[{"id":"9584","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E7, The Voice Is Intact: Finding Gwendolyn MacEwen in the Archive, 6 April 2020, Mcgregor"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creator_names_search":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah Mcgregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/901581e1-fcf7-454a-80ff-e03417153c28/spokenweb-episode-7-macewen-w-call_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"spokenweb-episode-7-macewen-w-call_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:35:53\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"34,524,308 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"spokenweb-episode-7-macewen-w-call_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-04-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Simon+Fraser+University+Vancouver&zoom=15&minlon=-119.42087173461915&minlat=49.934207031480234&maxlon=-119.37726974487306&maxlat=49.950170586872346#map=19/49.282403/-123.108551\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 W Hastings St, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.282403\",\"longitude\":\"-123.108550\"}]"],"Address":["515 W Hastings St, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"bennett, andrea. Excerpt from “The People’s Poetry.” The essay appears in the book\\nLike a Boy But Not A Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood outside the Gender Binary\\nto be published by Arsenal Pulp Press, fall 2019.\\n\\nCamlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. “SGW Poetry Remix” MP3 file, 12 Dec 2018.\\n\\nMacEwen (a performance).” Resurfacing: Women Writing across Canada in the 1970s. Mount Allison University & Université de Moncton, 26-28 April 2018.\\n\\n— “Performing the Archive: A Remix.” Performed with Jason Camlot. Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, Montreal, 5 May 2019.\\n\\nMacEwen, Gwendolyn. “Dark Pines Under Water.”\\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaHTMxvxNGc\\n \\n\\n—  Reading with Phyllis Webb at Sir George Williams University, Nov 18 1966.\\nhttps://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/gwendolyn-macewen-at-sgwu-1966/\\n \\n\\n— “Past and Future Ghosts.” Afterworlds. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “(Un)Covering the Mirror: Performative Reflections in Linda Griffiths’s Alien Creature: A Visitation from Gwendolyn MacEwen and Wendy Lill’s The Occupation of Heather Rose.” Theatre and Autobiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice. Eds. Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman (Talon, 2006). 89-104.\\n\\n— “An Archival Remix” Performance by Katherine McLeod and Emily Murphy. Toronto: Modernist Studies Association, 18 Oct 2019.\\n\\n— “Making Shadows with Recorded Sound: Dance as Criticism, in response to Gwendolyn\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549528510464,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["Poet Gwendolyn MacEwen, perhaps best known for winning the 1969 Governor General’s Award for her collection\nThe Shadow Maker\nand the 1987 GG, posthumously, for\nAfterworlds\n, is perhaps one of the most significant Canadian poets whose work is entirely out of print. MacEwen was only 46 when she died, and her tragic life combined with the mysticism of her poetic voice has made her a figure of enduring fascination for other poets and scholars, even as her work’s deviation from popular narratives of Canadian literature has often led to her being dropped from our literary histories. In this episode, SpokenWeb podcast host Hannah McGregor reflects on why MacEwen’s voice continues to haunt so many of us, alongside authors Jen Sookfong Lee and andrea bennett, and SpokenWeb researcher Katherine McLeod. \n\n00:00\tStacey Copeland:\tOh hi, SpokenWeb Podcast project manager Stacey Copeland here. How are you? [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano] I wanted to take a moment to let you know we are looking for contributors from across the SpokenWeb network to pitch and produce episodes with us for the 2020 season. All SpokenWeb team and network affiliates can submit episodes, no podcasting or audio experience necessary. Do you have a great archival find or current project you’d like to showcase? Ever wanted to interview a fellow colleague or Canadian poet? Our team is here to support you every step of the way from episode idea to editing to final production. So send us your pitch and get in touch at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. That’s spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. [End Music: Instrumental Piano]\n01:02\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n01:13\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. You might know poet Gwendolyn MacEwen as the winner of