Happy #AudioDramaSunday & New Year Pals!

It’s been a minute since I’ve done one of these, but I’m back with a brand new platform and an extremely limited knowledge of how to make things look good. That being said, my new home at Beehiiv will allow for a web archive for you wonderful podcast creatives to share with your own audience, even if they haven’t subscribed! I’m really excited for this seemingly small, but hopefully consequential development that’ll help get these micro-reviews in front of as many eyes as possible.

Things have been feeling particularly liminal for me this past month. I’m slogging through my last few weeks at the day job after a layoff, while splitting the rest of my time between frantically applying to new ones, interviewing for said new ones, and leaving as much time as humanly possible for creative productivity. I’ll say a whole lot more about that below, but in the meantime know this: my current lack of financial stability may have slowed me down for a minute, but my passion for this medium and for the community that makes it hasn’t wavered for a second. I’m just as thrilled to be a fiction podcast fan and creator as I was when I first stumbled across Welcome to Night Vale all those years ago.

All that said, I have taken a few listening breaks during my time away, allowing myself instead to either curl up with a good book, devour movies I’ve been meaning to watch for years, or catch up on my rapidly growing TV queue. As chaotic as this New Year has been in so many ways, I am doing my best to prioritize my own rest and mental health. This was particularly easy to do last weekend during a trip to Disney World with my mom, brother, and step dad, where we spent a marathon two days reconnecting with both our childhood and the memories of my aunt, who passed away in 2020. It was extremely cathartic for me to see my mother in the place where she feels closest to her sister, especially since we lost her during such a fraught time. We even got to meet up with two of my cousins (her sons) for lunch and mini golf when we got into town!

On that note, let’s get right to it:

Witness

While I’m not going to try and recap everything I listened to during my time away, I would be remiss not to speak about Gideon Media’s brilliant Audible adaptation of the 1985 Harrison Ford & Kelly McGillis film Witness. I’ve known this one was coming for quite some time, since I’m lucky enough to help this show with growth marketing on their indie productions, but getting to finally experience it was revelatory. I’ve never seen the original film, so I can’t speak about the two in comparison, but what I can say? Is that this is a thrilling portrait of life among the Amish; a religious community that I have very little personal knowledge of, despite growing up so close to many of them. The series features audio fiction heavyweights like Briggon Snow (The Bright Sessions, Caravan) and Graham Rowat (The NoSleep Podcast, Omen) and extremely rich sound design for what I’m told is essentially an adaptation of a silent film. Between Mac Rogers’ script, Jordana Williams’ direction, and Sean Williams production, this is a can’t miss series that I sincerely hope you’ll give a chance.

New Year’s Day

Lauren Shippen (The Bright Sessions, MARVELS) gave us over 100 episodes of the brilliant microfiction Breaker Whiskey across 2023, and that could have been enough. But no, she kept the hits coming with this year’s surprise launch of New Year’s Day, a new annual show co-starring Briggon Snow and Andrew Nowak (The Bright Sessions, Maxine Miles), who have been working with Shippen for almost a decade at this point. This show gives me the perfect blend of The Portrait of Dorian Gray and The Prestige, and boasts the kind of chemistry between leads that most shows can barely sneeze at. The fact that Atypical Artists have doubled down on their independent roots after years of working alongside partners like I Heart Radio and Netflix may say a lot about the current state of our industry, but excites me nonetheless. I will always support a creative that’s able to pay their bills with a project, but at the end of the day, knowing that the art itself is the most important thing on their minds is heartening.

Unlicensed

Continuing down my recent Audible rabbit hole, I finally went back and devoured all of Night Vale Presents’ Unlicensed This show, co-created by Joseph Fink (Welcome to Night Vale, Alice Isn’t Dead) and Jeffrey Cranor (Welcome to Night Vale, Within the Wires) features their trademark combination of grit and wit to a brilliant degree. And while it may ditch the supernatural trappings of their landmark original series, it more than makes up for that with a sense of style and substance, with lush descriptions of the California landscape that it takes place inside of. It’s a fantastic hardboiled PI story without the license, with protagonists who were easy to love, and a central mystery that was far too compelling to abandon. I’m sad that it’s taken me a year and a half to finally get around to listening to this show, but am so glad that I finally dipped my toes in. The ride was absolutely worth my time.

Dreamers

If you’ve visited the Forgive Me! feed this morning, you’ll see that this we’re presenting a new show called Dreamers by Broken Crown Productions. This team recently joined the Fable & Folly Network and as soon as I saw the logline boasting the story of a young woman whose nightmares and fantasies are made by a dream factory called The Reverie, I knew I had to check them out. This show feels equal parts Never Have I Ever and The Good Place in its unique blend of slice of life storytelling and high concept sci-fi. Their whole first season is out now wherever you find podcasts, with a second season that just premiered a few weeks ago! You’ve got plenty of time to catch up to their weekly schedule that’ll run through March.

