Kate O'Connell is a radio producer and a registered nurse who lives and works in New York City, where the coronavirus hit with force. In addition to working in an ER in Queens, Kate has also been chronicling her experiences with the overwhelming reality of this pandemic. We've been featuring Kate’s audio letters on Transom and in our podcast all al…

Erica Heilman is the producer of the neighborly podcast, Rumble Strip, and when COVID-19 struck, she looked for a way to be useful. She wasn't needed to make school lunches or volunteer at the hospital, so she asked her podcast listeners if they wanted to make something together. Word spread. Around the world. "Our Show" is a gathering of voices, a…

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Saidu Tejan-Thomas is a young poet. For a long time, he had a story he needed to tell: an homage and apology to his mother. It's a tragic love story driven by the tangled search for a better life. It's personal for sure, but set against the universal perils of immigration--in Saidu's case, from Sierra Leone in West Africa--but by extension, from an…

This is a story of art & love, of madness & beauty, of youth & age & death. It took Bianca Giaever 2 years of listening to 546 tapes of Pulitzer-winning Franz Wright to make. Jay Allison guided her. Listen.Transom

The story of Kempis Songster, who was given a mandatory life sentence without parole for a crime he committed at 15 years old. He is forty-five now, still incarcerated, but recent Supreme Court rulings are giving him a chance at parole. Produced by Samantha Broun and Jay Allison in collaboration with the Frontline Dispatch.…

Editor’s Note: This speech was delivered as a “provocation” on the opening night of the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago, November, 2016. (photo by Jay Allison) I confess I like preaching, but don’t want you to feel preached to, so I claim that these sermons are for me, and they are . . . even when I don’t heed them. They’re here…

*Editor’s Note: This conversation was recorded on October 25, 2016. Jenna: So let’s start with who are you and what do you do? Laura: I’m Laura Walker, I’m the President and CEO of New York Public Radio. Jenna: And how long have you been here? Laura: Very long. [Laughter] I’ve been here for twenty years. Jenna: Really? Laura: Really. Jenna: What jo…

The moment I heard about Jim Salestrom, I knew. Not only was this the story I wanted to do for the Transom Traveling Workshop, but I knew in my gut the story was also about me. I came to the Transom Traveling Workshop with all sorts of notions as to what Good and Bad in audio storytelling means. I’ve been hanging out around these parts for quite a …

Last fall at the very end of the semester I saw a poster in the hallway of the art school at Virginia Commonwealth University for one of my favorite podcasts, Love and Radio by Nick van der Kolk. It turns out that it wasn’t a poster for the podcast (Do podcasts have posters? They really should!) but rather for a graduate level documentary radio cla…

Revisiting Difficult Things The story of the violent crime my mother survived in the fall of 1994 has never been something I share easily. It’s more something I offer after I’ve really gotten to know someone and feel that there’s something important they need to know about me, about my family. I’m acutely aware of the impact this crime has had on m…

What Miranda July Can Teach (& Remind) Us About Making Media for the Public Admittedly, I over prepared for this interview. Beyond spending many evenings researching and thinking, I also hijacked every one of my hangouts with friends for months, turning brunches and walks into tactical conversations about July’s work and what makes it so compelling…

Rob Rosenthal, Lead Instructor Rob Rosenthal …one of the things I love most about my job as lead instructor [is] I have no idea what’s going to happen. From day-to-day, from workshop to workshop… every class is different. The stories are different. Even the style of storytelling is different… Read more. TSW: Class of Fall 2015 “No Flush, No Fuss” b…

A “Code Blue” You’ve seen it on TV. The line on the heart monitor goes flat. Reassuring beeps are overtaken by the ominous, solid tone of death. Doctors come running, throw electric paddles on the chest and yell, “Clear!” The patient springs back to life — most of the time, at least on TV. Yet a “code blue” can also be traumatic. A large nurse thro…

Lyrics Black Bach – Lyrics by Billy Dean Start Now – Lyrics by Billy Dean Purchase Click here to purchase songs Artists’ Notes Ben Verdery: My daughter Mitsuko asked me during the holidays if I’d heard her friend Billy Dean’s new music. I hadn’t, but immediately started listening and was captivated by the tone of Billy’s voice and the varied textur…