the 1969 Governor General’s Award for her collection The Shadow-Maker or the 1987 Governor General, posthumously, for Afterworlds. She’s also maybe one of the most significant Canadian poets whose work is entirely out of print. MacEwen was only 46 when she died and her tragic life combined with the mysticism of her poetic voice has made her a figure of enduring fascination for other poets and scholars. At the same time, her works’ deviation from popular narratives of Canadian literature has often led to her being dropped from our literary histories. In this episode, I’m inviting you to join me as well as authors Jen Sookfong Lee and andrea bennett and SpokenWeb researcher Katherine McLeod as we reflect on why MacEwen’s voice continues to haunt us. Here is, again, me, Hannah McGregor, with “The Voice Is Intact.” [Theme Music]\n02:47\tHannah McGregor:\tHave you ever heard her read?\n02:48\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tNo, I’ve never heard her voice.\n02:49\tHannah McGregor:\tOh my God, do you want to?\n02:49\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tYeah!\n02:50\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen recording, overlapping with Hannah McGregor and Jen Sookfong Lee’s commentary] A fugitive from all those truths, which are too true, the great clawing ones and the fire-breathers,–\n03:00\tJen Sookfong Lee:\t[Gasps]\n03:00\tAudio Recording:\t–the ones that rake the flesh–\n03:01\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tSo much nicer with her voice!\n03:01\tAudio Recording:\t–like Pyramus,  and those that crush the bones to chalk and those that bear their red teeth in the nights.\n03:09\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tSo melodious, her voice.\n03:10\tAudio Recording:\tMy mind emulates,–\n03:12\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI’ve never used the word melodious.\n03:14\tAudio Recording:\t–dragon, fish, and snake and shoots fire to melt the Arctic night–\n03:18\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tSo ASMR, though.\n03:20\tAudio Recording:\t–or chews off the edges of continents or wraps itself around the ribs of the world,–\n03:23\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI knew it, I knew it, she had to have a voice like that. She couldn’t write these poems without that voice.\n03:26\tAudio Recording:\t–squeezes…\n03:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tSomething that will come up often when presenting about MacEwen, and certainly in conference sorts of settings, where people really wanna hear her voice. And if you talk about MacEwen and don’t play her voice, then people are really aware, like, “Wait, we want to hear her voice.” But then to also think about the layers of mediation and copyright and all the things that also are distancing us from her voice and being aware of that, too.\n03:54\tHannah McGregor:\tThe voices you’re hearing belong to academic Katherine McLeod–\n03:58\tKatherine McLeod:\tI am Katherine McLeod and I’m an affiliate researcher with SpokenWeb at Concordia University.\n04:04\tHannah McGregor:\t–and author Jen Sookfong Lee.\n04:06\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI have been trolling Margaret Atwood since 1997, big props to me.\n04:11\tHannah McGregor:\tYou might recognize Katherine from earlier episodes of the SpokenWeb Podcast. She’s a Montreal-based scholar of Canadian literature with a focus on sound, performance, and archives and the co-editor of the new book CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. She’s also the curator of SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Week series. Jen Sookfong Lee is a Vancouver-based writer, radio broadcaster, and podcaster. She’s the author of The Conjoined, the co-editor of Whatever Gets You Through: Twelve Survivors on Life after Sexual Assault and the co-host of the podcast Can’t Lit.\n04:44\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, continuation of Gwendolyn MacEwen recording, overlapping with Hannah McGregor’s commentary] …once the monster’s jaws unfolded fire–\n04:48\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd that third voice you’re hearing is Gwendolyn MacEwen reading on November 18th, 1966 as part of the Sir George Williams poetry series held between 1965 and 1974 at what was then the Sir George Williams University and is now Concordia University. The audio recordings of this reading series are at the heart of the SpokenWeb partnership and form a rich and exciting digital archive that has already inspired significant scholarship on the history of the poetry reading. But I’m not interested in this reading series. I’m interested in MacEwen.