Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
The Transom Traveling Workshops are back. I just want to quickly tell you about them before jumping into this episode. Last March, after, I don't know, like a several-year hiatus, Transom offered a workshop on Catalina Island in California. Ten students worked with David Weinberg, he was the teacher, and over the course of the week, they produced profiles of people living on the island. It's a great way to learn the craft of narrative, sound-rich, character-driven storytelling.
Well, Transom is doing it again. They're offering another workshop this summer, this time in Interlochen, Michigan. David will be at the helm again, and Interlochen Public Radio is the host. And the location of the workshop is the campus of the Interlochen Center for the Arts. I taught there many, many times for Transom, and let me just tell you, it's a beautiful setting by a lake. The dates for the workshop are August 24th through the 31st. Applications are due May 30th.
All the details about tuition and travel and lodging, etc., etc., they're at transom.org. This is Sound School, the backstory to great audio storytelling. I'm Rob Rosenthal. I produce this podcast for PRX and Transom. When you're trying to figure out how to write the beginning of a story, one trick is to ask yourself this. What's the first thing I want people to see? What's the first image?
With that question in mind, let's listen to this opening to a podcast series. It takes 28 gallons of fuel and a spark to burn a human body. The body lays flat for hours, engulfed in flames, as the crematory furnace reaches 1,600 degrees, as hot as molten rock. Our skin, fat, muscles, and organs vaporize at that temperature, but not our bones. When the furnace is turned off, only a skeleton remains, laying prone.
like it decided to take a nap. If you want to fit those bones into an urn, you have to pulverize them in a machine that looks like a large blender. Two heavy blades grind them down into pebble-sized pieces of bone. The ashes are only ashes in name. They're not soft or powdery to the touch, but coarse like dry sand. It's an imperfect process. If perfect means every last bit of us ends up in an urn, inevitably some small percentage of our remains falls into literal cracks in the furnace.
The cracks formed over time by the intense heat. Some of us, of our remains, is even mixed with remains of previous cremations. But when all is said and done, most of our bones end up in an urn. And of course, that's if everything goes right. I have so much I want to say about this clip. I'll start by saying I find the writing to be incredibly satisfying.
The writers are Johnny Kaufman and Sean Raviv. Sean's also the narrator. They're doing everything right. Short declarative sentences, very few commas. The subject and verb are always clear, like check, check, and check.
But more importantly, Johnny and Sean take what is otherwise fairly routine writing for audio to another level with a couple of skillful maneuvers. Of course, there's the indelible first image, but did you catch that first sentence? It takes 28 gallons of fuel and a spark.
to burn a human body. No time is wasted. None. There aren't a handful of sentences that serve as an on-ramp to the topic. The listener is placed right in the story, immediately. It also helps that that sentence is pretty startling. Here's another maneuver, simile. When the furnace is turned off, only a skeleton remains, laying prone, like it decided to take a nap. Like it decided to take a nap.
Up until that point, they've written one fact after another after another about the temperature, about how long cremation takes, about how much fuel is needed. Fact, fact, fact. Then, a little piece of decorative writing. A simile. If a reporter's job is to deliver the facts, you could argue that simile is unnecessary. Nice, but not essential.
I believe the opposite is true. We're not just fact delivery machines. You know, a good nonfiction writer will drop in an occasional bright, shiny piece of writing as a way to lean into the storytelling, you know, to show they care about the story and the craft. To put it another way, a well-placed simile serves the listener and the listening experience. Besides, in this case, I'm not sure I know what a prone skeleton looks like.
What is that exactly? But adding that the skeleton looks like it's napping, well, now I know exactly what he means. I see it better and feel the stillness. The other element of their writing to take note of in that clip is the quiet reveal of tension. But when all is said and done, most of our bones end up in an urn. And of course, that's if everything goes right. If everything goes right.
That gently foreshadows the conflict. It doesn't oversell it. Plus, it raises a question. What could go wrong at a crematorium? A colleague recommended this podcast to me. It's called Noble, an eight-part narrative series from Waveland and Campside Media that was released in the summer of 2024. So I'm a little bit late to the party since I just listened to it recently.
Audiences loved the podcast. Noble hit number one on Apple Podcasts, and The New Yorker declared it the best podcast of last year. It's the story of a bizarre crime at a crematorium in the town of Noble, Georgia in 2002. Hundreds of uncremated bodies were discovered on the property. The podcast also wrestles with what I think is a great universal question. What do the living owe the dead?
