A year ago, I was asked if I'd audition for the host's position at Radio One's Tapestry. Tapestry is a program devoted to the religious and the spiritual.

I'd never worked in radio. I am a writer. It never occurred to me to work in radio. The invitation was unexpected and a little surreal. So, naturally, I said "yes."

The audition went well, despite my flagrant incompetence.

And then, to my dismay, the job interview went well. I've never been good at job interviews and, besides, I'd been fired from two of the last three jobs I had.

The interview should have been a fiasco, but it wasn't. I liked everyone in the room and, I think, they liked me. We talked about everything from Rimbaud and Harold Pinter to the origins of the word "religion," and by the hour's end I was sad to leave.

I didn't get the job. (That, in a spectacularly right decision, went to the great Mary Hynes.) What I got instead was a proposition. Would I care to create a pilot for my own radio show? Total freedom, anything I wanted, on whatever subject. There were no guarantees the pilot would be accepted, but everyone was kind, generous and committed.

Again, I was a little dismayed. I am in the midst of rewrites on Asylum, a novel it took me five years to finish, and I'm just finishing my first children's novel. Both projects demand a degree of attention and selfishness.

Why should I do radio? Ultimately, I think I said "yes" because the idea of learning to write for radio was kind of intriguing. And as I've now learned, having written the first few episodes of Radio Nomad, which debuts on CBC Radio One tonight, writing for radio is a kind of simplification. Even more than theatre, radio demands a concision and linearity.

Almost everything I learned as a writer of literary prose is useless to me. Maybe the easiest way to talk about this is to talk about writing for theatre.

The reason writers of prose make lousy playwrights (at least initially) is that it takes time to fully appreciate that words are only an element in the creation of theatrical work. Lighting, sound, stage design . . . all work toward saying what a play has to say.

Most importantly, because I do believe theatre is essentially an actor's art, the actor (his or her body and voice) can convey certain things much more efficiently than words can.

The writer has to learn what to leave out, so that his words are not redundant or superfluous, so that his words do not get in the way. Knowing what to leave out comes with knowing the actors who'll be playing your piece, being familiar with the director, stage designer, and so on.

This is all far from easy. There are very few great prose writers who have written great theatre (Beckett is one of the few who comes to mind), just as there are few playwrights who've written great prose (Goethe is one, but the list is short).

In radio, the writer has no help from lighting, or stage design, but neither does he or she get to put many of those cues in with words. Long passages of description are pretty tiresome to listen to, and literary language, demanding as it does a certain amount of concentration, becomes something closer to music, on radio, than it is to sense. (Have you listened to Under Milkwood, lately? It's beautiful the way Tchaikovsky's Fourth is beautiful. )

In radio, you are aware of speaking to not a particular audience but a group of people with different sensibilities. Before you set off on a piece about, say, Arnold Schoenberg, you do have to ask yourself how many in the audience will know of his work, how many will be familiar enough with it to care about his relationship to J. S. Bach. You take your audience more closely into account than you do when you write a novel. After all, your voice (your words) are in the personal space of people who are not at all obliged to care about the things you care about. Your audience can leave -- any time, without shame, without your knowing.

In radio, sound is the only vehicle of sense. So, what is it sound can do, exactly?

The second major question is about voice.

While the playwright might hear a certain actor's voice while he or she writes, the actor's voice is only one aspect of the actor's arsenal.

In radio, voice is capital. Writing follows the voice.

However beautiful a written passage is, if it can't comfortably be said, you have to question its value. (As the chief performer of my own words, I've sometimes been very irritated by my writing. On the other hand, as writer, I have been even more horrified by my voice. The hardest part of doing radio has been getting used to the sound I make: as if my father had been goosed.)

Of course, the radio I've been writing about is Canadian, accessible and public. There are other kinds of radio. There's the experimental radio of, say, Peter Handke. Handke doesn't necessarily fuss about the audience's needs. There's the radio of Samuel Beckett, Glenn Gould or Steve Wadhams, one of the most inventive creators of radio the CBC has ever had. These are creators of sound sculpture.

Shouldn't I long for the freedom to say, write, proclaim in any way I see fit? No. Actually, I prefer limitations. Being "forced" to work with less has been a revelation, to me, in a way that total freedom would not have been. Having to write colloquially has allowed me to meditate on the colloquial. I find myself re-sensitized to words, to language.

And that, I guess, gives a good idea of the objectives of Radio Nomad. Living somewhere between an essay and a ghost story, Radio Nomad is a way for me to explore language and rhythm, sound and storytelling.

What I'm hoping for, in doing 13 episodes of Radio Nomad, is a playful exploration of a new medium. I would also like to return to literary prose more aware of what language does when it's at play.

Novelist André Alexis is the writer and host of Radio Nomad, which launches tonight at 8:05 (8:35 in Newfoundland) on CBC Radio One.

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