📚Your fiction recs are here✨ Elena Fernández Collins🤗
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
Every weekend I choose at least one fiction podcast to really dive into. I usually have time to binge something, and I usually have the mind space it takes to appreciate audio dramas. Every single time I want to do this, I look up Elena Fernández Collins—her Twitter feed, her writing on The Bello Collective, or The AV Club. I don’t know anyone who has better suggestions. I ease into fiction podcasts more and more every weekend, and appreciate Elena’s suggestions more and more, too. The way Elena speaks about audio fiction below makes me want to listen to all of it at once. (But not really, because it also makes me want to listen to audio fiction at only 1x speed and more carefully.) But Elena does inspire me to dedicate more quality time to fiction. I dare you to read the interview below and not click on several of Elena’s recommendations. This interview is a GIFT!
xoxo lp
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Elena Fernández Collins
Elena Fernández Collins curates a biweekly newsletter about audio fiction, Audio Dramatic, covers the audio fiction podcast beat for The Bello Collective, and is a contributor to The AV Club’s Podmass, among others. Follow her on Twitter here.
Okay, here’s an annoying question, but I want my readers to hear your answer: What are the most underrated fiction podcasts?
I spent a while turning this question over. I think we’re still in a time where most independent fiction podcasts are underrated, at least if we’re looking at how fiction podcasts are covered in media and which ones get the headlines. I think in general, indie fiction podcasts get a lot of flack they don’t deserve because they’re being held to standards that simply don’t apply to them: the standards of nonfiction public radio, of places that have the money to hire actors from Hollywood, and of audiences who think that a “trope” is automatically a bad thing that should be avoided at all costs. You see this last problem in all kinds of fiction media, it’s nothing new; unfortunately, because independent podcasting results in fans and creators being so accessible and close to one another, their comments can have a much higher rate of impact.
But let’s narrow the perspective here to not include the podcasting industry as a whole. There’s this amazing podcast, Fan Wars: The Empire Claps Back, by Shenee Howard. It’s a romantic-comedy between two Star Wars fans who meet online and get into arguments over their fandom. I think it’s absolutely brilliant: it makes me laugh, I am rooting for them to grow and love one another, and it’s got a lot of things I don’t see from romantic comedies in other forms. I’m also going to go with Solutions to Problems (full disclosure: I’m in one episode of the second season). This is a Dear Prudence-style advice show set on a space station way in the future, and it’s hysterical; not only that, but their satire and commentary on real-world issues is truly on point without punching down and that takes so much care.
What kind of fiction shows do you want to see more of?
Please. Give me more romance fiction podcasts. The intimacy, the closeness, the space to talk and communicate in relationships – podcasting was made for this, y’all. Give it to me.
At which speed do you listen to shows, and how and when do you listen?
Okay, brace yourselves, are you ready?
I listen to everything at 1x speed.
Usually when I tell people this, they ask me, flabbergasted, where I find the time to listen to all that I do and usually the answer is “I have ADHD and I am very good at multitasking”. But there’s a reason for it! I started with fiction podcasts and listening to fiction podcasts at more than 1x speed feels like I’m doing it wrong. Someone poured time and energy and thought into timing the dialogue, the sound effects, the length of silence and pauses; I’ve tried listening at 1.2x and 1.4x and I have missed so many important moments of awkwardness, or threatening presence, or even just “you’re supposed to feel scared right about now” moments. (This is not to shame anyone who listens quickly, but instead: if you’re having trouble connecting with a fiction podcast and you listen on a faster speed, I highly recommend you try it at 1x before giving up!)
And as for how and when, I listen usually from my phone (I use Podcast Addict) and I listen any time I have the energy and focus to do so, because in my job, I can’t really afford to waste time! I’m trying to be better about planning a listening schedule in order to avoid audio burnout, which is definitely a real thing.
QUICKFIRE! Can you give me a fiction podcast based upon the following words?