\n05:22\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tThe first time I discovered Gwendolyn MacEwen, it was probably reading “Dark Pines Under Water” in an anthology. And I think it was, it was a green, it was Oxford University Press, edited by Margaret Atwood, of course. Because back then everything was edited by Margaret Atwood. Yeah, and it was “Dark Pines Under Water” and I think it was only one poem that was anthologized in there. And I read it, I must’ve been 17 or 18–\n05:46\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwan reading the first lines of “Dark Pines Under Water”] This land like a mirror turns you inward / And you become a forest in a furtive lake.\n05:52\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tAnd that poem, which people say is about Canada, right? Like I think you and I were just discussing this before we turned these mikes on, but the… They say it’s about Canada, but I read it as being this like fear of the internal and sort of the fear of the Gothic-ness that lives inside us that we only see in reflection. Upon reflection, in reflection.\n06:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, continuation of Gwendolyn MacEwan reading “Dark Pines Under Water”] The dark pines of your mind reach downward, / You dream in the green of your time, / Your memory is a row of sinking pines.\n06:20\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tAnd there was enough in that poem for me to want to read more of her work.\n06:26\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, continuation of Gwendolyn MacEwan reading “Dark Pines Under Water”] Explorer, you tell yourself, this is not what you came for / Although it is good here, and green.\n06:33\tKatherine McLeod:\tActually when you mentioned your master’s, that was the first time I learned of MacEwen, was during my master’s degree out at UBC, out west in Vancouver. And I was in a course with Sherrill Grace and it was a CanLit graduate course and we were thinking about autobiography. And we read the play by Linda Griffiths Alien Creature: A Visitation by [sic: should read “from“] Gwendolyn MacEwen. And in the play, Linda Griffiths uses MacEwen’s words to conjure the presence of MacEwen as this magical poet and really to think about kind of really the reflection of the self through a poet’s words and a poet’s presence. And so I actually ended up writing about that play and that was my first academic publication, was about Linda Griffiths’s play about Gwendolyn MacEwen, sort of the presence of the voice in the play and as a remediation of MacEwen in that way. But it was, it was back in my master’s, too. So it’s sort of this long… MacEwen has always been.\n07:36\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tYou know, and I took these books off my bookshelf. There’s, you know, pictures of her on it and she had these huge, like, sad eyes, big, sad… You know, like that movie Big Eyes, it’s like that kind of thing. And I realized that like every poem I’ve ever read of hers, her eyes are there. Like they’re there somewhere. There’s a lot of looking, a lot of vision, a lot of dark vision, you know?\n07:56\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt really was the voice of her poetry, the sound of her poetry, the way she’s able to conjure up a presence through the words themselves. And I think a lot of her poetry actually has to do with, it has to do with haunting. There’s this sort of this continuation that’s really evoked in her poetry and a real, a strengthened voice that you can hear from the words on the page, I would argue. Even though it’s fascinating then to think that what often captures people is hearing MacEwen herself read the poems and then whenever someone’s able to listen to MacEwen, reading her poetry–\n08:30\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, continuation of the first Gwendolyn MacEwen recording] …but mark now how harmless are the claws…\n08:32\tKatherine McLeod:\t–is something that just captures one’s attention and she’s able to create a real strong sense of voice in her poetry and then, when it’s read out loud, it’s even more powerful.\n08:42\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Guitar And Drums]\n08:42\tHannah McGregor:\tI can’t remember the first time I heard Gwendolyn MacEwen’s voice, but I remember that I first heard her work read out loud by a friend. And I know that I was excited enough about her 1982 poetry collection, The T.E. Lawrence Poems, that I initially planned on writing about it in my dissertation before the practicalities of putting together a research project led me elsewhere. Actually, despite the fact that MacEwen was one of the authors who led me to the study of Canadian literature, I’ve never written about her formally. This podcast episode is the closest I’ve come. MacEwen was born in Toronto in 1941 and rose to fame quickly and young. She published her first collection of poetry in 1961 and won the Governor General’s Award for her fourth, The Shadow-Maker, in 1969 when she was not yet 30 years old. She died young, too, at 46, and the combination of her fascination with mysticism and the almost mythically tragic shape of her own life have turned her into a somewhat mythic figure in her own right.