Chapter 1

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DEDICATION For every young person who has something to say and the courage to say it.

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The worst sound in podcasting is silence.

Twelve-year-old Noor Hassan knew this because she was currently experiencing it. She sat in her closet — which doubled as a recording studio since she'd lined the walls with egg cartons for soundproofing — with her USB microphone pointed at her face and absolutely nothing to say.

"Episode one," she said into the mic. "Um. Welcome to... um."

She hit stop. Deleted the recording. Tried again.

"Hey everybody! This is Noor Hassan, and you're listening to..."

To what? She didn't even have a name for the podcast. She'd had the idea for weeks — ever since Mr. Park's media literacy class, where they'd discussed how media shapes the stories people tell about each other. Noor had raised her hand and said, "But most of the stories about people like me are told by people who aren't like me. Wouldn't it be better if we told our own stories?"

Mr. Park had said, "So tell them."

And now here she was, in a closet with a microphone and no stories and no name and nothing but dead air.

"It's not," she typed back. "I have nothing to say."

"You ALWAYS have something to say. That's literally your brand."

"Having opinions and having a podcast are different things."

"Start with a conversation. That's what the good podcasts do. Just two people talking."

Noor stared at the message. A conversation. Not a monologue. Not a performance. Just two people talking about things that mattered.

"Would you be on it?" she typed.

"Depends. Will I be famous?"

"You'll be famous in my closet."

"I'll take it."

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Diego Reyes was Noor's opposite in almost every way. She was loud; he was quiet. She was impulsive; he was methodical. She was Muslim and Iranian-American; he was Catholic and Mexican-American. She loved hip-hop; he loved classical guitar. She argued with emotion; he argued with data.

Their first recording happened after school, in the closet, with Noor's mic between them on a stack of books.

"Okay," Noor said. "We need a name."

"What's the podcast about?"

"Stories. Our stories. The stories that don't get told."

"Untold," Diego said.

"Untold. Untold Stories?"

"Too generic. Everyone has an 'untold stories' podcast."

"The Unseen?"

"Sounds like a horror movie."

They went back and forth for twenty minutes. Finally, Noor said, "What if it's not about the stories themselves, but about who's telling them? Like, the whole point is that the people who usually get talked about should be the ones talking."

"Our Turn," Diego said.

Noor grinned. "Our Turn. I love it."

They recorded their first episode right there — no script, no plan, just a conversation about why they wanted to start a podcast. Noor talked about being the only visibly Muslim kid at school and how tired she was of being represented only in news stories about terrorism or oppression. Diego talked about being bilingual and how his Spanish felt like a superpower and a vulnerability at the same time.

"We're not sad," Noor said into the mic. "We're not victims. We're complicated, interesting people with weird hobbies and strong opinions and families that drive us crazy. And we want to talk about THAT, not the stuff people assume about us."

The episode was twenty-two minutes long. Noor edited it on free software, added a royalty-free intro song, and uploaded it to a podcast hosting site.

Five people listened. Four of them were family members. One was Mr. Park.

But it was a start.

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For episode two, they decided to interview someone.

"Who?" Diego asked.

"Someone from school who has a story that nobody knows about."

They chose Amara Okafor, a quiet eighth-grader whose family had immigrated from Nigeria when she was six. Amara was known at school mainly for being extremely good at math. What people didn't know was that she was also an accomplished traditional drummer who performed at Nigerian cultural events around the state.

"People think math and music are separate things," Amara told them. "But drumming is mathematics. Every rhythm is a pattern, every pattern is a sequence, and the way patterns interlock in traditional Yoruba drumming is as complex as any equation I've seen in school."

The episode was called "The Mathematician Who Drums," and it was the best thing Noor had ever made. Amara was articulate, funny, and passionate, and the episode captured something real — a person who was so much more than the single story people knew about her.

Twenty-three people listened. Then Mr. Park played it in class. Then the school newspaper wrote about it. Then sixty people listened. Then a hundred.

