Garth Stein at the Chuckanut Radio Hour

Garth Stein, author of the best-selling novel The Art of Racing in the Rain, was a guest on our local radio program, "The Chuckanut Radio Hour." It's a shame the picture is rather dark and blurry, but I wasn't able to use a flash since the show is recorded live and therefore must be quiet.

"The Chuckanut Radio Hour" is recorded in front of a live audience and then broadcast on local radio station KMRE 102.3 (it's broadcast from our American Museum of Radio and Electricity, which I shamefully have not done any posts of yet. I'll try to remedy that shortly.). You can also listen online here. It's an old-fashioned radio hour, with live music, author interviews, poetry, essays, and a short comedy serial called "The Bellingham Bean," which follows the lives of a group of people running a coffee shop.

Garth Stein's latest novel is written from the point of view of a dog. The writers of "The Bellingham Bean" ran with that theme. Here, he gamely voices Elmo, the fictional Bellingham Bean's hamster. He's in the middle, with the rest of the Bellingham Bean players on either side. Normally, the authors on the show just do an interview and a reading, so it was particularly fun to see him do this. He was a very convincing hamster. ("Hamsters," by the way, are what we residents of Bellingham call ourselves. Just in case you were wondering.)

The Chuckanut Radio Hour is on every Saturday at 6 PM PST and Sunday at 9 PM PST. Their website doesn't look updated, but you can get podcasts of their first year here. If you want to hear this show, it will be broadcast December 12 & 13. Again, if you're not local, you can still "tune in" online here-- just remember we're PST.