SHOW NOTES
No. 6Waiting for Company
The one about camping where they saw the three orbs.
Dispatch 06 begins with a mystery in the desert: a strange mechanical hum that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. After reports of unexplained lights in the sky, the narrator does what he considers the only reasonable thing—drives into the desert alone, builds a fire, and waits for his brother Fred to arrive. What follows is less an investigation than a long conversation with uncertainty itself.
As darkness settles in around the campsite, every sound becomes suspect. An owl may be an owl. It may not.
READ FULL SUMMARY
The desert feels simultaneously empty and crowded, familiar and unknowable. The narrator finds himself reflecting on humanity's fascination with the unexplained, from UFO sightings to the larger mysteries that quietly accompany ordinary life. Humor remains close at hand.
Fred is still an hour away. The flag marking the campsite is attached to a tree, which proves less helpful than expected. One brother contemplates civilization's relationship with the unknown while the other worries about directions, timing, and the truck.
Their contrast becomes the episode's grounding force. At its center, Waiting for Company is not really about strange lights in the sky. It is about companionship.
The unknown feels larger when faced alone and smaller when shared. By the end, the mystery remains unresolved, the strange hum continues beyond the firelight, and the desert offers no answers. Yet something important arrives anyway.
The narrator comes looking for evidence of visitors from elsewhere and discovers he was waiting for something much closer to home.
READ ABOUT MAKING DISPATCH
Making Dispatch
Before I began looking for an actor, I encountered a new generation of synthetic voices. The technology allowed me to direct a performance closely and privately, without placing the experiment under the weight of a conventional production. It gave me room to fail, reconsider, rewrite, and try again.
The limits of the technology began shaping the stories themselves. One voice meant that everyone else would have to exist through his reactions. Short passages became brief encounters. Telephone calls left one side unheard. What looked like a limitation became the form: a world revealed through the effect it has on one man.
The stories are written as prose rather than scripts. Sound is not decoration added afterward; it belongs to the narrative. A clock, a distant train, a rocket crossing the Mojave—each carries part of the story that the words leave alone.
Who am I
Origin
I suppose it began before there was anything to begin.
As a boy, I found the old radio programs after they were already old. They arrived carrying static, voices from somewhere else, and whole rooms that could be built without showing you a single wall.
They held me more completely than television did.
Maybe because they left something for me to do.
Close your eyes and listening becomes a form of participation. A few words, the movement of a chair, a dog worrying its collar somewhere beyond the microphone—and the mind supplies the house, the hour, the weather outside.
My years in documentary and media production only deepened that fascination. A microphone never records merely the thing it is pointed toward. It catches hesitation. Distance. The room around an answer. Sometimes the soundscape tells the truth before the person does.
I wanted to make something out of that.
The first idea was modest. I hoped to leave my children a few stories containing some of what I believed about living—not instructions exactly, and certainly not a sermon. Something they could encounter as art and decide for themselves whether it was useful.
The first story became The Little Doorway.
Then there was another.
Then another.
Pretty soon, those stories needed a house. A podcast seemed as good a house as any.
I tried reading them myself.
Mercy.
That settled that.
Before I began looking for an actor, I encountered a new generation of synthetic voices. The technology allowed me to direct a performance closely and privately, without placing the experiment under the weight of a conventional production. It gave me room to fail, reconsider, rewrite, and try again.
Somewhere in that process, Geezer III appeared.
He was an old desert dweller with a cockeyed view of things. Slightly misguided on occasion. More intelligent than he lets on. Hospitable, though not harmless. The sort of fellow you might listen to for seven minutes and then continue hearing after he has gone quiet.
Is he me?
Not exactly.
Though I cannot honestly say where he stops.
The limits of the technology began shaping the stories themselves. One voice meant that everyone else would have to exist through his reactions. Short passages became brief encounters. Telephone calls left one side unheard. What looked like a limitation became the form: a world revealed through the effect it has on one man.
The stories are written as prose rather than scripts. Sound is not decoration added afterward; it belongs to the narrative. A clock, a distant train, a rocket crossing the Mojave—each carries part of the story that the words leave alone.
That is the territory Dispatch occupies: somewhere between literary fiction, radio companionship, and a signal found late at night.
I write the dispatches.
Geezer sends them.
That seems explanation enough.
Me
The name on the transmission is not necessarily the man at the microphone.
I am a writer and documentary filmmaker. My work has examined youth violence, poverty, public health and the systems people build to survive one another. My films have received the George Foster Peabody Award and multiple Emmys.
I write and produce Dispatch from the American West. Geezer III handles the transmissions.
READ ABOUT AUDIO LIT
Audio lit
Audio lit is not literature transferred into audio. It is literature composed for listening—where voice, silence, atmosphere, music and recorded sound are part of the writing.
The name is new; the practice is not. Audio lit can be found in sound essays, fictional transmissions, recorded diaries, audio miniatures, spoken-word compositions, found-tape narratives and stories in which atmosphere does some of the writing.
Dispatch takes another form: the recurring fictional transmission—a single voice, an implied world and an atmosphere that participates in the storytelling.
A starter list of audio litFive dispatches. October 27–31.