Noor and Diego looked at each other. "We should keep going," Noor said.

They did. Every two weeks, they published a new episode, each featuring a different student or community member whose story challenged assumptions.

They interviewed the school janitor, Mr. Petrov, who turned out to be a former professional chess player from Ukraine. They interviewed Noor's neighbor Mrs. Nakamura, a Japanese-American woman who had been born in an internment camp and now ran a bonsai garden that attracted visitors from across the state. They interviewed Coach Williams, the PE teacher, who had been a competitive figure skater before a knee injury ended her career and who still choreographed routines for the local ice-skating club.

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Episode seven changed everything.

It featured a girl named Fatima — a Syrian refugee who had arrived in the US two years earlier and was still learning English. Fatima was shy and spoke softly, and Noor had almost not asked her to be on the podcast because she worried the language barrier would make the interview difficult.

But Diego insisted. "That's exactly the kind of story we should tell. The one that's hard to tell."

Fatima spoke about her journey from Syria — the years in a refugee camp in Jordan, the long application process, the flight to America, the confusion and loneliness of starting at a new school where she couldn't understand anyone. She spoke about her family — her parents, who had been a teacher and an engineer in Damascus and were now working at a grocery store and a dry cleaner. She spoke about her little brother, who had learned English faster than anyone in the family because he watched cartoons all day.

"That note," Fatima said, her voice cracking, "was the first time I felt like maybe this country wanted me."

Noor had tears running down her face by the end of the interview. So did Diego, though he pretended it was allergies.

They published the episode on a Thursday. By Monday, it had been shared over ten thousand times. A local news station picked it up. Then a national news blog. Then a major podcast network reached out, asking if they wanted distribution support.

"We're going viral," Diego said, staring at the download numbers.

"Fatima's going viral," Noor corrected. "Her story. That's different."

"Is it though? We told it."

"She told it. We just held the microphone."

This distinction mattered to Noor, and it would matter more as the podcast grew. The question of who owns a story — the person who lives it or the person who tells it — was about to become the central challenge of her work.

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With visibility came criticism.

Some of it was constructive. A girl named Priya, who was Indian-American, pointed out that the podcast had yet to feature any Asian-American students. "You're doing the same thing you're trying to fight," she said. "You're telling some stories and ignoring others."

Noor took this seriously. She invited Priya to be on the next episode, and then asked her to become a recurring contributor who could help ensure the podcast represented the full diversity of their school.

But some criticism was hostile. An anonymous account on social media accused the podcast of being "anti-American" and "divisive." A parent complained to the principal that the Fatima episode was "political propaganda." A kid in the hallway told Noor that she should "go back to where she came from," which was New Jersey, but that wasn't really the point.

The harassment rattled Noor. She was twelve. She had started a podcast in a closet. She was not prepared for strangers on the internet having opinions about her.

"Maybe we should stop," she told Diego during a crisis meeting in the closet.

"Stop? We're reaching thousands of people."

"We're also making thousands of people angry."

"Some people. Not thousands. And the people who are angry — think about why. They're angry because we're telling stories they don't want told. That's exactly why we should keep going."

Noor's mother, who had been listening from outside the closet door (the egg cartons were not as soundproof as Noor had believed), knocked and came in.

"I heard what happened at school today," she said. "The 'go back' comment."

"It's fine, Mom."

"It's not fine. But it's also not a reason to stop. Do you know what your father's grandmother used to say? She was Bahá'í, back in Iran, and people said much worse things to her. She used to say that the truth is like a light — you can't hold it up without casting shadows. The shadows don't mean the light is wrong. They mean the light is working."

Noor thought about this. She thought about Fatima, who had survived a war and a refugee camp and a new country and still had the courage to tell her story into a microphone. She thought about Mr. Petrov, who had lost his chess career and his country and still showed up every day to mop floors and secretly help the chess team. She thought about all the people she'd interviewed, every one of them braver than the anonymous account calling her names.