Okay, I went through and I slapped the titles in each one as fast as I could, and then provided a short little description afterwards!
a. Animals > Zoo: an FBI agent ends up stumbling upon a hidden and obscured zoo of cryptids that moves locations.
b. Love > Love and Luck: the queer love story of my heart, about two men who fall in love over voicemail and start to build a positive, uplifting queer community and space with a little bit of magical help.
d. Scary > Point Mystic: magical realism horror about a town that’s not on any map, and the histories of the people that have ended up there. This is ingeniously produced work.
e. Mind fuck > What’s the Frequency?: This will absolutely break your brain. This is a psychedelic, experimental noir, about what happens when a popular radio serial becomes the only radio program left on the air in 1940s Los Angeles, interrupted by mysterious broadcasts.
f. Hilarious > Adventures in New America: Afrofuturistic political satire sci-fi buddy comedy (there’s a string of adjectives for you), following the wild escapades of curmudgeon IA and lesbian thief Simon Carr as they try to figure out how to pay for IA’s medical treatment.
h. Listened more than once > Flyest Fables: gorgeous and heartfelt hopepunk uplifting Black kids, following the travels of a magical book that takes children in distress on adventures to help them find solutions, strength, courage, and kindness for themselves. Includes musical numbers.
i. Stop what you are doing and download right now. > The Big Loop but that one’s kind of cheating since I gave you that one a little while ago, so let’s go with Unwell– Gothic horror in the Midwest, a woman returns to her hometown to take care of her mother after she breaks her leg and finds not all is as it seems in Mt. Absalom. If you liked the looming dread of The Haunting of Hill House, I think you'll enjoy this.
When it comes to fiction, which do you care most about…the actual story, the sound, the voice acting?
I have a hard time untangling them sometimes! I think I’ll answer this a different way: the thing I care the least about is sound quality. Bear with me. I still care about it! But I often ask myself this question that I learned from my interview mentor, David Rheinstrom of Radio Drama Revival: am I just listening for the money?
That means, am I expecting the sound that comes from money to drop on good sound equipment, or a sound booth, or even the time it takes away from working for money to learn sound design and editing? Or am I truly holding space for people who may be learning, and also thinking about all the other things I care about: story, acting, setting, themes? Am I thinking critically about the audio I’m experiencing, or am I listening for the money? (and yes, I definitely apply this thinking process to nonfiction podcasts too!)
What do you tell people who say they don’t listen to fiction podcasts?
I usually ask them why, first! It’s often the case that people just haven’t been matched with the right fiction podcast. I ask if they’re willing to try again with me and if they are, I dig into whether they watch fiction movies, TV, or books (I have yet to meet someone who doesn’t engage in fiction in at least ONE of these realms), and try to match what they like in those areas to a podcast or two. I will now smugly inform your readers that my fail rate is very low.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Kaitlin Prest’s ability to vibrantly tell a story with sound is unparalleled, and my expectations for Mermaid Palace’s Asking For It, a queer, modern take on the Goldilocks tale, were very very very very very very high. I woke up very early on Tuesday morning to listen to it in the dark, alone, and I felt like I was in a theater being surrounded by sound. My expectations were exceeded. For the sounds Kaitlin Prest is famous for—the whispers, the phone calls, the sex, the raw conversation. But also for unexpected sounds. The show uses the music of a real band, The Hips, a duo of women who fit so perfectly into the show, it’s like they belong inside. I tried listening to the music alone and it sounded like completely different music. I love Goldie’s mom Dolly and if I had 1 minute with Kaitlin Prest, I would beg her for a Dolly spinoff show. If you haven’t listened to Asking For It, I am jealous of you. I recommend you find some special time to listen to it.
