We’re hip-deep in the winter convention season! I’ve recently returned from the podcast track at the Austin Film Festival, Vancouver is gearing up to have their first festival in a few days, and several cities are gearing up for their …
Category: Casting Light Essays
On Supporting People of Color in the Audio Industry
There have been a lot of changes, big headlines, and ground-rumbling in podcast-land lately. For me, one of those earthquake moments was Phoebe Wang’s speech at Third Coast. I wasn’t present, but I was following as soon as I saw the first tweet …
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Genre Discussion: How do we discuss mental illness in horror?
Content Warning: I’m talking about mental illness and its depiction in horror (as someone with a mental illness); as such I make mentions of ableist language, various symptoms, and gamifying mental illness. I spent all weekend at a horror film …
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Genre Discussion: What can be counted as magical realism?
Magical realism is a post-colonial genre of fiction, originating in and heavily represented by Latin American authors from countries colonized and exploited by various European empires and governments.
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How can we engage with audio fiction in languages we don’t speak?
One of the subjects podcasters and podcast critics constantly circle back to is the status of podcasting as a very slow-growing medium, even though it’s only slightly more than a decade old as a medium. Tied into this problem of …
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Genre Discussion: Engaging with dystopian and light-hearted fictions
To start this off with an understatement, we’re living — all of us, worldwide — in some particularly turbulent times in all spheres of life: socially, politically, economically, and environmentally. In 2017, there were a lot of articles about the rise of dystopian fiction, mostly focused on …
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What kinds of support can niche communities build?
With the upcoming Podcast Movement convention, where we’ll see not only a fiction in podcasting panel but an article in the booklet written by yours truly, it’s a good time to reflect on the podcasting community and its various niches, …
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Genre Discussion: The necessity of subversion in true crime parody
A warning before we start: I’m talking about true crime parodies, and violence against women and minority communities. Nothing graphic. Ever since A Very Fatal Murder made waves in headlines, the parodies of the true crime genre are coming in droves, having …
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What should community engagement look like?
It’s been a rough and busy few weeks on the internet for the audio fiction community, huh. We’ve had some conversations where I think we were, at the very least, diplomatically disappointed. And it’s been in general a super busy …
What’s the way forward for queer representation in audio drama?
It’s Pride month, and I decided that I wanted to talk queer representation in media, in audio drama and elsewhere: what we’re doing right, what we’re not doing right, and why it matters to even talk about it at all. …
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