Short Talks

Short Talks is an audio diary kept by one voice, a speaker who introduces themselves as K Short, and it makes no effort to sound like anything else. Entries tend to start the same way, with the day, the date and the exact clock time. Those stamps do real work. They put one recording on a Sunday morning beside a window in downtown San Diego, another at 1:42 a.m. with sleep clearly overdue, and two more in May 2019 and May 2021, two years apart. That gap matters, because the show often talks about itself. In one entry the speaker decides on the spot to start the podcast back up, reasoning that at the very least the recordings will document getting through a hard stretch. In 'Hey, it’s been awhile...', just pressing record takes courage. The talk then turns to pent-up creative energy, the fear of committing to one idea with only so much time and energy, and the feeling of being unknown with no community nearby. A best friend, Ayesa, comes up as the person who stayed through the hardest parts. 'Why Am I Doing This?' asks outright why the need to keep going persists, tracing the impulse back to blogging at twelve or thirteen, when MySpace was catching on. Even the numbering gets second-guessed. Is this season two, or simply the next number after everything that came before? Scripts are off the table by choice. One episode, recorded on video from a mobile tripod, explains that a tidy, organized script was planned and then dropped because it would not have been an honest way to speak. What fills the space instead moves quickly and by association: a raise at work, the outside perspective that comes from watching oneself in an edited Instagram video, and commotion outside a window that interrupts a reading and pushes it into a second sitting later the same day. Faith is the thread that keeps resurfacing, and it rarely arrives as a lesson handed down. In one late-night entry it shows up as gratitude for being redirected, a blunt resolve to read the Bible, and relief at being able to count on God. Across two Sunday entries the speaker reads from a book described as confirming the move away from the internet. In 'The Cost of Seeking Approval (12 Ways Your Phone...)', that reading sets the quick buzz of online praise against Psalm 139 and the words of Jesus and Paul. Social media is the other recurring worry, from pulling back on posting to souring on how promotional photography and video had become. Closings stay warm, with thanks for the listener's time and reminders to rest on a Sunday or find small moments of self-care. What a listener gets is less a devotional than a record of belief, loneliness and purpose being worked out in the moment, with the mess left in.