Practitioner
AJ Danna
Creator, Atomic Hotline
Interviewed July 2026
Works Atomic Hotline — multi-chapter telephonic audio drama, ~60% live
Experienced for this research Atomic Hotline — July 2026, inside the window
This page is provisional until AJ Danna has reviewed it for error. That undertaking was given at the outset of every interview and it stands.
Jimmy
The DJ character is procedural, but Jimmy is the one who gets people to play and carries the emotional connection. Danna did not expect the attachment: when Jimmy died, participants wrote in upset, and he added endings in which Jimmy lives.
What the audience wanted, and he refused to build
Corrected at his request, October 2026. After playing the show, multiple participants told him they had wished for an option to detonate the bomb and destroy the town. He was struck by how far they were prepared to push the atomic story once disbelief was suspended. The desire was theirs, not his: he had deliberately excluded mass death from the design, partly because a visit to the National Atomic Testing Museum humanized the era for him while he was building it, and partly because his uncle’s work at Mercury had already given him that perspective. So the finding holds and its direction reverses — participants asked for the atrocity and the maker declined to make it available. Set that against Markham’s saboteur, who pretended to complete a ritual she had not performed: audiences will push past what a designer has sanctioned in both directions, and the design has to anticipate appetite as well as refusal.
Humour as the recovery tool
Humour is the strongest thing for bringing a caller back when you have lost them.
What the volunteered becomes
No amount of planning predicted how the show evolved. The things participants volunteered are now hallmarks of the piece — authorship migrating outward from the maker, as in the Telelibrary.
Lineage
In his own words: Candle House’s Next Time was his phone-based inspiration — a show that “spoke more to me personally as a human being than as an artist and made me say ‘I can do that.’” His first telephonic show as a participant was Stepy Kamei’s One Bad Day. Two practitioners on this site put a third into the field.