VALLEY VOICES PODCAST

Another veteran storyteller this week for NEPM’s Valley Voices Summer Shorts podcast. Paul McNeil takes a minute to examine his life’s philosophy while in the back of a cop car.

Jessica Geil takes us back to elementary school on NEPM’s Valley Voices Summer Shorts podcast this week. She seems to be remembering a lot of emotions that were specific to her situation, but somehow those feelings are pretty relatable for all of us!

This week on NEPM’s Summer Shorts podcast, veteran story slam participant Matthew Dicks takes a look at one night from the past that could have been just embarrassing, but in the end gave him a chance to re-think his relationship with his in-laws.

As part of NEPM’s 10th season of our Valley Voices Story Slam, we asked for people’s “Valley Folklore” - tales about the unique place that we all live.Helene Busby went to Hampshire College, surely one of the most “unique” parts of our “unique” Valley! For this week’s Summer Short, Helene brings us a funny remembrance of Hampshire and its quirky students in her story “Talking Trees”.

Up next in our Valley Voices Summer Shorts podcast season, it’s Valerie Reiss with a story about her and her dad that swoops from the present to the past and back again. Enjoy!

Storyteller Wesley Blixt kicks off 2025's Summer Shorts season of Valley Voices from NEPM - check out his nostalgia for his younger days and how they led him to where he is now.

It’s the Valley Voices Story Slam podcast: We had the winners of season 10’s Story Slams on stage at the Academy of Music in Northampton in April. And now we present to you - the Best of Season 10! There were great stories all year long, but Chris Bell, Ann Marie Zanfagna and Susan Cocalis were the audience’s favorite that night. Enjoy!

NEPM’s latest Valley Voices podcast presents the winners of our Story Slam on the theme “Elementary”. We let the storytellers elaborate on what that meant to them, and then invited them up on stage at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls. The audience favorites that night were Nina Brand, Jeff Conant and Ami Jackson.

NEPM’s latest Valley Voices podcast presents the winners of our Story Slam on the theme of Valley Folklore that we hosted at the Iron Horse in Northampton. The Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts is a very particular place, with lots of folks who have tales to tell about it. The audience favorites that night were Susan Cocalis, Bryan Tawney and Molly Snyder.

NEPM is celebrating 10 years of hosting nights of live storytelling that we call Valley Voices Story Slams. For the first slam in our 10th season, we figured we wanted to be “toasted” - whether that’s a clink of champagne glasses, or something very different! Here are the three winners from that night in Studio A at NEPM in Springfield, MA - Ann Marie Zanfagna, Chris Bell and Julia Mitchell.