ben james

DMF

Introducing

LOOSE FISH is a podcast dedicated to sound-rich stories about everyday people immersed in the thrum of life. In upcoming episodes, you’ll meet soldiers, farmers, carpenters, English teachers, jailkeepers, revolutionaries: a chorus of individuals whose lives and labor — in the light of our shared attention — begin to take on the luster of the extraordinary.

The show is conceived, produced, and designed by award-winning writer and reporter Ben James.

UPCOMING SERIES

I grew up with a family story of my dad rescuing a soldier’s baby during a police raid, and then delivering the baby to my grandmother in the middle of the night. This was Kentucky in the late 1960s. Fifty years later, I went looking for that soldier and his baby, and what I found was the jaw-dropping, mostly-forgotten history of the active-duty GIs who organized against the Vietnam War from inside the U.S. Army.

This immersive, 5-part audio series examines the larger history of the GI Movement through the intersecting stories of two families — and an incredible cast of individuals — all forever connected by their efforts to end that godawful war.

THE ENLISTEE — FTA Episode 1

Fun Travel and Adventure begins with soldier Tom Jackson and his wife, Kathy, two flag waving kids who end up the caretakers of an antiwar coffeehouse — with no coffee — at the height of the Vietnam War.

THE ENLISTEE — Fun Travel and Adventure, Episode 1

UPCOMING SERIES

In this audio/photo series, I ask people I’ve just met on the street to tell me about a song that’s had a massive impact on their lives — a song that, at some point, turned them inside out. After they tell the story (and maybe after they’ve sung a bit of the tune), we listen to the song together — LOUD. I take their portrait while we listen. There are trucks whizzing past us, pedestrians walking by. It’s entirely public and awkwardly intimate, a shared act of attending: “and our faces, my heart, brief as photos.”

UPCOMING EPISODE

Stephen Yoshen has lost numerous body parts, several buildings, an array of marriages, and more tools than anyone will ever be able to count. Meanwhile, he’s built almost a hundred houses in the hills of western Massachusetts. In this cacophonous vocal collage, the carpenter/dancer/potter attempts to portray his life as perfectly normal, while his friends, children, crew members, and extended family narrate — in luminous detail — how beautifully demented the man actually is.

“Stephen’s sort of like a bear that’s been through a number of battles, but that, for some reason, is wearing your grandmother’s pajamas.” — Lincoln Fishman

“The first story I have is probably not appropriate.” — Shino Yoshen

SOME NOTES ON THE PODCAST:

  1. LOOSE FISH will launch in Fall 2026.

  2. There’s no regular schedule. Expect about a dozen immersive episodes per year.

  3. The show is propelled by my wayward curiosity, bound by my unruly attention span.

  4. Western Massachusetts and farther.

  5. John Berger. Svetlana Alexievich. Ursula Le Guin.

— Ben James, Summer ‘26