A Compelling Voice

Persistence has paid off for area radio producer Will Everett, whose "Theme and Variations" is now heard on 65 NPR affiliate stations across the country.

By Derek Mayfield

When he's on the road taping interviews and talking about his national radio program, which he produces in Port Isabel, Will Everett hears a variety of reactions.

"People ask, how does a classical music and literature program come out of a town of shrimp boats and bait stands? There's an urban legend that things like this only happen in big cities."

It's a legend he has worked hard to dispel in the course of three years of national exposure with "Theme and Variations", which is now heard on 83 stations across the U.S.

Currently making his home in Port Isabel, the vigorous, thirty-something host and producer brings the experience of more than a decade of foreign travel to bear. His migrations have brought him to such places as Dublin, Ireland, where he was principle oboist with two orchestras, as well as a five-year sojourn in France and travels in a number of developing countries.

His compelling baritone voice became familiar to Valley radio listeners six years ago when he began reading short stories and discussing classical music on KMBH-FM. He persisted for two years as an independent producer until "Theme and Variations" was picked up by National Public Radio in 1999.

I first interviewed Mr. Everett in 1999, prior to the syndication of "Theme and Variations." At that time he was living in a spacious Spanish-style apartment with bookcases on nearly every wall. He was rehearsing a radio dramatization of Medea by Euripedes, and as I waited on the porch I could hear the declamations of actors reciting lines from the violent Greek tragedy -- not a typical event in this quiet coastal town.

But when I met up with Mr. Everett recently I was surprised by the spartan conditions of his new Port Isabel home. I found the books gone and the rooms completely empty as he led me to his back porch with its view of the Laguna Madre where we talked about music, literature and of course "Theme and Variations."

You don't own a stick of furniture. What happened to all the books?

I'm learning to live without them. My library has been in temporary storage for about a year and a half, and who needs furniture? I don't entertain much anymore, and I don't watch TV, so I thought I'd try for an extreme form of simplicity and leave the rooms bare. The owners are tearing the place down next year anyway. I'm sort of a squatter here.

I understand that you're travelling a lot these days.

I spent about half of last year on the road, taping interviews and visiting stations and what have you. I was all over the place last year. In the Age of Information there's a tendency to stay home and do all of your networking on a telephone or a computer, but I prefer the personal touch. It's great fun to go into the home of a writer or a composer. How are you going to rummage through their bathroom cabinets on a phone interview?

You began doing "Theme and Variations" as a live program here on KMBH back in October 1997. I understand that you had no prior radio experience.

The first time I went into the studio to do the first "Theme and Variations" was actually my first experience on radio. Bobbie [Barajas, then program director] didn't know that, I think. I may have forgotten to tell her that. It wasn't the most artful of broadcasts, I can tell you. [laughs] I read a story by Herman Hesse. Bobbie saw how nervous I was and said "I see a recording studio in your future," and she was right. A few months later I was doing the show in my own studio. Live radio is murder, especially when you're in there trying to read a 30-minute story. You're never as conscious of your digestive system as you are on live radio. But running your own studio is murder too. Every week there's some new equipment emergency. In the early days I was recording out of an old walk-in refrigerator with six-inch walls. It was the only place I could find that was quiet enough. I was in that fridge for three years. I don't need to tell you how hot it was in there in the summer time.

How did the idea for the show come about? Was it your idea or Bobbie's?

It was one of those things that happened spontaneously in the course of a chance conversation. We were at a cocktail reception after a piano concert given by the Chopin Society. I believe it was the first time we'd met. One thing led to another and pretty soon we were envisioning a show that incorporated fiction readings with classical music, because those are the two things that I'm absolutely crazy about. It was very much a spur-of-the-moment incarnation. I don't think Bobbie expected to hear from me again, but the following week I showed up with a script for a program that I was calling "Theme and Variations," and she gave me the Friday night slot. Those first broadcasts were dreadful, but KMBH stuck with me. Anywhere else they would have shown me the door.

And it was a couple of years later that the show was syndicated?

That's right. National Public Radio picked it up in October 1999.

Quite an accomplishment for someone with no prior radio experience.