The White Vault: Goshawk

I had two episodes of The White Vault: Goshawk to catch up with this week and I’m so glad that I did. While I’m sad that to have already said good bye to a character played by one of my favorite actors in AD ~NAME REDACTED FOR SPOILER PURPOSES~ I’m already wildly in love with the rest of the show’s cast. Every time a season of this landmark arctic horror series ends, I have no idea how they’ll find another way into their world of frigid terror, and every time? They manage to shock and surprise me with the ways in which their labyrinthine narrative continues to branch and expand in new and exceedingly impressive ways. Travis Vengroff and KA Statz are a super group of talent, and I will always buy in to their stories from minute one.

Beef And Dairy Network Podcast

The Beef and Dairy Network Podcast is truly one of the most unhinged pieces of comedy greatness that I have ever experienced. If you’ve read this letter before, you know how deeply bought in I am on the series’ essential premise and crackpot creative team, which is never more true than when they release a Christmas special. This year’s, Beefhead Drinks, was no different! Although, I must admit, for a world that absolutely detests anyone who’d even CONSIDER the human consumption of lamb, they haven’t got any problem with a myriad of disgusting concoctions made from the insides of various deeply endangered species!

The Kingmaker Histories

The newest episode of The Kingmaker Histories had some unfortunate points against it this week, because it didn’t check in with my boyfriend Telesphore, played with aplomb by my best AD friend Josh Rubino (Forgive Me!, Windfall). In all seriousness though, season two of this show has continued to build on the wonderfully weird and complex world of the Valorian Socialist Republic in new and exciting ways. Leonid’s journey through the ranks of the army was a wonderful adventure, and having more Zane Schact (Two Flat Earthers Kidnap a Freemason, Forgive Me!) in my life is always a welcome development. Can’t wait for the next episode this week!

Windfall

Speaking of Windfall, I’m ecstatic to say that I have taken the last several weeks to FINALLY make some progress on season two, and while I can’t confidently announce an official premiere date, I CAN tell you that that day will come this year. Trying to bring this show back to your queues for the last 5 years has been difficult in more ways than I can accurately describe here, between several script rewrites, personal hardships, COVID delays, a mostly successful crowdfunding campaign, multiple cast and crew babies, my wedding, and persistent technical difficulties during production, we had a lot going against us to finally getting here.

There were moments when, even though we’ve had over 85% of the audio in the can for the past two years, I wasn’t sure this day would ever come. But now I have combed through all of our production days, lined up everyone’s audio, segmented it down to individual scenes and takes, and built out the official sessions where each episode will be created. There’s a long way to go still ahead, but I’ve even had our first pick ups session of 2024 with our friend Cornelius Mohr who stars as Cas. I’ve got another session this week with Jes Washington (Greater Boston) who’s playing one of my favorite new characters we’ve ever created! That’s all I can tell you for now, but expect more frequent updates as the year goes on.

Hannahpocalypse

Look, if you’re going to give me a brand new villain played by Leslie Gideon (The Path Down, Meteor City), I am going to love your show infinitely more than I already did, and that’s exactly what Hannahpocalypse did for me this week. Morgan Sosa, The Black Widow, is a perfect compliment to this world and more than lives up to her namesake. She’s got spunk, she’s liable to commit some treachery, and she’s more than happy to show us how the Wasteland isn’t as peachy keen as Hannah would maybe like us to think!

Camlann

This week, I saved the best for last, even though it wasn’t the last thing I listened to: Camlann the first original independent series created by audio fiction champion Ella Watts (Doctor Who: Redacted, Murmurs). With astounding production sound design and composition by Amber Deveraux of Tin Can Audio (The Tower, Folxlore) and an all Welsh cast, this series takes the familiar trappings of Arthurian lore and transports those characters and themes into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But if you’re sick of our world’s ever present and endless obsession with grim dark dystopic pop culture, please don’t let that make you skip this series! Ella and Amber have made something so special, centering the hope punk ideal of doing our level best to care for each other, rather than succumbing to our terrifying circumstances. I had the distinct privilege of getting an early listen to the pilot, as well as the upcoming second episode, and let me tell you: it only gets better from here.

Which brings us to why I waited until the last minute to talk about this masterpiece! This year, I’m doing Bobby’s Snacks a little bit differently, and featuring the occasional creator spotlight. To kick things off, I spoke with Ella about the creation of Camlann. Learn more about what is sure to be one of 2024’s absolute best show’s below:

You've previously said this project has been in the works for nearly a decade: can you tell me a bit about where the idea came from, and why now is the perfect time for you to launch your first original indie fiction podcast?

I studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic Studies at the University of Cambridge way back in 2012. Among the things I studied were Medieval Welsh literature and history. I absolutely fell in love with one of the oldest collections of Welsh stories we have - The Mabinogion as it's more commonly known, or more accurately The Four Branches of the Mabinogi. I was also amazed and intrigued to learn that we have very strong evidence to believe that the legend of King Arthur came from Wales, and was originally a political myth of resistance created by a culture under occupation. I'd never heard that before and I was really interested to learn why. In a lot of ways, Camlann has become a story about British heritage and identity - about the ways that the cultures of Wales, Scotland and England have been in constant conversation with each other for thousands of years in a way that the English in particular don't want to admit.

