening to stuff in other languages. It’s a little more tactile. You can sit in the audio a bit differently.

I even like the audio experience of having it available in the BandCamp app – because it’s very sparse. There are no links to click, or [distractions] that will take you elsewhere.

One of my other things was thinking about how we get our work out of the audio ecosystem and into other places, to grow audiences. So I’ve [taken Written in Air] to zine fairs, art book fairs, and publishing fairs. I take CDs that have the digital audio on them in a little sleeve with our logo – people are really excited by those.

When you introduced the magazine, you described it as “armchair travel for the human heart”. Why was that important, and how did you choose which pieces ended up in the issue?

The pieces are not all personal storytelling, but they’re deeply in people’s lives. I think when people are willing to speak with you [as a producer], they’re giving a part of themselves to you. That’s what I think audio is: we’re going through the complex emotionality of human life. Everything’s from the heart in that way.

There are also some investigative-style pieces which are complicated. I don’t have any rules around the types of stories we tell. The most important argument is: ‘well, why are we doing it in sound?’ It has to stand on its own in that way; it can’t be something I could have just read.

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I’d love to hear more about why you decided to focus on the escorts for Holding The Line.

I live in Pittsburgh – we’re like 45 minutes from Ohio and equidistant from West Virginia, where there was an outright abortion ban. Things then got murky in Ohio. More people were coming here for abortions, but there were also more protesters coming here – because they’ve lost their places to go, and they still want to be angry.

I’ve seen those clinics, but as a bystander, you just walk past. You don’t linger there. So I was very curious about what it’s actually like to be there all the time. How does that work?

I got in touch with the clinic escorts and they agreed to let me record them. It was actually their idea to find ways [to record] where I wasn’t present. They [explained that] anytime the media is around, it’s not a normal representation of what things are usually like.

So the story was all recorded with clip-on lavs. I sat in my car and no one knew I was there. Ethically, we were fine – because the people who are there protesting, they film everything with GoPros. Every second of these interactions is already recorded anyway.

Afterwards, I interviewed the escorts. I did that for about 18 months. I recorded almost every Saturday. There’s a lot of material. That’s a big part of my work: sitting in a thing and taking the time to gather all the material. I got a grant from the Heinz Endowments to make this piece. To me, audio is so interesting when you’re able to show things moving through time.

So what’s your approach to then getting all that tape down to a six-ish-minute piece?

While I’m recording, I’m logging all of it, which was actually the nice thing about not being out there as a producer, is I could take super detailed notes of every single thing that’s happening, and type all that out. So I had a very kind of quick way of finding tape that I needed.

A lot of the escorts were willing to wear mics but didn’t want to do interviews. So in the end I only used scene tape from people who did give interviews.

I’m assuming at that point you didn’t know this story was going to end up in the Written in Air magazine?

No. I’d planned to pitch it to Lights Out and Short Cuts, but then they both got cancelled.

Then I realized it would make sense in the magazine. You’d asked me about choosing which stories go in the magazine: [one thing I consider] is how different the stories are from one another.

With this first issue, I feel like it’s very much an expression of all the different types of ways that you can tell stories in sound. Like there’s something archival; there’s a deeply reported piece with a lot of interviews; there’s a personal piece. It shows all the types of ways you can make things.

How is the magazine funded?

It comes from my pocket. That’s how I made this first one.

I’d applied for grant funding, but didn’t get it – because it was hard to describe [in the grant application]. There’s no reference point for it that already exists.

So I just decided: I need to just make this and pay for it myself. I’m not independently wealthy, I didn’t really have the money. But honestly I was at a point where I wasn’t very busy work-wise, because the audio industry is collapsing. It feels shit. And I really want something like this to exist. I was like, if this is the last thing I do before I have to go work in some other industry, I’m fine sticking my own money into it. So that’s what I did.

I literally just finished paying everybody last week. I was getting everyone on board [by saying]: ‘you will get paid for this. It’s going to take time, but if you also believe in the thing, we will do it.”

And it’s nice because now that it exists, I can apply for grants for future issues.

So what’s the plan going forward? Are you accepting pitches for upcoming issues?

I don’t have a formal process – it’s mostly been ideas that [have come to me] for the BBC commissioning rounds. They are stories I’m really excited by, but were not successful in pitching the BBC.

I want to try and get the money to do four more magazines, with 8-10 pieces in each.

Let’s talk about pitching stories to you for the BBC. What are some common mistakes that people make?

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I collaborated with Jamel over the course of several months to make this piece. He had input on the shape of the story, and he also got paid a fee for his time. All elements that would make my old journalism professor frown sternly at me.

But the traditional rules feel less relevant these days - - especially for character-driven narrative audio. It’s something podcast consultant and showrunner Karen Given was mulling over as she produced her new show What Takes Root. It’s a first-person, non-narrated series featuring changemakers from the Global South. And she says it was an experiment that goes against the grain of everything she was taught in journalism school.

She wrote the following piece in her brilliant newsletter, Narrative Beat, about breaking all the rules - from collaborative storytelling, to compensating sources. Here’s Karen…

From a listener standpoint, there’s nothing too, too revolutionary about this project.

But from a journalism standpoint, this project represents an attempt to shake up the rules of the game. To acknowledge that not every project fits the strict definition of the word “journalism.” And that, in this new-ish podcast space that many of us inhabit, some of the rules of journalism ethics that we were all taught in J-school aren’t actually … ethical.

In fact, sometimes, those rules actually take advantage of the people we’re interviewing.

You’ve heard me talk about this kind of thing before.

When I started in journalism, I learned a set of rules:

• The interview subject must agree to talk about anything, with no questions off limits.

• The interview subject must go into the interview blind, with no prior knowledge of the questions that will be asked.

• Once the interview begins, everything is on the record, unless the interview subject specifically asks to turn off the recording and go off the record.

• The interview subject will have no input into what is used or not used, and they will not be given the opportunity to review the finished product before it’s made public.

• The interview subject will not receive any sort of compensation for their participation.

If you followed these rules, your journalism was deemed “ethical.” And if you didn’t follow them…

Well, good luck in some other career.

But the truth is, I’ve been breaking a lot of these rules for a really long time. I think many of us have!

The old rules of journalism are structured to protect journalists from people in power. They level the playing field so that when a journalist is interviewing a politician, for example, the politician doesn’t hold all the cards.

But what about when the journalist is actually the one who holds the power? Maybe the person being interviewed is from a marginalized community? Maybe they’re fighting back against an unjust system? Or facing the consequences of unjust laws?

What should the rules of interviewing look like then?

The Project

It all started when a friend from college called me up and asked a completely unexpected question. If I were to receive a grant to produce a podcast, what podcast would I want to produce?

Okay, okay. There was a bit more to the whole process than that!

My friend was working with an organization called ORA – the Omega Resilience Awards. And so she preferred that the podcast have something to do with the causes that organization supports.

(All good things, in my estimation. ORA funds fellows in India, Africa and Latin America who are working to combat many of the big evils in the world: racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, global inequities and even climate change.)

And the grant was actually a research grant – which I took to mean that I should be trying to research something. Uncover some sort of new truth.

And so, I proposed a podcast project where I would interview ORA fellows about how they came to do the work that they do. And for the “research” part of this “research” project, I would try to come up with some new rules – a new way of thinking about narrative storytelling that was less extractive and more collaborative.

ORA must have liked the idea...because my grant proposal was approved!

The Inspiration…or is it The Anti-Inspiration?

This idea has been on my mind since listening to the podcast Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative. It came out in early 2024 and it made a bit of a splash – at least in journalism circles.

The podcast followed a documentary audio maker who was attempting to address many of the concerns that I’ve brought up here.

Interviewing can be an extractive process. Sometimes we’re asking our interview subjects to relive their trauma and to expose themselves to backlash and consequences. And almost always, we’re offering them nothing of value in return.

But while Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative made a good case for the “why,” but it was less successful when it came to the “how.” No offense intended, but when it came to the “how,” that project it was a bit of a mess.

The host faced setback after setback in her attempt to find a new way to approach documentary audio. And while setbacks can make for an entertaining podcast, they often don’t lead to substantive change.

So my goal was to take the lessons learned from that experiment – and my decades of experience “breaking the rules” – and to see if we could mash them all together into something that actually works.

A Caveat…

Okay, I think this goes without saying, but if you actually are working in traditional journalism, and your goal is to hold people who are in power accountable for their actions, this is not the method for you!

The rules of journalism exist for a reason. I’m not saying we should throw them out entirely. I’m only saying that sometimes…the rules don’t apply.

Step 1: The Workshop

I’m a teacher at heart. That’s actually why I got into journalism in the first place. I love distilling down information and passing it along.

So my first step was to hold a storytelling workshop for my potential interview subjects – and anyone else from ORA who was interested in the process.

Often, at the beginning of an interview, I’ll find myself explaining my goals to the person I’m interviewing. I’ll say things like, “I want to get you telling stories, so I’m going to ask questions in a weird way…to help you do that.” Or even, “I want to tell this story in your words, not mine. So I’m going to ask a lot of questions that I already know the answers to…so that the listener can hear these stories directly from you.”

This time, I took that concept much, much farther. I started with the basics. Why narrative? Why do we want to explain concepts through stories?

And then I went through some of the big concepts, one by one.

Anecdotes. What they are. How they work. How you string together a propulsive set of anecdotes to build a story.