\n09:46\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tNo, she was deeply social and she was as famous as poets get, really, in Canada, ever. Like, she was a bit of a rock star, like she started doing things like having like a signature black eyeliner situation and like signature clothing, like loose silky things. I mean, come on, man, I wish I had like a signature look,\n10:05\tHannah McGregor:\tBut this iconic status was no accident. MacEwen came into her own as a poet in a historical moment when it was possible to be both a poet and a celebrity. And her poetic persona was very much tied to the culture of poetry readings in the 1960s, perhaps most notably at the Bohemian Embassy, an alternative club in Toronto where she would meet poets like Jay MacPherson, Margaret Avison, Phyllis Webb, Al Purdy, Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, and Milton Acorn.\n10:32\tKatherine McLeod:\tWell, I’ll start again. Like thinking about MacEwen also allows you to think about spaces for performances of poetry. Thinking about, say, the Bohemian Embassy in Toronto, you know, it’s talked about how MacEwen would show up to the Bohemian Embassy and there would be the sounds of like the coffee maker in the background and all these poets maybe reading with these like loud, bombastic voices or however, however poetry, you know, the poet’s voice was thought of. And then this woman’s coming up to the microphone and she’s often talked about as appearing very quiet and suddenly just absolutely captivating the audience. And I was so drawn to the fact that somebody very sort of unassuming could have such an impact and just call everyone’s attention. And it also, then it allows you to think about what it meant to be performing as a poet, a particularly very young female poet, at the time that MacEwen started doing her readings and being up there with a young Margaret Atwood and all the rest of the 1960s poets. Just how, how she held her own on that stage, too.\n11:32\tHannah McGregor:\tIn fact, it’s impossible for me to think about the historical context that shaped MacEwen’s work without thinking about that poetry scene of the 1960s and how central it was to the invention of that thing we now think of as CanLit. And when I think of MacEwen and the poet she would become, the poet who would write The T.E. Lawrence Poems and Afterworlds, collections that have haunted me as long as I can remember, I keep coming back to those years in the early ’60s to what happened to her then. And I’m not the only one.\n12:03\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Piano]\n12:06\tKatherine McLeod:\tI also think about the way that she was so determined to be a poet and there’s something about that, again, thinking of, you know, what models did she have to look to, to be a female poet in Canada at the time? Really she had to sort of forge her path of what that looked like and what that sounded like and trying to sort of find her place and her voice, the space for her voice, in that world. She was in the circles with so many of the very loudest male poets at the time and still managed, you know, she managed to be known for the strength of her voice, but it sounded incredibly difficult, too. And I was very interested in how she managed that and what she had to fight against in order for her voice to be heard. You know, who was this person Gwendolyn MacEwen? What kind of work could she have produced if she was in a more sustainable environment for her writing? You know, can we learn something from that now or are we still struggling against the very same things?\n13:04\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI often wonder sometimes when… ‘Cause she wrote a lot of her work after this was done, like most, the the bulk of her work after that marriage was over. And like there’s a part of me that sometimes thinks those things that she’s trying to access is maybe that marriage. Like I wonder sometimes, right? ‘Cause like when you get married or you’re in a relationship when you’re really young. Like, I got married really young, I got married, I met my ex-husband at 21, I was married at 24. By no means was that like an imbalanced marriage, I would never say that. But it defines you, I think. Like in your twenties, you’re exploring things, you don’t know who you are, your identity is so malleable. So what did Milton Acorn, what did he try to shape her into and what did she end up taking on and what did she end up rejecting would be my question. And I don’t think any of us will ever know this answer. But then looking at her poetry, I sometimes wonder if that darkness is there and that, and the way she would sort of like, as we were saying, she was not ever writing in the voices of men who were like loud, big, you know, masculine men. Always the opposite. And to me that’s kind of a gentle pushback against that Milton Acorn angry bear.