KUOW Presents connects listeners to a diversity of stories and perspectives from around the Pacific Northwest and around the world on topics that matter to our daily lives.
The writer Allan Gurganus admired Tennessee Williams. One day, Gurganus heard the famous playwright had read one of his stories and enjoyed it. Full of confidence, Gurganus traveled to New Orleans where some friends had arranged for him to meet Williams. But the drunken, Tabasco-stained man he met taught him a lesson he didn’t expect.
WUNC's Dick Gordon brings us Gurganus' captivating story of a literary giant in decline.
Even pop culture needs to be scientifically accurate. At least, that’s what Donna Nelson believes.
She’s a chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma, and she acts as "meth consultant" for the Emmy Award-winning show "Breaking Bad."
The show is about a high school chemistry teacher who starts cooking up crystal meth in order to pay for his cancer related medical bills. Donna Nelson says it's important to have scientific details represented as accurately as possible, especially on a fictional TV show. Not only because people are becoming more science literate, but because a failure to get details right can be distracting and misleading.
Nelson talked with the CBC's Jian Ghomeshi about how she got the job, and what she does as a science advisor for "Breaking Bad."
Chito is not your typical animal lover, he really loves a challenge. Something he always longed for was to be friends with a crocodile. So when he discovered one of the reptiles injured in a lake near his house Chito decided it was his best opportunity to get to know one. NPR's Stephanie Foo brings us the story of Chito, and probably the world’s most beloved crocodile named Pocho.
Sometimes a terminal illness can take such a toll that the person suffering from it decides to end their sickness by ending their life. Fran Schindler knows how awful and lonely that choice can be. So she sits with sick people who take their own lives so they don’t have to die alone. She calls herself a Final Exit Guide. Fran talks with WUNC’s Dick Gordon about her work.
Canadian lawyer Kathryn Smithen is seen as a pillar of her community. In addition to practicing family law, she is a single mother. But she hasn’t always been an upstanding citizen. She has a checkered past that took her 25 years to shed. She tells the CBC’s Sook Yin Lee about her journey from convict to lawyer.
Mina Miller is a Seattle pianist who founded the organization Music of Remembrance 15 years ago. Her passion for the organization springs in part from her family history. Mina comes from a Holocaust family.
James FitzGerald was born into one of Canada's most important families. His grandfather John is a titan of public health in Toronto's history, credited with saving many lives with vaccines he developed. James' father, Jack, was a pioneer in the field of allergies. But both of their names were swept under the rug of Canadian history.
It was only in recent years that James uncovered deeply buried family secrets and learned about his father and grandfather's difficult life journeys. In his book "What Disturbs Our Blood," FitzGerald investigates the suicide of his grandfather, its effect on his father, and himself. James FitzGerald talked with the CBC's Sook Yin Lee about why he felt he had to write a book about his father and grandfather in order to redeem his family name.
Watching salmon churn upstream to spawn is a quintessentially Northwest scene. But it’s not a terribly intimate one. Port Angeles poet Alice Derry finds the connection between salmon running and a longtime couple accepting the losses they’ve suffered together in her poem, “Finding the Poem.” KUOW’s Elizabeth Austen guides us through the piece.
Many Pacific Northwest artists feel compelled to respond to the drama of the salmon fighting their way upstream to spawn. In "Finding the Poem," Port Angeles poet Alice Derry sees in the salmon's efforts a parallel with the way we learn to accommodate each other in a long marriage — and how often it is loss that teaches us, finally, how to do it.