"We're not stopping," she said.

"Good," her mother said. "Now please take those egg cartons off the wall. They're attracting ants."

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The podcast's biggest challenge didn't come from outside. It came from within.

A ninth-grader named Jordan approached Noor with an incredible story — his uncle, a veteran, was struggling with PTSD and homelessness after returning from deployment. Jordan wanted to tell his uncle's story to raise awareness about veteran homelessness.

The episode would be powerful. It would be important. And it would expose deeply personal information about a man who hadn't consented to being on a podcast.

"We can't do it," Noor told Jordan. "Not without your uncle's permission."

"But it's my story too. It's MY uncle."

"It's about his experience. His struggles. We can't broadcast someone's pain without asking them first."

"He won't agree. He's too proud."

"Then we can't do it."

Jordan was angry. He accused Noor of being a hypocrite — she wanted to tell stories that needed telling, and now she was refusing to tell one.

The class discussion was the best one they'd had all year. Students argued passionately on both sides. Some said that important stories needed to be told, even if the subjects were uncomfortable. Others said that consent was sacred and that no story, however important, justified exposing someone without their permission.

The episode was one of their most listened-to. And it attracted a new audience — journalism students, media teachers, and other young podcasters who were grappling with the same questions.

Jordan eventually came back. "I talked to my uncle," he said. "He said no to the podcast. But he said he'd talk to the VA. I think that's better."

"I think so too," Noor said.

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Noor was terrified. Podcasting was safe — she could edit, rerecord, cut the awkward pauses. Live storytelling was raw. No safety net.

But Diego loved the idea. "This is what we've been building toward. Not just us telling stories, but everybody telling stories."

They planned the festival for a Friday evening in the school auditorium. Open mic format — anyone could sign up for a five-minute slot. The only rule was that the story had to be true and had to be yours to tell.

Twenty-two people signed up. Students, teachers, parents, and community members.

The stories were extraordinary.

A seventh-grader named Marcus told the story of his grandfather, who had marched with civil rights leaders in the 1960s and who had passed down his marching shoes to Marcus, who kept them in his closet as a reminder that justice isn't something you believe in — it's something you walk toward.

A teacher, Ms. Singh, told the story of moving to America from India at age sixteen, not speaking English, and finding her first friend through a shared love of cricket — a sport that nobody else at her school had ever heard of.

A parent — Mr. Franklin, of all people — told the story of his grandfather coming to America from Poland, struggling to fit in, and finding community through a weekly card game with men from six different countries who couldn't understand each other's words but understood each other's loneliness.

And Fatima stood up. She walked to the microphone, and the auditorium went completely silent — five hundred people holding their breath for a shy girl who had barely spoken English two years ago.

"My name is Fatima," she said. "And this is my story."

She spoke for seven minutes. She spoke about Syria and the camp and the flight and the first day of school when everything was strange. She spoke about the note in her locker — "You are welcome here" — and how it had changed her life. And she spoke about the podcast, and how hearing her own voice, telling her own story, had made her feel for the first time like she mattered in this country.

The auditorium erupted. Five hundred people, standing, clapping, crying, unified by the simple, radical act of listening to each other.

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The podcast ended its first season with twenty episodes, over fifty thousand total downloads, and a growing community of listeners who used the episodes for classroom discussions, youth group conversations, and family dinner-table debates.

Noor and Diego sat in the closet — the same closet, the same microphone, the same egg cartons (now ant-free) — and planned season two.

"We need to go bigger," Noor said. "Not just our school. Other schools. Other towns. Other countries."

"We need more voices," Diego said. "Not just us hosting. Other kids hosting their own episodes."

"A network," Noor said. "Our Turn becomes a platform. We teach other young people to tell stories, and they tell theirs."

"That's a lot of work."

"Everything worth doing is a lot of work."

They looked at each other and grinned. One year ago, Noor had sat in this closet with a microphone and nothing to say. Now she had too much to say and not enough episodes to say it in.

