Mike Martinez & Tyler Wray
44 episodes listed below
Lives told without easy endings.
Everything is Stories is a measured oral-history show built around people telling the difficult parts of their lives in their own words. The episodes stay close to remembered rooms, streets, jail pods, desert roads, and family silences before reaching the larger moral weight.
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Everything is Stories treats a life story as evidence of how much a person can carry. The show is quiet in its framing and exacting in its attention. It lets speakers stay inside memory long enough for the small details to matter: a walk-up near the Hells Angels, a typewriter under pressure, a jail pod with familiar faces, a gallon of water in the desert, a cross placed near a road. The episodes are often hard to hear. They are not shaped as confession for spectacle, or as redemption for comfort. Recent installments follow Mark through gay New York, AIDS, credit-card fraud, addiction, prison, and the aftermath of survival. They follow Kim through domestic violence, a fatal confrontation, incarceration, and the uneasy social life that begins even when a person feels finished. They follow Dora and others through migration routes where debt, heat, fear, and abandonment become matters of life and death. Alvaro’s desert crosses turn the border landscape into a field of names, bodies, memory, and art. Dell’s story moves through forged papers, law enforcement, prison art, and the insistence that people inside still have faces and talent. Hen’s Teeth enters religious harm with unusual moral discomfort, hearing both institutional failure and the damaged interior life of a person who caused harm. The show’s strength is patience. It allows direct speech to remain uneven, funny, ashamed, angry, tender, and unresolved. Brief prompts and archival fragments appear, but the center is almost always the person speaking. Everything is Stories is best for listeners drawn to oral history, documentary audio, and morally complicated accounts of survival. It asks for attention. It gives back the feeling of having sat with someone while they tried to tell the truth without cleaning it up first.
Made for: For listeners who want intimate documentary audio, oral history, and personal stories that sit with moral complexity. It suits people comfortable with difficult subjects handled with restraint.
What sets it apart: Everything is Stories stands apart by letting testimony carry the episode instead of forcing a host-led thesis. Its power comes from concrete memory, long pauses, and the refusal to make survival sound simple.
Created and produced by Mike Martinez and Tyler Wray, Everything is Stories is an ongoing survey of personal histories. Each episode is a first person narrative from someone who has lived through consequential changes to their notion of self and the world.Harry Crews said it best: “Nothing is allowed to die in a society of story telling people. It is all–the good and the bad–carted up and brought along from one generation to the next. And everything that is brought along is colored and shaped by those who bring it.These voices have told their greatest moments where...
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Extended first-person accounts turn migration, domestic violence, AIDS, addiction, and prison into precise studies of survival and consequence.
Everything is Stories gives sustained space to people recounting lives altered by violence, migration, illness, addiction, and incarceration. The accounts unfold in the speaker's own language, with the host stepping in sparingly to clarify a choice or its aftermath.
First-person testimony turns "why didn't you leave?" into a question you will not ask so casually again.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A hard, intimate survival story that keeps asking what one life carries for everyone else.
The episode traces survival across body, memory, and paperwork, moving through HIV, prison, a brother’s death, and the fear that life keeps moving while others are left behind.
A hard, unsentimental account of survival, grief, and the damage people carry to keep going.
Mark's story moves from being gay and living with HIV into meth, fraud, prison, and the rough arithmetic of survival, and it never lets the listener pretend any of it is neat.
A wartime-to-coming-out story set against 1970s gay New York.
Mark's story opens with his mother's life split by the Nazi occupation of southern France, then turns inward to his own coming of age: awkward crushes, confusion about attraction, and the pull of New York as a place where a life could be remade.
A roadside memorial frame opens into a patient account of remembrance, labor, and reinvention.
The episode opens with Wilmer Sukushahanai Peralta and Francisco Merino Sanchez, then follows Alvaro from government work and teaching into photography, New Mexico, and a wider search for purpose.
A grave, unsparing look at church power, abuse, and the language of forgiveness.
Hen's Teeth sits at the point where faith, damage, and institutional self-protection meet. It follows a church argument about forgiveness and hierarchy, and it is strongest when it stays close to the plain facts: a public fall, admitted abuse, therapy, drinking, shame, and the…
A studio full of prison art gives way to a stark reminder of how paperwork can swallow a life.
Dell's story moves from a studio full of prison art to the memory of agents storming his door over birth certificates, ID cards, Social Security cards, and a typewriter.
A violent breakup becomes a close study of fear, arrest, and the aftermath of domestic violence.
Kim Dadu's account moves from domestic violence into what follows it: fear, arrest, jail intake, and the social life of the women's pod. It is strongest when it stays close to her voice.
A serious border story that lets testimony carry the weight.
This episode treats border crossing as a shared human ordeal, not a distant headline. Money changes hands, people sell what they have, go into debt, and keep moving across 262 miles of hot, dry, often mountainous terrain.
Ira Glass frames weekly theme-driven segments spanning family secrets to Portland's protest conflict.
Jonathan Goldstein tracks down people from someone's past to engineer real reconciliation.
Survival starts as inherited air.
Survival keeps changing shape.
Survival starts as family inheritance.
A roadside wash becomes a memorial.
Forgiveness comes first, and it does not arrive cleanly.
Dell opens among prison art.
Kim Dadu enters jail feeling like her life is over.
The story will not let the listener stay at a safe distance.
Kim remembers trying to get a full breath.
First, the story stays close.
An office doorbell changes the day.
Abraham Bolden starts at the bottom.
Life experience becomes the measuring line.
Stories come first here.