Hope and Resistance is the first piece of audio Zinnia Bender has ever made. The Paonia teen recorded it on her phone, in a closet at home, and NPR gave it an honorable mention in its national Student Podcast Challenge.
For the nation's 250th anniversary, this year's challenge added a special prize for podcasts exploring what "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" means to students. NPR says it received more than 700 entries, and Zinnia's podcast is among the honorable mentions.
Zinnia, a sophomore at North Fork High School in Hotchkiss, made it for Clara Pena's multimedia class, where every student produces an episode on NPR's theme and those who want to can enter. Pena says NPR makes a point of telling students they don't need fancy equipment. Zinnia, she said, "recorded the main audio from a closet on her phone."
She used her phone's voice memo app, learned to edit as she went, and rerecorded a few passages again and again until she slowed down enough to get the take she wanted.
NPR's prompt included stories about rights and protest, and Zinnia chose protest. Her podcast moves from the Kent State shootings to the Stonewall riots to Occupy Wall Street. She also interviewed a longtime friend and KVNF supporter, Meg O'Shaughnessy. "Protesting has such an against energy and protecting is such a supporting energy," O'Shaughnessy says in the podcast.
"I think it's important to focus on what we can do to help, what we can do to fix, what we can do to move forward to make it better," Zinnia said. That, she said, is why she chose protest: "I don't like to focus on the negative. I don't think it gets anything done."
Next for Zinnia is fiction. This summer she wrote short stories and submitted five of them to an online writing contest, and she's working on a fantasy novel. Most of her favorite book series, she says, are about standing up to corrupt government and creating safe places for people who face prejudice. She wants her own writing to carry concepts like "fighting fascism and misogyny and homophobia" in "something that's more palatable for people who might not read that necessarily just as it is."
In the KVNF studio, she read the first story she submitted, "What Happens", in which a black flower nearly ends the world and a single bulb brings it back. Now she's working on an idea through Spark Lab at North Fork High School, a free program from the nonprofit Homegrown Pathways where students pitch ideas for seed funding. She wants to hire an artist to turn her short stories into comics, and eventually a graphic novel. (KVNF's Local Motion explored Homegrown Pathways and Spark Lab in March.)
"I love writing. I love reading," Zinnia told KVNF, and she hopes to find more people who love fiction as much as she does.
Listen to Zinnia's full podcast , Hope and Resistance (above), and hear her read "What Happens", below.