Turning points, signposts, foreshadowing.

It was all very similar to the workshop I teach for journalists, except I was teaching it to the people I would be interviewing.

Step 2: Recruiting

Okay, I’m not gonna lie. I didn’t plan to recruit. I thought the workshop would be enough!

But as I spoke to the fellows who had attended the workshop, I realized that many of them felt their story wasn’t “enough” to be featured on the podcast.

It wasn’t dark enough.

Wasn’t disadvantaged enough.

Wasn’t inspiring enough.

I think we – as journalists – have done a great disservice to people from marginalized communities. By only telling the stories of the poorest, most downtrodden and most marginalized, we’ve missed the opportunity to feature many of the people who are affecting true change in this world.

The people I wanted to interview were some of the most accomplished people I had ever met. And still, they had been socialized to believe that they weren’t “enough.”

So yeah, Step 2 sometimes involved convincing people that their stories were worth telling.

Step 3: Narrowing the Field

Once I had convinced people to participate, I still needed to choose the best stories.

This is always going to be a thing. I would have loved to interview every single ORA fellow. But the grant I received just wouldn’t cover that.

But here – as elsewhere in this project – I really challenged myself to keep an open mind. Just like every other audio maker, I have preconceived ideas of what makes a story worth telling. And I have biases, built on years of experience, on what type of person makes for the best storyteller.

Generally speaking, I’m looking for emotional people, not analytical people. Analytical people can tend to focus on facts and statistics. And I’m really looking for someone who can focus on story and emotion.

And I’m looking for stories with a plot. Excitement. Surprises. Tension.

(Just to be clear, tension is an absolute requirement for this type of storytelling. But there are lots of different types of tension. They’re not all life and death. And some of the most compelling types of tension are internal – invisible to everyone except the person experiencing them.)

But for this project, I was interested in pushing the boundaries of what made for a good story – and a good storyteller. So I pre-interviewed everyone who expressed interest in working with me. And I’m so glad that I did!

Because the one person I was SURE would be terrible actually ended up contributing to one of my favorite episodes.

Step 4: Compensation

Yeah, I know that’s a super scary word for those of us who came up through the journalism world.

Compensation can look like a lot of different things. Every time you promise a book author that you’ll mention their book, that’s a form of compensation.

But “exposure” is not always enough. Realistically, this podcast is not going to inspire dozens of (mostly American) listeners to fly to Chile to buy tickets to see the Teatro La Crisis – an experimental theater company focused on social transformation.

“Exposure” is only valuable if the person you’re interviewing is in a position to benefit from it. And that’s an incredibly privileged position to be in.

So, yeah….we’re talking about money.

One of the lessons that I took from Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative was that an hourly rate was not necessarily the best idea. I want to fairly compensate their time, not give them an incentive to sensationalize their own story. And if you pay someone hourly, they might be tempted to stretch out the process and mold their story into what they think you want, in order to “rack up” more hours.

So a project rate seemed like the way to go.

I based my project rate on five hours of work. I’ve budgeted enough projects to know that would likely cover the amount of time I was asking the fellows to commit.

And I based the actual rate on the rate that I would be getting paid. Because there’s no reason why my labor would be more valuable than theirs.

Originally, my idea was to provide half of that compensation in the form of a microphone and half in cash. It seemed logical, as many of the fellows who were participating were also interested in producing their own podcast someday.

But quickly, I learned that it’s ridiculously expensive to send microphones to the Global South (much more cost effective to purchase locally.) More importantly, not every fellow actually needed a microphone. Some already owned one. Some had no use for one.

It was only my outside lens that made me believe that a microphone was an appropriate element of “compensation.”

So, I sent everyone the full stipend…in cash. And anyone who wanted advice on which microphone to purchase with that money received my enthusiastic – possibly over-enthusiastic – assistance.

Step 5: Planning

Normally, my planning process looks something like this:

1. Find a “subject” who might be interesting.

2. Dig around in the subject’s history, using research and/or a pre-interview.

3. Decide which part of that history will be most interesting to my audience.

4. Interview, focusing only on the parts of the story that interest me.

5. Edit, mix, publish – again, further refining and highlighting the story I want to tell.

6. Send a link of the published piece to the subject.

I feel like I’ve approached this process with the absolute best of intentions – with an ear towards truth, not sensationalism. And it’s worked really well for me, for a long time.

But it’s not very collaborative.

This time around, I flipped that process entirely on its head.

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There are loads of opportunities to pitch your stories and apply for awards or fellowships in this issue. Plus: the investigative podcast that gave me full-body goosebumps on multiple occasions (it’s been a while since that happened).

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This is exactly what Helena de Groot wrestled with as she made her brand new show Creation Myth – out this week in the CBC’s Personally feed. The turning point came when a friend gave her some counterintuitive but incredibly helpful feedback – a note that allowed her to go deeper in her storytelling, and tap into something universal.

Originally from Belgium, Helena grew up in a family of musicians and went on to work as producer and sound designer. She is now based in New York, and she also produces the gorgeous show Poetry off the Shelf.

Creation Myth is about Helena’s choice to have (or not have) kids – but it’s actually a love letter to anyone who is struggling to make a difficult decision in their lives. Helena was so generous in this conversation – she told me how she faced the challenge of narrativizing her life, putting plot to her thought process; how sound design can add an entirely new POV; and why a powerfully emotional reaction from early listeners kept her motivated. And of course she tells me about that game-changing note (I have it as a post-it on my own desk now.)

Tell me about Creation Myth.

I started writing the show when my husband left. The reason he left was that, after eight years of marriage, and eight years of trying to change my mind, he finally saw that I would never want to have kids.

Once he was gone I thought, wow, I’ve maintained this position for so long, so ardently. But, why? Why is this so important to me that I’m willing to sacrifice this big love, this man that I moved across the ocean for? I was so puzzled by myself and sort of angry - like why couldn’t I just change my mind?

I wasn’t initially planning to make a podcast. All I wanted to do was process. I don’t journal the traditional way, on paper – I record things instead. So I started recording me talking to myself, talking to my [family, my] friends.

The show starts with this point of certainty: I’m going to investigate why I don’t want to have kids. But, quickly, I began having doubts. Like wait, do I want kids?! Because this decision is forever. Whether you have a kid or not, it’s forever. The idea that I might make a mistake was terrifying. Every time doubt crept in, I would go back to the drawing board. I would throw out everything I knew about myself, I was willing to rethink my identity. That’s why the show is called Creation Myth. Maybe it was all a myth, a story I told about myself.

At what point in the process did you pitch it as a story?

After my husband left, the project was very amorphous. I worked on it on the backburner for two years. I collected a lot of tape: I have more than 250 separate recordings, some are 10 minutes long, some 4 hours. Talking to my friends, talking to people who don’t have kids whose lives I can learn from. It was so inspiring but it was just a collection of tape.

A year later, my friend encouraged me to send a pilot to Tribeca. That was a helpful kick in the butt. I didn’t get selected but it was very invigorating to see: ‘oh this can be a shape that can exist in the world’.

One friend gave me feedback on the 35-minute pilot: that I went over the story beats too quickly. They said, “I feel like you should go deeper, you should really sit with these feelings and interrogate yourself more.” I thought it’d be so indulgent! But he said, “Helena, the deeper you go, the less indulgent it will be. People will only be able to connect to it when you go deep.”

I thought that was so good, so I put it on a sticky note on my computer screen: “the deeper you go, the less indulgent it will be.” Every time I think this project is too much about me, I think about that note.

I then sent a trailer to Resonate’s 2024 Pitch Party, and I won! I got a first-look deal with Virginia Public Media and $10,000 to make a [new] pilot. That was so transformative.

After I pitched the trailer in front of an audience and jury, people came up to me in tears – men and women with stories that sometimes resembled mine, but often not. What they all had in common was they were wrestling with a choice that people around them didn’t like. They were trying to stay true to themselves, but also trying not to hurt other people.

You mean choices that had nothing to do with having kids?

Yes!

Wow, so you had hit on something big.

Yes. And it released so much emotion. The fact that people connected to it so deeply made the project come to life [in a new way.]

It also made me realize that I’m not doing this for me – of course I will be the one doing it, and worrying if it’s good… but I have to push through that because there’s something here that people need – and it’s not about me and my ego. It’s an act of love for my fellow humans. We all have some decision in our lives that people don’t agree with, and we have to try and stick with it anyway.

Veronica Simmons from the CBC – who is now my editor – was in the audience at the pitch party. She reached out to me afterwards. And the CBC bought it. [And once I started working with the CBC, the show started changing. Because my editor Veronica had listened to some of the tape [of me interviewing friends of friends of friends who did not have kids], and she was like, “I’m so much more interested in you than in these other people [who have no connection to you.]”. She also encouraged me to go deeper on my own story. [I was hesitant, but a year later, I sent my new pilot to Tribeca, and this time I got selected. That helped me believe that all this me-me-me could be interesting to other people.]

The act of narrativizing a thought process must have been challenging – how did you give it plot?

Yes, this is a very good question, and this is the central struggle that I have with this show. You’re right. It’s like, [the story is] in my head.

But in terms of giving it plot, the first part was easy because a lot of things happened. I met a guy, I moved across the ocean, I told him I don’t want kids. He started pushing. He left. I met someone new, and that brought new doubt. Those are clear story beats.