\n14:07\tHannah McGregor:\tAs I was working on this episode, I reached out online for someone who could help me better understand MacEwen’s relationship with the poet Milton Acorn and how it might’ve shaped her work. My answer came serendipitously in the form of an essay by writer andrea bennett from their new book Like a Boy but Not a Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood Outside the Gender Binary, which is available for pre-order now from Arsenal Pulp Press. With their permission, here’s an excerpt from the essay\n14:36\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Low String Instruments]\n14:43\tHannah McGregor:\tIn the early 1960s, a part-bar, part-coffee shop, part-venue space opened on St. Nicholas Street, a few blocks up from Yonge and Wellesley in Toronto. Soon after it opened, poet Milton Acorn, then in his late thirties, began to hold court there. The Embassy held poetry readings on Thursday nights, when Acorn would read, generally overstaying his welcome on the stage. Afterwards, Acorn would find himself surrounded by younger poets, many of them students from the University of Toronto. Margaret Atwood, then a student at the University of Toronto, read at the Embassy; a little later, a teenage Gwendolyn MacEwen found the spot, the community—Acorn.\n15:23\tHannah McGregor:\tAcorn was bombastic, drank a lot, often had a fat cigar sticking out from the side of his mouth. MacEwen was slight and half his age but had a compelling voice of her own. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she wasn’t at university. She was self-taught, had had a tumultuous—occasionally violent, marked by alcoholism and mental illness—home life. Many of the books that chronicle Acorn and MacEwen’s relationship come close to saying that Acorn was something of a father figure for the younger poets gathered at the Embassy—dispensing poetic advice, maybe acting more like a big brother. Acorn started off as MacEwen’s “poetic mentor,” but their relationship soon morphed and they began to date. Eventually, they married. This was something Acorn wanted and MacEwen initially did not; he’d proposed in December 1960 when she was nineteen and he was thirty-seven, and she’d said no, writing, “Milt, my love is not the same as yours… I feel no need to find myself physically, sensually, emotionally in another person… I’m still getting acquainted with life, with myself.” However, she agreed to his proposal a little later; he was in Prince Edward Island for the winter, and she was missing him while he was away.\n16:39\tHannah McGregor:\tAcorn and MacEwen’s friends speculated about why they had gotten together at all. Chris Gudgeon’s biography of Milton Acorn, Out of this World, says people referred to them as Beauty and the Beast. It was easy to see why Acorn was drawn to MacEwen—she was young, beautiful, talented, and insecure. MacEwen, Gudgeon writes, quote, “fed Milt’s lopsided vision of himself as a heroic poet-knight, battling the dragons of injustice, and leaving the fair maidens swooning.” End quote. (Another Acorn biographer, Richard Lemm, is more explicit, quote: “He had a constant companion who would listen to his political discourses. A sexually experienced man, he could teach and savour his less experienced lover.”) End quote. Although it was less clear what had drawn MacEwen, one friend from the Embassy pointed out that when they met, in contrast to later on, Acorn seemed confident, strong, clean-shaven, eccentric but put-together. Acorn and MacEwen had friends who guessed that part of the reason she’d been attracted to him was career-related—she was “ambitious” and saw him as “established,” a way to further her writing and publishing goals; Al Purdy thought, quote, “Gwen was with Milton because Milton was ‘getting attention.’” End quote.\n17:53\tHannah McGregor:\tRosemary Sullivan, MacEwen’s biographer, writes that it’s important to be careful about the way we think about MacEwen and Acorn’s relationship in retrospect. There was a power imbalance, and the relationship seemed doomed from the start, and Acorn was persistent, but there’s no evidence that he was abusive, either physically or emotionally. At least, not until the relationship crumbled. MacEwen took a solo trip to Israel a few months after her wedding; when she returned, the distance and solitude had given her a new perspective on Toronto, and her relationship. As Sullivan puts it in Shadow Maker, quote, “Almost as soon as she had married, Gwendolyn recognized that she had made a terrible mistake.” End quote. MacEwen wanted a marriage of equals, and Acorn wanted a wife. Acorn was “deeply conservative” at heart, homophobic, anti-abortion (he wrote at least one terrible poem about it), and he wanted to see “supper on the table every night.”