🎙️I always look forward to seeing a new episode of Public Intellectual in my feed, and the On Creepy Men episode was one of my favorites. Jessa talks to Heidi Matthews, a sort of creepiness expert specializing in creepiness when it comes to gender relations, about the ambiguity of danger, and how we know whether or not we should fear someone or not. How much can we trust our gut? (Not much.) What causes a man to be called a creep? What do we do when we see a creep? Can women be creeps? Why do we love to report a creep? The answers are all sort of surprising (increasing marginalization on already marginalized populations like the homeless, the mentally ill, the poor…creepiness has more to do with physical attributes than threatening behavior.) JUST THE OTHER DAY I was thinking about how glad I am that I am not an old man because I LOVE looking at people’s butts, and as a harmless-looking white girl, I’m able to get away with it. Is everyone still with me? What I’m trying to say is this is something I think about a lot. (Does anyone remember the SNL sexual harassment skit… “be handsome, be attractive, don’t be unattractive?”)
🎙️The Boring Talks host conversations with people who find traditionally boring things fascinating, and the result is lovely—vignettes of enthusiasm and appreciation for mundane things. Like this episode on pencils! It made me want to go out and buy 5,000 Ticonderogas. The nostalgia, the reliability, the design, the color, the smell! Another episode, Swearing (a personal cross-cultural comparative study of Hindi and English) is wonderful because it really focuses on appreciating why swearing is so great—because of the mouth feel. So although translations to swear words in other languages might not make sense to us, the way it feels to push them out of our mouths is universal. Don’t swear again without truly recognizing just how GREAT it feels. Don’t hold a pencil without appreciating its sweetness. I am convinced this podcast could make me a happier person.
🎙️I (unfortunately) finished the second season of The Intersection, where David Boyer spent 18 months reporting from an intersection in the middle of Google's Silicon Valley HQ. Over the past 30 years, this corner has gone from farmland to boomtown. The interviews paint a depressing picture of this company town, the value of the land, and the people whose lives are being destroyed by Google. As I’ve said before, The Intersection makes you feel like you are standing right there, in the street, talking to the people, watching the buildings rise, the communities crumble. Now that I’m done with season two (and ready to move onto season three, where Burning Man is profiled,) I feel like I’ve been right there, reporting with David.
🎙️Only listen to The United States of Anxiety’s Fragility in Liberty if you want to get MAD. The episode starts at the Statue of Liberty with the origin of the monument’s message. (It was originally conceived as a tribute to the abolition of slavery.) But then it moves onto a personal, gut-wrenching story about a specific casualty of US immigration policy. Carlos Aguirre-Venegas was an undocumented immigrant who got mixed up in a little-known law that's now being used to prosecute tens of thousands of people who crossed the border, separate some from their children, and lock them away in federal prisons. In Carlos’ case, the law did separate his family. Ruined it actually. Because SPOILER ALERT it in part ended Carlos’ life.
🎙️Slow Radio doesn’t tell a story in a traditional sense, but it brings you to another place, allowing you to imagine a story of your own. The 15-minute episodes are a celebration of sound of places all over the world, allowing you to take in the way an environment ebbs and flows via noise. From Dadar to the Stars takes you to Mumbai, beginning with a quiet, cricket-speckled morning, to the swelling sound of a bustling city. I love listening to these at night, before I go to sleep, or while I’m walking around the city in darkness.
🎙️Supernatural Sexuality with Dr. Seabrooke is a fictional sex and love advice radio show…for monsters. Noted folklorist, sexologist and relationship therapist Dr. Olivia Seabrooke helps clients with thorny relationship issues that apply to ghosts, vampires, minotaurs, non-binary moth men, etc. Dr. Olivia’s advice is so based in human nature that I think if you were listening without knowing it was being directed to monsters, you would think it was being directed to humans. It’s all about learning how to deal with others who are culturally or physically different. Turns out it doesn’t matter is the recipient of the advice is human or otherwise.
🎙️The Baron of Botox has been a chilling ride. It follows tragic life of Dr. Fredric Brandt, who went from being the dermatologist of the stars, to the butt of a joke on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, to a depressed man who took his own life. On the surface, Dr. Brandt seemed a cheerful man who loved his work and his clients, but those who knew him better were able to see that something wasn’t quite right. As The Baron of Botox pieces together the last days of Dr. Brandt’s life, it becomes clear how seriously everything was wrong. I feel a little helpless, listening. In retrospect, all signs point to a man who needed help. But while they were happening, I’m sure they just felt…strange. (Dr. Brant literally gave the shirt off his back to a friend who mentioned she liked it. It doesn’t get more textbook than that.) I kept returning to this line in the episode: “When you’re trying to piece together the last few weeks of someone’s life, it can begin to feel like an abstract painting. The things people remember can take on new meaning in hindsight. Details become storylines.”
🎙️And of course that reminds me of Last Day, the show from Lemonada that explores overdose deaths and the opioid crisis, particularly the last days of the people who have succumbed to them. The Blame Game was the episode I have been waiting for. It talks about the people enabling the opioid crisis–China, Mexico, Purdue, the Sacklers. An interview with David Smith, a healthcare economist who has lost three family members to overdose, doesn’t blame Purdue. He blames human nature.
🎙️An old episode of This American Life popped up in the feed, and it’s one I love. The Secret of My Death includes a letter a woman, Nadia Bowers, wrote to her sister’s dealer. Her sister died of a drug overdose. It’s strange and heart-wrenching. It kind of makes you wonder… “should I be here for this?” It feels so private. Another story on this episode is about a man, Dave Maher, who was identified as dead on Facebook, even though he wasn’t. The outpouring of love and positive memories of Dave from friends overwhelmed him, and confused him. (Can you imagine what that would be like?) Dave felt like he was a terrible person. So why did everyone have so many wonderful things to say about him? There were many beautiful stories he didn’t even remember. We think we know ourselves better than everyone else, but sometimes the person that we think we are does not match up with how others perceive us. The episode closes with another story, Funeral for a stranger, about a guy who has to go to a funeral for a stranger who died of suicide. It takes many twists and turns and is worth a listen. It ends with a reminder, as podcasts that touch upon suicide always do, that anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts should call the suicide hotline. And I don’t mean to be flippant, but why isn’t this number easier to remember? Why can’t the number to the suicide hotline just be the letters TALK? Or 1-800-8255? Can you imagine if you needed the number, your life depended on it, but you couldn’t remember the first three numbers?
🎙️If you love Elena Fernández Collins as I do, you should subscribe to her newsletter Audio Dramatic. The latest issue had an interview with Morgan Givens of Flyest Fables, and Morgan talks about the genesis of the show. (The story is adorable.) Flyest Fables is beautiful and fun for adults to listen to, but it really has children in mind. It makes you feel like you’ve jumped into a storybook. The kids in the interconnected stories are dealing with a real-life problems and then introduced to a magical, fantastical world. Morgan does ALL the voices, and the singing. I want to kidnap a child, since I do not have one of my own, and make them listen to Flyest Fables with me.
🎙️I find that The Kitchen Sisters is a hard show to describe to people, because while the episodes are cohesive, each one is so unique and seems to stand as its own piece of art. The Lou Reed episode takes us through the Lou Reed archives (and an interview with Laurie Anderson,) and the result is a collection of sound and poetry that made me really happy and really sad. I even felt a connection to the universe, listening to an archivist talk about Lou Reed’s Drones, a traveling art installation of Reed’s instruments against a group of amps so that their tuned feedback creates an enveloping drone of harmonics that shifts and changes, based on the audience location. The sound makes you feel like you’re in an ancient church.
🎙️Not to turn this newsletter into the Dear Young Rocker newsletter, but DID YOU LISTEN TO THE LATEST EPISODE? We are now at Chelsea’s senior year of high school, and the pain Chelsea feels when her cello teacher tells her she isn’t talented enough to study music in college, and…does she have any other areas of interest? [INSERT RELATABLE PANIC ATTACK.] Chelsea takes the listener back to what this felt like for her, all the pain and emotion involved. (Why would you tell a teenager this? High school is ridiculous.) In true Dear Young Rocker fashion, Chelsea gives herself a pep talk: If you think of yourself as bad and stupid and wrong, you will always be able to find people to validate that thought. (Kind of the opposite of Fred Roger’s “look for the helpers” mantra.) (It even reminded me of like the Facebook story in the This American Life episode above…the people who lift you up are out there, even if you don’t think they are, or even that they should be.)