I guess I live a charmed life. But that's not nearly as prestigious as it sounds. NPR has their lovely Galaxy Five satellite spinning around in the heavens, and it's great to have a national audience, but it's not a high-paying gig. With NPR if you want to make money you have to get out there rattling your alms cup and raise it yourself. I set up a nonprofit corporation for that, and I have a dear friend, Liz Sweeten, who has been with this thing from the beginning who helps in that department, and a few volunteers. I couldn't do it alone.

Have you ever considered putting the program under the auspices of a larger institution to ease the financial burden and allow you to concentrate more on the creative angle?

I don't know who would hire me. But you're right. It would be great to get away from all the grant-writing and all that. This is very much a business of feast or famine when you're an indy working outside of the system. I can't think of more than a handful of radio programs that aren't umbrella'd under a radio station or some other entity. Life would be a lot easier that way. I like the freedom of being my own boss, but I like to pay the bills too, and sometimes you don't have it both ways. Funding is a precarious thing in the arts. Some months the money comes rolling in, other months you're out at the local plasma center twice a week selling vital fluids. That sounds like self-martyrdom, but we all do what we have to do to get what we want, and persistence always pays.

Didn't you work for Public Radio International for a while?

No, I only interviewed there. I was experiencing a serious shortage of money, and I applied for a job hosting one of their symphony broadcasts. They didn't respond to my resume. Maybe they thought I was too much of a maverick. So when I didn't hear from them after a month, I borrowed some money and flew up to Minneapolis and made them interview me. [laughs] They didn't know what to do with me, so they offered me an assistant producer's job. But then they showed me the little cubicle they wanted me to work out of. Big mistake. Not to mention that it happened to be about a million degrees below zero that week and blowing a full blizzard. Also, they told me I'd have to kill "Theme and Variations." They have their own literary programs. They produce Garrison Keillor, for crying out loud! I couldn't do it. I flew back here, worked hard and eventually things came together with NPR. They still call me from time to time, just to see how things are going. But that cubicle! I guess I've been in open pasture for too long. Maybe I am a maverick.

You received funding last year from the Texas Commission on the Arts. Is that something that's likely to continue?

I hope so. Our funding comes from a combination of listeners, corporations and private foundations. I was quite proud to see T&V on the short list for last year's TCA funding. That was a high honor, especially as we received top scores in the media division. We got another top score this year as well. Have you seen all those "State of the Arts" license plates? That's where a large part of their funding is going to be coming from in the near future. You should go out and get one of those license plates. It's a brilliant concept, creating state-wide arts support through the marketing of a product like that.

I read an interview you gave recently where the word "spiritual" came up a lot in the conversation. But then I've also noticed that the fiction you read on the program tends to reflect a wariness of religion. Is that an accurate assessment?

That's not exactly true. No, it's not true at all. I came out of a strict fundamentalist background, but I don't have an axe to grind. Besides, religion and spirituality are not even remotely the same thing. I think most of my listeners know that. The smart ones do. One of the writers I like to read on the program is Flannery O'Connor, a religious writer if there ever was one, a fervent Catholic, and yet superficially you'd think she was on a career-long religious vendetta. Remember the story about the girl with the wooden leg who gets seduced by the Bible salesman? That sort of thing. She never stoops to mockery. What possible good does it do to mock someone? I don't subscribe to any particular religion, but I don't go out of my way to blow pepper up the nose of anybody's religious doctrinology either. I like to keep my own ideas out of the way. Live and let live.

On the other hand, you wrote a story called "The Love Brothers," which you read on the program, and you certainly put your ideas on the table there.

Well, in the story the father happened to be a Baptist youth minister or something, but that was just a jab. I was feeling angry about hate crimes, which is what that story is all about, and I was angry at the insouciance of most religionists toward that sort of violence, particularly gay-bashing. There's this undercurrent of "well, they're gay, they had it coming," and that makes my hackles stand up. That was a story about a young kid who was killed by a couple of goons because of pressure from their religious father, but the father could just as easily have been a Wal-Mart manager or a car dealer. The religious element was in there mostly for effect.

It was a powerful story.

