Retreat! And Make Stories with Friends
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Jasmine moved to Berlin a couple of years ago to take a gig as the head of creative audio for an app called Blinkist. It's an app that summarizes books. Jasmine says she didn't really know many freelancers in the city at first, but in time she connected with quite a few independent producers. I noticed that everybody was kind of sitting in front of their own laptops at home and they were all so...

And every time I met them, they were kind of venting and asking for advice or, you know, finding inspiration in the chats that we were having. And I was like, wow, there are people here and they don't know of each other. I need to have them meet each other because I think they would make great work together. It sounds like you want a community, a collaborative community. Yes. A community was something that I've always longed for.

It's especially a creative community where you kind of get to play together. What's better than that? Why not callings at work? Isn't that enough? Yeah, but it's limited. Limited by economics, she says. The need for a podcast company to develop and pitch shows, seek financial partners, contract with platforms for distribution, sell ads, you know, the whole shebang. In short, limited by the need to make money.

Instead, she thought, what if I create an altogether different environment, something non-commercial, bring together some of these lonely audio producers, hang out, see what happens. To play and to fail and to get to know each other and to, you know, celebrate and...

The craft of making audio. This idea for a kind of audio vacation, as she put it, came to her late last year, 2023, not too long after she'd made a piece for Audio Flux. That's a project of Julie Shapiro and John Delore, where producers are invited to creatively respond to a set of prompts.

Jasmine wanted to capture the essence of her audio flux experience only face-to-face in Germany with her new audio friends. And I wanted them to come out of the retreat invigorated and energized and ready to just make something and play around and like,

you know, F the money for just a second and just make something that they've always wanted to make. Just try something, you know, that's what I wanted. And I wanted them to be like, oh, wait, hold on. I'm not alone. There's all these people out there and I can maybe work with them in the future. A few months later, in March of 2024, Jasmine launched The Echo, like sound bouncing off walls. Only in this case, ideas get to reverberate.

And Echo is spelled E-C-C-O, Italian for Here You Are. That really vibed with the entire idea of what this project was going to be. This is Sound School from PRX and Transom. I'm Rob Rosenthal. Jasmine Biomi is my guest. And today on the program, get your ears ready because we're going to listen to two stories that came out of the first Echo Retreat. ♪

Back in 2009, Jasmine earned a bachelor's in broadcast journalism from the American University in Cairo. These days, she's the senior podcast producer for TRZ Media, a Berlin-based company that produces investigative podcasts.

In her spare time, sparked by her idea, she connected with freelancers, told them about her plan, and invited them to the Echo. I kind of curated people who I thought could really benefit from knowing each other and learning from each other. And they weren't all people that you'd think of immediately. Like some of them are people that I'd just known who I knew they would

They have a brilliant mind, but they're not getting the chance to actually show what they've got at work. But I know they could do it. So I brought those people in as well. And then we went out into the countryside. A small village in eastern Germany where they stayed in a home with a garden and a community kitchen. Sounds lovely, actually.

13 people in all, mostly from Berlin, including producers whose work has been featured on Sound School, like Alison Berenger, who produces The Bodies podcast, and Jeff Emptman, who makes Here Be Monsters.

The retreat cost each participant about 300 U.S. dollars. That includes their transportation and money to cover Jasmine's expenses. It ran four days, Thursday through Sunday. And Jasmine says when they first arrived, they settled in, chose bedrooms and feasted on a big meal of Japanese curry. And then I stood up and I kind of said, all right, so this is an experiment. What do you all want to do?

there were two things that I want to make happen every day, which is I want there to be a creative writing session every morning, and I would really love for there to be a listening session every evening.

Spoiler alert, the listening sessions in the evening didn't happen. We were way too tired by the evenings to be listening to anything. But the morning writing sessions did happen. And then they came with suggestions for how they think we should structure our next day, etc., etc. So we started building on that. And that was that. That was the first day. ♪

A couple of people in the group made some recordings over the weekend, but no one was expected to actually make a produced piece. In fact, Jasmine encouraged people to stay off their computers. I wanted to keep laptop time to an absolute minimum because this was about community.

So instead of mucking around in editing software, the participants batted around ideas for stories. They thought about them, wrote about them. They'd go for walks together and hash out problems, offer critiques and challenges and support. Audio people are the best people in the world, I'm sorry to say. They're so generous with each other, a lot of them. And that was the spirit of it all. Everybody was very, very generous with their ideas and their feedback and feedback.

their tips and advice for the industry. All of this kind of stuff was happening. It was great. By the end of the fourth day, she says everyone had a much clearer idea of what they wanted to make going forward. But they also faced a problem, a question. I need to make a decision now whether I actually have the capacity to create something without getting paid for it or not. She says everyone left optimistic, believing they'd be able to fashion their ideas into stories.

