Non-narrated pieces let the subject speak for themselves in their own words, with no narration from a reporter, producer, or host. As an essayist, this format comes a bit more naturally to me than other scripted audio.
Putting together a non-narrated piece is the Ginger Rogers to my prose writing’s Fred Astaire: doing the same thing but backwards, in heels. Here are four examples of that work.
Davinah Simmons is a full spectrum doula - birth, as well as miscarriage and death. She is also a Black woman in a predominantly white city with a history of erasing Black people, by way of everything from redlining to police brutality. In the first summer of COVID-19, amidst the George Floyd uprisings, the toll of both the virus and police killings fell disproportionately heavy on Black bodies. Due to the openness necessary to do her job, she felt that deeply.
"Birth work and death work is spiritual work. Whether you want to acknowledge that or not. There is so much that happens in the birth or the death of someone. And it's really important as a person who is holding that space and creating that container that you know how to regulate yourself in the moment, but also that you know how to deeply care for yourself after."
Speaking with Davinah was emotional for me; that heaviness had also fallen on me. I was experiencing long COVID symptoms that affected my vision and my appetite, by way of difficulty tracking rapid movements and months of nonstop nausea. Existing my body in general was hard enough, let alone the wider world. But Davinah spoke of laughter and joy, of the need to rest, and of a fierce insistence on pleasure as a way to survive: this plague, our world, and into a place where we see Black people in the future.
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Tacoma-based doctor John Okrent picked up a pen. The poems he was writing were for his daughter to read later - a future bulwark against the things that he can’t share with her now, like a simple hug when he gets home from work.
“I wanted to describe to her what I was seeing out the window. I wanted to tell her about the incredible pink moon that everybody saw. I wanted to describe the people coming together at sundown to bang pots and pans and sing out of their windows, and I wanted to obviously tell her too about the refrigerator trucks being set up as temporary morgues outside the hospitals.
But also about the the cherry trees that were just, you know, surrounding those refrigerator trucks and have seemed to me more beautiful this spring then I can ever remember. “
Repair Revolution is an inclusive, empowering, queer-owned and operated auto repair shop with a social justice heart. It’s helmed by Eli Allison, who’s built the first garage where I’ve ever felt comfortable hanging out. When the pandemic began, the shop’s finances took a hit, and Allison worries about the LGBTQ community that depends on the garage, including his employees. “For the folks that have come here from all over to work in a shop that treats them equally, that honors their difference – that celebrates, I mean, beyond honoring. That celebrates that they're different and that celebrates that they’re queer.”
But one thing that’s come out of this time is some radical emotional honesty. “I think we're trained to be like, “Hey, how you doing?” “I'm okay.” As a just a standard response. And the truth is right now, a lot of people are not okay. And so being willing to engage in those deeper conversations, I think I've learned a lot from that. No time to have an ego.”
On the northwest corner of Seattle’s Fremont Bridge, there’s a blue tower with a neon Rapunzel on the outside, letting her cathode hair down over the shipping canal. And in 2018-19, on the inside of that tower was composer Paurl Walsh. The time allowed him to translate his complex history with the neighborhood, from homelessness and addiction to a city residency. The bridge is the most frequently opened drawbridge in America, but it’s balanced by counterweights. And at the pivot point is a stillness that is present in the music.
My very favorite moment in the piece comes early in the piece, when Paurl is walking me through the bridge’s operation. Just as he says “once [the guardrails] are down, the alarm will stop,” the bridge falls into silence on the exact beat. I could never have planned for that: moments like this are why I am head over heels in love with audio.
Possibly the best welcome I’ve ever received to someone’s home is, “Let’s start in the back — I’ll show you my dead carp collection.”
Warner Lew is a fleet manager for a seafood company that fishes Alaska’s Bristol Bay. But he was once a little kid who loved amphibians, watching the frogs at his local pond die out thanks to pollution. Driven by a love of the sea, he’s on a crusade to bring sustainability back to your dinner table. For him, that looks like herring - which he calls “the Rodney Dangerfield of the sea.” Small oily fish get no respect, he says — but as climate change reshapes the oceans it may be time to change the way we eat.