\n18:50\tHannah McGregor:\tMacEwen and Acorn had an open marriage; he’d taken advantage of this when she was away, and she began a side relationship with a painter when she returned from Israel. Acorn gave her an ultimatum—him or the painter—and, not even a year into their marriage, she chose to leave. It was a choice that Acorn could not brook. He fell apart. He drank; he showed up on friends’ doorsteps in the middle of the night, distraught and drunk; he wrote MacEwen angry, bitter letters. Quote, (“One letter from that time begins with ‘You Dirty Bitch’ and ends up asking ‘WHERE IN THE WORLD DID YOU LEARN TO BE SUCH A LOUSE?’” End quote. Writes Gudgeon; another, quoted in Shadow Maker, sent after MacEwen told Acorn of her intentions to divorce him, quote, “accus[es] her of being ‘the Great North American Castrator.’”) End quote. MacEwen wrote back, at least at the beginning, explaining herself, trying to make him understand. Reading their biographies, the snippets of his letters that make it through, it appears as though Acorn’s life had fallen apart, and he’d set the blame squarely on the shoulders of his much younger ex, who simply wanted space, freedom, and an amicable divorce. When Acorn refused to give her a divorce—in the era before no-fault divorces—MacEwen was forced to travel across the country, to Vancouver, to gather evidence of his marital infidelity in order to petition the courts. Purdy, who’d been Acorn’s best man at the wedding, reluctantly acted as a witness to Acorn’s adultery so that MacEwen could finally break free of the marriage.\n20:21\tHannah McGregor:\tIn 1969, years later, MacEwen and Acorn were both announced finalists, alongside George Bowering, for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry or Drama. Acorn was still a mess—outstaying his welcome at friends’ houses, drinking, not bathing, suicidal, hospitalized for depression, still half hoping MacEwen might come back and blaming her for everything that was wrong in his life. When MacEwen found out her book The Shadow-Maker was shortlisted alongside Acorn’s I’ve Tasted My Blood, Nick Mount writes in his book Arrival: The Story of CanLit, quote, “She was afraid enough of him to write to the judges that if there was any change of her having to share the award with Acorn, she would rather withdraw her book from consideration.” End quote. But she and Bowering won, and Acorn didn’t.\n21:10\tHannah McGregor:\tCanLit did not graciously accept MacEwen and Bowering’s wins. Instead, poets Irving Layton and Eli Mandel co-authored an open letter protesting Acorn’s loss. The letter was in part a call for money, to be raised and, quote, “presented to Milton Acorn as the Canadian Poets Award.” End quote. Another public plea for Acorn, this time an editorial by poets Seymour Mayne and Ken Hertz in a now-defunct Montreal literary magazine, reads, quote, “Either because of literary politics or a gross ignorance of Canadian poetry on the part of the Canada Council jury, Milton Acorn has been denied the Governor General’s Award that he truly has earned.” End quote. Acorn’s supporters generally focused their ire at Bowering. One of the three jurors who’d chosen MacEwen’s and Bowering’s books over Acorn’s was Warren Tallman, an American who’d been hired to teach English at the University of British Columbia; the thinking went that Bowering’s style, which was influenced by US poets, was emblematic of a type of cultural imperialism that needed to be studiously avoided if CanLit was to be its own proper national cultural project.\n22:17\tHannah McGregor:\tFive days after MacEwen and Bowering were fêted at their awards ceremony in Ottawa, a broad swathe of CanLit, including Layton, Purdy, and Atwood, showed up at Grossman’s Tavern, on Spadina Avenue in Toronto, to witness Acorn receive a cheque for $1,000 and a medallion naming him the People’s Poet. When I think of this night—Acorn got so drunk he lost the medallion twice; his friends let him read for forty minutes; he was roundly celebrated—I immediately picture MacEwen and wonder how she felt, if she was at home in her small apartment that night, if there was anyone with her. And I wonder if anyone at Grossman’s thought about MacEwen. Did they wonder, celebrating Acorn, if they were enacting a deeper injustice by attempting to address a perceived one?