They set a deadline a few weeks down the road, and Jasmine said she'd help. She offered to be a sounding board as they moved forward. On top of that, the crew organized their own peer reviews, so everyone had support. In the end, nine of the 13 people made a story. Like this one, Take an Acorn from Your Past and Plant It, by Marta Medvesek. That piece almost didn't happen. Marta was in the process of moving away from Berlin, and she was really struggling.

And she didn't quite know how to make it happen. There was something in her head. She had a feeling and like a really vague idea, but she didn't know how to put it together. And it was like a day before the deadline or something like that. And she said, I ended up making something. Can you have a listen? One day I was going about my business when I stumbled upon... Once there was a tree. An oak tree. An oak tree.

And she loved a young girl. A small, round-shaped, unnoticeable, in the middle of her pathway. And every day the girl would come. I don't know why, but I kept coming to it, day by day. She would hang from her branches. Season by season. Stretching. From bare branches to buds to leaves to fruit. Sit in her shades. Everything moves in cycles. Reading. And so will my grief. Thinking.

Tell her all about her day. First year, I only noticed seasons. Then, I started seeing the small things. The murmuring in winter. Cry. Cry.

And when she was tired, she would just stand there and stare off. The first snow caressing dead leaves in the distance. The acorns, eyes closed, sleeping furious, holding the bark. The worms trying, but having no chance. The tree has seen her many times. Against the trunk. Break apart and fall back together. The sound of my blood flowing. And the girl loved the tree.

Very much. And the tree was happy. But then... But time went by and the girl grew older. And the tree was often alone.

Then one day, the girl came to the tree and the tree said, tell me all. Instructions. Take an acorn from your past life.

Put it in soft, humid wraps inside your backpack and go. Come with me, said the girl. Leave it in the darkest corner of a place that doesn't feel like home. I'm sorry, said the tree. Allow it to fail. But I'm rooted here. To rot. To be eaten from the inside. But I have acorns. But secretly. Take my acorns, girl, and plant them. And when it sprouts...

Watch the small oak tree grow on your windowsill. Then you will be happy. When it gets stronger, where will you plant it?

The girl stayed away for a long time and the tree was starting to get sad. In an overly lit bathroom, I put it in a pot. The wet earth against ugly yellow tiles. It sprouted. One morning, I wake up to three tiny leaves. The girl came back.

Fragile, tender, she could hardly speak. Delicate, slow, so easy to be crushed. But also to grow 40 meters into the sky. The root is pushing through, searching to break out of the pot.

I have a feeling that I already know him. It's not a slander, but it has something to do with that cleanliness. Everything is clear, visible, it's wide-sighted. You have a feeling that you can breathe, that you can live, that you can be free. A slander is at the edge of the forest or in the forest when there is some cleanliness.

But here, the forest is not visible. And the tree was happy. Because for me personally, it's a tree, because it also gives me a sense of stability, security, purity, clarity, and beauty. Because it's so wonderful to see these trees change over the years.

and how you change with them while you walk. Once I thought: "How interesting it is when you know one part of the world, but you've never been there, and how that part of the world will always be there, even if you're not there." The world is not a place for you to live.

Marta Medvesek produced that story. Again, it's called Take an Acorn from Your Past Life and Plant It. Marta is a freelance producer who splits her time between Berlin and Zagreb in Croatia.

I have to say, I had difficulty choosing selections to play for you. I wasn't sure what to pick given how good the pieces were and how different they all sound. But there is one piece that I knew right away I should feature, a difficult story to listen to because of the subject matter. In fact, it might be something young kids shouldn't listen to. It's called Red of Visibility. Phoebe McIndoo made it. Phoebe had told me about this idea of feeling invisible and this kind of

feeling of being so exposed to, you know, the male gaze and how it made her feel really uncomfortable. She didn't tell me about the story behind it back then. I knew she had gone through trauma, but I didn't know the details of it. And she really wanted to enter the process of what it means to be seen.

And she said it's this color red that she associates with being seen. I had no idea where she was going with it. And so once she sent me the piece, it was so powerful. She could have wallowed in self-pity if she wanted to, and she didn't. She reclaimed energy and she reclaimed that feeling of being seen. And she was like, here I am. I am running not away but towards.

