Local professor and author hired as narrator in Kevin Costner’s new internet travel venture

WF Strong

WF Strong, a local author and communications professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, was recently selected to be a travel narrator in actor Kevin Costner’s new internet travel venture “HearHere.”

HearHere was developed to bring the stories of the local area to the listener as they make their way along their journey, Co-Founder Bill Werlin said. With the theme of “every place has a story and now every story has a place” the HearHere team gives each story a GPS coordinate and sets up an active range around the story.

“When you cross the boundary of that active range, the story starts to play on your phone or iPad. You instantly start hearing about what you’re seeing out the window, immersing you in the passing vistas,” Werlin said. “The listener gets a deeper understanding of the area they are traveling through enriching their whole road trip.”

Strong said in an interview that Werlin reached out to him after listening to one of his podcasts “Stories from Texas,” which is managed by Texas Standard and is one of NPR’s most popular podcasts. Some of the stories Strong wrote for his podcast are now on the platform of HearHere, but since they liked his voice they also hired him as a narrator.

“He heard of my podcast and thought that these stories that I have done in podcast form were rather ideal for what they were doing. They had already done a lot of stuff for California, for Arizona and they were moving east so they needed Texas. They picked up a lot of my stories to put on their platform so that I could tell people about Texas as they traveled through it,” Strong said.

“They liked my voice for this sort of content so they hired me to do other stories that are written in-house and then I just take their text and record it. Some of those are Texas, and then I did some for Miami. They keep sending me every day, I can’t keep up.” he said laughing.

“I have about seven to do right now, so they hired me as a narrator and then with my own stories, if you’re driving in your car and listening to my stories, it will show on the screen me as author, me as narrator and will connect to my book on Amazon.”

Strong said he is hopeful we will be able to go back to some degree of normalcy and be able to travel within the next eight months. He said people are ready to get out of the house and travel.

“I think that with the inoculation rate going as it is and the number of infections dropping, I think we’re going to be out and about, to some degree of normalcy, within six to eight months,” he said. “But I’m not an epidemiologist, I’m just guessing. But I know that a lot of people are really chomping at the bit to get out of the house and get back on an airplane, get back in the car and make road trips. People are ready, they are ready to go.”

Strong is set to publish his second book, “Stories from Texas Volume II” in May. You can find his first book on Amazon.