Make from the heart 💗

Sara Curtis on soulful audio at NYT

Jun 24, 2025

When the New York Times Audio team was hiring a producer a few years back, they were looking for someone with “soulful, poetic sensibilities”. Enter producer Sara Curtis. “I feel weird saying that about myself,” she laughs, “but that was the language they used!”

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.