🗞️ Newsletters are scary 😱 Imaginary Advice’s Ross Sutherland ✨
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
I usually use this space to talk about podcasts, but today I’m going to talk about newsletters. In 2008 I got my first job as an editorial assistant at a prominent parenting magazine. It was my job to send out our weekly email blasts to half a million people. We had a photo database—our photographers would upload the photos they took on photo shoots there. I would pull photos from the database to go in the newsletter.
One summer newsletter was about traveling with kids. I pulled an image of a girl curled up in a suitcase, her legs pointing outward. I had the newsletter approved by my boss and our copy editor and sent it out. Within minutes we were getting angry emails. A FOX News article had been written about the magazine promoting child pornography. I went back to the newsletter. Looking closer, I noticed the little girl did not have underwear on. Why was this photo taken? Why was it in our database? Why didn’t anyone notice? I was sure I’d be fired, and I wasn’t, which made me think it was more difficult than I’d ever imagined to be fired.
Sending newsletters is a scary act. Today, if you make an update to your website or podcast or a Facebook or Twitter post, you can edit or delete it. But newsletters are forever. I always thought I would have anxiety if my job was writing for The Skimm or something, where every single day the stress of pushing that “send” button would drive my anxiety levels heavens high.
Last week I included a podcast in my big recommendations list that isn’t the kind of podcast I like to promote. I hadn’t listened to the entire backlog, but had enjoyed the few episodes I had listened to. It was brought to my attention that the hosts of the podcast were actively hurtful to members in the trans community, something I didn’t pick up in listening. (I then watched in horror days later, as the hosts began to participate in anti-trans conversations online.)
I was able to delete the words from the Substack post, but it’s still there, in the newsletter, because newsletters are forever and scary. They shouldn’t be scary if the newsletter writer does their research, which I did not. This show doesn’t deserve any more attention than I’ve already given it, so I’ll stop here. I am sorry and will try to be better.
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Imaginary Advice’s Ross Sutherland
Ross Sutherland is the host of Imaginary Advice. Follow him on Twitter here.
Kindly introduce yourself and tell us what you do!
My name is Ross Sutherland— I make the podcast Imaginary Advice (write, host & edit) predominantly based in the bottom of a wardrobe in Peterborough, England.
The podcast is a combination of fiction and essays. Pretty much everything is written specifically for the podcast. The show is always changing form (and you can listen to the episodes in any order), but overall there's a trippy, late night feel to the programme. If you like Joe Frank, Black Mirror, Night Vale, Blue Jam...it’s that kind of territory.
Imaginary Advice doesn't seem to follow "rules" that other podcasts follow...every episode is totally different. Do you set any rules for yourself when creating content?
I work really hard to change the format every month (even though it makes the podcast much harder to describe to people). When I was a kid, I used to listen to John Peel on BBC Radio 1 and I always loved how he’d play Norwegian death metal one minute and then Mad Cobra the next. Every Peel session was a journey into the unknown! I’ve tried my best to emulate that on the podcast. For one episode I’ll write a blow-by-blow novelisation of the film Rumble in the Bronx, then the next I’ll pretend to be a podcast about horse facts. I try to imagine it’s a bit like spinning the dial on late night radio and finding a weird show that you’ll never be able to find again (and you can never quite work out if it’s drama or a documentary, but either way you have to listen to the end.)
I remember a radio commissioner once telling me “if you don’t have a format, you don’t have a product”. That kinda hurt at the time. But now I find it quite liberating. Because... it’s OK not to make a “product”. Podcasting is also an art-form in it’s own right, and art doesn’t need to be validated as a product in order to exist.
Even though the format of the show is always changing, there are a couple of things that remain constant. For example, every episode has a lot of emphasis on sound design and score. I’m always trying to create something that feels immersive, or to use editing creatively to achieve something that I couldn't do in a book or on stage.
Also most episodes feature some kind of combination of essay-writing and storytelling. My audio fiction episodes tend to have mini-essays hidden inside them (a bit like an extended footnotes), and my essay episodes often have little poem interludes (which function a bit like dream sequences in the essays). I think podcasting as a medium is well-suited to these kind of experiments... Audio is so mutable. And overheads are low! Which is always handy when it comes to taking risks, fucking around, etc.
Are there any rules you think podcasters should adhere to when creating a show?
