Nontraditional

Two folks try to make love and family work without a road map. Adam Darrow agreed to an open relationship on a don’t ask, don’t tell basis, and it held up until his wife’s best friend was given six months to live and asked for a foursome before she died. Adam handed over the apartment, flew across the country, and then sat in a coffee shop for an entire day with no phone call and a very loud voice in his head. Kelli Auerbach was queer, single, infertile, and holding frozen embryos when she decided to run her own surrogacy search instead of paying an agency. She opened phone calls with strangers by asking about their vaginas, and the one woman who felt like destiny started turning up in her fantasies. In case you're wondering about the stranger behind the music that closes the episode, it's Wondering Stranger! Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/nontraditional  Be Part of RISK! 🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in New York City on December 8, 2026 ✍️ Pitch your story⁠ ❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ 💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected] 📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠ 🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠ 🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

RISK!'s second live Chicago show, back now from August of 2014, nearly came apart from technical trouble and a lineup crisis, but the audience there saved it. (Content note: child sexual abuse) Darren Bodecker is ten, on an Air Force base in Spain, when his babysitter explains what best friends are required to do. One move later he passes it along to a nine-year-old, and the town decides who he is. Mindy Bilderback, uninsured and in a borrowed Omaha basement, wakes with her left eyeball in her palm. (Content note: suicidal ideation) Jen Bosworth-Ramirez comes home to Evanston for Christmas, to a mother leaving her father and a father in a sleeping bag he believes makes him invisible. Shannon Cason, six years celibate, spends one night with the church secretary and is called to the front of the sanctuary. Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-chicago-2-cre542  Be Part of RISK! 🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in New York City, Tuesday, December 8, 2026 ✍️ Pitch your story⁠ ❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ 💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected] 📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠ 🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠ 🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two people, decades and continents apart, are both foreigners in the land they were headed for. Lucy McCullough is six when her parents’ visas expire and the family needs a country that will take them. She builds her idea of Canada from picture books in an embassy library, then lands in Toronto with a note stapled to her shirt directing a stranger to her classroom. Later, Sara Aghamohammadi is shopping in Iran in her brightest hijab when a woman in a black chador taps her and her cousin on the shoulder. Where clothing is a police matter, one can argue and the other cannot afford to speak. And thanks to Lisa Cantrell and Capital Storytelling in Sacramento, where both were first performed. Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/immigrant-stories-4  You can find all of our Immigrant Stories episodes at risk-show.com/immigrantstories  Be Part of RISK! 🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in New York City on December 8 ✍️ Pitch your story⁠ ❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ 💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected] 📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠ 🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠ 🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Halloween weekend brings back one of RISK!’s eerier classics from November 2013. Jackson McKeehan, orphaned at seven and still an anxious wreck as an adult, books a session with a psychic medium during the breakdown-adjacent final semester of design school.  Brett Wean’s college friend Cassie keeps saying, with a totally straight face, that her dead sister lives in her closet, and her boyfriend eventually returns from Christmas at Cassie’s parents’ house with his own matching claim. (Content note: suicide attempt) Heidi Galore, four years in as a police officer, answers a welfare check on a man no one has seen in three weeks, with dark brown liquid dripping into the apartment below. Scott Whitehair spends months engineering the perfect fifth-grade Halloween: Freddy Krueger, down to the twenty-dollar glove and the Burn Victim makeup kit, with the school janitor’s bathroom chosen as the transformation site. And thanks to This Much Is True in Chicago, where Scott first performed this live. Leave a comment and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/scary-stories-4-yikes-cre505  Be Part of RISK! 🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in New York City on December 8, 2026 ✍️ Pitch your story⁠ ❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ 💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected] 📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠ 🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠ 🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The eighteenth annual Halloween-tide episode runs from a dark bedroom to a front porch to a burning house. Larry Dorsey Jr. is eighteen and staying at his girlfriend’s apartment in the projects when a fever comes over him out of nowhere. He lies down beside her, hears footsteps stop in front of the bed, and finds he cannot move or open his right eye. Aaron Calafato opens his wife’s phone at midnight to find a photo of the delivery driver who took her apple pie instead of leaving it. The man has sunken cheeks and a smirk, and behind him a treeline Aaron thinks he recognizes from his own front porch. (Content note: child neglect, emotional abuse) Ash wakes at fifteen to thick brown smoke hanging silent in her bedroom, and crawls down the hall toward the heat to find her mother’s bed consuming itself in flames.  This episode features music by the wonderful Allysen Callery! Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/scary-stories-18-spine-tingling  All of our Scary Stories episodes are at risk-show.com/scarystories Be Part of RISK! 