That piece made me breathless. How do you connect to the colour red? Red of love. Red of soil. Red of rain. When I was six years old, we had a school doctor called Dr. Wallace. Red of stone. Red of river. He would pay occasional visits to our primary school. Red of rose. Red of eye. Red of joy.

The school's emblem was a red S for sacred pierced by a red H for heart and our school colour was red. Dr. Wallace saw us individually in the headmistress's study where we were told to take off our red checkered dresses and red tights.

All the better for Dr. Wallace to check our little red pulses and hold our young red vitality between his raw red hands. Red of light. Guiding his hand he found treasure in the growing red space that was my freedom, my pleasure. Red of floorboards. Red of perfume. Red of dust.

When your childhood sense of where one red body begins and another red body ends is derailed, your skin-red shame will make you wish you were invisible. And yet anyone who's ever turned a shade of red will know red is red is red is visible. The trick is to claim back red. And so as part of this healing to reclaim red,

I decide to paint my entire body red with the help of friends. Red of visibility. First strokes. Painting myself red in the forest and baring my body. Red of bristle. Red of glade.

Under the stroke and soft of brushes, red of feather, red of bird. There was an opening of sky above my head. It felt like a thousand hands had found my body, dancing shades of new red across it. Warm. It was warm, and then confusing. I had wanted to prove how much I had healed, as if healing was a form of evidence. But there was nothing to prove. The forest was itself. I was just me.

soil red and beautiful, just as I'd been before. While walking, I spoke to a friend about healing. They advised repeating out loud, that is not my shame. That is not my shame. And that is not my shame.

Running, I recorded new associations of red. Red of laughter. Red of hum. Red of rain. And I discovered other things too. I typed Dr. Wallace into a Google search bar and stories came up. Dr. Wallace.

Women who had testified and who were testifying years later. Former GP was found guilty on Tuesday of eight counts of indecent assault. Five girls aged under 14. Pornographic images of children had been viewed on Dr. Wallace's computer. Our stories survived us. The hardest thing of all was to name it.

So I spoke into the church bells. I was sexually assaulted. Saying it out loud, I didn't feel powerful. My voice sounded weak and small, a thin thread of words in the chaos of a high street. It was only later, when the first tears fell, I saw how the truth spoken out made currents that river-raged and rang, a growing tide of stories that would save us.

Red of rage. Red of trails of water along the ground. Red of collecting light. Red of good. Red of change. Red of trust. Red of reclaim. Until my world exploded with redness. Red of create. Red of birds flying high. Red of visibility.

Yeah, I'm breathless too. And teary. Phoebe McIndoo's Red of Visibility.

It's hard to make a turn here out of that story, but there is one last element of the Echo Retreat I didn't mention. Something Jasmine says is not very common in Berlin, a listening event. The participants in the retreat played their stories on a Friday night last May in the basement of a cafe. Jasmine says the place was full. About 80 people came. That communal listening practice?

It created such a bond between everybody there. It was something really, really special. And especially people who've never been to a listening event in their life before, but they were from the audio world and from the podcasting world. They came to me afterwards and they told me how great it was. And even us as a cohort, these things were just all of a sudden, these audio pieces were out in the world.

There's one more piece from the Echo for you to listen to at transom.org. It's a playfully produced story called Marjorie by Sara Hoshery. Also, Jasmine told me she's planning more Echo retreats. Two next year, she hopes. One in the global south, another in either the U.S. or the U.K.

I have some personal news for you. A couple of days after this episode drops, I'll be on a radio tour of Europe for a month, giving presentations in Slovenia, Germany, and Denmark. I cannot believe my great fortune. I'll give a talk on scenes in audio storytelling at the Audio Festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia on October 7th.

Jasmine is hosting me at an Echo listening event in Berlin on October 20th. I'll feature some of my favorite stories produced by students and workshops I've led over the years. And I'll end my tour in Copenhagen, where I'll hold a master class and dissect the elements of good audio storytelling at the annual Audio Days Festival. ♪

You can find details in my feed at LinkedIn or at X at underscore Rob Rosenthal. So look, if you're in the neighborhood, come on by. I'd really like to meet you. Music in this episode comes from my friends at Stellwagen Symphonette. I record episodes of Sound School at WCAI in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Genevieve Sponsler and Jay Allison edit my scripts. Additional support for this show comes from PRX and Transom. I'm Rob Rosenthal. Thank you for listening.

From P.S. and transom.org.