It comes across well on the radio, but the effect isn't the same when you read it on the page. The ending kind of falls flat when you don't have the music and the sound effects, I think. But yeah, it got a lot of mail.

I noticed that you haven't aired your own work on the program in some time.

I began writing a novel last year. Once all of my attention started going into long fiction, the story well started drying up. Scott Fitzgerald could crank out stories in the morning and work on Gatsby in the afternoon, but I'm not Fitzgerald. If I'm working on a novel, that's all the fiction I want to do, or am capable of doing. A story takes an incredible amount of creative energy, and I don't have that much to spare. Novel writing is easier in some ways. You get comfortable with a group of characters and their environment and find out what sort of surprises they have for you. With a story you have to start all over again, new characters, new situations. And there's no money in it, absolutely none, not for newcomers like myself. I don't have my foot in that door. I don't have one toe in the door. You can always publish in journals and get paid in copies, and some of those little mags are very prestigious, but I don't quite see the point, not with this novel screaming at me from the other room.

Tell me a little about the novel.

It's not politically correct these days to be a Francophile, but that's what I am. I love France. I am an American but I spent many years in France, and I love everything French. I think the French are the most exquisite people I've ever met anywhere. There's been a relentless tug of war going on between the American part of me and the French part. I'm about 300 pages into a novel which is sort of my paean to these two countries that I love so much. It's a coming of age novel, as most first novels are. The novel takes place in the early life of a boy who is raised in France but later goes to live with his American father after his mother is sent to prison. For various reasons our hero finds himself alone at age 16 in a big old house smack in the middle of nowhere, with no resources or family to speak of, only a few close friends, and he's got to make do. There's a lot of the German Occupation in it, and a lot of sexuality issues that need to get resolved. How it ends, I haven't a clue. I've still got a couple hundred pages to go. I may or may not kill this poor kid. [laughs]

Is it a common strategy to write a novel without knowing the ending?

Actually I do know the ending, I'm just wondering how I'm going to get there. It's like a road trip, and as with any road trip, you make the most interesting discoveries when you deviate from the map. I think most writers have little or no idea where their novel is actually headed when they start out, or maybe they think they do, but they start out going north and find themselves on the South Pole by the time the thing is done. People like John Irving or Stephen King probably know precisely, to the finest detail, where their novel is going, but not the rest of us. Most novels begin as an exercise in self-therapy. You write about something because you've got a burning desire to know more about it, or because it's a problem you've never quite been able to resolve in real life, or maybe because it simply delights you. But it's not like building a house, where you follow the plans and look at the blueprints to see how you're coming along. I want to leave all options open. I love it when I decide to move the plot this way and find my characters dragging me in some other direction altogether. You achieve a sort of trance-like state when you write, and these things can happen. At the same time, you can find yourself making crazy detours that must be overruled. It's like parenthood. You have parents who dominate and control their kids, then you have others who give their kids various degrees of free range. Writers who try to dominate their characters have a concept of writing that I don't understand. If these characters are to come alive on the printed page, they have to have a certain degree of organic life while they're inside the mind of the artist.

You mention parenthood. I understand that you once entertained the idea of being a single parent.

I did. I spent two years working to adopt a ten-year-old Russian boy named Vladimir. It didn't work out. The regime in the region I was adopting in did not look favorably on single men at the time, and because of the regional nature of Russian politics -- it's a long, sad story. I wasn't the only adoptive parent who took knocks that summer. I went over in 2001 with a Russian lawyer and spent two months in a place called Krasnodar trying to complete the adoption, but certain well-placed individuals would not let it happen. The part that made the whole thing so painful was that Vlad and I spent two years getting to know each other, and while I was in Russia we saw each other nearly every day for two months, and I loved that kid like my own son, from the bottom of my heart. He was the sun and moon to me.

What happened to him?

