Origin
story
Re-Imagined Radio began in response to a question.
2013. Summer courses at Washington State University
Vancouver. I was teaching digital storytelling. Students were building digital projects based on
The War of the Worlds radio drama. We planned an exhibition in a downtown gallery.
"Will visitors understand our stories if they don't know the source?" one student asked. Good question.
I asked The Willamette Radio Workshop for help. WRW, a group of Old Time Radio (OTR) enthusiasts,
offered live
performances of radio programs from the "Golden Age of Radio," the 1930s to the 1950s.
Founded and led by Sam A. Mowry, The Willamette Radio Workshop was keen to help. "You find a venue.
We'll bring the performance," Mowry replied.
For the venue I turned to the historic Kiggins Theatre, built in 1936, and still the heart of downtown
Vancouver, Washington's Art District. "You can use the theatre if you handle the publicity," Dan Wyatt,
owner and manager told me.
And so, with that chain of events, I founded Re-Imagined Radio.
Our inaugural performance, October 30, 2013, the seventieth anniversary of the original broadcast of
The War of the Worlds, was a standing room only success. After the hour-long performance,
Sam, Dan, and I looked at each other and said, "What's next?"
We agreed on "A Christmas Carol," mid-December. Another sold out performance. We decided to keep going.
We chose more OTR content. Artifacts from a time when radio dramas, stories, and shows were a popular
and primary entertainment and information source for listeners. Each live performance was a study of how
the the orginal radio program might have been produced and broadcast from
radio studios thirty to forty years earlier.
We explored different forms of radio storytelling. Fiction, horror, science fiction, comedy, westerns,
and suspense. We frequently re-imagined our re-creations by changing
gender roles,
adding audio-visual projections, encouraging audience participation, and incorporating digital recording
and streaming. We considered our performances a unique form of storytelling, based in community
listening events.
The COVID pandemic, 2020, prompted a shift from live performances to recorded radio broadcasts and
streaming. Our original partner community radio stations were KXRW-FM and KXRY-FM, who broadcast and
live streamed our monthly episodes. The digital recordings we made for our episodes became the basis for
our podcast and YouTube series.
Every recorded episode produced since 2013 is available here, our archival website, through our
podcast series, and our YouTube
channel. Enjoy listening!
— John Barber
Founder, Producer, Host