\n23:06\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Low String Instruments And Whistling]\n23:12\tHannah McGregor:\tIf MacEwen wasn’t quite part of that new CanLit scene represented at the People’s Poetry party at Grossman’s Tavern, maybe it was because she also wasn’t part of the project of building a thing that looked recognizably like CanLit,\n23:25\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tBut that white male sort of masculine sort of like, yeah, like the, it’s the Milton Acorn narrative. She just didn’t care. She just was like, “I don’t care. You guys go fight it out in your huts with your potatoes and axes. I’m going to go, I gotta to go to Egypt, get some bomb black eyeliner, see you later.”\n23:43\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd perhaps it’s something about her poetic rejection of accepted nationalist narratives, those “potatoes and axes” that Jen alludes to, that make her appeal to those who are a little skeptical about essentialist stories about what it means to be a Canadian or for literature to be Canadian.\n23:59\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI think there’s a lot of pressure for authenticity and I think it’s a marketing thing in many ways. I think that in my experiences writing for both big publishers and small presses, that the big publishers understand that a certain amount of authenticity sells, it doesn’t even really matter if you’re writing fiction. Like if you’re somebody, like, who looks like me and you’re writing a family story about a Chinese Canadian family, then the authenticity is easy to sell. It’s easy to sell. It’s like, “Well, Jen’s real grandfather was also a barber” or whatever. You know? It’s very much a merging of self, brand, and book.\n24:32\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd her lack of investment in those narratives can help to pry open the spaces to think about alternative ways of organizing our literary history.\n24:40\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tIn the history of Canada, for me anyway, like, I’m not a historian by any stretch. The only history of Canada that I’m familiar with, like, in any deep way is the history of Chinese Canadians. And for most of that time that there were white settlers on this, on this land, there were also Chinese Canadian, usually indentured, labourers. And I don’t think the garrison mentality, how many times can I say that on this recording?\n25:04\tHannah McGregor:\tOh, garrison mentality, for those who don’t know, is a term that was coined by literary critic Northrop Frye and kind of popularized by Margaret Atwood’s literary critical writing, which essentially argues that one of the major themes in Canadian literature is anxiety about the dangers and emptiness and threats of the Canadian landscape.\n25:25\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI don’t, it doesn’t suit their experiences of let’s just say being chased off a gold claim, doing laundry for the railway workers, being a railway worker, being abandoned by the railway and not having passage home, scouring the woods for the remains of your friends so you can send them back home for a proper burial. Where’s garrison mentality in that? It’s not the land that has destroyed them, it’s the white people. So like there’s an alternative there and I think that any sort of marginalized group who has, you know, been alongside the white settlers all this time could very well choose their own anthology that would support that narrative. And wouldn’t that be interesting?\n26:06\tHannah McGregor:\tThis isn’t to say there’s nothing CanLit-esque about MacEwen’s poetry career. In fact, MacEwen had a strong, if often largely functional, tie to the CBC. As Katherine McLeod explains, it began with a prize.\n26:18\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Low Strings]\n26:23\tKatherine McLeod:\tGwendolyn MacEwen won the CBC Poetry Prize in 1965 and at that point she was very young, very young poet. And through winning the prize, she got the attention of Robert Weaver who was then the producer and editor of the program Anthology, which was a CBC literary program that, you know, ran from the mid ’50s up until 1985, so very long standing literary program. And Robert Weaver became a really strong supporter of Gwendolyn’s work. So he had her on to read on Anthology shortly after winning the CBC Prize. And she then read on Anthology numerous times, but also started to write radio plays. So the one that she’s most well-known for is the play Terror and Erebus that is all about the Franklin expedition and the Northwest Passage. And she also, she wrote two more but, which aren’t as well-known, but that, the play Terror and Erebus, was broadcast in the mid ’60s and re-broadcast. And both by writing the plays and also reading for CBC, she was able to make a bit of money, which the reading on CBC and writing for CBC ended up being a way that she was able to support herself. Again, continuing that sense of wanting to really be a poet and be self-sustaining in that way.