Choose Your Own Adventure marks 10 years of communal adventuring on Trent Radio

Chris Lawson and Emily Minthorn settle into Studio A at Trent Radio on a Sunday evening, their two dogs stretched out happily at their feet. 

Lawson leafs through the yellowing pages of Space Vampire by Edward Packard, the 71st installment of a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) series written for pre-teens in the 1980s. As Lawson prepares to narrate the adventure tale on-air, Minthorn curates a playlist of spacey and spooky background music to set the mood.

The show’s intro music swells into a synthed-up electric guitar riff, signalling the beginning of the live show. Elsewhere in Peterborough, listeners are tuning in, ready to play along and shape the outcome of the story. Will the pre-teen cadet at the centre of Space Vampire save his fleet from doom? The listeners will decide. Whenever the story calls for a choice, Minthorn will poll listeners, who will send their votes by social media or text message to determine which of the many branching storylines Lawson will follow.

“There’s something really compelling about being in the centre of choosing where the story goes, rather than just having it relayed to you,” says Liam Kennedy-Slaney, a devoted listener who tunes in almost every week.

Kennedy-Slaney says he’s also a fan of Lawson’s storytelling. “The recurring highlight is Chris’s attempt to do as wide a variety of accents as there are stars in the universe,” he said.

On this episode, Lawson voices Maurice, a space station cook, as if he’s a boisterous Quebecer. The main character’s friend takes on the cadence of Napoleon Dynamite. And of course, the vampire villain has a lilting Hungarian accent.

Before donning their headsets and reading Space Vampire, Lawson and Minthorn — who are married — spoke with Currents about how the show got started.

The couple moved to Peterborough in January 2015, Lawson explained, and they listened to Trent Radio to get to know their new community. “Part of the novelty of living here was attuning to what the town had to offer, which included the community campus radio station,” he said.

Soon, Lawson and Minthorn discovered they could send messages to the radio operators via the (now defunct) in-station messaging system. “We would razz whoever was broadcasting,” Minthorn said. “And make insane requests.”

After a few months of ribbing the station’s volunteer hosts, the couple agreed that it was time to try hosting a show themselves “and then see how easy it is, actually,“ Lawson said.

As they brainstormed ideas, Lawson recalled the huge collection of old Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books his brother had gifted him.

“You wanted me to get rid of them,” Lawson said, shooting a playful look at Minthorn. “I just carried this extremely heavy box everywhere with me for several moves,” he said. So having just moved again, the box of books “was kind of front of mind. And then the idea just became, what if we made other people play these games?”

The nerdy hilarity of the books, combined with Lawson and Minthorn’s obvious chemistry, attracted a growing number of local listeners over the first year that the show aired.

Kennedy-Slaney was one of those early listeners. He knew right away that the hosts had tapped into something special. “You get involved in listening,” he said. “You’re not just an audience member, you’re actively participating.”

The longtime listener also appreciated how the show’s live, interactive format promoted a sense of connection among listeners. “There’s something cool about listening to the radio and knowing that there’s other people out there listening to it,” he said. “I really like the way this tethers those folks who are listening together.”

The novels — intended for juveniles — are “very corny,” according to Kennedy-Slaney. That prompts listeners to offer sarcastic comments that Lawson and Minthorn are always sure to share on-air, he said.

“You feel like you’re part of a little group,” said Jo Sippola, another fan from the show’s early days. “You get to feel like you’re in a little community. It’s not big, but it’s cozy,” she said.

Lawson and Minthorn said CYOA reached the height of its popularity in 2017, when they started hosting occasional live shows, so fans could meet and play along in person. A live show in April of 2018 at The Garnet was also the launch party for Lawson’s and Minthorn’s very own Choose Your Downtown Peterborough Adventure book, which they co-wrote with their friend David Fry.

The book, which is subtitled You Are a Downtown Ambassador, satirizes a 2017 initiative from the Downtown Business Improvement Area that hired several security guards to serve as “downtown ambassadors” to walk the streets and give downtown a friendlier, safer, and more orderly vibe. 

In the CYOA version, the downtown ambassadors are hapless and power-hungry as they patrol an absurd and surreal version of Peterborough on the verge of collapse. “I don’t think there’s a good ending in it,” Minthorn laughed.

When COVID-19 lockdowns forced Trent Radio to cut all live programming in 2020, Lawson and Minthorn shifted their focus to work and family matters. They didn’t dust off their Choose Your Own Adventure books again until 2024.

When they did, longtime listener Karol Orzechowski was ready to play along again. “I remember listening to the first show back and when the theme music started playing I got so excited,” he said. “I got goosebumps.”

“The wind kind of got knocked out of our sails and felt like maybe things had just moved on,” Lawson said of the show’s hiatus. But during the four-year break, the couple were given enough books to last five more seasons. “So we may as well keep going,” he said. “And even though I’m a much more harried, nearly forty-year-old man at this point in my life… I always enjoy the show.”

Choose Your Own Adventure currently airs Sundays at 7 p.m. on Trent Radio, 92.7 FM. The spring season is almost over, however, with only a few weeks left. The show will return in the fall.