I was prepared not to like the series because of the trailer. In fact, I doubted my colleague's taste after listening to the trailer because it reeks of true crime.
Everywhere you looked, there was just bodies, just human bodies. In the winter of 2002, the most mind-blowing crime you've never heard of happened in the least likely of places. We all know the story. Well-respected people in a small community, and boy, that's a real small community. More than 300 human bodies were found in a tiny town called Noble. I mean, guys, this is like a horror movie. I was like, my God, there's skeletons everywhere. There was just this sickening odor.
This was just overwhelming. It all starts when a delivery man stumbles upon a dead body on a remote property. I looked down and seen that there was bones and bodies just pushed up in a pile of debris. Over the next few days, the police find bodies almost everywhere they look.
Most of them have been there for years. The bodies were dumped in woods and storage sets outside the crematory. Residents of the town of Noble are in shock tonight. What follows is one of the biggest and most expensive investigations in the history of the American South. I'll stop there. I think you get the picture. That sort of if it bleeds, it leads storyline does little for me.
I just don't understand why producers often treat crimes, especially gruesome crimes, like something to gawk at as we drive by. It's like they forgot we're talking about events that happen to other human beings. Fortunately, the tone of the series was vastly different than the tone of the trailer. I don't know why they were so different. I'd be curious to know how those choices were made. Aside from that, I think the writing in the episodes can be summed up in a single word. Respect.
Like in this scene, a portrait of Ira, one of the victims, and his wife, Sheila. In 1979, Sheila was working in hospice care while finishing her nursing degree. One of her patients set Sheila up with her son. Oh, she kept saying, oh, I've got this good-looking son. You're just going to have to make him. He's coming in. Well, he came to see her that day, and I thought, well, he's not bad. I can make some work with these clothes. I can fix that. His name was Ira, and he was an Army Ranger.
He had brown hair and blue eyes and a slight hint of a mustache, and Sheila thought he was cute. Just like Sheila, Ira had become fiercely independent after a tough childhood. But their mutual independence added up to good chemistry and good dates. Sheila and Ira got married six weeks after they met. Sheila was 19 and Ira was 22. They had two children and raised them together with Sheila's daughter in a house in Chatsworth. Ira got a good job at the Department of Transportation, and Sheila was soon able to stay home like she wanted to.
In his free time, Ira liked to deer hunt. He used a .30-06 rifle and later a muzzleloader that Sheila got him. She actually got him a kit, and he had to put the muzzleloader together himself. He told Sheila he liked it better that way because he built it. Ira was a Hershey kiss nut. He would buy a huge bag of them to eat while he was sitting up in his tree stand, watching for deer. But he didn't want to make that rattling sound, so the night before, I would sit there and unwrap
Each of those individual Hershey kisses, I'm putting them in a Ziploc bag for him. That is the sweetest thing I've ever heard. Literally and figuratively. Oh my God, that's so amazing. Yes. To Sheila, Ira was the kind of guy worth unwrapping Hershey kisses for. They were happy together. But sometimes life comes down to a coin flip. And one day it became apparent that Ira lost the toss. He was out hunting and traipsing through the woods, stepping over fallen sticks, crossing creeks,
and he noticed that he had trouble keeping his balance. A few years later, he started having involuntary trembles in his limbs. Then they graduated to more severe tremors and slurred speech. In 1994, Ira was diagnosed with Huntington's disease. Huntington's is caused by a faulty gene. If a parent has it, there's a 50% chance their kid gets it. Before the disease takes your life, and it always does, it takes away your balance, your strength, your speech, until you're just in bed and need help with everything.
It's a nightmare. For the patient, of course, but also for the people who love them. My own father had Parkinson's disease, which is similarly progressive and unstoppable. It killed my dad, but not before it nearly broke my mother, who had to take care of him as he forgot who she was, lost his ability to clean himself, and got violent with the people he loved most. Which is all to say that families that deal with physical and cognitive breakdowns are often in a battle against breaking down altogether. All while they're dealing with the question of why. Why did this happen to us?
Ira was put in hospice care at home so he could die as peacefully as possible. By then, he was helpless to do almost anything at all. So we made it through the 4th of July, and then that was about it. He was in bed after that. And it got to where he couldn't swallow, you know, and things like that. But I took care of him. In that example, I want to note Sean and Johnny's use of telling details, the specifics that help you feel Sheila and Ira's relationship.
