A Practice of Leaving
Ninety days before North Star Public Radio goes dark, senior producer Mara Ellison is handed the closure memo
Ninety days before North Star Public Radio goes dark, senior producer Mara Ellison is handed the closure memo and asked to make the station's disappearance sound like continuity. The first page is missing the emergency plan.
In Minneapolis, Mara follows a missing emergency-broadcast appendix through relay logs, donor presentations, and a supposed successor plan. What she finds could leave rural listeners with less service while preserving the parent network's polished story. Her former protege is organizing the staff, the station's sound engineer is asking harder questions, and Mara's own body is refusing the pace she has always demanded of it.
A Practice of Leaving is a sharp, humane contemporary workplace drama about labor, public trust, and the cost of being useful. As the final broadcast approaches, Mara must decide what she is willing to lose to put the truth on air.
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Ninety Days
The memo arrived at 8:12, before Mara had taken her coat off.
It carried the parent network's letterhead and a subject line so clean it seemed to have been scrubbed: Regional Service Transition: North Star Public Radio. By the time she reached the second paragraph, the newsroom had begun its usual morning machinery around her. The assignment desk was arguing softly about a county-board vote. Someone had burned coffee in the kitchenette. Through the glass of Studio B, Cal Mercer sat at the console with one hand raised, asking a host to take the weather copy again without the phrase unprecedented conditions.
Ninety days. Broadcast operations would cease at the end of the quarter. Certain programming would migrate to the parent network's digital service. She, Mara Ellison, would serve as transition lead, coordinating staff communications, archive disposition, donor outreach, and "continuity planning."
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