In 2005, Daren published Verb: An Audioquarterly, an audio literary magazine. It was a relaunch of a project from 1991 that garnered coverage from the Washington Post, NPR’s Morning Edition, and even made the cover of Publisher’s Weekly.
The 2005 version moved on from cassette to CD, and brought some award-winning authors along for the ride, including Robert Olen Butler, Ha Jin, Tom Lux, Peter Case, Stuart Dybek, and Tom Franklin.
It predated the wash of podcasts that would follow over the following decade and a half, but the content is perfect for that format. It was named one of the best new magazines of 2005 by Library Journal.
At a party one evening, Daren was discussing the project with Stuart Dybek and Tom Lux. Stuart mentioned that he’d written a song in response to Tom Lux’s poem My Malaria. Until Verb, there’d never been an outleft for the pairing, so Daren asked him to record it for our first issue and paired it with Tom reading his thirty-year-old poem.
My Malaria, Tom Lux, recording ©2005
My Malaria, Stuart Dybek, recording ©2005