But later on, nothing happens, as in there’s no plot – it’s me wrestling with a question. So this process became externalized through me talking to people who know me really well, that’s how I structured each episode. I found someone, like a close friend, my mother, or my sister, who would talk to me for that part of the story.

We would remember a moment or time together, and that’s how the stuff inside my brain could become externalized. [I would tell them how I felt, and they shared how they saw [me]. [And] those people also had different lives from me – most either have or want to have kids – so you get many more perspectives on the choice.

Then together, we retold the story of: what is it that I want, and who is it that I am, and in what way is my self image just a little bit off? And how can I rewrite the story?

When you and I were emailing last summer, you said you were in the middle of a very thorny narrative knot. Can you share what that was, and how you untangled it?

I don’t want to go into the specifics [to avoid spoilers!]. But what I can say is that it is weird to try and have profound insights about your life on a deadline. You don’t go to therapy, like, “by next week I have to have figured this out!”

It’s so interesting that you’re trying to figure out this personal problem in your life whilst trying to figure out a production problem at the same time. You also emailed me something Erica Heilman said, that she’s part of “the church of starting and finishing”. How did that work in practice? How did you keep going?

I mean, it helps that the CBC has put up money and I signed the contract!

But even before that, I did keep going. Even when I didn’t know if anything would ever come from it. [Previously,] In my creative life, I’ve had a million ideas, and I’ve started so many projects and then abandoned them as soon as I lost confidence a little.

I think with this… well, the movies, books and audio that I like best are when someone is actually figuring something out in real time. They’re genuinely processing a thing and they’re searching, it’s a quest. Something is eating you and you want to understand it. I think that’s why I kept going: the question literally had a hold on me and wouldn’t let go. And how could I let go of the project that was helping me figure it out?

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Talk to me about the sound design.

Sound design is so important to me. I was raised in a family of musicians. My dad plays the piano. My mom is a singer. They made us go to music academy throughout my childhood. Like you learn how to read and you learn how to ride a bicycle and you learn how to play music. It was really like that.

Music is almost why I make audio stories. The words themselves are already musical. I write in a very rhythmic way. I have a cadence in my ear, and I try to syncopate sentences when I want the feeling of drag, or the feeling of doubt.

For me, music is a way to both underline something and contradict it. Sound design is a whole other layer. For example, maybe I’m being super dramatic in the VO, like, “Why can I not make this decision?!” But then I’ll use a silly clown song for the score. So the listener knows that I know I’m being ridiculous – in retrospect.

It’s almost like how point of view functions in literature. Is it first person? Is it close third? Sound design is the point of view. It’s the way I’m telling the story. So if I’m talking about eight years ago, I’m telling you how I felt eight years ago, but the sound design is me now.

Are you working with a composer or using a music library?

I use APM. APM is my happy place and my insane place. I love that every impulse that I have, they have something. It’s like any other scavenger hunt, some days you just are so lucky, and you find it’s like the gods of APM are favorable, and then you find one thing after another. And some days I spend hours not finding anything.

It sounds like you had a clear idea of the overall tone you wanted for the show.

My partner Brendan Baker is also in audio, he’s a sound designer. So I score everything, and then he listens and also talks through any problems I have. He’s like my sounding board, someone who has a little distance from the project who can help me when I can’t see it anymore. I come up with the ideas, create the first draft, then kick it over to him. He listens, suggests changes and when I agree with them, I implement them.

It’s like a story editor, but for sound design.

Yes and it’s great because he has given suggestions [to change] where to stop the music [stops—usually earlier than I did], and it really punctuates the story differently.

I once heard Leonard Bernstein say that, because a symphony is too long for people to pay attention the whole time, the job of a conductor is to basically tell the audience: this is when to wake up [and notice something]. I like to think of sound design like that.

Was there anything else you wanted to say on the challenge of making work from your personal life?

I think of memoir as something that happened in the past, and you know how it ended. For me, I didn’t know how it ended. It is by definition artificial, right? Nothing ended.

So it was a very existential thing to do, because I’m only 42 – I hope I have more life in me! But also I am closing a chapter. I’m thinking about the first half of my life in effect. And thinking about, what have I done with my life so far? What have I learned? Who have I come to understand myself to be? What is the meaning of my life?

If I hadn’t made this project… I mean, I guess that’s why people have midlife crises. But this felt a little bit like the opposite of a midlife crisis.

It has a spiritual component – and I don’t have a spiritual frame, I’m not religious. So it was interesting to find a shape for that anyway. I do think that making art is my spiritual frame.

It was helpful to have the art to rely on, to ask how can I make it beautiful? How can I make it emotional? How can I bring in all these different layers, how can I play with sound and language?

Those were the constraints that I worked in; that was my practice, my daily meditation. For me, art is how I look at life. It’s how I understand what life is. And it sounds grandiose or something, but I’m so grateful that I got to make this.

You mentioned the post-its on your desk – what are they?

There are two. “The deeper you go, the less indulgent it will be”.

The other is “never give up, always surrender”. That combination opened a door in my mind.

To me, “never give up” is like: keep striving, keep trying to expand, to face the world, to face life, not close off, take risks, put yourself out there, fall and get up. Deal with hard things and make it through.

But then, “always surrender”, that one is hard for me. I’m very good at not giving up. I am not good at surrendering because I’m a control freak, I like agency. So it’s this idea of, ‘you can only do so much, then it’s out of your hands’.

For instance when I have writer’s block, or a moment when I think the project’s going to fail, I look at that note: “never give up, always surrender”. I really believe that if you’re blocked, there’s a reason. You haven’t surrendered, you’re imposing your will on the thing. And maybe the sentence wants to be a different way. You have to let go of what you want it to be, and almost let it tell you what it wants to be. Oh my god, it sounds so woo woo.

You told me about the emotional, positive reaction that people had when you pitched Creation Myth at Resonate. How do you think people will respond when they hear the full season this month? Or are you trying not to think about that?

While I was writing it – like molding the story from the clay of my life – I couldn’t think about that. It would make me freeze up.

But now that it’s [almost] done and I’m in the sandbox part where I get to play with sound, I am thinking about how people will respond. It comes with a lot of fear. I know people will be judgmental while they’re listening – because that’s how we all are as listeners!

I’m also afraid of people on the far-right finding it. I’m questioning if my life has meaning without kids – which is like grist for their mill. But I didn’t want that to be a reason not to make the show. Trolls don’t deserve that kind of power.

But my hopes and dreams are… firstly that people feel buoyed by it. That they will feel supported in whatever decision they’re facing. That they feel permission to sit with it and make it complicated. I hope it can do something for people.

And also for me personally, I hope that this show will be a thing that will allow me to keep making things. Like I don’t want money or fame – I mean of course I want money, but it doesn’t have to be more than what I need to live and make things. I hope that people will be like, “Wow, we love that. We want to commission you to make a thing”.

If I can just go on and be a maker for as long as I’m alive, I’m happy.

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Here are your audio jobs for this month - - plenty of pitch opportunities, awards and events too. Thanks for reading.

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Mia asked her team: what’s your biggest success? What’s your biggest pain point?

What’s your goal for the next year?

She even wanted to know: what’s one thing you do to take care of yourself?

Mia is a veteran audio producer who has spent her career championing creativity, diversity, and character-driven storytelling. She was formerly VP of content and production at Pushkin, and has also taught audio storytelling at Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and Wesleyan University.

In this issue, Mia told me how she builds a workplace culture of kindness, what video podcasting means for narrative audio, why she left Pushkin … and why we all need a ‘creative flock’ right now.

Mia and I chatted back in October, right after Slate had just released a beautiful new show called When We All Get To Heaven, a series that tells the story of one of the first gay-positive churches, and how it faced the personal, social, and political trials of the AIDS epidemic, including the deaths of hundreds of its members.

I started by asking Mia about the origins of the show…

I started at Slate in June 2025. One of the first emails I got was from Anna Sale, host of Death Sex and Money, forwarding me an email from Krissy Clark [When We All Get To Heaven’s managing producer], saying, “Hey, I’m working on this thing. We’re looking for distribution. Might you have any interest?”

And I just love narrative. That’s where I came up, that’s what I’ve always loved. Slate doesn’t do a whole lot of narrative; they have Slow Burn, which is their crown jewel, and they have Decoder Ring, which is this amazing long-running narrative show.

But other than that, they’re all primarily chat shows. And so I listened to the first episode, and I heard how gorgeous it was. It was 10 years in the making. It had been grant funded, and they were just looking for distribution. They specifically wanted to work with Slate, which was really exciting to me.

I brought it to my boss, Hillary Frey, and she was like, “what if we just put it in the Outward feed?” [Outward is Slate’s queer podcast]. We had a number of conversations about how to make it work. Ultimately, we were able to create a deal where very little money changed hands.We could give them a network and a platform, and they could give us content that we would never be able to make on our own. I mean, the fact that so much went into it – 10 years of production! That’s not something – even with Slow Burn – we would ever be able to do. It feels like a really wonderful partnership from my perspective.

I want this to work for them so badly. I’ve made so many narrative productions, and I know what heart rending work [it is] and just how much goes into something like that. Holding the stories of these people. A lot of the people whose voices you hear are no longer around. They’ve died of AIDS. There’s just so much riding on this for the participants of the series, and I want to do them justice, I want them to get heard, and I want those stories to be out there in the world.