I have no idea. All avenues of communication have been blocked. He's presumably still in that orphanage. No one adopts those older kids, no one. It breaks my heart when I think about how different his life might be right now. I worry about what will happen when he turns 16. That's the age when the Russian orphan is declared an adult and put out on the street. They give him a hundred rubles [$3] and a bus ticket to wherever he wants to go. But where the hell is he going to go? The boys end up joining organized crime and the girls go to the cities and become prostitutes. These kids have no future at all, none whatsoever, and I could have done something for one of them. It was the worst experience of my life, and God knows what it must have done to little Vlad. They really tore him to shreds at the court hearing. He's a smart and sensitive child. His favorite writers are Pushkin and Tolstoy. That's hard to imagine, isn't it? A ten-year-old reading Tolstoy. Those kids are so phenomenally intelligent it just takes your breath away. But nothing's happening in Russia. No future. Everyone I met said the same thing: we're scared, every year is worse than the year before.

I note that the character in your book is the same age Vladimir will be when he has to lean on his own resources. Was that a conscious outgrowth of your Russian experience?

Not consciously, but who knows.

Returning to "Theme and Variations", to what extent do the programs reflect your own personal likes in music and literature?

I never read anything on the program that I don't like, and I try at all costs to avoid music that I don't feel excited about. If I'm not excited, it'll come across on the air. If you look at the broadcast schedule you'll have a pretty good idea of what I was reading six months ago. That's the way it works. If I'm high on Shakespeare, you'll get a Shakespeare Festival, like the one we're having now.

So who else are you excited about these days?

That's easy. In music: Sibelius, Vaughn Williams, Bach, Sibelius, Britten, Shostakovich, any Russian composer you care to name, in fact. [pauses] Charles Ives, Alan Hovhaness, Sibelius. But I'm a product of my culture, so my listening interests go all over the place. I have an admiration for the progressive-rock group Yes that borders on fetishism.

Writers?

I love Tolstoy. War and Peace may be a memorably big book, but it is also one of the great wonders of the literary world. I've recently discovered Mary Renault. She's quite good, I think. I used to get maniacal about one writer, read nothing but Dos Passos or Capote or Cormac McCarthy until I had exhausted his or her canon, then move on to my next idol. I'm a real hero-worshipper. Right now I'm between heroes. I read a lot in the line of duty, and there hasn't been much time for pleasure-reading lately, not with a novel on the stove. It's not good to read too much of any one writer, not if you're writing every day. I don't want to find myself writing like Amy Tan or Maeve Binchy. I tend to swing toward American writers from the first half of the twentieth century. I prefer Fitzgerald over Hemingway. I sympathize with Fitzgerald and his afflictions. I like Capote. I overdosed on Capote at a tender age, and I still get the shakes if I don't read some Capote every now and then. His fiction and reportage have been tragically overlooked. He's a rather sentimental writer, but his writing works. Who can read "A Christmas Memory" with a dry eye?

You've done how many programs of "Theme and Variations" now?

Something like 220 or 230. I'd have to check. That's if you go all the way back to the beginning. Since syndication, about 150.

Where do you envision the show to be when you tape your 300th episode?

By then, with any luck, it'll be on more NPR stations, and every station for the blind in the country. No one knows it, but there are something like a million blind people who depend entirely on these low-wattage radio reading services for their entertainment and information, and I'd like T&V to be on every one of those stations. That's our current project.

How do you think the future of T&V will be affected by current global events?

There's a trickle-down that happens, of course. Whether you're talking about corporate support or government, there's only so much money in the kitty, and when you need x amount to cover the unexpected costs of war, that means you need to take away x amount from things you can live without. And of course the penknife points first of all to arts funding. The Texas Commission on the Arts, they're losing a lot of money this year, a bundle. Foundations are being hit hard by the economy and by what's been happening with the stock market. These are things I'm not an expert on by any means, but I'm an expert on what a rejection letter looks like, and I could repaper my walls with the number of denials I've gotten this year from foundations that don't have half the financial resources they had two years ago. Lately we've begun turning more toward corporate underwriting, but businesses are suffering too, particularly in the Valley.

Do you enjoy living in the Valley?

I've tried various North American locales in recent years, but somehow I keep finding my way back here. I'm a great fan of Mexican culture and bullfights and tropical breeze. I'll end up in France one of these days, but not yet. I've still got quite a lot of unfinished business down here.

"Theme and Variations" airs Sundays at noon and Mondays at 7 pm on KMBH 88.9 and KHID 88.1.