🎟 See RISK! live⁠ on December 8, 2026 in New York City ✍️ Pitch your story⁠ ❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ 💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected] 📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠ 🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠ 🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A classic RISK! episode from July 2014 built around three situations that everyone involved would happily have ended earlier. Sam Mullins is in his final year at the University of Victoria acting program when a midnight phone call reassigns him to a role in a doomed play he was never supposed to have. Winter Tashlin, a BDSM educator, brings home a tube of capsaicin cream from the pharmacy and ignores every safety protocol he teaches in his own class. Anne Thomas is eighteen, six months after the accident that paralyzed her from the chest down, when the pool instructor sets her up on a drive-in date with a fellow patient. You can leave comments and find episode details at risk-show.com/podcast/make-it-stop-cre541  Be Part of RISK! 🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in New York City on Tuesday, December 8, 2026 ✍️ Pitch your story⁠ ❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ 💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected] 📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠ 🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠ 🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ploy Anderson is rushing out of her Bangkok house for a lunch date, a hair roller still clipped under her helmet, when a 10-wheeler drifts into her lane. Abel Athi Kumar is easing into a slow Sunday when his housemate starts screaming by the pond, where a python has his cat Whiskey in its coils. And Art Attaphon, reading alone in a tiny Silom library, checks Grindr, and winds up signing a consent form in a stranger’s hotel room. Three residents of a city where the most ordinary afternoon of the week can turn on you fast. Thanks to the Bangkok Stories Show and workshops, both regularly held at The Garage Burger and Grill in Thong Lo, where all three of these stories were shared. Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/bangkok-stories-1  Be Part of RISK! 🎟 See RISK! live⁠ on December 8, 2026 in New York City ✍️ Pitch your story⁠ ❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ 💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected] 📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠ 🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠ 🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we're revisiting the first RISK! episode ever recorded outside the United States. In July 2014, the show traveled to London for a live event co-produced with Spark. (Content note: suicidal ideation) Dave Pickering heads to a swingers club to test whether the ugliness he's carried since childhood really lines up with reality. Suraya Sidhu Singh steps out of a shower on her first American visit to hear her friend confess that he thinks the neighbor across the hall is dead. Simon Sarginson grows up with a free-spirited mother whose response to cancer is as defiant as her response to everything else. And Radcliffe Royds falls from a fully loaded Audi Quattro to a Soho builder's skip in the space of a fortnight. And thanks to Spark London for co-producing the show that brought us across the Atlantic for the first time. Leave comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-london-1-cre540  Be Part of RISK! 🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in New York City on December 8, 2026 ✍️ Pitch your story⁠ ❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ 💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected] 📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠ 🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠ 🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two RISK! favorites come back for Latine Heritage Month, handed to guests who know the territory. Brenda González & Delsy Sandoval, Latina co-hosts of Tamarindo podcast, join us to talk both stories through and celebrate Latine lives that rarely get to be this light. Javier Morillo spent his twenties shutting down white men who reduced him to a fantasy. Then country music got its hooks in him, and a conference in Austin put a real cowboy in front of him. Ximena Ospina is seven when her family leaves Colombia inside a month. She starts first grade in Marina, California, able to count to ten and ask for orange juice, and little else. Then story time runs long and she really needs the bathroom. And thanks to Lisa Cantrell & Capital Storytelling, who produced the Sacramento live show where Ximena first told this one! Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-hispanic-lives-5  You can find all of our Hispanic Lives episodes at risk-show.com/hispaniclives Be Part of RISK! 🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in New York City on December 8, 2026 ✍️ Pitch your story⁠ ❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ 💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected] 📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠ 🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠ 🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Three of the most memorable stories from the last six months of RISK!, back in one place. (Content note: gun violence) Jon Rappoport is on a work call outside Chicago when his wife kicks the door open: their twelve-year-old twins are texting from a mall on lockdown for an active shooter. Tuesday Thomas, a trans woman in Los Angeles with a long record of choosing unavailable men, meets someone on a dating app who is funny and spectacular in bed, right up until he asks her not to look him up. (Content note: child sexual abuse, incestuous family dynamics) LeCount Holmes was eleven when his father promised to introduce him one day to a grown woman who could teach him how to make love. At sixteen, his father came to collect him from school. Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-risk-37 You can find all of our Best of RISK! episodes at risk-show.com/bestofrisk  Be Part of RISK! 🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in N.Y.C. (December 8) ✍️ Pitch your story⁠ ❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ 💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected] 📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠ 🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠ 🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices