CBAA Awards Finalist: Little Fictions

Wed, 23 October 2019

The 2019 Community Broadcasting Association of Australia (CBAA) Community Radio Awards will be held on Saturday 26 October in Melbourne. Our brilliant program Little Fictions has been nominated for an award in the Best Radio Program: Talks category. To celebrate, we asked the Little Fictions team some questions about being nominated, and their association with the station.

How did it feel hearing Little Fictions had been announced as a finalist in the 2019 CBAA Community Radio Awards?

We were really amazed and delighted when we heard we had been nominated for this national award. Amazed because although we have been broadcasting for just over a year on 2RPH (our first show went to air in July 2018) and the live show Little Fictions which this program is based on has run since 2014, we are relatively new to the national airwaves.There are a lot of great talk programs on community radio so it is a real honour to be nominated in such a strong field.

You’ve been on 2RPH for a little while now, what have you learned in producing the show over that period?

The first year of production has taught us lot. Our initial shows focused on the vault of stories we had recorded from our live performances and so we were mainly concerned with making sure these live recordings translated to quality listening experiences for our new radio audience. We spent time thinking about how to present the stories thematically and how to achieve an interesting range of storytelling styles and a variety of voiced narrations across each half-hour show. Because we also had access to the 2RPH studios, with technical support from the inimitable Peter Worthington (also nominated!), we were able to start incorporating live and phone interviews with the people behind the show.

Our episodes began to include interviews with authors, actors and sound designers which provided insights into the stories we presented as well as the creative and technical processes behind those amazing narrations provided by the Little Fictions actors. This new direction presented planning and logistical challenges which meant more time and resources on the production side of things. But the results have been very rewarding and we hope our listeners enjoy ‘meeting’ our authors and artists. We were also delighted to have had the opportunity to include some veteran volunteer readers from the 2RPH radio community. So in all we have learnt that there is a wealth of possibilities for creative collaborations in the community radio scene and we would encourage other arts practitioners to get involved. There is a tremendous resource in your local community which you can help to enrich and also be enriched by.

What makes you most proud about the program?

Little Fictions On Air is one of the few literary-based storytelling shows on the Australian airwaves and I am extremely proud to be involved. As curator and producer of the show, I am very proud of the high quality of the stories we present, the quality of their narrations, the diversity of authors and actors involved and of the overall feel of the show. I am in awe of our multi-talented presenter, Ella Watson-Russell, who is not only a superb voice actor and a lover of stories and storytelling but also an experienced theatre-maker whose ‘process’ interviews add a valuable dimension to the program. She is also super organised!

I am also proud of our production team. Ella and I have worked with some amazing young audio technicians, many of whom have undertaken internships with us at 2RPH as part of their sound production course at TAFENSW and the University of Technology, Sydney. As the founding publisher at Spineless Wonders, I am also very proud to be associated with the community radio sector, and with 2RPH in particular. Radio 2RPH plays a unique role as a reading service for the general population and offers a particularly valuable to those with issues around access. It is great to be part of this unique collaboration.

Any changes/updates/announcements you can share about the future of the program or schedule?

We are busily working on a series of episodes which will take us up to early 2020 and we have some excellent, engaging stories and interviews lined up. We are planning a special rat-themed episode to celebrate the 2020 Lunar New Year. Once again, we will celebrate Mardi Gras with some Queer fiction and present feminist stories in the week of International Women’s Day. And we have a special episode planned featuring stories collected by Spineless Wonders’ author and story-gatherer, Richard Holt, who was writer-in-residence at the 2019 Ashfield EDGE Festival. We are really keen to find out from our listeners what themes or issues they would like us to explore through our little fictions, so please do drop us a line at info@shortaustralianstories.com.au with any suggestions or feedback to help us improve. We are also looking for volunteers to assist with the show’s production, so drop us a line if you’d like to get involved.

To catch up on past episodes of Little Fictions, visit the Podcasts page here.

Images:

1. Bronwyn Mehan, Producer and Curator of Spineless Wonders, the organisation behind Little Fictions, and presenter Ella Watson-Russell at the 2RPH Mid-Year Celebration in 2018.

2. Actor Eleni Schumacher, host Ella Watson-Russell and audio technician Cassie Sells recording an episode of Little Fictions On Air in the studio.