Hi – I want to welcome you to writersvoices.com. This website had been three years in the making, and it sure is exciting to see it become a reality. Let me tell you how it all came about.
I live in a small but vibrant town in southeast Iowa, Fairfield. You may know it as the US headquarters of the transcendental meditation movement and the home of Maharish University of Mangement, but it is so much more than that. My family moved here just as I was starting high school, so I’ve spent most of my life in or around this community. Over the years in this town, I have started several successful businesses, raised my children, and been an active in a number of groups and organizations.
One of the great delights of living in a small town (and there are drawbacks too, but we’re focusing on the positive here) is the strong sense of community that develops when you see the same faces year after year – and in a variety of contexts. So it is not surprising that when a small but extremely dedicated and creative group of social entrerpreneurs in Fairfield decided to launch a low-powered FM community radio station, they asked me to do a show.
KRUU 100.1 FM in Fairfield, Iowa (www.kruufm.com) is a one-of-a-kind radio station. It is a local non-profit with an open-source philosophy in everything it does. For three years now, it has been broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with over 95% original local programming provided by over 100 show hosts and volunteers. Writers’ Voices has been airing live weekly at 1 pm Central Time every Friday since the first week, rebroadcast at 8 am on the following Monday morning.
When station manager James Moore asked me to consider hosting a show, he knew that I had years of experience in public speaking through my prior involvement with Toastmasters. He also knew me as business person, a writer, and an amateur musician, but he didn’t know my secret weapon – my mother Caroline had been a radio personality in Fairfield thirty years earlier, and still had a weekly interview show on a small Christian station in Burlington, Iowa. The idea of doing a show with my Mom really appealed to me. It would be one way to make sure that we spent some time together every week. Plus, despite my Toastmaster background, the thought of doing a show live on the radio every week was a little intimidating to me.
Now, my mother has been an enthusiastic reader for as long as I can remember, an interest which was imparted to me and an on-so-early age, so interviewing writers seemed like a natural fit for us. Thus, with only the shortest of gestation periods (or thought into what this really meant), Writers’ Voices with Monica and Caroline launched in October 2006.
But that was only the beginning – the rest of the story is still to come.
You must log in to post a comment.