What Every Audio Producer Can Learn From Avery Trufelman
Trufelman offers a masterclass in the promise of the personal
When I read that “Wedding Dress” was not only the last episode of Articles of Interest, but also the last episode that producer Avery Trufelman would be working on for 99% Invisible, I must admit, the feeling was bittersweet. If you’re unfamiliar, Trufelman has been a producer with 99% Invisible for the last 7 years, as well as the producer of the spin off podcast-within-a-podcast Articles of Interest, and the award-winning debut original Nice Try!, about humanities many failed attempts at building utopias (if this is the first you’re hearing of Trufelman, I highly recommend this interview by Imran Ali Malik that Bello published back in May). Trufelman has also just been announced as the new host of The Cut from Vox Media.
Although Trufelman is off to bigger and better things, her episodes of 99% Invisible offer important instruction on how to tell a story using audio. Her production elevates stories from typical radio show to incredible works of art, while at the same time, making them feel intimate, human, and alive. And so, upon hearing this announcement, I did what any journalist (and fan) would do: I went back and listened to every single episode that Trufelman made during her 99% Invisible tenure. I wanted to find the through lines, the connective elements, what sets a Trufelman story so far apart from the rest, because there is something truly special in her work, something that takes the facade of intimacy that podcasts offer, nourishes it, and watches it bloom into something genuinely personal.
The episodes below are more than just a collection of good pieces of audio. Between the narrative beats and musical stings, deep within the tender interviews and subtle cuts, are lessons on the fundamental principles that any aspiring audio producer should learn. The collected episodes below are phenomenal examples of these principles — curiosity, focus, honesty, personality, a focus on ideas — and ultimately, how to earn a listener’s trust.
“Cover Story,” 99% Invisible
“Cover Story” is the first piece Trufelman produced for 99% Invisible, but all the hallmarks of a good Trufelman episode are there. What’s most impressive is the development of Trufelman’s curiosity throughout the episode, and the transference of curiosity to the listener by the end.
This episode centers around the question, “What makes a good magazine cover, and where did these conventions come from?” We’re introduced to George Louis, whose Esquire covers were the controversial conflict that drove the commercial magazine cover from what it was in the old days to what it is now. And that’s a just fine story to tell, until Trufelman shifts the focus from the story that has already played out, and onto the story yet to come. In the second half of the episode, the new subject is a dialogue between George Louis and the modern cover designers, spanning not only two generations and two different approaches to the art, but two different interviews. It’s brilliantly cut so that each declaration sounds like it’s a retaliation to the others’ critique, while subtly assuring us that these two people aren’t actually talking to us. It not only shows us their divide but also that this conversation is real and alive and happening outside of the auspice of narrative radio.
Brilliantly, it ends in a fade out, with Louis laying out point after point against the modern cover. The fade out is done with the utmost respect, and it is through this fade out that Trufelman accomplishes something that only the best audio stories do: Trufelman’s curiosity has now become our own.
“Miss Manhattan,” 99% Invisible
It’s kind of incredible that so many of the statues that adorn the buildings of Manhattan were all modeled after the same woman, Audrey Munson. But that fact is just the launching point for a story that Trufelman found much more incredible: the life of Audrey Munson. Hired to model at a young age, and at the height of the Beaux Arts movement in New York, Munson’s life was like a shooting start; bright, beautiful, shining, only to fade and dissipate. But Trufelman knows that there is more to a shooting star’s story than just its brilliant flash.
99% Invisible is a podcast about design, and it would be really easy to use Audrey Munson’s life as the scaffolding upon which to build a story about the rise and fall of the Beaux Arts movement in the United States. But Trufelman goes for the exact opposite, using the Beaux Arts movement as the framework upon which she builds a story about the beauty, fame, innocence, of Audrey Munson. There’s a critical moment in the piece where Beaux Arts has ended, and the remainder of Munson’s life could be consigned to a sentence and obscurity. Instead, we watch tenderly as Munson lives out the rest of her life, her pain and loss presented with the utmost empathy and love. What results is not an episode about the design of sculpture, but the design of life.
“Lessons from Las Vegas,” 99% Invisible
If I’m being honest, “Lessons from Las Vegas” isn’t just my personal favorite Trufelman story. Its approach to the humanity of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi makes it my personal favorite episode of 99% Invisible.
The episode is primarily an interview between Trufelman and Scott Brown, about the survey class Brown and Venturi taught to study the architecture of Las Vegas. They were interested in the way that the buildings of the strip would change to suit the tourist population, in a time when the rest of the architecture world looked on Las Vegas with indifference. Their work resulted in Learning from Las Vegas, widely considered the seminal text of postmodern architecture, and one of the most important books on architecture from the last five decades.
