The beings behind the work

We are Tracie Perrie and Heather Ford, wives, creative partners, and the two people behind Catching the Hum. We were best friends for ten years before anything between us changed, so there was already a long history of knowing each other well, disagreeing freely, and noticing what the other one missed. What came later did not replace that friendship. It gave it somewhere new to go.

For much of our lives, both of us were very good at becoming what a situation required. Then, within a relatively short stretch of time, we each lost people who mattered deeply to us. Grief has a way of disturbing arrangements that once seemed permanent. We began looking more closely at the lives we had built, at what belonged to us and what did not, and at the parts of ourselves we had made quieter for other people. Somewhere inside that change, we began to see each other differently. Heather maintains that she noticed first. Tracie has never formally conceded the point.

We eventually left Canada and made a life in Mérida, Yucatán. We arrived with very little Spanish, which meant that for a while we could not rely on language to tell us everything we wanted to know. We became more attentive to tone, expression, atmosphere, and the strange certainty that sometimes arrives before an explanation does. Mexico did not give us intuition, but it made it much harder to dismiss.

Our connection to this place has never been entirely practical. Certain places in Yucatán, Uxmal especially, have felt familiar to us in ways we cannot fully account for, and we have stopped believing that every meaningful experience needs to be solved. We are interested in what happens when a place seems to recognize something in you, when a moment carries more weight than it reasonably should, and when a feeling continues long after there is any obvious reason for it to remain. Some things become clearer with time. Others are more interesting when they do not.

Tracie writes the novels, stories, and essays. She is drawn to interior lives, to the things people know before they are willing to admit they know them, and to the distance between the life someone has chosen and the life still moving underneath it. Her forthcoming novel, The Shape of More,  lives in that territory. Heather is the continuity editor, which means she can follow the emotional truth of a scene while also noticing that somebody cannot possibly be in Paris at noon on Thursday if they were still in Sarajevo at 1pm. She holds the structure, the sequence, and the quiet details that allow a fictional world to remain believable.

That division of labour is not as tidy as it sounds. Heather sees patterns early and asks questions that often change the work. Tracie follows threads that may not make sense until much later. One of us is more likely to say, “There is something here,” and the other is more likely to ask exactly what it is, although we regularly trade roles. Much of what eventually appears on this site begins there, in the space between recognition and understanding.

The podcast is the least polished version of that process. It is simply the two of us talking, following a thought until it changes shape, arguing with our own assumptions, laughing at things that probably should not be as funny as they are, and occasionally discovering halfway through a conversation that we have been experiencing the same event very differently. The years of friendship are in it. So is the marriage. Neither of us is particularly interested in pretending we have reached the final answer before we press record.

Around all of this is an ordinary life. There are early mornings, birds outside the windows, coffee, Spanish that improves and then inexplicably disappears when someone asks us a simple question, errands, photographs, writing, and Purrja making herself relevant to whatever is happening. Those things are not separate from the work. They are usually where the work begins.

Catching the Hum is where we keep what stays with us. A story, a conversation, a photograph, a place, a question, or something we cannot yet name can all belong here if it continues to carry a charge after the moment itself has passed. We do not need everything to become an answer. Sometimes noticing that something is still humming is enough.