When I was a kid, there was no public radio in Vermont. The closest I had was a transistor radio, smuggled under my pillow, that picked up WQXR's classical music all the way from New York City when the night skies were cloudy.
Moving to Boston at 18 was an embarassment of riches. The city was a smorgasbord in so many ways -- cultures, religions, food. But I began to live on the radio. WGBH and WBUR, the NPR affiliates. But also WERS (Emerson College) and the high weirdness of WMBR (Walker Memorial Basement Radio at MIT) on weekend nights. More. Lots more.
It was a natural step for me when I became the assistant to the general manager at WFCR in my early 20's. Soon, helping run fund drives, I cultivated my drama club voice into a radio voice: "WFCR: five college radio in the Pioneer Valley." With Bob Goldfarb's permission, we started using available studio time in the evenings to record small-genre fiction on tape for the National Foundation for the Blind, a project called "Audible Fantasy."
My world, sometimes, lives more in my ears than my eyes. Radio tells me I am more of a storyteller than a writer.
Today, the words, the music, the sound collages on too much caffiene and too little sleep, come as much from the Internet. Moving 3000 miles hasn't deprived me of the excellent mix of music from Eugene, Oregon's KLCC-FM. ethnotechno.com brings me a genre of music I might never have heard of -- South Asian Techno -- as a new favorite.
What does it mean, now, "public radio," when public can mean a podcast, or a stream. When there is sponsorship or not, or membership or not, or funding or not? It's the blogification of sound, splashing in bitstreams in ether.
Yet, in my office, in my kitchen, it is the radio playing from morning to night, whenever I am at work alone. A life in radio, la vie en rose. First love, obsession, like the feel of a book, mine.
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