STORY BY CORIE LYNN
High Plains Public Radio is a station that reaches across Kansas into Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Colorado.
Every Sunday, listeners throughout these states tune in to listen to Little Spouse on the Prairie, a five-minute program hosted and written by Valerie Brown-Kuchera, an English instructor at Fort Hays State.
During her show, Brown-Kuchera shares the humorous moments from her family, ranging from trips to Paris to April Fools antics, and the realities of raising a family on the High Plains.
However, she began her time in radio by leading a book discussion and started Little Spouse on the Prairie by chance.
“[The station manager and executives] were saying they were looking for a new humor piece to fit into a morning slot during Weekend Edition,” said Brown-Kuchera. “They asked me, kind of jokingly but kind of seriously, if I had any other writing that might fit that profile. I really didn’t, but I just went with it anyway and said, ‘Sure,’ so they asked me to give a pitch.”
This was the first program pitch Brown-Kuchera had ever done, and it went over well. When the program began, though, she didn’t have a direction for the show.
“That was what was so scary because it was something I just said yes to. When you get to be my age, you’ve said no to everything so far out of fear or out of hesitation or the feeling that you couldn’t pull it off,” she said.
She went on to explain that, because of this, she said yes on an impulse. All Brown-Kuchera knew was that her program needed to be a light moment in between the heavy news of the week.
Over the two and a half years it has been on the air, this light-hearted programming has proved to be a success, with Brown-Kuchera citing Angie Haflich and producer Ron Rohlf for their roles in the show.
Rohlf, an audio professor at FHSU, joined the program after the former producer, a student, graduated a year ago. He decided that, in order to fill the space left behind and practice what he teaches, joining the production was something he needed to do.
“I told her I’d do the whole thing: help her get the recording, help her produce the whole show and then send the finished show to Garden City so that the producer there at HPPR can not have to worry about that in their week,” Rohlf said. “We’ve been doing it for over a year now.”
In its first year, Little Spouse on the Prairie was awarded a third-place honorable mention by the Kansas Association of Broadcasters. This year, its episode “Deep-Fried Fun” was awarded first place in the Editorial/Commentary category.
The day the award was announced, Brown-Kuchera received a text and a link to the announcement from Angie Haflich.
“I was so excited. I could not wipe the smile off my face for the rest of the day,” Brown-Kuchera said. She then called Rohlf, who was as surprised as she was, to tell him the news.
“I did not even know that they had entered any of our stuff. They entered an episode I would have suggested,” he said.
With this win under their belt, both Brown-Kuchera and Rohlf are looking to the future of Little Spouse on the Prairie.
“If things lighten up down the road sometime,” he said, “we’ll add a thirty-minute interview podcast to the show, and who knows what will happen then. I think it will go national. Right now it’s regional.”
Brown-Kuchera also has dreams of the program being broadcasted on a larger scale but would like to see her episodes turned into a collection of essays, similarly to Garrison Keillor of A Prairie Home Companion.
“He had a show on for years that started at an affiliate, like HPPR is, and then other affiliates picked it up. That would be a total dream if that happened[,]” she said.
Regardless of the scale Little Spouse on the Prairie grows to, Brown-Kuchera is certain there will always be a place for it in the media.
“I recognize the power of podcasting and radio as a future,” she said. “Sometimes old media falls away when new media gets invented, but I don’t see that happening with radio, especially with the onset of streaming podcasts.”
Brown-Kuchera also encourages listeners, old and new, to follow her on Twitter as @valeriekuchera as well as @littlespouseontheprairie on Facebook.