A Story for All Seasons --and Media

If you’ve heard Sarah Vowell’s voice, you likely haven’t forgotten it. High, slightly nasal, it has a childlike quality that belies the witty and insightful remarks that fill her essays on Salon (https://www.salon.com) and in her books “Radio On: A Listener’s Diary” and “Take the Cannoli: Stories From the New World.” But Vowell’s voice is most recognized from Public Radio International’s “This American Life,” heard locally Saturdays at 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on KCRW-FM (89.9), where she is a contributing editor.

Question: You work in many media--radio, books, Internet, live performance. Do you have a favorite?

Answer: It depends on the story I’m telling. For me, the most enjoyable thing I do is the least enjoyable to everyone else. The most pleasant, fun thing is being a critic. I love sitting at home in my pajamas and doing book reviews. People hate critics--they use them, but they hate them--but they like stories. I like the variety of the different jobs. The radio is obviously my most popular forum. On the other hand, sometimes that can be the most limiting because it goes by so fast.

Q: How did you get from writing into radio?

A: From writing about radio. My first book is about listening to the radio, and I’d met Ira Glass [host of “This American Life”] while I was writing that book. And after I’d finished, we’d become friends, and we were having dinner one night and I started telling him a story and he said, “Great, can I get a tape recorder?”

Q: Listening to someone read her own material always makes it seem more intimate. Do you get different responses to your radio work than your Salon columns?

A: I think “intimate” is a good word. People who have heard me on the radio feel closer to me. That’s good and bad. Print is more remote. When you’re saying something in print, people think, on some level, that the typography is talking. On the radio, definitely a person is talking.

Also, because I have a voice that is childlike and peculiar, I feel that I can be more eloquent in print because I don’t have my voice getting in the way of my message. Sometimes I talk about serious things--genocide, history, politics--and in print it looks exactly the same as when George Will talks about those things in Time magazine.

Q: What do you think about live performances by writers?

A: It’s a completely different talent. Some of the best writers don’t have that talent to read their work out loud. I feel lucky to be able to do that. Writing is so lonesome; it’s nice to be able to come out and face the people and get their reaction, or hear them laugh, or hiss.

People laugh at weird things. Audiences can definitely reinterpret one’s work. Things I thought weren’t funny they’ll laugh at or vice versa. . . . My book editor and I were having a debate over one joke about homosexual acts in Central Park in the story about Disney World [in “Take the Cannoli”]. He thought people outside of New York City wouldn’t get that. But I’ve read it several times in various places and audiences always think homosexual acts in Central Park are funny.

Q: Do you enjoy live readings?

A: Sometimes I get nervous about [what comes] before and after, when I’m supposed to meet people and talk to people and say hi to people in the audience. Partly because they’re eerily familiar with me and my family through my work, but also because I can be shy around strangers. That’s where I’m definitely a writer. You have to be a solitary person to do this job, and that can carry over into my social finesse.

But I’m a total spotlight whore. When they say my name and point to a podium, I’m on.

Q: You’re from Oklahoma and Montana and moved last year to New York. Do you think Westerners have a different outlook from those in the East?

A: I definitely have the Westerner’s relationship to the Eastern establishment. I went to Montana State; I’m one of the first in my family to go to college. I have that striver’s disdain for the Eastern establishment, I guess because a lot of the people in the East, and in the media in particular, they grew up assuming they would do something and be somebody.

I find that completely alienating. I never thought that. That was never a given.

Q: Did you always want to write?

A: What I wanted to do changed every nine months. The longest-running career goal was to be a composer. I was very ambitious about that; I was just mostly untalented. Until very recently I thought I was going to be an art history professor. I’ve always been very hard-working, very determined toward things I had little inclination or talent for. Like sports, or music, or even academia. I feel so lucky to have stumbled into writing because I kind of have a knack for it.

Q: What else have you been thinking about lately?

A: Besides Howard Cosell? He was a childhood hero of mine and there was this biography of him on TV this weekend. I was watching him and listening to him, and I can see why he appealed to me. He had a peculiar voice. He said what he thought, and sometimes people hated him for it. He took very moral stances--about racism and anti-Semitism, but also he was . . . really quick and loud and opinionated and entirely lovable.

BE THERE

Sarah Vowell at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the UCLA campus Saturday at 11:30 a.m. for the “American Gothic: From John Lennon to JonBenet” panel (Young Hall, Room 50) and then at 2 p.m. with Dave Eggers, author of “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” (Dodd Hall, Room 147).