We sometimes get to talking about the craft of writing in this newsletter. So if you’ll excuse the slight detour from book writing into broadcast writing, I want to tell you about one of the greats.

We all lost a friend around here this week. NPR’s Susan Stamberg died Thursday. I’ll let other folks remark on her pioneering status as a woman in journalism, or the way she championed visual art on the radio. But back in my producer days, I’d help Susan record her scripts. And whenever we recorded, I made sure to bring whoever our intern was at the time – to show them the ins and outs and doohickeys of studio recording, sure, but also to show them how a script becomes radio magic. Take this 2015 piece about Irving Penn’s fashion photography. It’s a three-minute Morning Edition piece about an exhibit. Susan must’ve done thousands of these by the time I got around to working with her. It could’ve been a rote exercise, but here’s her opening line:

“Well, they're so perfect. So posed and glossy and perfect. As a chubby Manhattan kid in the 1950s, I thought I was supposed to look like that, the pinched waists, the impersonal expressions. But I knew I never could, and anyway, who'd want to?”

Like all good poetry, it’s meant to be read aloud. It’s funny, playful and personal, but it’s also a serious consideration of the art she’s about to tell the listener about. And if you did read it out loud, you may have noticed those p-sounds – perfect, pinched, the impersonal expressions. She was tasteful. She didn’t bang you over the head when she was having fun like this – in fact, I remember not realizing what she was doing until halfway through the script. But she was having fun. That’s what I wanted to impress upon any impressionable young radio person in those recording studios.

To bring it back to books, a few months ago I happened to come across Susan’s at my local used bookstore. It’s called Talk, a compendium of her interviews from 1971-1991. It ends with an interview with Mark Strand, the poet laureate. On a day where All Things Considered was covering natural disasters, war and international politics, Susan spends nine minutes talking about poetry. Not just that – she spends the first few minutes of the piece literally getting lost looking for Strand’s office. Looking back this interview for the book, she writes:

“The search, in a way, is emblematic of my work in radio. Trying to find art, insight, connections, in the middle of the news of the day. Working to make those connections – ideas and interactions that lift us beyond the day’s ‘events’ – become an intrinsic part of the news we tell. Searching for things that last.”