We’ve Never Been The Same: A War StoryTransom

“Maria, Lena and Me” on PRX About “Maria, Lena and Me” Lena in Russia So here’s the very roundabout way I ended up making my first radio documentary. I’ve worked in television for the last 15 years producing news documentaries mostly for PBS. Before that, I was a graphic designer. Before that, I studied Religion and Computer Science at Oberlin Coll…

About Southern Flight 242 When I was seven years old, my father died in a commercial plane crash. It’s a fact I grew up knowing and something I never wanted to look into, until now. After I decided to make a radio story about the crash, I often wondered if it was the best choice as my first big project as a new radio producer. It took far longer th…

“Of Kith and Kids” on PRX About “Of Kith and Kids” It started with a pledge to my local public radio station… yes! As a sustaining member of WNYC I receive a New Yorker subscription and read the piece: State Of Play: How Tot Lots Became Places to Build Children’s Brains by Rebecca Mead. The article covers the 2010 opening of a high profile playspac…

“Diary of a Bad Year: A War Correspondent’s Dilemma” on PRX About Diary of a Bad Year: A War Correspondent’s Dilemma This project was born in the place where so many good ideas come to life — Woods Hole. I was visiting Jay and the Transom Story Workshop to talk about making radio. Like good reporters, Jay and Melissa Allison, Viki Merrick, Samantha…

“Walking Across America: Advice for a Young Man” on PRX People in the Piece (in order of appearance) “I don’t know why he’s doing it. He’s just crazy, I think.” Bill Guy, Shady Grove, Alabama. “Like it or not, it is about breaking this hold that death has on us.” Therese Jornlin, Andrew’s mom, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. “You’ll know who you are. Be…

About A Code To Live By In Appalachia “Mysterious” is probably the first word most people associate with the Melungeons. They were a mixed race group that settled in southern Appalachia in the late 1700s. They lived in their own communities, separate from their white neighbors. Some stayed in those communities as late as the mid-20th century. Jack …

“Forgiveness” on PRX About Forgiveness I stumbled upon this story on a long distance bike trip, while I was doing a radio project on veterans’ experiences at war. As you can see, this story has nothing to do with veterans or war. It just goes to show that sometimes you just need an excuse to be out there looking for stories and something wonderful …

About An Open Letter to a Fussy Woman at a Toll Booth Toll collection is the second oldest profession. In Greek mythology, Charon the ferryman (one of the oldest service workers) required that a toll be paid to carry souls across the rivers between here and Hades. Souls unable to pay were left to wander around for eternity searching for the damn pl…

“Blind Parenting” on PRX About Blind Parenting In my previous, and now current podcast, I spend a lot of time satirizing this and that aspect of other people’s lives. So I found the task of doing an actual story about my own life daunting. But only once I tried to do it. When we started, I figured Maura and I would just crap out something in a few …

[“Portrait of the Bully as a Young Man” on PRX](%20http://www.prx.org/pieces/75197-being-a-bully "PRX Piece") About Portrait of the Bully as a Young Man Sometime in the fall of 2010, after I had seen or heard or read another bullying story about terrible things happening to young people, I realized that the coverage of these terrible things was tot…

“Bucky’s Dome” on PRX About “Bucky’s Dome” One of the biggest challenges I faced was condensing all of the information I had into a manageable story that makes sense. Buckminster Fuller was a philosopher, architect, inventor, author, dreamer – he was multi-faceted in a way that is rare these days. I needed to convey that without giving a long lectu…

“The D-Word” on PRX About The D-Word What is the D-Word? – It’s a 30-minute documentary that attempts to explore our rather neurotic relationship with that five-letter word: death. It was produced as part of my thesis project for an MSc in Science Media Production at Imperial College London and so is my first try at producing a feature length docum…

“Splash” on PRX Who did What to WHOM!? My memory’s not what it once was. But hearing a certain name made an instant connection with the past. A prominent Tampa lawyer was murdered by his ex-wife. She snapped, drove to his new home and shot him six times. I got a cold chill when the victim was ID’d. I’d known him as a neighborhood kid decades ago wh…

“The Memory Palace” on PRX A Favorite Episode of Nate DiMeo’s: Nee Weinberg I recently asked my, um, my Facebook group, to suggest which episode I should post for this thing. I guessed that opinion would coalesce around a few of the crowd pleasing-est. I was wrong. The suggestions were all over the place (even citing a couple that I can’t really ev…

