Weekend reads: A reprieve

Radio, and the lost art of restoring equilibrium

James W. Welgos/Getty Images

We had snow flurries this morning in Toronto. Big, fat flakes fell outside the apartment window. The naked branches of trees were tossed about by icy winds. The streets below were silent. The smell of coffee lingered. The dog slept, sprawled out on our living room rug. 

By this time in March, I am usually restless. Impatient for the summer, longing for its carefree warmth and late twilights and aimless walks through leafy, tree-lined streets. But today, I am content with the cold, holed up indoors with my books and my thoughts. A moment of reprieve. A restoration of equilibrium. But also, a kind of communion. Because this particular brand of solitude is not solitary, but instead filled with voices. The voices of writers, yes. But also the voices of readers, some of whom wrote me long letters this week. 

It struck me, this morning, that this was what public radio used to feel like. Like an act of collective discovery. Like a way of thinking through the terrible things and the beautiful things, but not having to be alone in doing so. A way of simultaneously accessing the inner lives of people living all around you and the most open-hearted parts of yourself.

When I was in my mid-twenties, a segment on CBC Radio changed the course of my life. I was in graduate school, and I was planning to become an English professor. I had started writing for the university newspaper and had tasted the magic of journalism — the sheer, astonishing delight of getting curious about something and then being able to call someone up and ask them about it. As I drove home from campus one night, CBC was interviewing a famed radio host. (After years of trying, I still haven’t figured out who it was. Do tell me if you remember hearing him.) The radio host was telling the interviewer why he’d become a journalist. I wanted to know, he said. I wanted to know what life felt like for other people. As I sat in the car outside my apartment, unable to turn the radio off, listening to this man talk about all the people, from all walks of life, that he’d spoken to during his long career, some switch inside of me flipped. 

When I finally turned off the radio, I was no longer an academic. I was an aspiring journalist. My life was transformed. By half an hour of radio. 

Many years later, Alex Blumberg from This American Life came to speak to a group of us at the CBC. He told us that radio was one of the few public places where people spoke openly about their feelings. I thought about that statement for weeks afterwards.

When I’d worked in newspapers and magazines, and online, the intimacy of interviews had been contained. By the time the person’s words made it to the page, or the screen, they’d been sterilized. Rendered flat, stripped of emotion. Nobody got to hear the universe of suffering conveyed in a single sigh. Nobody got to hear when every syllable was uttered with a steely determination, every word a testament to perseverance, endurance. And nobody got to hear when the warmth of a single smile infused whole interviews with hope.

I wanted people to hear these things — every crack in someone’s voice, every pregnant pause, every joyful eruption of laughter. When I finally landed in radio, everything seemed to click into place. 

I can’t tell you how many mornings I spent listening to CBC’s Metro Morning. Sometimes at home, in an armchair, drinking coffee. Sometimes at my desk in the newsroom, with headphones on, or in the studio control booth, mesmerized by the conversation unfolding on-air. Sometimes in an Uber, on my way to the CBC building, the driver and I suddenly gripped by a segment, the two of us rapt, listening together. 

When done well, radio takes these moments of shared humanity and transmits them to the wider world. It is a remedy for isolation. A healing balm for the grief of being human.

When we lost public radio to the ideologues, we lost a living, breathing link to our fellows — and, through these shared experiences, to deeper parts of ourselves.

The letters I received after I left the CBC were drenched in this same sorrow, this heartsickness for what once was. I still get those letters sometimes today. I listened every day for decades, the person will write. I listened in the car, with my family. I listened in the kitchen, with my spouse. I listened at my local café, with the staff and other patrons. I listened at work, with my coworkers. I listened in the woods. I listened on the bus. I listened out walking. And now, I can’t listen anymore.

This is what I hope the CBC comes to understand: For so many of us, we didn’t just lose our favourite radio shows, we lost each other.

So I was relieved, this morning, to be overtaken by that old radio feeling again, drinking coffee and staring out the window, contemplating the letters you all sent me. I felt, anew, that old sensation of coming together to grapple with our messy humanity. And of emerging with the conviction that we’d be alright. Because every morning we tuned in, and found our way back to each other.