🎙️The latest episode of You Must Remember This’ Make Me Over series sent me into a DEEP Cass Elliot internet hole. Cass was the fat (most talented?) member of The Mamas and The Papas, and the amount of criticism she received for her weight was so outrageous, it went past outrageous, all the way to non-outrageous, and back to outrageous again. The Mamas and The Papas gave off a make-love-not-war hippy vibe, but underneath all of that they were torturing Cass for her weight. And newsflash: Cass Elliot did not die choking on a ham sandwich. Tell everyone you know.
🎙️I have started to catch up on The Lonely Palette, a show I never would have dreamed I liked. (Art history!? What am I, in a lecture?!) On each episode Tamar Avishai brings us a piece of artwork and talks about all that is behind it, to make us as excited about it as she is. I started with an easy one, Behold The Monkey, (who isn’t interested in the Ecce Homo restoration?) But I’m equally as fascinated in everything else I’ve heard. A recent episode about Katsushika Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa (c. 1829–1831) emphasizes why the fact that we’ve all seen this piece a million times causes us to overlook the power of it. Every time I listen to a new episode of The Lonely Palette I find common threads from other ones—why certain pieces of art explode in popularity, how styles are transported across the world and over time. I’ve only been listening for a few weeks, but I feel like if I went into an art museum right now, I would have at least 10x the appreciation for the art there than I did before.
🎙️Brought To You By is Business Insider’s show about the brands you THINK you know all about, but you’re wrong. Episode one on Marlboro was fascinating, and it is clear host Charlie Herman was only scratching the surface of the story. It begins with Marlboro as the underdog of cigarettes who started to market filtered cigarettes to women (because filtered cigs are girly.) But the market was too small, so they started making filtered cigarettes look MANLY and a thing of COWBOYS. This invented a brand, and a mascot, that lived long past television’s ban on cigarette ads. You could see a photo of a country plain with the words “MARLBORO COUNTRY” and you’d know that The Marlboro Man was there. And you wanted to be just like him. But remember, behind every Marlboro Man is a Marlboro Woman. And it was a woman who started it all.
🎙️I love Pocketcasts for so many reasons (it’s my app of choice) and they’ve started sharing in-app listening lists from cool people like Caroline Crampton and James Kim. On James’ list was UnFictional—“captivating stories of real life told by writers and performers with a talent for tales that will suck you in.” I feel like I have stumbled upon a treasure trove. (And probably because I was just listening to it, this feels like Flyest Fables for adults.) Vampire of Barcelona introduces us to Enriqueta Marti, who was incorrectly tied to several child disappearances in Barcelona in the early 20th century. (So they found a bunch of bloody rags and bones when ransacked her house. Can’t a girl have a good time in the privacy of her own home!?) Fast forward to NOW, she is a representation of evil in stories, songs, operas, and novels. The story could have ended there, but a 21st Century historian uncovered the truth about Enriqueta. It feels like the Salem Witch Trials of Spain, but all on one poor woman.
🎙️I’ve been listening to Motive, which follows a group of young women who come together to pin down a man involved in the death of a college student studying abroad in Spain, and his link to several allegations of sexual assault and abuse. I studied abroad in Florence, and these stories bring to mind so many memories I have of being in dangerous situations that I fortunately emerged from unscathed. I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but if you know anyone about to study abroad, I’d send them this series. Not to scare them into staying in the United States (in Florence, I remember thinking that the frat guys I went to school with were far more threatening than the dudes hollering “ciao, bella” at me from scooters) but because it emphasizes how careful young people need to be, how American students often have a target on their backs.
🎙️This week we finished The Dream’s season two, which overall had its ups and downs for me. But it went out with a bang. The second I finished I listened to Jane Marie on Night Call, as a sort of goodbye to the season. Jane Marie is very relaxed in the interview, and she gives some good context for the show.
🎙️I love you!