I hope that we can give them what they’re looking for, and I hope everyone finds it, and everyone listens to it. But this kind of partnership is definitely something that Slate hasn’t really done before.

What other shows are you focusing on at Slate?

Well since I started [the role], I’ve been on a ‘get to know you’ tour. I was at Slate about 10 years ago, and very few people who were there then are still here. So I’ve really spent most of my time getting to know everyone, getting to know the shows, getting to look beneath the hood and try to see how everything works.

Every shop is a little bit different. And I’ve been at a few of them! I told everyone [at Slate], ‘I’m not going to come in and remake the whole thing. I want to work with what you’ve got.’ I want to keep what makes Slate so special, and try to breathe fresh life into projects that need it.

Three of our shows are on YouTube. [Video] is just where things are going, especially for chat shows. So it was about figuring out which shows would be good to start with. Obviously you’re not going to do that with Slow Burn or Decoder Ring -- because the editorial process is so in-depth. It needs to be an interview show that you could pretty easily port from audio into video – and then get the team on board.

There’s a lot of anxiety around video. There’s a lot of resistance. I feel it too: narrative does not work on YouTube. But it’s just the reality of the business. The first Slate YouTube video was from our parenting show Care and Feeding. The other two, Slate Money and Political Gabfest, are also live.

I’m curious how you met that resistance to video amongst your team?

How do I get people’s buy in? I mean, everyone knows that this is the direction that podcasts are going in, right? It’s understood: YouTube is where it’s at, like it or not, that’s what all the metrics show. We have to be there.

So my argument is we have to think business minded. We can still continue to do the audio work we love; this does not have to completely upend our production processes.

The idea for me is that it’s relatively low stakes. Like, just try it and let’s see what happens. Have fun with it. Get good lighting. We got webcams for the hosts, got them some nice ring lights, made sure that they understood that they were going to be on camera.

I really tried to foster an air of experimentation and fun. That’s what I bring generally, is a little bit of creative mischief. That’s how podcasting started. It was just all creative mischief. It was like, hey, what if we get rid of the broadcast clock, and we could make whatever we wanted for as long as we wanted in this brand new space called podcasting?

So what if you just approach [YouTube] with that mentality of let’s have some fun with this and see what happens, and not put so much pressure on it?

The other thing was ensuring that I wasn’t asking people to do so much more work than they were already doing. Slate hired a video editor who is essentially taking the recording and doing a video cut of the same thing. So the audio process continues on as planned. And it shouldn’t really affect the audio side at all.

What do you think the migration to YouTube means for narrative audio?

That’s a great question. I think there is still a really big audience for narrative audio. I think that it holds its own separate space. People still have to multitask. They still go to the gym and go for runs and take long drives and wash dishes: all of those things that everybody fell in love with podcasting for in the first place. I think there is still a real appetite for audio only.

I think the question is, how do you pay for it? That’s the real struggle, because it just takes a long time to do well and to do beautifully. I’m not worried that there’s not going to be a desire for it. I think that anyone who makes it has to get a little bit more creative about how they’re paying for it, and whether that comes through grants or through academic institutions or through just labor of love… people do need to get paid. I was one of the authors of the AIR rate guide, and I believe very strongly in fair pay for your work, but you have to consider the cost when it comes to making these things, and then just figure it out.

Let me take you a step back, because I wanted to ask what appealed to you about the role at Slate. Why did you decide to take this job?

My last full time job was at Pushkin. Before that I was a freelancer for 10 years. My last freelance gig was on contract with Panoply in 2016, making Revisionist History. For season two, they said you need to come work for us full time, or we’ll find somebody else to do your job. Well, it wasn’t quite that stark, but it was sort of like: we want you here full time. So I took the job at Panoply.

I was there for three years, and then Panoply ended all content. That’s where Megaphone became their product. (Laura Mayer did an amazing piece about what happened there in Shameless Acquisition Target, which I highly recommend. It’s amazing.)

So basically, me and my whole team got laid off. At the same time, Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg were spinning up this new thing, which became Pushkin Industries. Almost within 24 hours, Malcolm was like, ‘I know you’re losing your job, but come do this other thing with me’.

I spent four years building up Pushkin, making lots and lots and lots of shows there. At the end of 2022 I decided to leave on my own. I was burnt out, I’d had enough. I freelanced for the next two years, which was good, but my finances took a major hit.

It’s freelancing, right? It’s kind of hit or miss. I made an amazing show during that time with Jane Perlez, called Face Off, which is still going on [season three came out in November]. I had to leave it when I started my job at Slate, which was very sad.

I had some teaching gigs, and I did a lot of my own writing on Substack with some pieces about the industry. But ultimately, I was a little bit lonely. I’m very much a team player. I like having regular colleagues. I had a lot of accountability buddies, and people I was working with informally. I was excited to be on a formal team again.

And then there’s the fact that I have two teenagers; one of them is a senior in high school, he’s going to college next year. My husband’s a school teacher. We don’t have a lot of resources, so that was definitely a factor as well.

Before I even applied, I had a conversation with editor in chief Hillary Frey. I was put in touch by a friend of mine Sara Burningham, who makes Amicus [at Slate]. I was a little nervous about going back full time, because my work at Pushkin had been so exhausting in the end. [And Sara was like] just have a conversation with Hillary and just see how it goes.

We had a great conversation; we really hit it off. I just liked her thinking. I’ve always liked Slate; I’m a huge fan of Slow Burn. Plus their writing is just so funny and smart. After my call with Hillary, I thought it would be a good fit. I did many rounds of interviews and was very happy in the end when they made the offer.

You wrote a brilliant piece on why you left Pushkin. Slate sounds like a very different environment – but are you approaching it differently? And how?

Yeah, well I learned so much in my [first stint] at Slate [in 2016]. I really became a manager there. At Panoply, I was a managing producer, and I had people reporting to me.

At Pushkin I hands-on produced the first seven seasons of Revisionist History. I was still in the mixes – like I was the producer. Over the course of my time there, I really moved away from production and into management, and I liked that. But I think the problem was the decision-making at the management level. I had ideas, and I felt like I wasn’t really being listened to. I did both [producer and manager] roles for a while at Pushkin, and I had to figure out the separation between making content and managing content, which are very different jobs.

I’ve come into [my current job at] Slate knowing that my role is as a manager. I am not in the business of telling shows how to make their content. I’ll listen to stuff once it’s done, and give feedback. But I am not in the weeds on production at all. I really trust the team.

I am all in on strategic thinking, and creating a workplace culture that feels really creative and experimental and kind and fun and transparent. I’m [using] all the things I’ve learned about management, and have the support of an editor in chief who I really like and respect.

How are you fostering that culture? How does that happen day-to-day?

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I hope your 2026 is off to a good (productive? calm? manageable?) start. I’m not really into new year’s resolutions, but I do like setting an intention—usually just one word—something to anchor myself in. Last year’s was “steady” (ha!). For 2026, I’ve chosen “faith”: an attempt to remind myself to slow down and surrender. We’ll see how it pans out…

I was intrigued by Krista Tippett’s suggestion to sit with a question, instead of a resolution. She advises picking an open-ended question to be your companion throughout the year, and offers this one to get you thinking: "What amidst all that is breaking wants to be born that I can attend to?"

In any case, whether you’re a resolution person or an open-ended question person, here’s a bunch of classes, open calls and audio jobs to inspire this new year.

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I hope you’ve made it to the end of this year (mostly?) in one piece and are ready for some rest and reflection.

In this newsletter I’m usually not one for sifting nuanced insights for pithy takeaways, but there have been nuggets of wisdom that have really stayed with me from the storytellers I’ve interviewed this year. So without further ado, here they are…

1) Telling stories out loud can help your writing

“Sometimes I’ll transcribe my oral stories and then turn them into their own pieces. It helps me see how you can condense something and then expand it and everything in between.”

—Harriett Jernigan is a writer and lecturer at Stanford’s program in writing and rhetoric, and founder of First Person Story. She also shares a trick from Pixar movies to figure out the beats of your story. Read it here.

2) Listening should be a communal experience

“One of the hard things about podcasting is that it can feel like such an individual experience. It can be hard to push ourselves to listen when it’s not communal. I do think bringing that element back – whether it’s through live storytelling or just making it a shared activity – is part of how you fall back in love with it. By remembering that it’s not ‘just’ storytelling; it’s a relationship and social activity.”

—Sayre Quevedo is a documentary artist working across mediums, telling stories about identity and human relationships. In this interview, he encourages us to trust the audience, and have the confidence to break some conventions inherited from public radio.

3) The revision process is the magic of storytelling

“Because it forces us to really confront our mistakes, look at our work and be willing to make it better by cutting and rearranging. That process is such a wonderful metaphor for life. I personally still struggle with perfectionism, but I think that storytelling and podcasting in particular has taught me that not only is revision okay, but that’s actually the goal.”

—Laura Joyce Davis a lecturer at Stanford and managing editor of the university’s Storytelling Project. She’s an award-winning writer, producer and the cofounder of workshop series Narrative Podcasts. Laura also shared some routes into teaching audio.

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4) Your recorder can bear witness to your life

“Making audio stories has always been a therapeutic language for me. I needed something that wasn’t another person to bear witness to this raw time in my life. A recorder felt like a way to have a witness. The sound of my voice is so particular to that time. I’m immediately transported because of the raw quality of my voice. I’m such a strong believer in making stuff through the moment – like making when it’s actually happening.”

