‎Mary Knauf’s commute turned her into an audio nerd. After spending her early twenties bouncing around jobs, including work as an au pair and at a movie theater, she was spending her days at a boutique PR firm and driving at least an hour each way to get there. So she started listening to LA public radio station KPCC… and then wondering if she could work there. 

She got an internship—something pre-entry level. But she had finally found an industry she was passionate about. “Getting to sit in on a pitch meeting was the most exciting moment of my life,” she remembers now. 

After that internship ended, Mary freelanced at KPCC until she landed a full-time job at Neon Hum, where she helped Dateline create the podcast version of their hit true crime show, The Thing About Pam. Now she works as a freelance producer on projects for everyone from Crooked Media to Michelle Obama. Mary and her partner, Jonathan Shifflett, also created Ocean Dreams, a surreal fiction show about dolphin cults and the apocalypse. We talked to Mary about making things for yourself, when NOT to release an audio show, and the hardest deadline of all: pregnancy. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. 

How did you learn the practical skills of working in audio?

I’m so lucky that I got to work at a public station, because everyone there is a resource. If I wanted to learn something, somebody there would teach me. I started with cutting the online show, top to tail, working in Adobe Audition. 

Then I really wanted to pitch a news feature, which you could do—you didn't have to be a reporter. After several months, I got my first feature, which was about a girl's skate group in Venice. 

I had to practice and learn how to use a Marantz microphone. That was step one. And then step two was like, okay, now I have all my tape. Thank God I recorded it correctly. How do I cut it? I got help from colleagues, and especially the head of the engineering department. 

I think that's the best way to learn, is just to have a piece that you're making and learn the basics and how to start. It wasn't until I started working with the podcast department that I learned how to sound design and add music. It was very gradual. I learned by doing and just taking on tasks.  

I did two or three news features while I was apprenticing. I learned how to talk in a microphone. Even though I never wanted to do that, it's good to know that because especially in podcasting, you're often helping coach a host. 

When you started striking out on your own, how did you acquire your own equipment?

I'm lucky—my partner is also a podcast producer, and he is a gear person. 

And also, usually these companies have stuff, and they will pay for it. If I needed something, I would try my hardest not to buy it on my own. Whether it be a subscription—like I worked on a show about Princess Diana, and I needed a subscription to Vanity Fair. I did some field producing for some shows, but they always had stuff to give me if I didn't have it. 

How did you learn how to write for audio?

I am a literature nerd. I am a huge reader. I'm in the middle of writing a novel. So writing is very important to me. 

But working in audio, it's a totally different kind of writing. I think the best lesson for how to “write to the ear,” which is the phrase you always hear, was working on those shorter feature pieces for KPCC. 

When I work with hosts or journalists that are used to like, straight up page writing, the clips that they're pulling will be narrative driven—clips where the person is saying “On this day” or “at this age.” It's timeline stuff. Whereas what I learned when making those features is, you pull out the stuff that makes you laugh, the stuff that makes you feel something, and then you write the VO around that.

For The Thing About Pam, Dateline had conducted all of the interviews already, because they were part of the TV series. So mostly I just had to wrap my head around  what that story was. I outlined each episode narratively, timeline wise. But I also thought: what is an exciting true crime show? I modeled  the opening of that show after the opening of Sunset Boulevard.

I did try and pull other references, but ultimately, the outline was mostly timeline stuff. And then I just filled it in with like, if I want to talk about the arrest, we need police interview tape. You go and you can look at the transcripts or listen to tape and figure out what works best. 

Talk to me about how you decided to make Ocean Dreams, then. Because that’s such a different kind of show than what we’re talking about. 

I wouldn't have been able to make a show like Ocean Dreams if I hadn't met [fellow How They Made It subject!] James Kim, who I worked with at KPCC, in the podcast department. He and I really got along. 

Right around the time that I was leaving to go do projects with Neon Hum, James was like, “I'm making a show. It's called Moon Face. I need help. I've been working on it for a while and I just need to finish these scripts.”

I was like, “Sure, I'll help you.” He came over to my house once a week for like six weeks, and we would finish first drafts of all the scripts together. That show showed me that it could be done: you could make an independent podcast, and it could be really exciting.

It was a totally different experience from KPCC. It was almost like making an independent film or something. He’s a major inspiration and someone I’ve looked up to my whole career. 

When Jonathan and I made the pilot for Ocean Dreams, it was the pandemic, and it was in response to being completely inundated with podcast work at that time. It was really odd. So many people lost their jobs, but the market was booming for us. We were making a lot of chat shows, stuff that wasn't our genre. 

We were talking a lot about this strange story. And we have this neighbor—her name is Deanna Oliver. She is the voice of Phyllis Squirrelli, the main character. And she is actually the voice of the toaster in The Brave Little Toaster. Living in LA, you just have a lot of creative people. and even people that maybe aren't working in a creative industry, they're open to doing stuff like that.

