This show is Untitled

“Good morning. My name is Trevor Chow-Fraser and this show is Untitled.” I’m always a sucker for a good pun.

For a little over a year, I took care of the Monday morning 9 AM timeslot at 93.3 CFRU Radio in Guelph. Untitled was a show about reading out loud. It started out with my partner Marcelle Kosman helping out with reading of Canadian poetry. Through the loss of Marcelle’s free time, and experimentation, the show expanded to encompass readings from other genres and even non-fiction. Some weeks were just music, but I always felt the value of the show came from the spoken word bits.

It all started when Bry asked us to do a fill-in show during the winter 2010 holidays. Up until then, I had no intention of being on air. I wanted to learn how the tech works, recording and engineering audio. In fact, I was fully intent on resisting all efforts to give me a show. Pre-recording a single fill-in episode sounded like a fun project, and a good way to learn to control the board. But after that, I was hooked. I remember spending days planning the first song on that fill-in show.

After the holidays, we were given a timeslot and we continued to figure out just what the heck we were doing, mixing readings with music. Our first show was ALL NEW POEMS ALL NEW MUSIC. I quite enjoyed that, digging into totally alien music while Marcelle read young poets. We also celebrated our first Family Day on air, a bizzare holiday that didn’t exist when I was growing up. We previewed the Griffin Poetry Prize that year, a show that was necessarily full of fantastic poetry. On my own, I remember doing some fun shows on the Women’s World Cup of Soccer, creative science writing, Winney the Pooh, and walls from China’s Great Wall to Israel’s security fence.

CFRU archives its shows online. As of 2013, the archive for Untitled cannot be searched, but you can still access the files. I’ll hotlink some of my favourites for you right here.

TBA