I run occasional podcasting workshops where I get the group to come up with the worst idea for a podcast they can and then present it to the rest of the group. The next phase is to review these terrible podcasts and ask “what is the one tweak that would make these terrible ideas into amazing shows?” And every time, the group manages to spin these dogshit ideas into podcasting gold. What’s the lesson here? Maybe that the difference between a terrible idea and an amazing one is, like, one degree?
Good ideas often come from breaking some unspoken rule. When I come across a new author/musician/ podcaster I love, my first thought tends to be ”I didn’t know we were allowed to do that...”
Also, for new people starting (particularly if you’re doing it with no training, like me)— remember that the more you edit, the better the program will be. It’s a lot easier to enjoy the messiness of the creative process if you give yourself time and space to tidy up afterwards. I wish I could go back in time and tell myself that.
Where should people begin if they want to dive into Imaginary Advice?
Maybe the episode Six House Parties, which is about a rivalry between two people played out over a summer of fancy dress parties. I don’t want to give spoilers but FYI at the end the entire universe gets turned inside out and explodes.
Can you tell us how you came up with the name Imaginary Advice?
Lots of episodes of Imaginary Advice are about the act of storytelling: why we tell stories, how they help us (or deceive us), etc. So the title is connected to that.
The title of the podcast is basically two aspects of fiction jammed together. Fiction comes from the imagination, it’s pure simulation. But fiction is also a teaching tool, helping us observe the world. Separately, these aspects make sense, but when you put those two words side-by-side, they feel wrong. “Imaginary Advice” feels like a contradiction. The two words almost seem to cancel each other out. If a story is imaginary, then is the moral of the story also fake? Or... if all fictions are just thinly veiled moral lessons, then don’t we have to take everything inside them as the voice of the author, therefore real?
It’s OK if no one else reads the title like that... But that’s what it means to me personally. The podcast exists in this strange twilight area between fiction and non-fiction. In that kind of space, you have to live with certain contradictions, and the title was an attempt to speak to that.
Jesus, I’m making the podcast sound really serious. It’s really not that serious. For a podcast title that pretentious, the show itself is immensely stupid at times.
Okay now we have to talk about Sex and The City: The Return, one of my favorite things I've listened to, ever. (Listen to part one here, part two here.) Are you a SATC fan? How on earth did you put that story together, with all the brilliant references?
I’m so glad you liked it! It was important for me to make sure that the story made sense to people who had never seen a single episode of SATC. Still, there are lots of references for fans.
I’d actually never watched any of SATC before writing the story. But lockdown had just started and I was in the market for a new show. I liked it way more than I expected. Particularly the first couple of seasons. Also, I really recommend the podcast So I Got to Thinking as the perfect companion to any 2020 SATC re-watch. It’s made by Juno Dawson and Dylan B Jones and it does a great job of taking the show and re-examining it through a modern lens.
The idea for the story came after going to watch Sleep No More in New York on my honeymoon. My wife and I had a not-great experience at the show, but I got really interested in the online community that surrounded it. These bloggers have mapped every corner of the play, they know it minute-by-minute. And they still have this unwavering belief that vast secrets remain to be discovered.They’re really writing the show itself, and making it way more interesting than it actually is.
In the end, I guess my story ended up being less about SATC, more about fandom in general. How superfans can become so obsessed with little details that they can’t remember what the story was about in the first place.
What are you working on now? What can we be excited about?
Right now I’m working on a fiction miniseries about a cult called The Golden House. As well as being a drama, the series also contains some ARG elements.... every episode contains a puzzle, and solving the puzzles leads the listener to bonus chapters hidden elsewhere on the internet. It’s a new challenge for me and I can’t wait to share it. It’ll be up on the Imaginary Advice feed from Sep 1st, as well as available as its own series.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Rachael Cerrotti’s grandmother, Hana, was a Holocaust survivor who lost her whole family to the war and spent her young years running from the Nazis, traveling country to country as a refugee, hiding in homes and farms, alone, trying to find a place of safety. Rachael grew up hearing Hana’s story, and We Share the Same Sky is Rachael’s attempt to literally retrace Hana’s life, traveling to Prague, where Hana grew up, to working on the same farm in rural Denmark where Hana was housed when she fled, to Sweden, and America. The podcast is a ticket for this journey. (“Rachael,” Hana tells her granddaughter, “the biggest difference between your travels and mine is that I had to burn all of my bridges as I moved forward.”) As you will find out, Rachael is dealing with her own personal sorrow on this trip. Rachael weaves in audio of her grandmother’s storytelling, and the result is an emotional, intimate history that examines the Holocaust in a way that I don’t think has ever been done before. The podcast is being used in high school classrooms across the United States as a way of teaching Holocaust history through a contemporary perspective. And, in the fall of 2021, a memoir will be released. Rachael ends each episode saying, “thank you for listening,” and I found myself saying, aloud, “no, Rachael, thank YOU!” I cried at the end of the series. I don’t know if I’m allowed to miss Hana, as someone who only heard her story on a podcast, but I do.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Anna Williams is doing something so incredible I’m fucking giddy—the first-ever podcast dissertation titled My Gothic Dissertation. In it she compares her own experience of being a grad student in modern times to being trapped in a 19th century Gothic novel. I hope I’m being clear—this is literally her dissertation. We get to hear the advisory board critique her project, and as an expert in Gothic literature, Anna is able to teach us about the genre while drawing strong comparisons to her experiences. Gothic lit is so fun, and so is this show. It feels like a creaky, dusty novel while at the same time is so modern that it’s never been done before. I could go on but I already feel like I’m wasting your time, just go listen to it.
