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, …
Category: Casting Light Essays

How is narration in audio a useful tool?
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 …

How can we support marginalized creators at conventions?
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, …
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What’s up with book to podcast adaptations?
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 …

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