Bello #45: Hear. Me. Roar.

Bello Collective newsletter — week of October 5, 2017

Friends,

I’m coming to you live from the Werk It Festival, a women’s podcast conference hosted by WNYC. It’s been two jam-packed days of seeing women that you’d recognize from your podcast queues share advice and hard-won lessons with women who are developing their own shows, as well as working to make the industry better and smarter for women everywhere.

Women already face tough barriers breaking into this industry, so we are dedicating this issue to lifting up the voices and stories of those very same women. We asked our contributors to tell us about their favorite shows and episodes that feature the voices and stories of women and I think we’ve got some good stuff to share with you.

On the first day of the festival, Anna Sale of Death, Sex and Money implored the women in the audience to “Listen to your restlessness.” As more distinctive voices emerge in our community, I’m certainly grateful to all the women that did.

Until next time,

Ashley

PS: Over 600 women participated in Werk It this year, and we tried to find as many of them as we could on Twitter. Follow them. Listen to their shows. Celebrate their work. And don’t forget to tell them Bello sent you.

Image by Scott Hart

Dana recommends:

• I’ve been listening to a lot of audio drama, including, but not limited to, these super high quality, scifi/fantasy, feminist, queer pieces of perfection: 1. The Far Meridian, which is told from the point of view of an agoraphobic woman whose lighthouse gets her out into the world to find her missing brother. 2. The Strange Case of Starship Iris brings you in right in the middle of disaster to the only survivor left on a dying starship, Violet Liu, as she learns to trust the only person who might get her out alive. 3. And then I can’t forget Deadly Manners which is already an instant classic of celebrity voices in a murder mystery dinner party. Agatha Christie would be proud.
• Circe is “the biggest badass the Odyssey has to offer” and as most women tend to be, a complicated lady [witch who turns men into pigs and women into dog-creature-things]. The gals of Spirits discuss Circe with Jess Zimmerman, who writes the Role Monsters series.
• For more drinking and talking about badass women of history, please see any episode of the Queens podcast. The latest covers Olympias, Queen of Macedonia. ❤️
• Candidate Confessional, a show in which guests discuss their political defeats, got especially awkward and difficult when host Sam Stein delved into his own closet skeletons. In What It’s Like to be at the Center of the Biggest Political Sex Scandals in American History, Stein fleshes out what it was like for Rielle Hunter when Stein released the first speculation about John Edwards having an affair (spoiler alert: the affair was true, and it was with Rielle Hunter. Also spoiler alert: it really sucked for Rielle Hunter).
• Saturday School, from the Potluck Collective, teaches Asian-American pop culture history every week, when all the other kids are watching cartoons. The latest episode Kumu Hina — also a Netflix documentary from 2014 — is about a hula teacher in Hawaii who identifies as mahu (someone in the middle of male and female) mentoring a young student who also identifies mahu on indigenous Hawaiian culture, hula, and gender. Saturday School is short in length but packs a punch.

Erik recommends:

• Planet Money featured a great episode called When Women Stopped Coding. Although it came out well before the Google memo fiasco, it remains one of the best counterpoints to whether biology plays a factor in individual success (hint: it doesn’t).

Calen recommends:

• In The Marble Garden, Sawyer Westbrook roams the cemeteries of North America and highlights the fascinating stories of those interred. The latest episode, The Blackburns, tells the story of runaway slaves, Detroit, and a race riot.
• In Mary Cassatt’s “In The Loge”, The Lonely Palette’s Tamar Avishai gives a wonderful rumination on what it means to be a woman, a woman artist, and an artist who is also a woman. Tamar is a master at telling the story behind the story behind the artwork.
• 99% Invisible dives into the history of the sports bra, which is truly one of the amazing inventions of the last half century.

Ashley recommends:

When I think about celebrating women in audio, I hear the voices of those those reporters and producers that keep me coming back to my favorite shows.

• Some of my favorite episodes of Reply All feature stories from Sruthi Pinnamaneni and Phia Bennin. Check out recent episode, What Kind of Idiot Gets Phished?
• Even though she’s breaking ground in what feels like an otherwise male-dominated conversation on design, I feel like Avery Trufleman is just getting started. In 99% Invisible’s Title TK, she explores how products are named.
• I mention Stacia Brown every chance I get because not enough people know her work, particularly her series The Rise of Charm City, a documentary on the complicated history of Baltimore.
• Zoe Chace covered the 2016 election in ways no one else did. If you think wrapping your head around a Trump administration is tough, That’s One Way to Do It introduces us to a young gay African American Republican who was his biggest fan.
• Even though their dad, Jim, hosts and produces the Roam Schooled podcast, its raison d’etre are his discerning daughters, Vern and Dana. The Genie is Out of the Bottle is a particularly prescient episode on guns.
• I know Starlee Kine is working on other projects behind-the-scenes, but I miss her voice and will be glad for her to find a new home. This decade-old segment from This American Life still reminds me why I fell in love with this medium.

Your recommendations:

• You also told us about some of your favorite shows that make you a better, smarter feminist: The Enthusiastic Enthusiast, Oh Witch Please, #WizardTeam: A Harry Potter Podcast, Femmes of STEM, Stuff Mom Never Told You, Talk the Talk, The Liturgists, Can You Not, and Short Cuts.

The Bello Collective is a publication + newsletter about podcasts and the audio industry. Our goal is to bring together writers, journalists, and other voices who share a passion for the world of audio storytelling.

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