Sometimes, to indicate how close and loving a couple is, a reporter will mention how many years they've been together, or maybe they'll describe all the family photos on the mantle, or how the couple makes each other laugh. I feel like I've heard those details and stories a zillion times.
In Noble, they avoided those tropes, telling us instead about the gift of a muzzleloader kit with that essential detail that it required assembly, just like Ira liked it. And those Hershey kisses? I mean, come on. I bet that image will stay with the listener long after they've heard the story. It's so much more effective than saying, they made each other laugh. And kudos to the reporters for asking questions that reveal those details.
Listening to that clip again, my editor's ear perked up for a moment when Sean said this. To Sheila, Ira was the kind of guy worth unwrapping Hershey Kisses for. They were happy together. I don't think those lines are necessary. They already did the job of showing us that Ira was the kind of guy worth unwrapping candy for. He didn't need to tell us. That's a small quibble. So much of the writing is economical. But here's something I have a question about. Did we need to know that Sean's dad had Parkinson's?
I'm actually on the fence about a reporter using the first person when reporting a story they're not connected to. On the fence and cautious. Because sometimes writing in the first person doesn't serve the story. It can be a distraction. One question to ask when considering using I, does the story stand on its own without it? If so, why use it? If it's not adding any value, just keep the focus on the characters in the story. And in this case, they could do that. They could remove the anecdote about his dad and the story still stands.
All that said, I don't mind what's been done here. It's short. He's not inserting himself to draw attention to himself. It helps Sean sound conversational. It might even help listeners connect with him better. And it's a useful way for Sean to deliver this point with more authority. Which is all to say that families that deal with physical and cognitive breakdowns are often in a battle against breaking down altogether. All while they're dealing with the question of why. Why did this happen to us?
Sean Raviv, the narrator, is a freelance journalist who mostly reports long-form stories for print outlets like The Atlantic and BuzzFeed and Wired. On the audio side, he's made pieces for iHeart and Wondery and others. And after sampling some of his other work, I'd say Noble is his best.
Johnny Kaufman's work has been more focused on audio. He's reported stories for This American Life and Reveal. And earlier in his career, he worked at NPR and for public radio station WABE in Atlanta. That's the store that Ray Marsh built, and that's one of my barbecue restaurants. So let me offer up one more clip, a short one with a pleasing turn of a phrase at the end. It's from a moment in the series where Sean describes the town of Noble. He
He was given a tour of the place by a longtime resident, Stan Porter. When Stan was growing up, his grandparents hosted big barbecues, where they'd fry up meat skins in a big lard pot, throw hams in the smokehouse, and put out sweet tea and lemonade. Their family and friends would dance late into the night to the R&B tunes of WLAC out of Nashville. There were few, if any, streetlights in Noble back then, so when families walked home after, they did so in the dark. But Stan remembers that as a kid he could somehow still see at night.
As in lots of small towns, Kids and Noble had night vision. Kids and Noble had night vision. That line is so good, I yelled to my partner down the hall and said, you need to hear this. That line reminds me also of the simile from earlier, like it decided to take a nap. So I guess I just wanted to make another pitch for little flourishes like that. They elevate the storytelling.
I learned a new word recently, verfabula. Apparently, it's a combination of the Latin words for truth and story, and it's used to describe the genre of long-form narrative storytelling. Sounds too hoity-toity for me. I much prefer creative nonfiction or narrative nonfiction. But lately, I've been thinking the best out of all the terms that are used to describe the type of writing in Noble is literary nonfiction.
All of these terms are used to describe the idea that writing techniques from fiction can be used in nonfiction. But literary nonfiction seems to reinforce that notion. Of course, these terms are nothing new. They've been in use for several decades. But I bring it up just to say I think Noble rises as a clear example of excellent literary nonfiction. Music
I'm going to do this again, focus on writing, because really, the title of this episode says it all. Writing makes all the difference. In the next episode, I'll feature writing examples to aspire to from NPR, a podcast called Pig Iron, and some compelling work from an independent producer.
I'm Rob Rosenthal. This is Sound School with the backstory to great audio storytelling. It's produced by PRX and Transom. My thanks to Genevieve Sponsler, Jay Allison, Jennifer Jarrett, and to WCAI, which is still in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the radio center of the universe.