Air: A Radio Anthology

by Donna Talarico (Editor)

This collection features 25 stories about the "old days" of radio. From first jobs in small town stations to listening to baseball games with grandpa, these essays take place across the decades in studios of all sizes, in homes, in cars, and, really, wherever the airwaves take us.

This collection is the first of our The Way Things Were series, a line of anthologies that celebrate the things we miss, the things we long for; forthcoming titles will celebrate diners, small town newspapers, and mom and pop stores.

Contributors to this collection will include:

Beth R. Barth
Brian R. Bland
Petrea Burchard
Rob Cardillo
Eileen M. Cunniffe
Francis DiClemente
Dagney C. Ernest
Stephanie Feuer
John Fisher
Jessica Forcier
James Richard Fox
Victoria Otto Franzese
John C. Heinritz
Anne B. Henry
Ross Klavan
Ginny MacDonald
Scott Manthe
Maggie Martin
Vicki Mayk
Amy M. Miller
Anthony J. Mohr
J.D. Phillippi
Colin Rafferty
Sarah Marie Wells
Big Jim Williams

262 pages, Paperback

Published March 26, 2019

About the author

Donna Talarico is founder and publisher of Hippocampus Magazine -- and its annual conference (HippoCamp) and book division.

Now an independent writer and content marketing consultant, she previously enjoyed careers in higher education, radio, newspapers, and ecommerce. Donna's been published in a variety of publications, including higher education trade magazines and alumni magazines, and she also has work forthcoming or published in literary and mainstream publications including mental_floss, The Guardian, The LA Times, The Writer, The Los Angeles Review, and others.

She's working on a memoir called Door to Door.

Reviews

[Gayle Pritchard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having worked at my college radio station (I had a show with my husband, Chris, called the Chip & Dale show, which we thought was a really clever play on our names), and having grown up spending summers in the backyard or at the pool with a transistor radio listening to far away stations, I really wanted to fall in love with this book. Don't get me wrong, there were a few gems in the mix, but the visual spacing of the words on the page and overlooked editing errors bothered me throughout, taking away from the pleasure of the read. Some of the early stories, in my humble opinion, just didn't rise to the level of writing that I would have expected in an anthology like this.
I like the idea of the themed anthology series, and look forward with hope to the next one.

[Mark NP · Rating 5 out of 5]

After my fellow traveller Mod Betty forwarded a call for submissions to a forthcoming anthology of essays about road trips that she thought I might like to write for, I decided to read the other collections in the same series called The Way Things Were to see what type of writing the editor was looking for.

This set of stories features the first person narrative recollections of people who worked in radio, mostly during the 80s and 90s (before digital technology changed everything about the job, I learned), and mostly around Pennsylvania and the surrounding regions, as that's where the publisher is based.

I enjoyed the stories and look forward to reading the next book in the series (Dine), and to sending in my own story to the latest call for submissions. I hope I get published!

[Jay Phillippi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Radio is filled with storytellers. The best people on-air are natural born storytellers, but they’re not the only ones. Salespeople are skilled storytellers and even the off-air support staff know how to tell the tale. It’s one of three places where I have felt that I had found “my people”.

So I’m amazed that I haven’t seen more books like “Air – A Radio Anthology“. This is a collection of stories from small market radio. It’s also a collection that includes one of my stories.

“A Box And A Blast” tells the true story of me, a small, gray metal box, and trust issues. It was fun to write, wonderful to get the word they had purchased the story, and truly exciting to share with the world.

If you grew up listening to the radio and always wondered what it was like in the studio, I’d recommend this book as well. These are the stories radio folk swap when we gather together. They represent the tiniest scratch of the surface of all the stories we could tell.

And told by folks who know how to tell a story.