Audio Narratives

As the 2015 Artist in Residence at KBOO Radio, I wrote and directed “The Pool,” a 30-minute radio play set in The Crystal Plunge, a public swimming pool in San Francisco that was demolished in 1958. For the setting of this play, which begins at 7:57 PM on a February night in 1983, I pretended the pool still existed, and the listener gets to hear the thoughts and conversations of the lifeguard and swimmers who show up for a seemingly peaceful evening of leopard-printed one pieces, methodic breast strokes, Jane Fonda’s aerobics, unrequited love and a misused defibrillator. Everyone’s looking for something and nobody’s going straight for it.

Music by Paper Gates.

I also host and produce The Staple, an Arts & Culture podcast presented by the IPRC. This is one of my favorite episodes.  Subscribe here.

Before I had a podcast I would get an itch now and then to make an audio narrative. Below are some examples:

“Three Sides to a Leaf”

Three very short pieces that I wrote and produced.

“A Quiet Place to Eat”

A short story about a father and son eating at a burger place when a man in hospital scrubs shows up pulling a human skeleton on a leash. Music by myself and Robert Maciel.

“Going Soft” by Jason Squamata

This is a personal essay that Jason wrote for my reading series, The Soft Show. I rerecorded him reading it and added sound design. Much later I found out that he wrote this on the day of the reading, on the bus rider over. The man is a factory.