Don't Mess with the Fairies
Forget Tinkerbell or those Victorian paintings of spritely pixies with wings. Traditional fairy folklore is much darker and weirder. Irish storytellers Philip Byrne, Helena Byrne, Eddie Lenihan, and p...
18 Okt 201831min
Audio Storytelling and Movies For The Mind
There has been a renaissance of audio drama podcasts over the last several years, so picking up where I left off in the previous episode, I bring the history of audio dramas up to date with the help o...
4 Okt 201832min
The Dark Side of Golden Age Radio Dramas
The "golden age of radio drama" may have been a stellar period for storytelling -- but the stories weren't all golden bright. Science fiction and horror were the ideal genres to explore the deep anxie...
19 Sep 201831min
Fantastical Feasts and The Writers Who Cooked Them Up
What is the role of food in worldbuilding? Characters usually have to eat to stay alive -- but food is also culture, and if you're creating a fantasy culture, food will be an expression of those value...
5 Sep 201826min
Meet My D&D Group
Stubborn Lippi a.k.a. Stubbs is a halfling, a bard, and a sorcerer. He's also the character I've been playing since I produced my 2015 episode "Rolling the Twenty Sided Dice," where I learned how to p...
23 Aug 201835min
Creating a Haven for Fanfiction
Last year, I interviewed Francesca Coppa for my episode Fanfiction (Don't Judge.) She's the author of the book "The Fanfiction Reader," and one of the founders of the fanfic site Archive of Our Own. F...
9 Aug 201834min
Do You Speak Klingon? Inventing Culture Through Language
Sci-fi fantasy worlds often use constructed languages (or conlangs for short) as a worldbuilding tool that can make us believe the characters come from an ancient or alien culture. But art can take on...
26 Juli 201829min
Fictional Deaths My Listeners are Not Over
Have you ever mourned the loss of a fictional character? It can be tough to get over, and difficult to convince people not caught up in that fictional world that your sense of mourning is valid. I tal...
12 Juli 201831min
