Having discovered a few recordings of my radio scripts on cassette, I searched our garage for a box with all the typed copies of essays written for my university's broadcast of "Morning Edition." My colleague Ken, who was taping film reviews for a local slot on that program, suggested I write book reviews for it. I did write a few, focusing on writers I liked and sometimes taught, but I wasn't comfortable doing it. I had no real alternative in mind when I asked John, the station's executive producer, if I could write something other than book reviews. "What would you write about?" he asked. "Just anything I feel like writing about," I answered. "Okay," he said. So, I did.
In 1980, when I started writing radio essays, I had completed my first book, Thomas Southerne, drawn from my dissertation research on Restoration theater, and written conference papers and articles on composition and rhetoric and English pedagogy. All that was about to elevate me from assistant professor to associate professor. I was a fully functioning academic. But as an undergraduate, I'd written a column for the college paper, The Lamron, succeeding a friend who had published satirical and humorous pieces. Titled "Root '66," my feature managed to amuse, entertain, or annoy those students and faculty who occasionally read it. I hadn't written that kind of thing in fifteen years and, probably because encouraging students to write personal essays had helped center my thinking somewhat, I had mellowed quite a bit. I felt ready to write short random essays.
The topics I felt like writing about were wide-ranging: our family life in Alma, my Western New York childhood, my reading, my viewing, the cycle of seasons, life on the road, the cosmos, a philosophy of place, and even, occasionally, current events. The first 20 scripts were written and recorded in the late summer and autumn of 1980, when Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were competing for the presidency. My satirical piece endorsing Bugs Bunny for president made one colleague confront me about my failure to be more reverential about the nation's highest office. Two other essays, titled "The Voter's Prayer" and "Evolution and Education," were never aired. I tried for fewer opinion pieces in ensuing essays.
At the end of each school year, I collected my scripts into binders with general titles: Airwaves Essays I, II, and III, Alternate Route (a variation on my old "Root '66" title), and finally Thinking Out Loud, drawn from my habitual tagline, "This is Bob Root, thinking out loud." The series ran weekly two-thirds of each year between 1980 and 1987, eventually totaling 225 scripts and only ending when I felt the need to write longer, more complicated essays.
Twenty-six years later, hoping to better preserve some of that work, I included fifty-two radio essays in Limited Sight Distance: Essays from Airwaves. I claimed in the preface that writing around three dozen essays a year "forces you to be more alert to the world, to move through your life always open to the possibility that what happens to you—whatever you notice, view, read, observe, experience, hear or overhear, wherever you go, however you get through your days—might end up in an essay. You walk through your life ever so much more awake because, pressed by constantly recurring deadlines, a part of you is always testing potential opening lines, composing narrative or descriptive or expository or reflective sentences." I compared it to "having a play-by-play announcer and a color commentator piped in over images from a video camera attached to your head, permanently displaying your angle of vision."
Sometimes a broadcast would prompt listeners to get in touch. One man wrote me about how, after hearing my script about a small-town hamburger joint, he convinced his co-workers to lunch at a local restaurant rather than a fast-food chain. The restaurant made their own pies, and my correspondent reported having had a slice of both the rhubarb and the lemon. Other people approached me to share their own thoughts about that week's subject. Hans, my department chair, sometimes stopped by my office to say he'd been in the shower during the broadcast and only heard the final minute or so and wanted to know what he'd missed. These encounters taught me something about writing essays—that what really interests you enough to write about, whether ordinary or idiosyncratic, will inevitably set off vibrations in other people, a kind of sympathetic tuning, almost in spite of your intentions. You may be writing for yourself but that doesn't keep readers from connecting to what you've written.
I'm going to post some of my radio essays over the coming weeks, ones that resonate with me, ones that might have resonated with some listeners.