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A Recipe for a Literary Nomads Podcast Episode
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4 May 2024 What Goes Into a Podcast Episode? Reader, A newsletter about time, partly to offer you all a glimpse behind the scenes of producing some of the Waywords content, and partly to sketch out for myself my pattern: perhaps we'll spot something interesting! One Episode of Literary NomadsI already know that I do more prep than many podcasts, mostly before recording in reading and research and "curricular" design; many others are guest interviews, more like informal dialogues. Once a topic for the episode is determined (and these are set in advance--as many as 20 episodes planned together around a single title, itself requiring some planning), I can get to work. Episode Research: 3-8 Hours This depends on the episode. The primary text for each season ("To His Coy Mistress" for the current one) requires exhaustive research, often a few books and dozens of scholarly articles, to assemble. Smaller episodes are still several hours, especially if they have other texts attached to them.
These sources are downloaded as often as possible digitally, for reading, annotation, and compilation with a number of tools:
Outlining & Writing the Episode: 4-6 Hours I outline the episode with a few tools:
I generally write most all of the episode ahead of time, sometimes dictating the "script," which ends up more like a thicker sentence outline. That gives me space to improvise and clarify and create a more natural delivery. Recording the Episode: 60-90 Minutes Podcasters understand that the recording itself is often the shortest part! I generally find that, with stops and starts, corrections and revisions as I go, it generally takes me twice as long as the length of the finished episode. I use a fair amount of hardware and software:
Editing the Episode: 4-5 Hours and getting faster
I do this is two rounds. First, the master audio edit where I repair errors in my performance, choose best takes, and adjust the audio levels, remove extra noise, etc. That takes about 3-4x the episode length. The second round is the complete episode. I place the master audio into an episode template I made in Reaper and then add music, chapters and images, SFX, and the like. Music is almost always composed separately from this section of time. The re-used main themes and variations are all composed and recorded for Waywords by electronic music artist Randon Myles. Former students of mine pre-recorded the transition labels. Publishing and Posting: ~2 Hours Once the audio is recorded and rendered with chapter markings, episode art, meta tags, etc. in Reaper, I need to post the audio to a podcast host who handles the storage and RSS distribution and create the website post for the episode along with social media and other cataloguing
In addition to updating all the links, designing episode art, and the like, I also go back to index key terms, texts, and cross-references through a large spreadsheet in my Google workspace, which is read and analyzed again by NotebookLM. I hope to use NotebookLM is successive stages to coordinate curricula and other content I produce, but never to write or compose: 1) it's bad at it, very bad; 2) I'm not interested in its creative ideas but in ours. Social Media posting includes the Meta Business Suite and Buffer, along with the individual platforms I have elsewhere. I make sure everything is posted by Friday at 4 pm EST, if I can, so people have a fresh episode to listen to over a weekend if they wish (and most other literature podcasts post at other times of the week). Complete 30-45 min. episode production: ~12 to 20 hours. If it hits 16, that's a youch, but it has gone on longer! I'd like to get it down to 8-10, but every trim in time is harder and harder to find. I don't believe I can "farm out" a lot of it (maybe the posting part), because so much of it is less-usual approaches to literary content. AI has cut several hours in the research side. For instance, if I find a large journal article on meter in ancient Roman poetry that I'm not sure has anything of valuable, I can first feed it to Notebook LM and ask specific questions I have ("Does this article discuss Horace's meter? Does the article suggest that Horace's meter contributes to a change in the meaning of the poem?"). If LM points something out, it also links me straight to the pages that have that discussion. Now I don't have to read 60 pages but 1 or 2 and the context around that discussion. Nice. Equipment and Learning How To: Waywords is entering Year 4 of its 5-year start-up plan, so I've been at this for a while now, learning about new approaches, work flow, programming macros and designing templates, etc. I also produced podcasts with my classroom students for about six years prior to Waywords. I have a ways to go, and new tech changes things constantly. (Also, this is about audio: video and written work are almost entirely different animals depending on the genre: book reviews, lesson plans, books, etc.) As for the amount of software and equipment, yes, it's a bit more extensive than many have or need, but this is what I have dedicated much of my "retirement" to, so the investment in all this over the years has produced a nice studio (though messy). In general, my purchasing guidelines:
If you're thinking about getting into this, awesome! There's a ton of powerful reasons (personally and politically and socially) to get into podcasting, and you need not begin with anything like what I have now. I started out with a more primitive Zoom H2, the ATR 2100 mic, some SD cards, and the free Audacity for audio editor. I just uploaded the files to my website (and my school's LMS) to play for a while, but then moved to Podbean (which I do not currently recommend) and later Blubrry. Once I made that move, it all began to get bigger . . . . I'm no expert, but what I've assembled here is from a lot of research (and even "courses" and books) about what works. I definitely have opinions about the products and methods I'm using! If you have specific interest in any of it, comments, ideas, or questions, please let me know! I'd love to help others with their projects or learn more about what I can do to tighten this up.
More Library and Education DefensesToday is the birthday of Horace Mann, one of the founders of the American public education system. With Teacher Appreciation week this week, here's some artwork that may be worth spreading
Manifesto In DraftLast time I talked about scary words like ethics and manifesto around our acts of reading, of teaching and growing literacy. The first draft of the Reader's Manifesto is out and seeking input between now and the end of May. Would love to see your thoughts on it. If you want to join our "committee" offering feedback, let me know! (Or, if you just want to email me some ideas, that, too!)
If you found this newsletter edition helpful or interesting, or if you'd like me to outline a different project I create or go into more detail somewhere, let me know. I spent this morning reading the epic of Gilgamesh, a small section of Arendt, and continuing my outline for Journey 6 of Literary Nomads, centered around the Le Guin short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." If you have thoughts about what I should touch upon along the several episodes we'll be doing there, I would love to hear them: I already have far too many and need to narrow down to what people would like to hear about! Thanks for reading! Ahead:
P.S. Some Continuing Feedback Links! v v v
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Waywords Studio
Want to dig a bit deeper, stretch a bit wider, discover unique insights in your reading? So do I! That's why we literary nomads explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Subscribe for podcasts and video, fiction and poetry, essays and online courses, unexpected freebies, and ways to lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs!