🇨🇺 Teikirisi, Selena, Switch board operators, Wonder Woman 🔍 Phoebe Judge 💞
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
This week we’re getting to peek into the podcast app and listening life of independent audio producer, writer, and editor Cherie Louise Turner. She created and hosts Strides Forward, a narrative podcast about women marathon and ultra runners.
App you use: Pocketcasts. I often ask my much more savvy podcast pals, like the crowd on the Bello Collective Slack, for advice, and many people loved PocketCasts, so I downloaded it and I love it, too.
Listening time per week: If I had to guess, I’d say 10 to 15 hours.
When you listen: Prime listening time is while running or walking, but I also do a lot of listening for work, so it’s often just part of my day. Cleaning and cooking times also get filled with podcasts.
How you discover: I subscribe to podcast newsletters (like this one! I’ve discovered several shows here!); I find shows from doing research for my show and the shows I work on; I listen to the shows my friends make; and I get friend recommendations.
Note: For Strides Forward, I focus on women because I’m a runner and former professional athlete (bicycle racing) myself, and because women get only 4% of mainstream sports media coverage, which means there are so many great stories left untold. Also, women outside of the mainstream sports culture bring a different approach to how we tell stories about women athletes, and I’d love to see more of that, so here I am. Strides Forward will be a year old in March and we’re growing: we have great stories lined up, we just launched some merch (thanks to Lauren, we’re at TeePublic!), and we’ve got a redesigned website.
xoxo lp
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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Phoebe Judge
Phoebe Judge is the host and creator of Criminal, This Is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Follow her on Twitter here. Follow Criminal on Twitter here, This is Love on Twitter here, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery on Twitter here. Photo courtesy of Sara Price.
How did you get introduced to the audio space? Have you always loved it, before podcasting?
I started working in radio at a small station on Cape Cod -- WCAI. I was an intern at first and then started doing some reporting. My first real assignment was covering a murder trial on Nantucket. It was the first murder that had happened there in decades. Then I moved to Mississippi where I was the Gulf Coast Reporter for Mississippi Public Broadcasting. I was there for two years. Then I worked as a producer for an American Public Media show called The Story with Dick Gordon. I started guest hosting the show sometimes and really liked doing longform interviews. That’s where I met Lauren Spohrer. We started working together on more and more stories. She suggested we make our own show, after work, and put it online. That’s how we started.
You are an OG in podcasting. Did you have a difficult time explaining it to people, or getting them excited about it, back in the day?
Absolutely. No one cared. I remember my father asking “how will people find the show?” Someone we worked with suggested we’d get sick of our “hobby.”
Criminal and This is Love feel completely different yet there is often overlap. Where does the Venn Diagram meet in the middle, and how do the shows most differ?
I think the shows are actually very alike. Really they’re just stories about living a life. We’re curious about why people do the things they do, and what keeps them going. When we started the love show we wanted to try our hand at making something hopeful. It felt like a time when people could use some good news. But really I think we wanted to challenge ourselves (like we’ve done with Criminal) to find stories that push the boundary of what the word “love” means. Unconventional stories. We knew this was not going to be a show with a lot of “boy meets girl” stories. We weren’t interested in that.
What made you want to start Phoebe Reads a Mystery?
For years, people have asked if I could read a book sometime. So when the whole world started shutting down in March because of COVID, we thought we would give it a try. A chapter a day, every single day, at 10am EST. Just something there for people if they wanted a routine. I know a lot of people listen on walks, or to fall asleep. For my part, I am reading all kinds of old public domain books I’ve never read before. My favorite has been The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.How do you unearth these interesting stories?
Do you think on your runs, or do you listen to something?
I never listen to anything when I am running. No podcasts, no music. The problem with listening to music is I think about how long songs are -- how much time is passing -- how much longer I have to go. If a song is maybe 4 minutes long, and I have listened to three songs, that means I have only been running about 12 minutes and then I start dreading what’s ahead of me. I don’t carry a phone or water or anything else. It’s good to have a break.
What’s something listeners don’t understand about podcasts and what goes into making them?
When a podcast has a host, like our shows, people don’t know how many people’s work goes into making each episode. Every bit of our shows is produced collaboratively with Lauren Spohrer, Nadia Wilson, and Susannah Roberson. I am on the microphone, but the ideas for the stories, the storytellers, the questions, the way we structure and pace various parts of a story -- every moment of finished audio is a collective creative act. A lot of shows are made like this. We should talk about it more. The really brilliant engines of podcasting are working off mic.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
UGH I love Teikirisi so much that after listening to the first episode all I wanted to do was make a pillow fort and listen to everything that had already been released, and the episodes kept getting better and better. Fryda and Carmen are using storytelling to give a bold voice to the Cuban-American experience. If you are Cuban American, I imagine you’d get this “hell yes” feeling listening to it, I imagine you’d feel SEEN! But if you’re not, like me, you will just enjoy being included in what feels like a call between two friends and getting to hear about their distinctive Cuban-American experiences. But it’s more than just a podcast about Carmen and Fryda’s friendship. In El Periodo Especial: Scarcity & Famine, Fryda’s parents are invited on to give a first hand account of what it was like during El Periodo Especial, the height of Cuba’s economic crisis, when there were extreme scarcity and reductions of rationed foods. They have jaw-dropping stories about how they fought to survive without being shot or arrested. Fryda’s dad says he felt like a criminal just trying to stay alive. Cuban Parties is lighter but just as compelling. And hilarious. Carmen and Fryda tell stories in a way that make me wish I was sitting with them, in person, to join in on the fun.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Did you listen to El Periodo Especial yet?
🎙️This is just a reminder that I’m Not a Monster dropped another episode, and it shouldn’t be missed. This show is so well done, and in the last episode, things are getting twisty. The family is back in the states and Sam, behind bars, has some explaining to do.
🎙️I feel like I’ve been waiting for Anything for Selena forever, and now it is here. (In both English and Spanish!) Journalist Maria Garcia is creating a portrait of Selena that few could replicate. She was nine and living undocumented along the U.S.-Mexico border when Selena was murdered. Episode one sets us up to understand Maria, and how she struggled with whether she felt more American or Mexican. But when she saw Selena, who seemed to be embracing both sides, it blew her little mind and changed her life forever. Selena modeled a kind of person for her that she wanted to be but didn’t know that she could. So that’s reason number one I want Maria to be telling me this story. Reason number two is that in the second episode, she gets rare access to Selena’s father, Abraham Quintanilla, whom Selena fans have a complicated relationship with and fiercely guards Selena’s estate. Maria’s producer told her that the podcast would not go on if she couldn’t secure the rights to Selena’s music, and she did. So we have a journalist reporting from her heart, access to Selena’s dad, and we get to hear Selena’s music.
🎙️LAist Studios did *such* a good job with California Love and California City…they were two of my favorite shows of last year. (I interviewed Emily Guerin about California City, the entire series is worth your time, and the Ellie episode of California Love made me cry.) LAist Studios’ newest Norco ‘80 tells the story of one of the most violent bank robberies in American history with eyewitness testimony and never-before heard police tapes, immediately throwing you into this wild world of Norco, California in 1980. There is a larger story, here, that paints a picture of policing in America. This podcast is a really exciting way to experience that story.
🎙️Last Day has an episode about suicide prevention, that is not about suicide prevention, that brings up a really obvious but often overlooked point about suicide: the most effective way to convince someone to live is to help them create a life worth living. It’s not really prevention. The focus of this episode is American Indians and Alaska Natives, communities currently experiencing an unprecedented rise in suicide while also coping with some of the highest rates of COVID infection in the country. After George Floyd’s murder, we talked a lot about weathering and Black trauma. This is extreme trauma and weathering, and the consequences are super deadly and super…well I hate to use this word now, but preventable.
🎙️I love June Thomas and have been missing her voice ever since The Waves went on hiatus. I completely forgot she has a show with Rumaan Alam and Isaac Butler called Working, where they interview creative people about how they write, compose, paint, and more. I had so much fun going through the archive. On older episodes, the trio interviews regular people like a tugboat pilot, an oyster farmer, a fireworks designer, a coordinator for students in temporary housing, a sports bra scientist, a cloistered nun, and more. Later episodes feature big names like Jane Lynch and Lovecraft Country’s Cinematographer Michael Watson. The conversations are friendly and fun, they always go far deeper than just the way the guest works, and I find myself applying something directly from the lessons these people share…no matter how different they are than me…to my own life.
🎙️I’m obsessed with Chelsea Devantez’s Celebrity Book Club, where she reviews celebrity memoirs with funny friends. These books are never exactly considered high-lit, but Chelsea takes an almost academic look at them, finding larger messages about fame, delusion, and ghostwriters. (She always gives ample information about the story behind the story and the ghostwriters, which is often my favorite part.) This week she read Drew Barrymore’s Little Girl Lost with Emily V. Gordon, which was written by Drew at age twelve. It’s a super heartbreaking book, Drew didn’t really have a childhood, and the book ends up being extra strange voice-wise, because it switches between Drew’s POV and a third-person, which was clearly influenced by Drew’s mom. I don’t think the point of this episode is to get you to buy the book (it’s out of print and super hard to find/expensive.) But taking a dip into Drew Barrymore’s young life is eye-opening and entertaining thanks to the hilarious and open Chelsea Devantez.
🎙️The Story Collider, kind of like a Moth slam run by scientists, is doing such a beautiful job telling stories of Covid. We will be listening to them in fifty years, they are so perfectly capturing the emotion and small nuances of Covid life. The latest episode is about the loss of community we experience in quarantine, with one story from astrophysicist Emily Levesque, who is unmoored by the fact that telescopes all over the world are being shut down because of the pandemic, and how watching a comet fly across the sky makes her feel connected. Listening made my heart swell. That story is followed up with a conversation with clinical psychologist and affective neuroscientist Aaron Heller about how in quarantine, we are less likely to have diverse daily experiences. Aaron talks about what this does to us. Spoiler alert: it’s shitty for our mental health.
🎙️On Nocturne’s Perimeter, Vanessa Lowe takes her recording equipment with her while vacationing in a castle in France, during the night, all alone. She is doing this to explore her fear of being alone at night in a strange place, a fear that pulses through the episode. It made me scared for her, and also made my brain jump to other times I’ve been alone and scared, usually at night. It’s an interesting situation to sit inside—the silence and nothingness shouldn’t technically be scary, but it is. This episode is a great example of how audio can be so visceral and loaded. At one point Vanessa says she almost hits a force field that stops her from moving forward in the dark. We all know that feeling. This episode is full of feeling.
🎙️Last year I listened to It Could Happen Here, where Robert Evans set out to prove that America may have be on the road to a second civil war. Much of Robert Evans’ reporting has people asking him, “how did you predict this?” But Robert says he’s just paying attention to historical patterns, and was probably the least surprised person in the country to watch the Capitol building be raided on January 6th. Nobody has a better sense of history, and how our past is playing out today, than Robert. On his new show Behind the Insurrections, he breaks down the history of fascism to help us see that that it’s been on a slow boil in this country for a long time. Episode one takes us to Mussolini’s March on Rome, the first fascist insurrection, and offers the surprising, left-wing background of Mussolini, and draws parallels to patterns we often see in modern fascism today.
🎙️God bless Andy Richter. After interviewing so many big celebrities for his show The Three Questions (where he asks “where have you been, where are you, and where are you going?”) and he’s starting to interview the biggest celebrities in my eyes…podcasters. Last week, Jamie Loftus. This week, Jon Gabrus. Who could be next? I’m gunning for Jackie Johnson.
🎙️On Greetings from Somewhere, Zach Mack traveled to South Dakota to get the real story of Mount Rushmore, a story that has been completely white-washed. During Covid, Zach traveled to Mount Rushmore to talk to Darrell Red Cloud, a Lakota studies instructor, who explains how the land was taken from his ancestors. I’m trying to imagine how ragey I would feel if I knew that land belonged to my people now was the site of an enormous, problematic monument with four gigantic white-man faces on it. It’s a truly American story. “If I were in charge of Mount Rushmore,” Darrell Red Cloud says, “I would tell the truth.”
🎙️My dad introduced me to one of his favorite bands, War on Women, and I have always loved the music. I had no idea how hard I would fall for the front singer Shawna Potter. I worked with her on a Tink campaign to promote her book Making Spaces Safer, a guide to giving harassment the boot wherever you work, play, and gather. (Listen to her on The Daily Zeitgeist here.) Shawna has experienced as lot of sexism and general harassment on tour, and has dedicated herself to working with venues to actively make spaces safer for everyone. Shawna kicks ass on stage and off, and now she’s kicking ass on the [podcast] mic for her podcast But Her Lyrics, where she chats with bandmates, experts and activists to take a deep dive into the lyrics and politics of War on Women’s latest album, Wonderful Hell. You’ll love the podcast if you’re a fan of War on Women’s music music, but also if you’re into feminism, politics, punk, music composition, and writing. I listened to the first two episodes (episode 00 is “optional” but you really should start there) while watching War on Women videos on silent. Every time I see Shawna going nuts on stage I fall in love with her a little more.
🎙️On the BBC’s Documentary Podcast, Colm Flynn checked in on some of the internet's original viral video superstars to hear how becoming an online sensation changed their lives, and to see how they are doing now. For some, like Cleveland’s Man With the Golden Voice, the experience was like winning the lottery. A lot to handle and somewhat of a curse. Judson Laipply’s Evolution of Dance video set the standards for viral video stars, and Rebecca Black was crucified as a thirteen-year-old. (The only thing about the episode that made me pause was Colm saying Rebecca’s video was “low budget.” I believe it cost her (mom) $30K.) These videos went big before we truly realized what that meant. And in a way, these people are internet frontiers.
🎙️Unshaming ran my favorite episode yet, a conversation with Barb Zablotney, who was in a terrible car accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Barb felt shame for being disabled, for being unable to be “normal,” to be unable to control her bowel movements. I’m sure I would feel shame, too. But I think what I would feel more is anger. It seems unfair that one moment could take so much away. Barb talks about how she was able to drop the shame she felt. She was crowned Miss Wheelchair Pennsylvania in 2018 and now is an advocate for people with physical disabilities.
🎙️Jobsolete, hosted by Helen Hong and Matt Beat, explores occupations that we might have in olden times but today know nothing about. It is so much fun to hear about these jobs and their strange requirements. (In episode one we learn that switch board operates needed to be young, a certain weight, unmarried, and brand new to the work force. And the original switch board operators were teenage boys, but that strategy changed once it became clear that the boys stirred up trouble and swore too much.) It’s fascinating and makes you think about who you may be if you had been born in another time.
🎙️I’ve been listening to more and more true crime shows, which rely so heavily on modern technology like fingerprinting, DNA, and ballistics. On The Constant, Mark Chrisler gives the fascinating history of how we solved crimes before forensic sciences. With his legendary energetic, humorous, and passionate storytelling style, Mark shares some super surprising stuff about the history of swimming witches and cold water trials.
🎙️Side Door shares the fascinating history of Wonder Woman, and how she went from an anecdote to to the “bloodcurdling masculinity” of male superheroes of the time, to damsel-in-distress accessory who gave up her powers to open a boutique, back to the ass-whooping warrior we know her to be now, all thanks to Gloria Steinem, who put Wonder Woman on the cover of the very first Ms. Magazine. Wow that was a long sentence. But it’s been a long journey. And one that makes Wonder Woman more interesting, and more relatable to women who feel pulled right and left, influenced by a society that is set on deciding who she should be.
🎙️I love you!