Neil Denny is the interview editor of Little Atoms, a podcast on Resonance FM, online magazine and more recently a print magazine. For over 10 years Neil has interviewed hundreds of writers, including Jonathan Meades, Adam Curtis, Hanya Yanagihara and Noam Chomsky.
Neil is our guest curator all this week, check back each day this week to see his recommendations.
Tell me about how you first got involved in Resonance FM?
My friend and co-founder Richard Sanderson was already involved at Resonance. He’d just finished a different series, and was mulling over what to do next. He’d wanted to do a show about science and rationalism, born out of frustration that at the time, the most popular show on Resonance was about UFOs. He would talk about this in the pub, and I would vaguely allude that I’d quite like to have a go at something like that (not having ever been anywhere near a radio station before). Then the tube bombings of 7/7 happened, we couldn’t get home to South London and so got very drunk in a pub garden instead. By the end of that afternoon we’d worked up a pitch for a show. Resonance gave us a trial run of six shows, and then never told us to stop. No idea where the UFO guy is now.
It’s actually become a selling point of the show for potential guests, that I will have read and engaged with their book. Ironically this also comes from me getting into this as an amateur, as it never occurred to me that you would do otherwise.
With the Little Atoms’ site spawning from the radio show, does the show shape the site’s content or is the connection between the two looser?
It’s a loose connection, but the radio show having been around longer has developed a strong idea of what constitutes a Little Atoms “thing” and that obviously feeds into the website. Although the website having a much wider range of contributors will widen that scope. It helps that Padraig Reidy (website and magazine editor) and I (audio editor) have similar sensibilities, and while I could paraphrase US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and say “We know it when we see it”, in reality it just comes down to stuff we like. This is particularly pertinent for me as I have an unrelated day job, all the reading I do in preparation for the show is done in my spare time, and I’ve no desire to spend that time reading something I’m not interested in.
Now, as the single presenter of the show, what kinds of pressure are there? (In terms of research, deadlines, finding interviewees)
As with only reading books I’m interested in, those changes were down to the boring logistics of fitting things around my day job, and so were supposed to reduce those pressures. The show was always recorded live on a Friday evening, which meant that not only did we have to be there every Friday, we could only get guests that were free then too. Moving to pre-record meant that the pool of potential guests was much wider, but also made it harder to schedule the other rotating group of presenters, so it was just more convenient to go to a single presenter. I have a constantly growing pile of books to read, so that’s a pressure. But again the flexibility with booking interviews helps. It’s actually become a selling point of the show for potential guests, that I will have read and engaged with their book. Ironically this also comes from me getting into this as an amateur, as it never occurred to me that you would do otherwise.
It’s a little shocking that that isn’t the norm. I regularly read reviews where the writer openly admits that they haven’t seen the movie or read the book that they’re reviewing, and of course there’s probably a whole lot more who are doing that covertly. Do you think it’s laziness or some other agenda which means that not all interviews are put together this way?
I think it reflects mainstream media coverage of books in general, as there are very few broadcast outlets for a writer to talk about their work at length. Ten minutes on Five Live with a presenter who hasn’t read the book but has been handed a few questions by a researcher is probably the best you can hope for. This is another reason authors are keen to appear on Little Atoms, simply because they get to talk about themselves for a long time. And so it seems disrespectful to expect an author to turn up and record for an hour and not engage with their work properly, and it definitely makes for a more interesting conversation. Of course the lack of a time constraint is one of the benefits of podcasting, so I guess it’s understandable that an interviewer at the BBC is under more pressure, but still, it’s a bit poor.
Our listeners presumably like to read, we’ve produced a beautiful object they can hold in their hands. Why wouldn’t they want to read that?
What do you look for in an interviewee?
Simply that they have written a book that I want to read.
The show has discussed very wide-ranging cultural phenomena, is that a reflection on your interests? Is it just as likely you’re reading about urbanism as you are about physics or children’s books?
It’s entirely a reflection of my interests, which as the show has been running for over ten years now, have inevitably changed with time. When we started we covered mainly popular science and the “new atheism”, and then it widened out to be more generally non-fiction. Then at some point I realised that I wasn’t reading any contemporary fiction because I didn’t have the time, so I started covering fiction on the show too. This is the great pleasure of producing your own show.
What’s the thought behind the print magazine? Is it a new platform for the old audience or an attempt to reach a new audience entirely?
We started a web magazine, that’s definitely an attempt to reach a wider audience, and it’s been a success. But a print magazine does seem a bit counter intuitive, what with print journalism seemingly on its uppers. There’s a thriving world of small, independent and well-produced magazines out there though. And look at something like Private Eye, which month on month is increasing its circulation, despite minimal engagement with the internet. And ultimately, we make a radio show about books. Our listeners presumably like to read, we’ve produced a beautiful object they can hold in their hands. Why wouldn’t they want to read that?
Neil Denny's recommendations
Break-In at Y-12
- Guest curator, Neil Denny: “I interviewed Eric Schlosser about his book a couple of years back, and it remains my favorite ever Little Atoms Interview. Here’s Eric on nuclear security and how easy it was for an 82-year-old nun to infiltrate a secure American facility. Content warning: Abject existential terror”.Neil is our guest curator all this week, check back each day this week to see his recommendations.