Listen to the janitor who was a chess master. Listen to the gym teacher who was a figure skater. Listen to the refugee who found belonging in a handwritten note. Listen to the grandfather who found community in a card game.

Listen. That was the whole secret. Not talk. Not argue. Not perform. Listen.

"Season two, episode one," Noor said into the microphone. "Welcome back to Our Turn. I'm Noor."

"And I'm Diego."

"This season, we're doing something different. We're not just telling stories. We're teaching you to tell yours. Because everybody has a story. And it's always your turn."

She hit record.

The dead air was gone. In its place, something alive.

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Noor and Diego created a simple guide — "How to Start Your Own Story Podcast" — and shared it online. Within a month, six schools had launched their own versions of Our Turn. A school in Oakland. A school in rural Georgia. A bilingual school in El Paso. An international school in Dubai. A school for deaf students in Washington, D.C. And a tiny school in a reservation community in Arizona.

Each school produced one episode per month. Noor and Diego featured the best ones on the main Our Turn feed, weaving together stories from kids across the country and the world.

The stories were wildly different and remarkably similar. A deaf student in D.C. talked about the beauty of sign language poetry — how ASL could express things that spoken English couldn't. A Navajo student in Arizona talked about learning to weave traditional rugs from her grandmother and feeling the weight of a tradition that stretched back centuries. A girl in Oakland talked about growing up in a neighborhood where everybody assumed she'd end up in trouble, and how a single teacher had looked at her and said, "You're a writer."

Different places, different languages, different cultures. Same hunger to be seen. Same need to tell their own stories. Same joy in finding out they weren't alone.

"This is what unity actually looks like," Diego said after they published the episode featuring all six schools. "Not everybody being the same. Everybody being heard."

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At the end of the school year, the Our Turn podcast was nominated for a national youth media award.

Noor and Diego flew to New York for the ceremony — Noor's first time on an airplane, which she mentioned approximately seven hundred times to Diego, who had been to Mexico many times and was unimpressed by air travel.

The ceremony was held in a fancy hotel ballroom. Other nominees included a student newspaper that had uncovered corruption in their school's food service provider, a youth-produced documentary about water contamination, and a video series about young climate activists.

Our Turn didn't win. The documentary about water contamination won, and Noor applauded genuinely because it was excellent and because clean water mattered more than any podcast.

But after the ceremony, something better happened. A woman approached them — Dr. Amira Shahidi, who ran a global storytelling organization called Voices Unheard.

She offered them a partnership — resources, mentorship, and a global platform to expand Our Turn to schools in twenty countries.

"Twenty countries," Noor repeated on the flight home. "Twenty countries, Diego."

"That's a lot of closets."

"We'll need bigger closets."

"Or we could upgrade to an actual studio."

"Where's the charm in that?"

They sat in silence for a while, watching America scroll by thirty thousand feet below — a patchwork of fields and cities and rivers and roads, full of stories waiting to be told.

"You know what I keep thinking about?" Noor said. "The very first episode. When I sat in my closet and had nothing to say."

"And now you can't shut up."

"The thing is, I always had things to say. I just didn't think anyone wanted to listen. The podcast didn't give me a voice. It gave me a listener."

"And then a thousand listeners."

"And then fifty thousand."

"And soon, a million."

"Maybe. But it started with one. That's the thing about storytelling. You don't need a million listeners. You need one. One person who says, 'I hear you. Tell me more.' And then everything changes."

Diego nodded. "Your turn," he said quietly.

"My turn," she agreed.

Below them, the earth stretched on — one country, filled with stories, waiting to be heard.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Crimson Ark Publishing publishes fiction for readers of all ages, drawing on the spiritual principles and rich cultural heritage of the Bahá'í Faith. Our stories explore themes of unity, justice, courage, and the transformative power of love — through characters and communities that reflect the beautiful diversity of the human family. Every book is an invitation to see the world not only as it is, but as it could be.

Visit us at crimsonarkpublishing.com