🎙️If you like Ross’s show Imaginary Advice, I think you will also like Benjamin Walker’s Theory of Everything, another experimental project that doesn’t adhere to most podcast “rules.” I can’t tell you how many times I have listened to an episode of Theory of Everything and wondered, “is this real? This can’t be real. But it feels real!” That’s because Ben blurs the lines between fiction and non. Man Without a Country is a retelling of Edward Everett Hale’s short story published in 1863 about an American Army lieutenant who renounces his country during a trial for treason and is sentenced to spend the rest of his days at sea. Ben’s protagonist disparages America and is sentenced to a life inside a hot air balloon, drifting above the country, never to land again on American soil. It’s a personal story of this interesting character, and full of tiny, beautiful snapshots of fictional American life, intermixed with pieces of true American history.
🎙️You know how women’s online magazines and other media outlets will profile people with the “how does she do it?” treatment, pouring over their day to see how they are able to accomplish all they do? I want someone to do that for historical and fictional figures, too. And I would want them to start with Isadore Banks, and his grandmother Nancy. The latest episode of Unfinished: Deep South continues to tell the story of Isadore, a wealthy land owner in the South post-Civil War who was murdered, by taking us to Arkansas, where George was able to basically build a town there and make tons of money, and taught his neighbors to stand their ground against night riders, despite the fact that there were rampant lynchings happening all over the South. How did he do it all? He may have been influenced by his grandmother, Nancy, who bought land and made deals to grow the family’s wealth. She was a single woman, formerly enslaved, holding wealth in the heart of the confederacy. Where’s Nancy’s monument?
🎙️2020 has really sucked so far, which has many people wondering if the apocalypse is nigh. On Unholier Than Though, Phil Picardi talked to Timothy Beal, professor of Religion at Case Western Reserve University, about a text that is often used as an end-of-times guide, The Book of Revelation. Revelation is so bat-shit wild, it’s an impossible text to truly interpret. Timothy reads it as a story not about the end of the world, but the edge of the world, a new beginning. So maybe it can tell us about our current moment. The pandemic has forced us to realize that we were living in excess, taking advantage of essential workers, and completely unprepared for worldwide upheaval. The lynching of George Floyd has made us reexamine our racism and the police and police unions. Maybe we don’t need a new normal, maybe we need a world renewal, a Revelation. Maybe we are on the edge of a new world.
🎙️Stories with Sapphire is releasing a series, Stories for Change, where she highlights storytellers of color. The episode with Johnny Compton is amazing and kind of what the series is all about—Black representation in horror and how Black people are often excluded from the horror genre, even though horror is a huge part of the Black experience in America. Johnny is the host of Healthy Fears, a horror podcast examining the things that we are naturally, understandably afraid of, and how they’re featured in beloved, notable and memorable works of horror. I got so frustrated thinking about how wide and exclusively the door is open to white people to explore horror that I wanted to throw my phone on the ground. Black people need to not just be invited to the horror table, they deserve a lion’s share of the seats.
🎙️Jesus wasn’t white, but most Americans picture him that way. Jesus was kind of like a cowboy. Does that mean…there were Black cowboys? YES!!! Obviously! Endless Thread’s Giddyup takes a look at The Cowboy, many of whom were Black, which is a chapter in the American story of whitewashing history. One step to being an anti-racist is recognizing the Blackness of our history that has been hidden from us. So I guess listening to this episode, and ones like it, is a step in anti-racism. Amory and Ben also take a look at Black riding groups that are carrying this legacy forward today.