—Sara Curtis is award-winning producer for NYT’s Modern Love, and is known for her sound-rich, intimate and poignant audio portraits. So much stayed with me from this conversation with Sara, not least her urging me to cover my desk with post-its (I’m getting there).

5) The best way to know your craft is to teach it to somebody else.

“Mentoring means giving back to a community that might have given to you. And it’s gratifying. It feels good to have your knowledge solidified.”

—Arielle Nissenblatt is a podcast marketing and production consultant. She’s been working in the podcast space since early 2017, when she launched EarBuds Podcast Collective. Here she also shares tips on promoting your work and getting jobs.

6) Get out of your listening comfort zone

“Everything feels very predictable now. So for me, anything that jostles you out of a usual listening experience has value. And maybe that helps you make different decisions the next time you make something yourself. When I think back on what’s been constant throughout my life, it has always been the art of listening.”

—Julie Shapiro is an audio executive and creative consultant, as well as co-founder of Third Coast and Audio Flux. She told me why she committed to a daily listening practice this year and said, encouragingly: “I really believe we’re in the middle of what I’ve been cheekily calling the heartful audio renaissance of 2025.”

A final note: here’s a collaborative audio project you can contribute to this Christmas Day.

Take care audio storytellers – see you next year. Thanks for your support of this newsletter. ♥️ 📻

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But sometimes it takes a huge amount of grace to acknowledge that maybe we need to look outside the industry altogether to find hope for our careers. Looking at where else our hard-earned skills and talent might apply.

Emily Guerin is a writer and reporter with more than 15 years’ experience in print, radio and narrative podcasts. She was a senior producer and host at LAist (formerly KPCC) for almost a decade, where she worked on the multi-award winning shows Imperfect Paradise and California City.

In 2025, she left journalism to work as an investigator for the San Francisco Public Defender’s office. Here, she tells me why she left, what the emotional fallout was, how she got her new job, and why she feels more excited about it.

Talk to me about your career transition. When did you have the inkling this would be your next role?

It was a feeling that I was going to get laid off. I worked at KPCC for nine years, and for the last three or so years, there were pretty significant layoffs there every year.

They disproportionately affected the podcast studio, where I worked. Initially they were cutting shows that were not ‘core to the station’s mission’, was how they put it. I assumed long-form narrative journalism would be safe. Then the next year, they cut staff from our show. I started feeling like, ‘okay this is probably coming for me’ And then it did. I got laid off in May [2025].

[There was also the wider sense] that no one was really investing in long-form narrative audio anymore. The studios that made those kinds of shows –like Gimlet or Pineapple Street – they stopped making them or don’t really exist anymore.

There were practical life reasons, too. I had been living in San Francisco for four years and working remotely with colleagues based in LA. It was fine during the pandemic, but as people started coming back [to work] in person, I started feeling like a face on a Zoom screen, and I didn’t like that.

I had a lot of interviews for journalism jobs, and was a finalist in a few places, but I didn’t get any offers. It felt like, this thing that I’ve spent my whole career doing, there’s just not a lot of opportunity anymore.

The thing that I love just doesn’t exist anymore. Long form narrative audio storytelling is kind of gone. I keep coming back to [the idea that] I didn’t leave it; it left me.

But I also think there was this other problem: when I got into journalism in 2009, it felt like there was more of an opportunity to change people’s minds. And towards the end, I started feeling like everybody that’s listening to this story already agrees with me. That started to feel less satisfying.

[The way I came across this role was that] I had a good friend who I used to write with at High Country News a long time ago. She got into criminal defense investigation, before the pandemic. I remember thinking it sounded really interesting.

So as the doors in journalism were closing on me, I felt like I could try this other door. That’s when I started more seriously considering criminal defense investigation.

Was it emotionally hard to leave this career that you’ve been in for so long?

Yeah, it was really hard; it continues to be hard. Journalism is kind of an identity, maybe more than a lot of other careers. It’s not like I do journalism, it’s like I am a journalist. It’s sad. I’m still very actively trying to figure out how I feel about it.

I like that my new job is in person and in the world. I’m getting to know my city a lot more than I did before. I’m still interviewing people. The reporting work is similar, and in fact it’s more interesting in a lot of ways, because it’s in the field.

But the writing is not there. The only writing I do now is when I interview a witness, I write up a report for the attorney and I structure it as best as I can. But it’s not supposed to be literary or creative; it’s a work product. So [I’m considering] how I feel about not being able to write the way I used to write.

I also don’t think that everybody can have everything all at once. I think it’s setting yourself up to be disappointed [if that’s your expectation].

Give me a sense of what your role is; what are you doing day to day?

I work for the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, so I’m a city employee. We represent people who are arrested, who can’t afford lawyers. Investigators work for the attorneys, and we basically figure out what actually happened, and also what is going to help and hurt our clients. Our client is the defendant.

I interview a lot of witnesses, including the victim (we call that person a complaining witness). I gather surveillance video, which is a very in-person thing. You’re often going door to door, asking businesses or individuals to give you their camera footage, or doing neighborhood canvases. There’s a lot of paperwork in law, it’s very analogue. There’s a lot of serving subpoenas in person.

One week a month, I go to jail to interview people who were recently arrested before their first court appearance to see if there’s anything that needs to be investigated or if there is anything helpful for the lawyer to know, so they can argue to get them out of jail.

How did you get the job? How did you adapt your resume, what skills did you need to learn?

I applied for this job four times over two years. Applying for a job with the city of San Francisco [requires] taking an exam and ranking in the top 10. Then HR can hire from any of those top 10 applicants. I took the exam and ranked 10th.

The first time I applied and had interviews, I think I wasn’t emotionally ready to leave journalism yet, and I feel like they could tell. I was more feeling it out. I didn’t get interviews the second and third times I applied.

For the fourth time, I had spent more time [preparing]. I talked to another criminal investigator, and a former journalist who works at my current office, so I had a better sense of the job. I could talk about it more intelligently, and I could also communicate more clearly why I wanted to do it and why I was ready to leave journalism.

In terms of the transferable skills, any kind of in-person reporting [is really helpful]. I’ve done breaking news, and covered fires. A lot of the work is just being comfortable going up to strangers and asking them questions.

The narrative audio skills come in with witness interviews, because they’re very narrative. You break down the incident in as much detail as possible and find out what happened afterwards. There’s less asking about feelings – though that can be useful if you’re trying to find out what the person wants to happen next with the case, or how they feel about the defendant.

The other thing that’s different [from journalism interviews] is that I don’t press people on their inconsistencies. That’s the lawyer’s job to do in court. Whereas as a journalist I would have to always call out the bullshit. I do kind of miss that, because I liked that.

What were the more challenging things that you had to learn on the job?

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Taught by Rob Rosenthal, this was the Transom Traveling Workshop: a week-long bootcamp in narrative audio that completely changed the path of my career. I was sleeping on my friend’s tiny couch, animated by coffee and pure fascination for this new medium I was learning. At the start of the week, I’d never used a recorder — by the end, I’d made this piece for KUOW. I return to the lessons I learned that week practically every day. The Transom Traveling Workshops are back next year - read on for more details, plus loads of other workshops.

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It’s the same reason why Arielle is also drawn to being a mentor to people who work in podcasting.

Arielle is a podcast marketing and production consultant. She’s been working in the podcast space since early 2017, when she launched EarBuds Podcast Collective. She’s managed studios, run marketing campaigns for hundreds of shows, and organized podcast communities. Arielle is currently head of community and content at Pinwheel by Audily.

Mentoring and teaching is a big part of her work; she has been a mentor through the TPA Mentorship Program. Mentors and mentees work together for three months – and applications for the Spring 2026 session will open in December.

Here, Arielle draws on her experience in the industry to share tips on what makes a good mentor, as well as advice on getting a job in podcasting.

Tell me about your approach to mentoring.

I love figuring out how to take somebody from where they are to where they want to be. I think about the steps I went through that got me here. A lot of my mentorship focuses on making connections with other creators.

When I’m working with somebody who already has a body of work, I listen and come prepared with notes for content and notes for marketing. Some people are more willing than others to hear critical feedback on content.

My marketing ideas often have a content component to them – it’s not like I’ll necessarily change the entire focus of the podcast, but I might suggest a segment to directly involve listeners.

A lot of my advice is to be a student of the industry–and a student of the community–before jumping in and having huge expectations for your career within podcasting.

What happens is I’ll talk to recent college grads, and they all want to jump into having jobs in the podcast space and that’s great, but sometimes these things take a while. Building the network really helps people think of you for jobs in the future.

I often encourage people to have a job elsewhere, to build their network and so they can have the capacity to take on a few (hopefully paid) projects that keep their skills fresh and allow them to have insights they can share on LinkedIn.

I think it’s about being willing to share your findings, and not being afraid to say exactly what you want. I often encourage people to post on LinkedIn, “I am seeking a job in X, Y and Z. This is what I’m uniquely good at. Let’s connect.”

When you’re working with people who are younger or new to the industry, how do you provide positive but realistic advice at this moment where things are at best in flux, at worst in real crisis?

A few years ago, it would have been: “check out this job board, check out that job board. If you find something exciting, I’m happy to connect you.” Especially with people who were interested in marketing, because there were more marketing, distribution and monetization jobs than production.

