I got my start in public radio while I was still attending the University of Minnesota's creative writing program. I landed a job writing for The Writer's Almanac, Garrison Keillor's daily program, where I eventually became the lead writer and producer, responsible for researching and writing all the scripts about writers and historical events featured on the show. George Lucas’s education website Edutopia interviewed me about my work at the time.

From there I moved to Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett's program exploring religion, meaning, and moral imagination (later On Being). The show won a Peabody Award while I was on staff. At the same time, I was also producing my own stories for the American Public Media program Weekend America, including a piece about a love letter I wrote that convinced my future wife to date me, and a piece about a fistfight I had with my older brother that I didn't bring up with him until I had a microphone in hand.

I left public radio in 2009 to teach writing at a college, but I couldn't stop making things. In 2014, I launched Anxious Machine, an independent podcast about how ordinary people are changed by technology. I defined “technology” as broadly as possible, so there are episodes about people grappling with drugs, guns, neonatal ICUs, and hearing aids. The show never broke through to a mass audience, but it developed a cult following. Episodes were featured in The Atlantic and named among the best of the year by Bello Collective.

Around the same time, I started working as a freelance editor and producer for other independent podcasters. I helped Sophie Nikitas develop a pilot for The Zoo, a podcast about online dating that The Atlantic named one of the best podcasts of 2017. I offered editorial notes on the second season of First Day Back, which Vulture named one of the best of its year. I was the editor of Mark Bramhill's Welcome to Macintosh, the beloved narrative podcast about Apple culture. I also contributed stories to Minneapolis community radio station KFAI, profiles of local characters like the owner of the oldest reptile pet store in the state and an elementary school principal who worked across the street from my house. A story I made about a local actor hired to teach public defenders courtroom presence won Best Feature from the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists in 2020.

All of this (the public radio years, the independent work, the editing, the reporting) built slowly into a single conviction: that audio storytelling is its own distinct art form, and that the best of it deserves the same critical attention we give to film, literature, and television.

That conviction is what became Phonograph, the podcast I co-host with Britta Greene, a former producer and reporter who worked at Minnesota Public Radio and the New Yorker Radio Hour. We started the show in 2018 under a different name (Before It Had a Theme, an inside joke for devoted This American Life listeners) and dedicated it to re-listening to old TAL episodes the way film critics revisit classic movies. Despite our small audience for that first season, IndieWire somehow found us and named us one of the best podcasts of that year.

After a pandemic hiatus, we relaunched in 2024 with a broader focus: the full landscape of audio storytelling. We treat individual podcast episodes the way cinephiles treat great films, discussing the audio equivalent of lighting, editing, tempo, and structure alongside the story being told. And we try to practice what we preach: the way we produce and edit our conversations takes formal cues from the work we're discussing, weaving the numerous clips of the thing itself into the episode about it. Podcast critic Samantha Hodder named us among the best "Industry Builders" in 2025, alongside the podcasts Audio Flux and Pitch Party. Lauren Passell wrote a rave review of the show when she first discovered it, and she’s “texted” our podcast to her “friends” in more than half a dozen of her newsletters.

It’s my hope that as this show grows, we can be a force for surfacing the best audio storytelling being made in the podcast market and beyond. We want to help people find those shows and help a new generation of listeners think about what makes this medium unique and vital.