🎙️Okay so Black people like horror, cowboys are Black, and there are Black people who live in New York City (you might not know this if you watched Friends in the 90s.) A lot of what we have to go on when learning about the Black experience is from TV and film, where white people reign supreme. Hollywood has been rocked by COVID—productions have been brought to a halt and funding has dried up. On Hollywood The Sequel, John Horn asks important people in the entertainment industry about how Hollywood should use this as an opportunity to change itself for the better. What would Kerry Washington, Ava DuVernay, and Kenya Barris do if they could rewrite the Hollywood code? Ava talks about how much like defunding the police, we need to kind of Burn It All Down when it comes to Hollywood—we can’t just put a bandaid on it. One theme comes up in the three episodes I listened to, that also drew me back to Endless Thread’s Giddyup and Sapphire’s interview with Johnny—how the world of TV and film needs to reflect the world we are actually living in. It needs to look like America, which includes people of color. And it’s time for different stories to be told. Black people in horror stories and depicted as cowboys. If you love stories like I do, this is exciting. Think of all the stories that have been left untold because we live in a racist country. Now is the time to hear them. And this also reminded me of the Unholier Than Thou episode about how we might not be in the end of the world, but on the edge of a new and better one.
🎙️The Chronicles of Now features fiction pieces from wonderful writers based on headlines from the news. Roxane Gay wrote a piece, String Theory: Life in the Quarantine Zone, about a woman in extended quarantine with her girlfriend, and what it does to their relationship. It’s a love story, and a pandemic story. And listening to it made me think about how truly bizarre this moment will feel in the future, if there ever is a post-quarantine future, really. It’s reporting on the current moment in a way that makes it feel like it’s the past. I loved this episode because Roxane sticks around to explain the meaning of the red string tied around her girlfriend’s wrist, and what drives both characters in the story. She first wrote it in March, and even talks about how she would have written it differently today, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
🎙️Dope Labs invited Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow of Call Your Girlfriend on to talk about the science of friendship, to promote Friedman and Sow’s book Big Friendship. Dope Labs hosts Zakiya and Titi are friends, so we get to hear about their bond, and along with Ann, Aminatou, and friendship expert Dr. Marisa G. Franco, we get an interesting conversation about adult friendships and how they’re different than kid friendships, why friendships are so different than other intimate relationships we have in our lives, and why it hurts so badly when they end. It’s often what Franco calls an “ambiguous loss.” (When I have experienced ambiguous friendship loss, it has stung more than any ending to any romantic relationship I’ve ever had.) They also use the friendship between Issa and Molly on Insecure to frame what they’re talking about. Love Dope Labs for the cool science talk, and the fact that they provide cheat sheets and homework for every episode.
🎙️Did you know there’s an ology for ignorance? It’s called agnotology and on Ologies Alie Ward interviewed Dr. Robert Proctor, who coined the word 30 years ago, about it, why people willfully ignore truth, “virtuous ignorance,” ignorance as fear, and my favorite topic of all time, religious hypocrisy. At one point, Alie talks about wearing a “nervous tunic,” which made me lol. She is the master of providing intelligent conversation with hilarious commentary and voice-overs, this has become her brand. Nobody else does it like her.
🎙️New York Times writer Walter Thompson-Hernández has released a project called California Love that introduces us to the city of Los Angelos in a way that we haven’t heard before. Walter spent years traveling for work and returned to his home to find a gentrified city so different than the one that raised him, and this podcast is a visit to a city that no longer exist, that shaped him. It’s a beautiful tribute and the chance to hear an alternative history to a city that we think we know.
🎙️You know I love Rachael King and Pete Naughton’s Tape Club. It’s a podcast for people who love podcasts. And if Nick Quah is giving you industry insights, and Podcast The Newsletter is giving you absolutely nothing intelligent at all and only unbridled enthusiasm for certain shows, Tape Club gives you both. Updates and recs. In a recent episode, Rachael recommended Prison Bag, an audio diary of a woman, Josie Bevan, whose husband is behind bars, and how she copes as a prison wife. Like Rachael says, this is a family story. A deeply personal exploration of what incarceration does to everyone touched by it. Moments you’ve never considered (what to wear to prison visits, what it feels like to see your husband get in trouble for rubbing his daughter’s back in the visiting area) are brought front and center with complete honesty and candor. It’s a show that does one of my favorite things that podcasts are able to do do—give us empathy for someone in a situation we would have never otherwise imagined.