We relied on neighbors and friends to make the pilot. And then we got busy, and the pilot sat. It wasn't until last summer that I had finished up some stuff at Crooked Media and Jonathan and I were looking at each other and we were just like, “We have to finish this.”

So we cleared the deck. We did nothing but this show. Which is crazy in retrospect, because a month after we really started in earnest, I got pregnant. And then it was like, we really have to do this.  

It’s a hard deadline!

Oh yeah. 

We had saved a bunch. We funded it ourselves. We had tried pitching it when we made the pilot and nobody was interested. It’s like, duh, it’s a really weird show. But I think it was a blessing that we never successfully pitched it anywhere because we got to make exactly what we wanted to make, on the timeline that we wanted to make it.

When we started working again, we used our resources. Deanna is a director in The Groundlings, and if we wanted to cast other people, she had a great pool of old school Groundlings to work with. That's how we got Oscar Nuñez to play a character. This great guy, Laird Macintosh — he plays Sunshine —he's been in The Groundlings forever. 

I imagine you relied on Jonathan’s equipment a lot for this, but was there ever a moment where you missed having studio resources?

Jonathan is also a musician, so he made all the music, mixed and mastered everything. We’ve always had a home studio setup, even just for freelance work. For this, though, we had legitimate actors. We're not going to invite them to our house. We can’t do that! It’s tacky. So a lot of our budget was spent on renting a studio. 

Ocean Dreams is a sci-fi adventure show. And there are specific audio rich settings, like in an aquatic pool area. We had conversations about, would it be better to do a field recording for this? And ultimately we decided that it would just sound cleaner if we added those effects in post. 

But we did record things with our friends. We were our own characters, and we recorded that stuff at our home studio. Like, we had to have a friend pretend like she was drowning in a pool. We poured water on her face and recorded it.

Our budget was tight. So we had like four studio days, and we recorded everything. We got everything we needed, thankfully. And if we didn't, we just cut it. 

It’s a useful editorial tool. Don’t have it, don’t need it. So then how did promotion work?

If I had advice for anyone, it would be: don't release an independent podcast in November. We hired somebody to help us pitch it, and were really shooting for like, getting some articles. We made this show as a showcase piece; we knew we weren't going to get a million downloads, but we wanted credibility from making it. 

I'm so thankful that Nick Quah wrote about it for 1.5x Speed. Then we were trying to get a couple others and it was really hard, I think because reporters are checked out at the end of the year. It's now holiday time. We missed the boat when it came to end of the year lists. But it is what it is. We wanted to make it and we had to release it, and I was pregnant. 

Social media is not something I'm interested in. It's not something Jonathan's interested in. So we thought, what is the version of this that we want to do? And we made weird, funny TikTok videos, and we would just release clips whenever a new episode dropped.

I will say, Reddit is an amazing place to advertise if you're an independent podcaster. There is an audio fiction subreddit and you can tell them the story of like, my husband and I made this show. You can build a community that way. We did that; I made a post months ago, and I think a week ago I saw somebody had responded and was like, ‘Who's the voice of this character?’ Somehow it’s still getting people to listen. 

We’re still figuring all of this out. It’s really hard. 

Oh, but the way we got the majority of our downloads—better than any article —was pushing for it through the Apple podcast marquee. They have people you can reach out to, and they do listen to your show. The woman who reached out to me and was like, “We're going to feature Ocean Dreams on New and Noteworthy.” She had listened to every episode and was actually a fan, and was wonderful to work with. She featured us not just on New and Noteworthy, but we were on the big marquee for a whole week. Our listenership jumped like 10 times what it had been doing before then.

What was it like to work with your husband?

I think a big part of our relationship has always been creative. We both worked at the radio station; that's how we met. Part of our day-to-day existence as a couple is watching movies and listening to music and analyzing and critiquing and stuff like that. So it felt very natural to do something with Jonathan. 

Before entering audio I had always thought of creative work as something that you had to do by yourself. That any noteworthy creative project is made an artist of one. A little genius.

That made it really hard to finish things. And then working with James [Kim] and seeing all of the great people and creative minds that he brings together when he's working on something was a lesson. Like oh, there is never just one person. 

It’s hard finding people that you trust, that you want to work with. Jonathan and I are always talking about crazy, dumb podcast ideas. I think because we trust each other, and because we're around each other a lot, it works for us.

What advice do you have for beginning podcasters?

My advice is to finish it. That’s the hardest thing to do. 

The podcasting industry is so crazy, and it's not exactly friendly to independent producers right now. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't make something. 

And make it fun! That was how Jonathan and I made decisions, was anytime something made us laugh, or anytime something seemed fun, we were like, “Okay, let's do that.”  Make it fun for yourself, and use your friends and your creative community. We had a blast inviting—we had scenes that needed like, cult chanting. So we got a big group of our friends over. We ordered a bunch of pizzas, ate our pizza, drank our beer, and then for 30 minutes recorded weird cult chants. That will forever be a part of our relationship with our friends.  

Times are tough. The industry is in a weird space. At least for me, it was a light amongst  a very strange, dark period in our field.

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