I often encourage people who want to do straight-up production to also learn the basics of marketing, even if it’s just the buzzwords, so that they can speak the language and communicate with the marketing people on their team – so that they are more marketable themselves. That will help you stand out amongst other job applicants who just have the producer chops. I think it’s important to be able to speak multiple departments’ languages, especially when you’re working for a smaller company.

I still give that advice these days. But I’m also realistic about [needing to] find a job in an adjacent field that allows you time to edit podcasts on the weekend.

I let people know as well that the podcast industry is much larger than just the word podcast. We need to start seeing podcasts as part of a company’s overall content strategy. If you want to work for, like, Radiolab, that’s a different story, but if you don’t have an organization in mind, and you want to work in podcasting, a great way to do that is to broaden your definition to include all pieces of content.

What’s a really proud moment you’ve had as a mentor?

This past semester I had four interns from high school. They were all boys, going to college for sports marketing or broadcasting. They listen to podcasts and wanted to make one of their own. It was fun for me being able to use different connections I have throughout New York that they can learn from. I took my interns to my friend who works at the New York Times – he gave us a tour of the audio department, and the kids thought that was awesome. We got to talk to one of the editors at The Daily. I had them listen to a bunch of episodes in advance so they could ask really great questions.

I was also able to get them into a studio through a friend. They got the experience of seeing how a mic and camera works. I helped them upload their first episodes. It’s a cool thing to be able to watch – and it’s now a skill they have.

Have there been any challenging moments or times where you were conflicted on what guidance to offer?

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Here’s your October listings of classes, events and jobs – and there’s actually a lot of jobs this issue! There are also a couple of great awards to enter with deadlines coming up soon – plus a brand new initiative from Resonate Festival that will get you closer to the action if you missed out on a ticket this year.

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The first piece of Sayre Quevedo’s I ever heard made me feel like I was eavesdropping.

Espera is a short doc that brings you inside a deeply personal conversation between Sayre and his ex-lover. It’s gorgeously textured and paced - you feel like you’re right there in the bedroom too.

This close intimacy – the sense of witnessing something profound between human beings – is present in all of Sayre’s multi-award-winning work. From his documentary feature The Quevedos, which chronicles his journey to untangle the story of his long-lost family, to Documenting a Death by Euthanasia.

Sayre is a documentary artist working across mediums (though he says sound is his first language), telling stories about identity and human relationships. He was formerly a producer for The Daily, as well as VICE News. He is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia’s Oral History Master of Arts program and at NYU’s Journalism Masters program.

In this conversation we nerd out on story structure and how to interview for non-narrated pieces. We talk about trusting our audience, how listening should be communal, approaching stories without shame, and why loving audio is like being in a long-term relationship.

When I spoke to Sayre back in August, he was kind of stuck. He’d been trying to write the same episode of a new show for weeks. It’s a personal story that will be distributed by Futuro media next year. “I went to a gallery yesterday and like, ate a sandwich in the park and saw some friends. I thought if I took a break and came back to it, I would feel refreshed, but no… it’s just as hard as when I started,” he laughed. “That’s the process, I guess.”

I’m curious what you’re struggling with specifically. Is it a structure thing? What’s the roadblock?

I think it’s stylistic and structural, simultaneously. My particular style of work – the thing I’m really interested in doing – is making stories that feel akin to how I feel when I’m reading a book or watching a movie.

For this project I actually started [writing] in the middle. It’s a five-episode series - and I wrote episode two, then three, four, then five. And now I’m working on episode one. This is a bit unusual for me. I usually start at the beginning – I get that right first and then everything flows from there. That’s the advice I give my students. This time my instinct was to start in the middle. Because I wanted to know where I’m going before I did the first episode; I wanted to know what seeds I needed to plant.

But I want to set things up without being overly expositional or didactic. It’s so easy to explain at the audience, to do the classic “in order to understand this, we need to go back in time”. It’s such a crutch – sometimes a useful one – but one that I really, really hate and want to avoid.

So I’m sort of banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how to set it up in a way that feels in line with the tone of voice, style and pacing of the other episodes. That’s in line with the narrative I’m interested in creating. I mean, it’s a good challenge – but it is so, so challenging.

With this project, do you have a lot of freedom to lean into exactly the way you want the story to be told?

Totally, yeah. It’s funny, I have a palm-sized notebook dedicated to this project that I carry around with me in case I have an idea or hear something that feels important. In trying to write this first episode, I was flipping through the notebook to see if there’s anything relevant. I found this quote by Marlon James: “You have an inner creator and an inner critic, but you don’t need both at the same time. If you allow your inner critic too early into the creative process, you’re not creating, you’re correcting. Critics don’t create. I have to trust that my subconscious is a better writer than me.”

One of the main challenges with this kind of work is that we’re very aware – sometimes too aware – of the audience. These ideas of writing for the ear, and structuring so the audience will understand, are important. They’re carry-overs from public radio to some extent – that we need to be constantly signposting and making sure the listener is never lost. And I definitely don’t want people to start spacing out or to miss important information.

But also: it’s very hard to create from a place where you’re sitting in both the creator’s seat and the audience’s seat simultaneously. It’s really tough.

Some of those guiding principals of radio do seem more aligned with an editor mindset. Like sometimes I can feel myself trying to edit something before I’ve even written it. I don’t give myself enough time and space to just write.

That’s exactly what it is. I have an index card pinned up on my wall that says: “this is play”. I constantly forget to look at it! It’s there to remind me: you’re not supposed to be editing yourself. You’re supposed to be playing around. You’re supposed to be just trying stuff without worrying about whether it’s good – you can go and perfect it later.

I wanted to pick up on something you said before: that you want to create audio stories that make you feel the way you do when you’re reading a book or watching a movie. Can you say more about that?

With some of the books and films that I like the most, there’s a feeling that life is unfolding in front of you. The thing that I most want for my work is for that to be the experience of the audience: that things are unfolding naturally. Because that, to me, is what life feels like. At its best, our work is reflecting life back to the audience – reflecting the form and feeling of life.

And that’s where things like exposition become really complicated, because in life, we don’t get a lot of explanations for things. The dots don’t connect for us in the moment. Sometimes they happen way later. So where do we put that vital information for an audience? Or do we completely eschew that and risk losing people? I don’t know the answer!

Share The Audio Storyteller

Do you think that there’s more need for exposition in audio vs books and films… or a perceived need?

I think again it’s very tied to the sensibilities of radio, which is this idea that people might tune in at any moment and need to be caught up, or they might get in their cars halfway through the story. Some of those sensibilities definitely are projections from that format.

Audio is a different way of engaging too. When I’m reading a book, I can go back if I miss something. Like in 1000 Years of Solitude where all of these characters have a version of the same name. Obviously you can rewind in audio but I think the goal for a lot of us [makers] is that people won’t have to.

I would like us to be able to trust the audience enough. I would like to create things where I don’t have to explain everything, where the audience can work it out themselves, or maybe shrug and just go, ‘Okay, I don’t totally get how these people are related, or I don’t fully understand how this person feels, or some part of this is obscure for me, and that’s okay’. Or, even better: ‘maybe it adds to the experience of what I’m listening to’.

Tell me why you were drawn to audio as your storytelling medium.

My mother’s a poet. I grew up around writing and poetry. I attended an arts high school and studied writing. So much of my first exposure to storytelling in a sort of more formal sense was writing, but auditory as well because I was hearing people read their own work aloud. Given the history of my family, so much of my understanding of myself was also through stories – through being told things about my mother’s life from her perspective.

I’ve experimented with photography, film and other mediums. But I feel like audio and writing are my first languages. I’m learning these other languages, and I enjoy trying to speak in them. But if I want to tell a story well, if I want to be able to reach through different layers of meaning in the most useful way, then it’s going to be through sound and writing. Those are the languages that I grew up speaking with my mother and with others through my adolescence.

With everything that the audio industry has faced for the last several years, how do you stay connected to your love for this format – and your belief in it?

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Popping up in your inbox with the September listings of classes, events and jobs. The ProPublica gig looks amazing. Plus some great SoundPath classes on a discount — and I’m bringing back an old fave: what I’m listening to. Enjoy!

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As an audio executive and creative consultant, Julie has worked with organizations and networks around the world, including PRX, Radiotopia and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. She co-founded Third Coast.

But first and foremost, Julie is a listener. This summer, she taught a SoundPath course on closer listening, and in 2023 she co-founded Audio Flux with John DeLore, inviting makers to create three-minute audio works inspired by a set of prompts.

👉 Circuit 6 is now open for submissions through September 15 under the prompt Creative Tension.

👉 Read to the end for your exclusive discount on AIR membership.

Julie and I spoke about how intentional listening can shape your production skills; why you should listen to things you don’t like; why she’s not interested in teaching people how to make a podcast; and what the Audio Flux judges are looking for in a winning submission.

Why did you choose ‘creative tension’ as the theme for the latest AudioFlux circuit?

For every Audio Flux circuit, we have a partner who helps inspire the theme, design, the prompts, and just gets us thinking outside of our own bubbles. For this circuit our partner is Lorna Hamilton-Brown. She's been a long-time advocate for Black knitters and crocheters; she’s this incredible artist, teacher and researcher.

Her social commentary through knitting is what led to her being referred to as ‘the Banksy of knitting’. So she's got some fire, a great sense of humor, and she was very open to seeing what her work might inspire in audio.

