Writers Carlee Calver and McKenna James Boeckner will debut their first audio drama series Us Soliscent Seeds on CHSR this summer.
Matt Carter
There will be a new audio drama debuting on Fredericton’s community campus radio station this summer. In response to the station’s open call for audio dramas issued earlier this year, co-writers Carlee Calver and McKenna James Boeckner thought the opportunity and the challenge it presented were too good to pass up.
“Audio dramas have always held an uncanny, floating, liminal space for me,” said Boeckner, who first began listening to radio plays during morning commutes to elementary school with their father. Several years on, and now in the pursuit of a PhD in English Literature at UNB, Boeckner has found a new love for the format. “I have grown a fan of the ways in which audio dramas have the unique ability to lull listeners into a visual landscape fabricated through oral storytelling.”
Calver, Boeckner’s writing partner for the series, shares a similar connection to the medium.
“My background is primarily in film, but I love experimenting with new mediums and have wanted to write a piece with audio in mind as the only medium,” she said. “So far, it has been an exciting challenge as a writer.”
Both Boeckner and Calver describe Us Soliscent Seeds as an eco-horror. Not exactly the murder mystery CHSR was seeking, but compelling enough to get the green light.
“In their call for audio dramas, CHSR originally indicated that they were seeking a murder mystery,” said Boeckner. “Because this genre of storytelling is not one that we are immediately familiar with, Carlee and I put a Calverian/Boecknerian twist on the call and proposed to CHSR a quasi-mystery from the perspective of an automated home system.”
Boeckner sums up their idea as an Amazon Alexa witnessing the death of her owner.
“This proposal has since shifted and re-set, but our story still holds our central relation between this automated robotic system and a mourning/conspiratorial sister at its base, now embedded with eco-horror growths festering at the base of the techno-centric dystopic world we imagined,” they said.
Us Soliscent Seeds will be shared as a four part series airing later this summer with the possibility of a podcast release at a later date.
“The series as it is written ends on a relatively large cliffhanger,” said Boeckner. “I am hoping that listeners’ minds foam with futures for our characters just as much as ours do – futures big enough for a possible second season. As Esther, one of our characters, articulates, ‘There’s nothing at the edge of a foggy cliff. Just the jump.’”
More to come. In the meantime, listen local. You can stream CHSR FM or tune in to 97.9 on your FM dial.
