A Thousand Words

Welcome to A Thousand Words, a special project by Good Beer Hunting. I'm Ashley Rodriguez.

As a producer at GBH, I work with a lot of photographers and visual storytellers. And while I’m familiar with the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words,” I’m not sure I’ve ever been challenged to consider what that 1,000 words might be like—or what it means to that visual artist.

There’s a piece of advice I always come back to when I think about podcasts and audio and storytelling. When I sit down and plan an episode of the GBH podcast, or help another member of our team cut interviews and put together a script, I call upon these words of wisdom: audio is the most visual form of storytelling.

Seems a little strange, right?

In this special episode of the GBH podcast, we asked members of our team to enter this realm of storytelling. Many of these folks are used to bringing you very visual stories through their wonderful photography, but for the last few months during COVID-19, doing on-site photography has been impossible for many. That hasn’t stopped them from visualizing the word of beer, both past and present.

With that in mind, you’re about to hear seven different stories read aloud by members of our editorial team and some are from our subscriber community, The Fervent Few. Think of each brief narrative as a snapshot of a moment, like an audio version of the b-Roll series on our website. The resulting vignettes offer a range in scope—from present-tense musings to episodes from the past that feel especially prescient now—and multiple perspectives on our shared crisis.

We asked folks to talk about their current lives in the face of COVID-19, and we commissioned these audio stories just before the current wave of protests calling for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd in late May. These stories still speak to the uncertainty of this moment, and we hope to expand this series further and include more moments of reflection—both inward and outward. Each storyteller will introduce themselves before jumping into their own narrative. We hope you can visualize every anecdote, and immerse yourself in the pictures they’re painting for you.

This is A Thousand Words, a collection of audio stories. Listen in.