A Favorite Episode of Roman’s: 99% Symbolic Although I have a hard time pulling out one episode to represent all of 99% Invisible, I chose this one about the design of city flags because I had the most fun making it. During production, I found I couldn’t say “vexillology” very well (that’s the proper name for the study of flags), and rather than pr…

“Scene of the Crime” on PRX About Scene of the Crime This summer I traveled to Colombia on a 10-day fact finding mission organized by Witness for Peace, a Washington-based social justice organization. Witness for Peace had scheduled ten long days of interviews with human rights activists, union leaders, displaced farmers, and witnesses and victims …

“Inside the Adoption Circle” on PRX About Inside the Adoption Circle Adoption reveals some profound but basic aspects of the human story. It’s an act of caring, love and bravery. An emphatic and ancient statement about human nature, it is also rife with questions about identity. We wanted to get to the stories that live inside those questions. In t…

“Finding Miles” on PRX About Finding Miles from Sarah Reynolds I first knew Miles as Megan back in college. When he decided to transition from female to male, he gave me a call. He was slowly coming out to his friends as transgender — testing them, really — to see who he could still count on. The radio producer in me kicked in and I thought, this i…

“Working With Studs – A Transom Radio Special” on PRX Bonus tracks from “Working With Studs” About Working With Studs Back in the 1980s, long before coming to work at Transom, I’d been working with Studs Terkel at WFMT Radio. Despite exiting ’FMT in ‘91, and leaving Chicago in 2001, I continued working as Studs’ transcriptionist and editorial helpe…

“Matthew” on PRX About Matthew I first met Matthew in the spring of 2008 when I was a visiting artist teaching printmaking workshops at Laguna Honda Hospital (LHH) in San Francisco. LHH is the city’s long term care facility. Many of the residents are elderly and suffering from some form of dementia. Matthew stood out both because of his youth and c…

About Kidnap Radio I was 19 when my father was kidnapped in Colombia. It was 1999. My mother came to my college campus to deliver the news and I flew to Bogota to be with my family for a few weeks. (My mother is American, my father’s Colombian and they divorced when I was 5.) After that, except for brief trips for a wedding and a funeral, I didn’t …

“Cat Lady” on PRX About Cat Lady I had struggled for a year, trying to write a piece about my mother, about myself, about what I observed to be an awkward, even incompatible relationship between the roles of artist and mother, about a child’s inheritance of his parents’ pain and desire. I had a long and unfocused essay, which I put aside. A few mon…

Jesse Hardman and Maura O'Connor recently drove around the southwestern United States visiting some of the 33 Native American reservations that have their own radio stations. They said it became clear that "radio, often dismissed as outdated for the Web 2.0 era, was the most essential medium of communication in Indian country." Airchecks from these…

“Jennie’s Secret” on PRX About Jennie’s Secret I don’t remember how I first encountered the story of Civil War veteran Jennie Hodgers (aka Albert Cashier), but I was smitten from the start. I was amazed that hundreds of women had posed as men during the Civil War. I couldn’t imagine how she (or they) pulled it off. And I was positively gob-smacked …

“Prostate Diaries” on PRX About The Prostate Diaries: From Jeff Metcalf A man walks into a doctor’s office for a physical and the doctor says, “You look good. Your heart sounds strong, lungs are clear, urine sample is clean but this next part will be a bit uncomfortable. You want to drop your pants and bend over the table so I can do a digital exam…

About Killer Whales I’m a scientist. Well, that used to be my fulltime job. Now I make radio and multimedia about science…mostly. Let me back up. While I was finishing my PhD in oceanography, I thought about what I would do when I graduated. I wanted a job where I’d continue to learn. And I wanted to have the chance to be creative. I considered aca…

“After The Forgetting” on PRX About After The Forgetting This story started in my living room. I was teaching a youth radio class for the Vermont Folklife Center, and Greg Sharrow, my colleague and friend from the Folklife Center had agreed to a marathon interview with three high schools kids. I’d given the kids a few choice details about Greg’s li…

Back to “A Trio of Podcasts” Read Curtis Fox’s Manifesto: “On Podcasting” A Favorite Episode of Nick’s: Aftermath From the company headquarters of Aftermath, Inc., amidst a strip of bland office buildings in Chicagoland, Tim Reifsteck makes his living cleaning up after the darkest side of human society. I chose this episode because it definitely il…