This story was part of KNKX's presentation of All Things Considered live at the Ballard Locks.

What keeps a lot of kids up a night is the fear of a monster under the bed or in the closet. The sounds an old house makes can distress even the bravest child. But what if what kept you up at night was the best thing that ever happened to you? That is what happened to Sound Effect contributor Arwen Nicks. She explores her sleepless nights in this essay: I had had a normal evening, homemade burritos with my girlfriend, talking about our days, her new students as a music teacher, something I read,

Most of Kayoko Nakajima’s work takes place at night at the bedside of Japanese women giving birth. Nakajima, who operates out of Kenmore, is believed to be the only Japanese-speaking doula in the Seattle area. Many clients call her during the night—whether that’s 10 p.m. or 3 a.m.—and she sticks with the mothers and fathers until they meet their babies. “Labor takes as long as it takes,” Nakajima said. “Once labor starts, there’s no day or night, for me, for the doula.” At a birth, it’s

Almost every night in the winter, there are hundreds of farmers at work along the Washington coast. The lights of their head lamps are just barely visible on the shoreline. They are shellfish farmers out harvesting clams, oysters, and geoducks. T hey are up at such late hours because of the tide. That’s when it’s lowest during the winter months.

Editor's note: The audio version of this story contains language some readers may find inappropriate. Sometimes the things that keep us up seem to come out of nowhere. Something we might never have given a second thought to all of a sudden, for reasons we can’t quite understand, become front and center in our life. That’s what happened to Arrington De Dionyso. He’s a painter and musician from Olympia. Back in 2010, De Dionyso was given the opportunity to paint a mural at a popular pizza place

The sidewalks of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood are home to drug addicts, the mentally ill and kids who’ve run away from home. These are the people most of us give wide berth to as we make our way in and out of trendy restaurants and bars. We turn a blind eye to then when they are camped out in a bus shelter. The level of caution afforded to these individuals goes up significantly when it’s dark outside. The people we avoid at night are the people Seattle photographer Tim Durkan actively

Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, is headed to Seattle later this month to give a talk. We grabbed a few minutes with him to ask what it is that keeps him from sleeping. As a child, Ira Glass spent nights considering his own mortality. “I would just lie in bed, trying to get my mind around the idea that I would be dead and everything in the world would continue without me,” remembers Glass. After he witnessed an uncle ship out to Vietnam and saw coverage of life there as a soldier,

This week on Sound Effect , we bring you stories of things that keep us up at night. We'll hear stories of fear and anxiety and meet people who work unusual graveyard shifts. Radio Nightmares Sound Effect gets a lot of inspiration from the hit radio show This American Life . So we thought we'd ask host Ira Glass what keeps him up at night . Turns out, his childhood fears were pretty dark. The Cameraman Seattle photographer Tim Durkan is a verified night owl and he spends his sleepless nights

Michael McAndrews has had a lifelong love affair with birds. It all started with an article he read as a kid in National Geographic. It profiled homing pigeons used in wartime to communicate messages between troops. Michael was captivated by the story of a bird named Cher Ami that saved almost 200 American soldiers in France during World War I. So he started buying his own birds and training them. In fact, his classmates called him “birdbrain,” not as an insult, but because birds were the only

28-year old Yemeni-American Mokhtar Alkhanshali loves coffee. In fact, h e is the first Arab certified Q-grader, the coffee equivalent of a sommelier for wine. Mokhtar grew up between the United States and Yemen. In his grandparents’ garden in Yemen, Mokhtar picked red coffee berries off the trees and laid them out on drying beds. His grandmother taught him when to harvest the berries, and later, how to brew coffee with spices like cardamom and cinnamon. This early affinity with coffee stuck.