Come By Chance

For many, ah, many years I had a little tag underneath my email signature that said ‘sometimes I write this newsletter called The Nuthatch’. That was quite a few years ago, so long, in fact, that I actually started a second, unrelated newsletter called Lobster City, to fill the gap. LOL. The good news is, the gap now gets its little baby moment in the sun. Have you heard of Craig Avery and Clarence Hynes? Well, you’re about to.

In 2014, Craig and his wife Tracey were working at Bull Arm, a fabrication site just outside of St. John’s, Newfoundland (where I came after moving out of Austin in 2018). It was Craig’s birthday, they had a little cake for friends, and then when Tracey went back to work, she started up a conversation with a guy named Clarence Hynes. Tracey had been taking a keen interest in Clarence for a while, because she thought he looked just unbelievably like her husband’s brothers. So close a likeness that she once sneaked a photo of him to show her family. Anyway, on this day, she was making small talk about the birthday, when Clarence said, “It’s my birthday too.” Huh. Where were you born? Tracey asked. “I was born in Come By Chance.” They’d been born on the same day, the same year, at the same hospital. Tracey immediately got up and ran out of the room to tell her husband what she’d heard.

This is the beginning of a new 7-part podcast series I’ve been making for over a year with Novel and CBC Podcasts, with a world class team of editors, producers, researchers, sound designers, and composers. It was a total privilege to be in their company, and we’re really excited about the finished product, and so happy to be getting the series out in the world. It just launched this week, with the first 3 episodes up now, and the next 4 will roll out in the coming weeks.

It’s called “Come By Chance” — You can listen to it here. Or just search for “Come By Chance CBC” on any podcast app and it’ll appear.

Tracking audio for a whole series was no joke, and I was pretty confident I could pull it off, but in the end, sort of surprised myself by finding, for lack of a better word, my voice; a storytelling delivery that authentically resonated with the words. (It sounds silly but I also found a Neumann mic which … I don’t know what wizardry they do, but, it’s something.)

While we were making this, my colleague Rebecca Nolan and I were criss-crossing the province on these reporting trips and in the middle of all that, Chris Brookes, one of the most creative audio producers in the world, died. He was from St. John’s, and it was always encouraging to know that this insightful, experimental audio maker was here amongst us, in his wooden house out on the Battery, a beacon of light to the rest of us here, trying to find new ways to tell stories that meant something to us.

We were dumbfounded and almost speechless in the car some days. Rebecca had been Chris’ most recent protégé and they were close. The loss was sudden, and Chris was such a fixture, you’d see him riding his bike and popping into coffee shops most days. I’m sure he’d brush all this aside, but for generations of documentary makers, he really was a beacon. An experimenter, a trickster, and that voice. Such a voice. I didn’t go to Yale drama school like Chris did, but listening to his amazing sculpting of words was the next best thing.

Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking about as we launch this week — that the people who come before showed us how to go about this business of telling true stories, as true as we could get them.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for sharing Come By Chance with your nans and your friends. Really means a lot. Would love to know what you think.