Category: Casting Light Essays

elderflowers against a blue sky (elderflowers symbolize kindness and empathy).

How can we practice radical empathy and self-care?

Elena Fernández Collins March 11, 2019

Digital spaces can sometimes get a bit noisy: a lot of ideas, thoughts, demands, needs, cries for help overlapping one another, and it can be hard to spend the emotional energy to sift through it, to know how to respond, …

background: like burned parchment. Upon it, thick Gothic calligraphy with the words "Once upon a time..."

How is narration in audio a useful tool?

Elena Fernández Collins February 18, 2019

The conversation surrounding the place of narration in audio fiction is one that has often plagued both my listening and my commentary, due to the huge divide on whether or not narration is a tool creators should still be using …

photo from the stage in an auditorium, of rows and rows of empty,b lue chairs, with two balconies, disappearing into the long darkness.

How can we support marginalized creators at conventions?

Elena Fernández Collins January 28, 2019

While I did not give any specifics for PodCon 2 hopes in the previous issue, I think it would be helpful to talk briefly about one thing: featured guests, speakers, and why podcasting as a medium growing into having multiple, …

black and white photo of a pair of white headphones standing upright in the open spine of a book, sunlight cast across the bottom half.

What’s up with book to podcast adaptations?

Elena Fernández Collins December 2, 2018

We’re all aware, possibly painfully so, of that podcast-to-TV adaptation pipeline and the possibility of podcasts being made solely so that they can be picked up by a movie and TV studio for development. We absolutely have to be wary …

a photo of an empty auditorium, brightly lit, with wooden chairs in the middle and two aisles going up on either side.

What does the wave of podcast conventions mean for audio fiction?

Elena Fernández Collins November 5, 2018

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 …

Photo of a bridge lit with yellow lights, focused on the stone supports underneath. At night.

On Supporting People of Color in the Audio Industry

Elena Fernández Collins October 24, 2018

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 …

A landscape of a decrepit and abandoned wooden railway, with dead leafless trees on either side and a dark sky with only a faint, thin, blurred line of light in the distance. Creepy, haunted atmosphere.

Genre Discussion: How do we discuss mental illness in horror?

Elena Fernández Collins October 11, 2018

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 …

A painting of Ivan the Fool riding a margic carpet with a giant magical lantern, over a bare forest ending at an ongoing river, with birds flying off in the lower right. A sensatin of greyness, desolation, the edge of the world.

Genre Discussion: What can be counted as magical realism?

Elena Fernández Collins September 12, 2018

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.

Foreground: books on a shelf stacked to form a square hole; Background, through the hole: a man and a woman smiling at each other, but you can only see their smiles and chins and their shoulders.

How can we engage with audio fiction in languages we don’t speak?

Elena Fernández Collins August 28, 2018

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 …

An edited photo of a heavily industrialized city with many skyscrapers, and a sensation of a desert in the distance and lots of air pollution, all stemming from what it likely an explosion of some kind far away that is large and bright, like a setting sun

Genre Discussion: Engaging with dystopian and light-hearted fictions

Elena Fernández Collins July 30, 2018

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 …