Lorna has a project called Tension Birds, which are these little knitted birds made out of tension squares [squares of fabric that is knitted before a new project, to test the tightness of the stitches]. Lorna folds these squares into birds, and then gives them away.

I just loved everything about that. The idea of creative tension came up [in discussions with the Audio Flux team], and we all just sort of went, “Ohhh!” You know when you hit on something.

For me, part of it is this moment, when for artists and creators there’s a lot of confusion about how to allow creativity, and the value of making art, when it seems like there’s so much at stake. I was talking to a reporter who's always had a deep interest in creative production, and she said, “I’m dropping that [creativity] right now. I have to go cover ICE in our community. I just feel so compelled to be a local reporter because of this administration.” And I thought, wow, talk about creative tension. This is a really interesting time to understand why it's important to also give yourself permission to create and play.

The Audio Flux themes are most successful if they can be interpreted very broadly. Like this theme could be about how you and your partner fill up the dishwasher and always get into a fight. It can be creative tension in any way, shape or form.

Do you go into each circuit with any particular hopes around what folks will submit?

What we hope is to see people stretch themselves. There isn't really a wrong way. We do want the prompts to be audible in some way; you should be able to hear the prompts in each piece.

But the point is not that every box is ticked. The point is you see this as an opportunity to make something; to try. Someone asked me, “Do you get any clunkers?” And for me the clunkers are when someone’s made a piece six years ago and just lops off a couple of minutes and submits it. It doesn't mean we don't like listening to them, but they're not as exciting to discover.

We're very genre-agnostic, and we've gotten every genre submitted, and inventions of new genres. We get a lot of first-person stories. Producer Chloe Prasinos made a beautiful piece called A Study in Blue for Circuit 1. I have since shared it on stages many times because it is so well done — very authentically in her voice — and she said it was such a gift to have that [rare] opportunity to make a first-person story.

So we get a lot of personal stories — and they’re some of my favorite ones — but I also hope this can be a vehicle for talking about the world beyond our own lives. I want Audio Flux to be seen as an important part of defining the world around us and demonstrating how we live in it.

What space do you see Audio Flux inhabiting at the moment?

It really came out of a desire to create a space for people to feel part of something generative and productive. I often say it’s like an engine for community, because with every circuit we meet more people, and more people come into the family. Once you've submitted, you're in the family – in our book, at least.

It’s also an important reminder for people about why they got into audio in the first place, the things they love about it, the things you can do. It's like proof of the potential for the medium – which you don't hear when you listen to chat casts all day long. We're trying to remind people how and why sound can help tell a story or help you feel something. The idea is to do something that’s as relevant to a cultural or artistic space as it is to a journalism space.

People are using it as a space to play, to feel excited and to try something. If you've been doing [audio] for a long time, trying something new is so hard in your day to day. Three minutes is low stakes, high reward… so why not?

In October we’ll launch the podcast version of Audio Flux - the point of which is to share the flux works. Amy Pearl is our host, and she’s wonderful. The episodes will be under six minutes, and each season will correspond with the circuits. We want this to be an opportunity for producers to use in their [career] trajectory, as a sort of calling card. We know people who have gotten opportunities on the backs of the flux works.

What are you listening for when selecting the finalists?

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I hope you’re doing well in this moment. I’ve been sending you this newsletter for five years now. It’s hard to fathom how much we’ve all been through in that time. Radio and podcasting have weathered many storms in the past half-decade, from mass layoffs to AI slop and the rise of the video podcast.

And honestly, speaking to journalists and producers for this newsletter has kept me feeling optimistic and energized about audio. They’ve been a real anchor. Going forwards, I’m more committed than ever to getting at the humanity behind storytelling, and bringing you the inner workings of what it takes to make great audio.

To continue producing this newsletter, I’m turning on payments. Become a paying subscriber for $5 a month, and you’ll get:

📻 Full access to exclusive interviews with award-winning audio makers and leaders in the field

📻 Resources and how-to guides

📻 Job opportunities, events listings and pitch call-outs

📻 Discounts on training and memberships

📻 Post comments and join the community

Upgrade to paid

Here are the incredible makers and thought leaders I have coming up for you through the rest of 2025:

⭐ Julie Shapiro on deep listening

⭐ Sayre Quevedo on making authentic audio

⭐ Arielle Nissenblat on mentoring

⭐ Helena de Groot on narrative arcs

⭐ Mia Lobel on leading production teams

… and plenty more.

I want to say a heartfelt thanks for your support these past five years. There’s so many more important conversations we need to be having about storytelling through sound, and I’m excited to bring you those insights and nuggets of wisdom.

In gratitude,

Clare

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It’s a spot-on description of Sara’s work. The award-winning producer is known for her sound-rich, intimate and poignant audio portraits – including the award-winning Where Do I Find You Now?, Lilia is Listening, and Ask Me, about the powerful grief and complex love she felt after losing her baby daughter (a heads-up that we do talk about this here).

I first heard Sara’s work on Short Cuts, and then read her beautiful Transom manifesto and have been obsessed ever since, so I’m excited to feature her in this issue. Since 2022, Sara has been an audio producer for the New York Times, working across arts and culture, including Modern Love. We talked about bringing your own aesthetic to an institution like NYT; how to interview for moments of surprise; making audio as a therapeutic language; motherhood and making; and why you need to be covering your desk with inspirational post-its…

Before we chatted, I asked Sara to send me a few of her recent NYT pieces she’s particularly proud of. She sent this Modern Love interview with Miranda July and this Culture desk story on poet Warsan Shire.

Why did you choose these stories to share with me?

I have followed Miranda July for many years, and listened to most interviews with her. I was trying to figure out when she shuts down in interviews, when she seems to be embodied, and what questions haven’t been asked of her yet. I wanted Miranda to feel seen during an interview in a new way.

I prepped Modern Love’s host, Anna Martin. I gave her examples, like here’s a clip from a podcast episode where she held her cards close and clearly didn’t feel safe with the interviewer; or here’s a moment where she’s saying the same thing she’s said her entire book tour. I was like: what’s the interview I haven’t already heard?

Miranda’s whole thing is taking risks and being uncomfortable – so let’s make it feel awake. Let’s have the whole interview be about waking up. Miranda is so powerful, but often in interviews she comes off as a doe-eyed, quirky artist. She has so much awareness and power than people have given her the space to show up with in interviews.

So I was hoping that the prep for Anna would allow for that part of her to come out and for me to feel surprised. And thankfully like that did happen. There was an element of surprise that I really loved.

Things naturally unfolded in the tape. Even though we were really prepared, it’s boring if a studio interview is just a transaction, right? Like you’re awaiting the answer you’re looking for. But there were naturally occurring moments like what would happen in the field. At the beginning they made a connection over Anna’s shirt: it illuminated something about relationships without having to name it.

I do work for a newspaper, so I knew the interview couldn’t be super out-there quirky. It had to have a bit of political framing – but not overtly like, “how do you feel about politics?” So we just poked at it a little bit – and that’s when she was like “of course I knew what I was doing” [ie intending All Fours as a book that would be radical, popular and confronting]. It made me think about her career differently. It made me feel a lot.

We go out with Anna asking Miranda about a song she’s listening to. It was sonically exciting. I didn’t want it to be heavy handed, but I wanted there to be an element of play and force. Like there was both power and playfulness to it. That’s something I look for.

For the Warsan Shire piece… I like tension and release. Reporters at The Times are so busy and intense – so when I meet with them and am casting to see if they’d be a good storyteller on tape, I’m thinking about, where do they really come alive? Abdi Latif Dahir is an international reporter who focuses on war and intense subjects. But he gets so lit up about poetry. I liked that contrast – between the severity of his work, and the release that Warsan’s poetry gives him.

Tell me more about how to interview so that people surprise themselves... is it about disarming guests?

To me, part of asking questions that surprise people is really listening and showing up to what they're saying. With celebrity interviews, I like to watch or listen to every interview I can get my eyes and ears on. When are they just going through the motions? Don’t ask those same damn questions that lead to that place. How boring! Find another way in.

When does the interviewer’s agenda for the story seem to get in the way of what's naturally unfolding in the tape? Like you’ll hear the guest start to open about something and the interviewer closes the door with another planned question. If the door creaks open, respectfully step in and pay attention. When do I hear glimmers of excitement or vulnerability in the person? Take note and spend a little more time in those places.

Some of it is taking note when someone lights up, or seems hungry to share their burden. Spending time there, even if it’s not where you thought the story was going, is important. I have a little scrap of paper in my office that’s stuck to the wall with strawberry patterned fabric tape that says, in brown sharpie: “Find the lights and turn them on.” Somehow that relates.

How do your stories at NYT Audio come to be — do you pitch most of them?

It’s different for every show at The Times, but on Modern Love, we read through published ML essays from the 20+ year archive and take notes. Is there more to their story? Do we have more questions? Is there a compelling arc? Do they write in scenes? Does the story feel a bit too tidy and like there’s not much more to talk through? Why does this need to be a conversation?

If an essay has a strong-enough narrative and if the topic is something we haven’t featured much on the show before, a producer will schedule a pre-interview with the writer. We'll meet with them for 45 minutes to an hour to try and determine if they’re a dynamic talker, if they’re willing to go to the edges of their ideas and feelings. Can they speak visually enough to ground us in a scene from their story? We’ll also find out if they have any guardrails about what they are and aren't willing to discuss.

