In a way, this blog grew out of Beaver Magazine, my seventh grade publication my teachers permitted me to circulate.  Other bloggers, such as Dave Bonta of Via Negativa, started out publishing among their grade-school acquaintances, too.

Blogging has eclipsed another childhood love – radio.  I used to listen to clear-channel A.M. stations skip off of the ionosphere in the evenings on my most-prized possession, a transistor radio, and I would write to the stations as far away as New Orleans, Buffalo and Des Moines (I grew up in Tidewater, Virginia) to tell them what I had heard when on their stations. They would send me QSL cards verifying my clams, and I would tape them to my bedroom walls.

When I was twelve, a walkie-talkie stole my heart away from my radio.  It was called a base station, and it could broadcast a few suburban blocks.  A few of my friends had base stations, and we would take turns putting on half-hour radio broadcasts complete with music from our record players and neighborhood news.

I later became a member of our high school’s radio show club.  We would drive to a local radio station each Saturday morning and put on a quarter-hour program we had planned during the previous week.  The club introduced me to some fun characters who, like me, loved to get behind a microphone and play disc jockey or newscaster. 

Then came college, where a friend of mine and I put on a kind of Jesus freak radio show every Saturday and Sunday morning on WUVA, one of the college's radio stations.  It was back when the Charismatic movement was apolitical and contemporary Christian music was fresh and, with respect to at least its leading artists, very much its own sound.  I would prepare and give mini-sermons between the music – little inspirational tidbits, really – and I was always disappointed when my friends would tell me that their favorite part of my show was when I read the weather.

Some part of me liked reading the weather, though: it made me feel more professional than anything else I did on the air.  It was probably the weather bits that led me to try out for a radio job during my senior year in Waynesboro, Virginia, not far from my college.  By the time they offered me the job, though, I had decided to forego radio for law school.

I haven’t returned to radio since.

But Dave at Via Negativa is making me think about radio again, or at least about podcasts.  (A podcast, after all, is radio you can schedule and carry around on an mp3 player such as an iPod.)  Last month Dave began hosting a delightful, evolving podcast that complements his blog very nicely.  For me, it’s like listening to Washington Post Radio, a service that must have been on for no more than a year.  On WPR, I could hear some of my favorite writers discuss what they were writing about, and I could hear some pretty good interviews, too.  I can do the same on Woodrat Podcast.  I hear Dave talking about his latest poetry series or interviewing his qarrtsiluni co-editor.  I hear his knockout interview with blogger Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi concerning the intersection of poetry and religious practice.  I hear a fascinating conversation among banjo players about their varying approaches to their craft mixed with recordings of them playing together.

I guess that, if you already like a writer (his subject matter, his mind, his “voice”), you’ll be predisposed to liking his radio, so long as the writer can make a decent transition from one genre to another.  (Think of the huge audiences many radio programs such as Amos & Andy and Jack Benny brought with them to television when they made that transition.)  Dave makes more than a decent transition from visual only to visual (blog) and verbal (podcast).  Dave is a gifted interviewer, affording his guests ample space to develop their answers to his thoughtful questions and adding enough of his own knowledgeable observations to keep the conversation moving in interesting directions.  Dave blogs and now broadcasts from the Pennsylvania hills, and his accent and inflection enhance the sense of place Dave’s blog has always carried.  Woodrat Radio, to me, is an oral blog.

(I don’t mean to suggest that Dave hasn’t experimented in other ways with orality at Via Negativa and elsewhere.  His videos and his recordings of his poems, most of which are accessible on or through Via Negativa, are high-quality fare, and he and Beth share such great chemistry on qarrtsiluni’s podcast episodes in which they describe the site’s visual art that you’d think they’ve been doing it forever.)

Woodrat’s Velveteen Rabbi interview is dear and informative.  Don’t miss it.

I discovered a while ago that I don’t have a voice for radio.  But Dave’s podcast demonstrates that I still have an ear for it.

You can try out Woodrat Podcast or subscribe to it at Via Negativa or on iTunes.  If you use iTunes, just type “Woodrat” in the search field.

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Posted February 5, 2010.