As for why now - honestly I just got tired of waiting! I originally put the wheels in motion to make Camlann at the end of 2019 / early 2020, so you can imagine how that went. It got to a point where it was safe to do it again, and I'd become even closer to our producer Amber Devereux through the intervening years, so I texted them and asked if they wanted to do it. I think there was also an element that it felt silly for someone who loved podcasts this much to not have made her own podcast by her 30th birthday!

Camlann plays with Arthurian lore, but updates for a modern audience in a way that's similar to Kieron Gillen's incredible comic series Once & Future. What is it about this kind of fantastical and mythic storytelling that lends itself so perfectly to any genre imaginable?

It's interesting - I adore Once and Future, and Kieron was kind enough to listen and give us a quote about the series ("Beautifully atmospheric, quietly petrifying, really human. It passes the test any story - I really need to know what happens next " - Kieron Gillen). I think that I, like Kieron, comics writer Si Spurrier, and all manner of other adapters, am fixated on the question of English or British identity. Whiteness isn't a culture, right? But being Romanian is. I think a lot about how one of the first cultures that fell victim to England's empires through history - whether we're talking Norman kings, Elizabeth in the 1600s or Victoria in the 1800s - was English regional folk culture. Much like our wild flora and fauna, English folk culture is critically endangered. It was bleached away by empire, in part because of this effort to artificially separate us from Scotland and Wales, and replaced by a literally whitewashed, plastic version of our stories. The Hollywood Arthur is not the real Arthur by any stretch of the imagination, but he's emblematic of the bastardisation of England and Britain's cultural heritage. I think most people think about who they are and where they come from - and the Arthurian cycle is powerfully representative of that for white Anglophones - in the US and especially the UK. If you're asking yourself what it means to be English, at some point you have to interrogate these massive stories at the heart of that narrative.

Music is such a key part of Camlann, from the theme song, to Dai's acapella tune at the start of the pilot, to Amber's picture perfect score. How did the two of you land on an overall identity for the compositions?

It was extremely important to me that Welsh language and Welsh culture were given pride of place in the show, because I wanted to re-situate Arthuriana in its origin, which is Welsh culture. I actually got rejected from the Austin Film Festival long list for it - with the judges' comments stating that no one wanted to listen to a show that opened in a language no one had ever heard of. Singing and music and poetry are extremely important to the culture heritage of Wales - home of the Eisteddfod, bards and poets, choirs and singers, and famous radio dramatists like Dylan Thomas. The oldest copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses we have comes from a Welsh manuscript! I think a lot about how sympathetic Welsh storytelling traditions are with audio drama. There's a Welsh Word - Cynghanedd. It means 'the singing of the words', essentially the musicality of poetry, synthesising all literary analysis terms we'd use for the sound of language in one word. It means sybillance, assonance, consonance, rhyme, rhythm, meter all at once. How do the words sing. With this in mind, it was obvious to me that I wanted to open each episode with our lead Dai singing a Welsh folk song, and I picked songs that felt appropriate to the theme of each episode, some more literal than others. Amber wanted to use that to theme each episode's scoring around its folk song.

Lastly, I just wanted to congratulate you on your recent promotion to Head of Production over at Six to Start! It has been such an immense privilege to watch your career flourished over the last half decade, and seeing you bring indie audio fiction talent into the same room as storied comics writers in order to bring Marvel Move to life. Can you give us any hints about what else we may be running alongside in the future?

In terms of Six to Start, I'm glad you asked! We've just announced that we'll be releasing a 10-part Daredevil series over the next few months, written by Unwell's Bilal Dardai. It's a fantastic espionage drama where you, the runner, are a law student at a prestigious law school that has just got a new guest lecturer called Matt Murdock... We'll also be having our classic 'Radio Mode' bonus episodes, in universe radio shows designed to be more ambient listening. Those are written by Wooden Overcoats' Tom Crowley and they're going to be great!!

BONUS SNACK!

The Book of Clarence

What you may or may not know about me is that I go to the movies as often as possible. My bar, when it comes to film as a medium, is pretty much on the floor. Did I get to go shut my brain off for a few hours and enjoy myself? Then that movie did it’s job, in my opinion, and my Regal Unlimited movie pass history will tell you that. That being said, when a film as raucously original as The Book of Clarence comes along, I know how badly I need to sing its praises to anyone who will listen. I’ve always been a fan of Lakeith Stanfield (Atlanta, Sorry to Bother You) going all the way back to his turn in the indie darling Short Term 12, but this film is an absolute tour de force for him. Not only does he play the titular Clarence, but also as his erstwhile twin brother, the Doubting Thomas. In this movie, Jesus and his disciples are superstars, and Clarence sees joining their ranks as his best possible chance to get out of the gambling debts he can’t seem to stop wracking up. The entire cast is revelatory, the Biblically epic proportions are a blast, and the music direction is absolutely pitch perfect. If you have ANY TIME to go see this film on a big screen, you will genuinely thank me for encouraging you to do so. We’re only 21 days into the year, and I’m already positive that this will be in my top 10 of 2024.

And that’s all for now, folks! Check back next week for even more of my listening history, and if you enjoyed this letter, it’d mean a lot to me if you’d share it with a friend. Take care of yourselves.