When Caroline (also known as my Mom) and I first started producing Writers’ Voices with Monica and Caroline, we thought we might pre-record most of the shows. Caroline was used to doing that with her half hour community interest show on KAYP 89.9 FM in Burlington Iowa. The station manager lined up her interviews, 3 or 4 at a time, and she’d make the commute to the station to record several weeks’ worth at once.
But KRUU 100.1 FM in Fairfield is a different animal. For one thing, because it is a volunteer-run community station, when you volunteer to do a show, you are also volunteering to be the producer and engineer. Pre-recording an interview has the advantage that it can be edited, so if you really mess up it can be fixed. But only if we had the time and expertise to do the editng ourselves. Which neither of us did. It quickly became apparent that broadcasting live was the most efficient way to get a show on the air every week. As I became more comfortable with being live on the air, I realized that live broadcasts had another advantage over the ones that, due to scheduling conflicts, we did have to pre-record. There is a certain “liveliness” and spontaneity to the conversation that is maintained in the live broadcasts, even when they are heard later as a recording, that gets suffused when you know that you can always do another take.
Once we started doing the live broadcasts, in October of 2006, it didn’t take long to nail down our preferred format. We had lots of ideas when we started out, and the first few shows in our archives demonstrate some of the content that we experimented with. From the beginning, the focus was to talk to writers not just about the content of their work, but about their live as a writer. Initially, the author interview was going to be only part of each show, but it soon became clear that to really get to know a writer and his work, we needed almost the entire hour. The format evolved into a short conversation on books and writing between the show hosts, followed by a 55 minute interview with a writer, some famous, some just starting out, on the writing life. We then close with a quote from Caroline, who has been collecting quotes for most of her 74 years.
Of course, getting the show on the air took a large investment of completely unpaid time. Not only the hour a week to actually do the show, but many more hours to line up guests, read the books, prepare questions, write the blog on KRUU’s web site, and prepare the show to be archived. With all of this time being invested, I wanted to do more with the wonderful interviews that resulted. The next step was writersvoices.com.
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