Trufelman’s interview with Brown focuses not just on her relationship with architecture, but also her relationship with Venturi, whom she eventually marries. The arc of postmodernism passes in the backdrop, and by the end of the story, the audience has taken on Trufelman’s curiosity about the ever-developing strip.
But the brilliance of this piece, what makes it my favorite, is its honesty. It’s a story about a town that wears mask after mask, doing anything it can to appeal to the traveling public, and the researchers who gently looked under that mask and found a reason to love it anyways. And Trufelman applies that lesson to the very story she’s telling — rather than buying into the ever-changing discourse of whether or not postmodernism is a valid form, she gently pulls back the curtain on the people who championed it and gives us a reason to love them — if for nothing else but their process, their curiosity, and their honesty.
“Wedding Dresses,” 99% Invisible
Trufelman’s final piece for 99% Invisible, and the conclusion to the incredible Articles of Interest series, was “Wedding Dress.” Incidentally, I think it is probably the purest expression of a really important constant in all of Trufelman’s stories — the personal.
Like every episode of Articles of Interest, “Wedding Dress” interrogates our relationship with the clothes that we wear and the value that we ascribe to them. Specifically, Trufelman wants to know what drives so many people to hold onto their wedding dresses, a gown made for one night and one night only, and whether there is value in the sentimentality. Holding the interrogation together are two people at very opposite ends of this: her friend and fellow 99% Invisible producer Vivian Le, who fiercely argues for the unsentimental, and Trufelman’s own mother, who has held onto her own wedding dress for all these years.
In little ways, be it an insert of her own perspective or a bit of tape from an interview that shows the natural rapport with her interviewee, there is always a personal aspect to every story. Where “Wedding Dress” really shines is in the final moments of the piece, when the subject stops being the history, design, and story behind wedding dresses, and starts to be this very small, personal story about Trufelman and her mother’s dress. It’s a brilliant moment, where Article of Interest breaks out of the confines of what it means to tell a story about people and fashion, by digging deeper into a singular story about two people and a piece of clothing. “Wedding Dress” brings Articles of Interest, and the oeuvre of Trufelman’s 99% Invisible stories, to a beautiful conclusion.
“The Pool and the Stream,” 99% Invisible
You’ll notice that “Wedding Dress” is not the last one on the list. I’ve saved this pride of place for the episode that I believe is truly Trufelman’s best work to date. It perfectly brings together every element above — the curiosity, the focus, the honesty, and the personal touches — and places them into a story about an idea. I don’t want to go much further into it except to say, if you have not listened to “The Pool and the Stream,” stop what you are doing, and go listen to it now. This is not just Trufelman at her finest — this is audio storytelling at its finest.
Whether you’ve been listening to Trufelman’s episodes for the past 7 years, or you marathon them all in a single week (both of which I can now say I have done), you’ll hit an unmistakable point: the point where you tell your editor that every single one of her 50 episodes could probably make the list, the point where you know that no matter what part of this world Trufelman decides to focus her curiosity on next, you absolutely trust her vision and voice. And it’s not just a trust that her stories will be good. It’s a trust that, if you let them, her stories will change you for the better.
When I was struggling with going to school in a Massachusetts town thousands of miles from home, 99% Invisible’s “Hard to Love a Brute” gave me a whole new way to understand my frustration with the built world around me and a new way to fall in love with it, including my campus’s monolithic concrete library. I stayed at my school, and in Massachusetts, because of that episode.
At my very first Third Coast Festival, exhausted from two days of talks and workshops, I took a moment to find a quiet place and listened to the most recent Articles of Interest episode, “Hawaiian Shirts.” I joked with my roommate that I had probably learned more listening to that episode than in all the sessions combined.
Now, I am a technology, design, and podcasting teacher, and Trufelman’s episodes are the first that I pick from when I need an example for class or I have a particularly eager student who needs more to listen to. There are so many great stories to offer, but I’ll never forget the night I gave one of my students “The Trend Forecast,” and she came back the next day ready to talk to me about every episode of Articles of Interest.
These are just a few of my own personal anecdotes, the little lessons I’ve learned from Trufelman’s stories. I’m sure I’m not alone. That’s just what happens when you’re a good storyteller — you change peoples lives for the better. Trufelman may be departing 99% Invisible, but there is so much we have learned from her already, and I have no doubt there will be many more lessons to come.
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