Karen Brown interviews Steve Yates on Mississippi Edition, MPB Think Radio

Time perception is an extraordinary thing. My wife is always tickled to recall to me that when microwaves first came into offices and homes, people waiting on snacks and lunches eagerly watched the digital timers winding down, and many starving seekers would bounce on their toes and shout, “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” The microwave did not change how time passed, only how that passage was perceived. Being on radio will radically change how you perceive time. Linked here on Karen Brown’s Mississippi Edition on Mississippi Public Broadcasting, her interview with me starts at 18:05 and runs about six minutes. We talked for seven minutes tops. It is both strange and wonderful to be in the presence of a great radio interviewer, one with years and years of experience as Karen has. Kyle Kellams at “Ozarks at Large” on Fayetteville’s KUAF and Randy Stewart at KSMU in Springfield are this way, so poised, so smooth, so good at what they do, you (the subject; the interviewee) never feel unnerved, nonplussed, or ill-at-ease. In fact, so good are they in this universe bristling with microphones and levels and lit with sound boards, it is hard to imagine Karen, Kyle, or Randy outside this compressed, racing, time-ridden space of radio. I felt I was with Karen for not much more than thirty seconds. In what’s on Mississippi Edition here (the private prisons story and the Nissan story do bear weird conjunctions with my story about the Pig-Thrower of West Point, Mississippi) I am barely edited. I sat down, she welcomed me, and in thirty seconds it seemed we said goodbye. All I remember is laughing. Fastest and funnest six minutes of writing life, I am sure. Thanks, Karen Brown and producer Ezra Wall! Who knew time could fly like that?