Finding Night Vale

When I was in junior high in the late ‘90s, I discovered old time radio dramas on cassette via my local library (where I was a volunteer book-shelver). The selection was limited to a couple of mystery shows from the 1940s, which I loved, but I eventually tracked down an elderly man in the Midwest who ran a mail order catalog of hundreds of other shows in mass quantity on burned MP3 CDs—horror, thriller, comedy, detective, sci fi—all from the golden age of radio. I was obsessed with these shows (Suspense, Lights Out, Inner Sanctum Mysteries, and my all-time favorite, Quiet Please) despite the antiquated cheesiness of some of them, but in particular, I fell in love with the audio drama format itself. My secret dream career became “fiction radio show writer,” but that job sadly did not exist in our modern era. I went on to film school and learned screenwriting, one of the great loves of my life, and while not an obsolete career, it is an incredibly difficult one to break into. And I still daydreamed about radio drama all the time, about some alternate version of myself that existed in another time period and wrote scripts for voice actors in some dusty office, eating sandwiches from the drug store and making calls on payphones. 

Then in 2011, after having just moved to Los Angeles where I was trying to get creative work, an editor friend reached out to me about something she had recently gotten into. It was a show called We’re Alive, a post-apocalyptic zombie serial, and it was an audio drama. “It reminded me of you,” she said. “Maybe you could write something like this and I could produce and edit it.” It was the first time I’d heard of audio drama being done in the modern context and I was EXCITED. I’ll be honest, I didn’t listen to any of We’re Alive—I just immediately wrote a three-part 2-hour audio fiction miniseries about a Fundamentalist Mormon enclave where the men turn into literal monsters and the previously repressed sister-wives have to become fighters to survive; it was called The Polygamonsters. I recorded and directed many of the voice parts myself (including my first collaboration with Night Vale’s own James Urbaniak, coincidentally playing a desert radio DJ), but unfortunately, it was never fully produced or released. In retrospect, it was overly ambitious, with way too many acting roles and sound design requirements. But James and I got to talking after we recorded his part and came up with an idea for a simpler fiction podcast that he could perform, a monologue show with one-off character based stories, which became Getting On with James Urbaniak. 

After we started making that show, we heard of another podcast doing weird fiction audio monologue stories, which of course was Welcome to Night Vale—and it was quickly becoming more than a show, but a phenomenon. They had heard of us too, I have no idea how, but eventually James was guest acting on WTNV and I was asked to guest write some episodes, later becoming a staff writer. Look, I don’t want to say I, alone, personally manifested the resurrection of audio drama from the sheer cosmic energy of all my pining over old radio show cassettes, but I will say becoming a writer for Night Vale has been an actual dream come true and one of the biggest blessings of my life. The opportunity that show creators Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor have given me, as well as the constant enthusiasm of the fans, continues to touch and inspire me every day. I’m so incredibly grateful for the listener support that keeps independent artists like us alive and making weird stuff, and I couldn’t be happier to be a part of this community with all of you. 

-Brie Williams