🎙️Rachael also recommended The Californian Century, the story of modern California told as a screenplay, narrated by Stanley Tucci. It’s vivid and dramatic, a new kind of historical storytelling I’ve never encountered before. It unfolds almost like a multi-dimensional comic or pop-up book, taking us along the history of California by giving personality to the land and the people who made it.
🎙️Hall of Shame is a podcast about sports for people like me, who love the stories behind sports more than the actual stats and logistics. A recent episode tells the story of Suzy Favor Hamilton, who was one of the greatest runners of the 90s but suffered silently through mental health problems, an eating disorder, sexual harassment, and she eventually purposely fell during a race because she just couldn’t handle the pressure anymore. She then turned to sex work, which I don’t think is a huge deal, but I guess was surprising to those who were following Suzy’s career. I want an entire series about Suzy, this single story highlights so many issues in sports, feminism, and mental health. I can’t believe I didn’t know about this.
🎙️I keep forgetting to write about Counter Programming, my girl Arielle Nissenblatt’s project with her friend Shira, that sets to provide content that counters all of the terrible COVID news we are being fed every day. Every episode is about a count or counter of some kind, and if you think this sounds boring, think about how good The Boring Talks is. Arielle and Shira are hilarious friends, the sound drops are so good, and I actually love what I get from the conversations. In this episode Arielle and Shira talk about Count Dracula and Count Von Count…two figures I didn’t realize I should know more about, but I do. Arielle is a podcast nut, so it’t not surprising she drops podcast recommendations. I would listen for that reason alone!
🎙️I’ve been listening to the new season of Uncover, about an innocent man in Nova Scotia who was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a sex worker, and it is very good. (I always like to hear how murder cases are dealt with around the world.) It made me go back into the Uncover archives, to listen to the series Escaping NXIVM, about the cult led by Keith Raniere and one woman's journey to get out. I knew very little about NXIVM, and this series perfectly outlines the strange story. Listening to accounts from some of the people who have escaped allowed me to empathize with people who I never thought I could empathize with. Reading NXIVM headlines, you would probably think, “how could anyone be so stupid to get involved in this?” But Escaping NXIVM has enough space to dive into the complications, and the emotions and stories of the women whose lives were ruined by Raniere.
🎙️I don’t like to tell you guys what to do, but go listen to The Boring Talks. YES the topics look boring but that is the whole point—behind each dull title is a fascinating, beautifully told, often emotional story behind something you’d never assume to find interesting. This week, jigsaws. I was not one of the millions of people who ran to puzzles when the pandemic hit, but after listening to this piece, I wanted to. An interesting comparison is made to the Great Depression, another time when we saw a surge in puzzles. What does a puzzle surge tell us about ourselves?
🎙️If you loved The Sporkful’s webby-winning episode, When White People Say Plantation, listen to this follow up, Plantation Rum is Changing Its Name. Is That Enough? It considers the thought behind this rebrand, and how Plantation Rum (and also Bigelow Tea) tell the stories of their brands, beyond using the word “plantation.”
🎙️I think Ana Marie Cox is a great interviewer on With Friends Like These (I always want to buy books from the authors she speaks to) but she did something a little different in this episode From Feminist to Fascist. She tells the story of Cordelia Scaife May, a rich white woman who started out as an outspoken feminist and ended up doing a 180 to impact a lot of the immigration restrictions in our country. What makes a person change their mind, so drastically? What can we learn about immigration by looking at the lives of the people who are fighting against it?
🎙️If you want to feel spooked listen to two true stories on Radio Rental—one about a close call with a notorious serial killer, and another story about a terrifying intruder that I swear was a Lifetime movie I once saw.
🎙️I love The Secret Room (you may remember my interview with Ben here) and the episode Crisis of Conscience stood out to me not because the guest shares a super juicy secret (she cheated in school) but because of Ben’s hosting skills. In all of his interviews, he exudes compassion for his subjects, and I am so impressed with his ability to empathize and honor the feelings of the people he’s speaking to. Episodes of The Secret Room never feel like interviews because Ben is so involved in the stories. Listen to this episode not to hear a juicy scandal (some of the episodes are truly juicy scandals,) but to hear an interviewer who uses sensitivity and care in a way that’s rare.
🎙️On Science Rules!, Bill Nye interviews Randall Munroe, creator of the sciency webcomic, xkcd about bad ideas, and why they are often just as valuable as good ones. This episode set my brain on fire—listen to it if you want to be creatively expired. It’s a lesson on how to think outside the box.
🎙️I love you!