We don’t want the conversation to be a replica of the written essay, we want it to deepen and expand the story, raise new questions, give it a bit more color and texture, and say something illuminating about the messiness of love and relationships. We’ll then write up some notes about what did or didn’t work, share the transcript and audio with a producer or Anna and double check that it’s a good fit. We also have a pitch meeting every week where we bring ideas to cover and celebrities to reach out to.

How do you bring your own personal approach and aesthetic to a place like the New York Times, which has a particular house style?

I asked myself that same question. How do I bring myself to this work in this space for this audience? I had a feeling that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get away from my own sensibilities and my own style. My editor Wendy Dorr reminded me: “I hired you because I wanted your style here.”

She said she needed more soulfulness in New York Times audio. I’m a very heart-centered maker. In fact, I fight for it in every story … even if the story doesn't overtly seem like it's about heart or emotion.

A lot of it is about pacing, and interviewing somebody so that – even if they don’t think they’re going to surprise themselves or unfold in some way – they tend to. I think that showing up in the tape can feel uniquely me.

I always want texture in a story. So even if I’m making a seven-minute something with a music critic, it's like: how can I build some texture into this so it’s not passive listening?

You were a freelancer for many years before this job – what convinced you to go full-time / permanent?

Let me first give you a sense of the kinds of things I’ve done in audio as a freelancer… sound designing for podcasts; I teach a writing for the ear workshop once a year at Smith College; I’ve done some audio erotica; I’ve done some editing; I’ve done audio installations.

And during the pandemic, I freelanced while my kid was really little, including producing a season of Gravy from the Southern Foodways Alliance, which is about how food tells stories about the American South. It meant there was very little time to rest. I was feeling really tired.

When my son was about two, I was also feeling so driven to work new muscles in my audio career. I wanted to be completely in it and not [pulled] in 500 directions [by freelancing and parenting].

I also wanted something that stretched the shit out of me, and that scared me a little bit – and honestly that enabled me to have more financial freedom. I had been doing so much personal narrative stuff that I was like: I want to help tell other people’s stories.

Wendy was my mentor in 2015 when I was an 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellow at U.C. Berkeley. I interviewed waitstaff all over the Bay Area and made stories from their perspective. I worked in restaurants for years and I very much think of wait staff as culture critics and wanted to give them that space to reflect on what they see at the table: power dynamics, vulnerabilities. Wendy looked out for me from then on.

For a while [in at the NYT role] I did feel like I had to be all versions of myself as an audio producer and maker, in order to feel justified for taking a job that on the surface doesn’t feel as creative or artful as the work that I’ve done in the past. But I’ve realized that that was kind of an illusion. It was limiting to think about this [NYT] job as my ‘jobby job and I can do artful stuff on the side’. Because actually there are lots of ways to be creative within this space – and part of that is learning from other people.

Previously I had been mixing, scoring, reporting and editing my own pieces. Here there’s an engineer, there’s a composer. At first I was precious about all those elements, but [I realized] it was so exciting to be part of something and to [figure out] how to take advantage of this. [Thinking of it as a] resource is probably why this has worked so well.

I am currently feeling very lit up by what I’m making in a space that I thought was not going to be that way for me. I thought this job was going to serve my stability, but I didn’t necessarily think it was going to serve my art. So sometimes the learning and the growth does come in a very unassuming place.

I look back at a lot of my work at the Times and I’m like, okay: I don’t feel like I’ve compromised myself in those pieces, which is cool.

How do you nurture your own aesthetic? What other art forms do you take in? What other parts of life do you take in?

I like being completely arrested by something. If I’m out in the world on a hike, and something immediately strikes my attention, I don’t think that much about it: I’m just like, holy fuck, there’s something in this. If I’m listening to a podcast and there’s a moment that really strikes me, I pause and I listen to it again, or an image, a scene in a movie, a recipe, what I’m cooking, the way that things are layered upon each other, how things interact with each other.

I like things that make me feel awake and language really does that right now. Just a line [in a book for example] where I all of a sudden feel like this subterranean heat inside of me. The fact that language can do that. It’s a thing that gets me feeling awe.

How did your work change when you became a parent?

I became a parent, and I lost my baby at three days old. When I went through this insane trauma, I had so much creative energy and nowhere to put it. As a new mom you’re usually nursing your child, and your whole day is oriented towards caring for this new human being. So I felt crazed in my body … it kind of felt like you’ve had a bunch of coffee but you’re trapped in a closet.

So I had to make stuff. I already knew that making audio stories was a therapeutic language for me; I started making recordings when I was like five years old, on a dictaphone. When we were teenagers I interviewed my best friends about their crushes, and made up radio shows. It was always in my DNA to have a bit of a confession booth on a recorder.

I also felt like I needed something that wasn’t another person to bear witness to this raw time in my life. A recorder felt like a way to have a witness.

I would walk for hours and hours at the beach and just make recordings. I had this very serendipitous exchange with a bus driver three days in a row that totally made me feel like this loss had given me a portal into interpersonal communication, in a way that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

I did some writing about this experience with the bus driver, and recorded it in my closet. I think I only tracked the narration twice.

I had very little distance between my loss and the creation of this piece. So I brought in my friend Leila Day, who’s an editor. I played her a 15-minute cut, and asked her: “is this just for me, or is this for everyone? She said, “this is totally for everyone”. We cut three minutes out, and it aired on Unfictional at KCRW.

This piece, “Ask Me”, wound up just like totally catapulting my entire career. I got awards, it aired internationally and was played in workshops. I play parts of it for students when I teach, firstly because there’s lots of imagery; [it shows] how visual audio storytelling is.

But also because the sound of my voice is so particular to that time. I’m immediately transported because of the raw quality of my voice. I feel so much for that person. I tell you this because I’m such a strong believer in making stuff through the moment – like making when it’s actually happening, especially in audio.

Yes, I could have maintained distance and made a piece about this experience with this bus driver like a year later and tracked it then. But I felt an urgency to create that was like mothering: I wanted to nurture something. And I also felt that you can’t replicate this sound. Like the sound of my voice is part of the story.

That was the beginning. Motherhood totally started my audio career. And that is totally wild and something I never would have imagined.

I've never heard anyone say that about their career.

Maybe it’s specific to having a baby and losing a baby, but like, I was fearless, because I had the most scary thing happen to me. Previously I had been much more of a cautious think-through-everything-before-I-try-it kind of maker.

That storytelling fellowship at UC Berkeley – I just went for it, I pitched it – and that was just a few months postpartum. So it made me a much more fearless maker – and also someone with way more empathy. When I was interviewing people, I was not scared of the dark places at all. I felt completely drawn towards them.

But to be clear, I don’t want to say, “okay I had this major trauma, but then I gave birth to my career and then everything was great”. Parenting while being a maker is incredibly challenging. So just because it jump-started things, navigating being someone who wants to be a present parent and also present in my work is really hard.

Thankfully, my son knows that I get lost in this stuff – lost in a good way, like, mama’s working for three hours. I cannot be in Pro Tools if I’m working on a thing for less than three hours. I just can’t. I need to explode a thing before I put it back together.

Something that's happened to me after years of being a freelance journalist is I almost cut my creativity off at the pass – like if I can’t see an immediate angle or ‘sellability’ for an idea, I don’t even give it time. Does that happen to you?

Yes. I think that that even happens at the Times where I might be like, this is too offbeat. Like, ‘I shouldn't pitch this’, or ‘is this celebrity big enough for me to pitch it to Modern Love?’

But then there's another voice that asks: “what is really interesting to you about this thing?” And if I’m lit up by it, I have to follow through with it because often there’s something in there.

And maybe it’s unfair because I have job security (whatever that actually means) to say to you: “Just make the thing! Don’t think about sellability!” I totally hear that that’s a concern. But I also feel that we’re never going to make anything interesting ever again if we don’t stay keyed in to what lights us up. Especially now it seems like every podcast is a video podcast, you have to stay tuned into audio, and what got you interested in the medium in the first place.

What gives you hope for our industry?

The people give me hope. In the 15 or so years that I’ve been doing this, I have met the most creative, brave, weird, wild, heartful, effervescent people in my entire life. And so no matter how much this community has been tasked with maybe making products that are slightly more palatable or bland or sellable … you can’t actually escape yourself, not really.

If everybody remembers why we got into audio storytelling in the first place, like eventually you will revolt from the thing you’re doing and go back to the heart of it. Write those reasons on post-it notes and put them above your computer!

On my post-it would be something like: “I started recording songs, confessions, my sister’s first babbles, mini interviews and whatever I could position my dictaphone towards, when I was seven. It felt like a portal to another world. One I was exceptionally curious to live in. Life is so much richer when you listen closely to it.”

Listen to more of Sara’s work here.

Awards, pitch calls and more

☀️ The Ecco call for audio ~ deadline 29 June

☀️ Women Who Podcast Awards ~ deadline 30 June

☀️ CBC open for pitches ~ deadline 30 June

☀️ Dreamscape Soundscape: sound design workshop ~ 27 July - 2 August

☀️ Introduction to Story Editing ~ AIR class ~ 11-20 November

Jobs

🏖️ Host, Audio ~ ProPublica ~ deadline 26 June

🏖️ Producer ~ Message Heard ~ deadline 30 June

🏖️ Managing Editor ~ Good Tape ~ deadline 8 July

🏖️ Advocacy Associate ~ AIR

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