\n27:51\tKatherine McLeod:\tSo one of the programs that I uncovered that I thought was one of the most fascinating when I was listening to MacEwen’s readings on CBC in the ’60s was a program that she produced and created for Anthology that was broadcast in 1969 and it was called Gwendolyn MacEwen Introduces, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how this program, Gwendolyn MacEwen Introduces from 1969, is an opportunity for her to talk about other poets and other works that she’s interested in. So it was this moment of listening in the archives and expecting that, okay, maybe this is going to be another reading by MacEwen, which are fantastic and captivating, but in this case she was talking about other poets. It was actually a four-part series and that’s where, the last episode of that four-part series, I was most surprised by because that’s where she started to talk about flamenco.\n28:46\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Flamenco: Guitar And Clapping]\n28:53\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd that is where I nearly fell out of my seat because I was so thrilled and amazed that here I was in the CBC archives, listening to MacEwen, who I was fascinated by and working on, and at the same time I have been cultivating my own dance practice and flamenco throughout my academic work for the past 15 years. And here I was listening to MacEwen talk about flamenco and in this past year with Dr. Emily Murphy, who’s an assistant professor at UBC Okanagan, we’ve started a research creation project that lets me perform some of these recordings back from this 1969 piece and bring in the flamenco side, too.\n29:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tSo Gwendolyn MacEwen’s interest in flamenco, there’s all kinds of connections between MacEwen and music and especially the sort of the Toronto world music in the ’60s and artists that were passing through, this continues into the ’70s and is a whole other story of MacEwen and her partner in the ’70s opening the Trojan Horse cafe and connections to musicians passing through and performing there. But back to the ’60s, I’m trying to figure out where she would have heard it or how she would have first been drawn to flamenco, but it makes a lot of sense because there’s something undescribable about the sound of her voice and this feeling almost like the duende of flamenco, which is a word that refers to this undescribable sense that when you’re just really moved by something. And MacEwen’s program, part four of Gwendolyn MacEwen Introduces, is all focused on the duende. And she’s interested in thinking about the duende as it’s theorized in Spanish poetry and then in flamenco as this undescribable feeling of the depths of your soul and true feeling and emotion. She’s interested in how we can understand that in poetry. And she’s thinking about poetry outside of Canada, but then she starts to sort of reflect a little bit more on Canadian poetry and she asks the question, where is the duende in Canadian poetry? Which I just find fascinating because where she turns, I think, goes back to her trying to figure out where her voice sits in Canadian poetry because the person she turns to as an example is Irving Layton. And it’s so, when we’re thinking about what kind of models or what is she thinking about when she’s thinking about Canadian poetry that is moving, on the one hand, yes, I see why she talks about Layton’s poetry, but I found it fascinating that she didn’t give her own poetry as the example because I would argue that her poetry has the duende. Her poetry is the poetry that moves you and the poetry that has that undescribable feeling. So in listening to the piece, it was really interesting to hear her theorize all of this, but also not see herself in that. And then I, that’s when I started to think, okay, as a critic, how can I argue that MacEwen has the duende? And one of the ways that I feel like is most successful in arguing this is, in fact, to dance her poetry.\n32:11\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen Reading, Overlapped With Soft Flamenco] I should have predicted the death of this city. I could have predicted it if only there had been no such pretty flowers. No such squares filled with horses and their golden riders.\n32:26\tHannah McGregor:\tKatherine’s work on Canadian poetry and flamenco and Jen’s imaginative alternative anthologies that reject the garrison mentality’s settler-colonial meta-narratives of Canadian writing both point in different ways to how MacEwen’s poetics can lead us away from perceived notions of what Canadian poetry is or can be. And as I think about ways that those of us who care for her work can keep MacEwen’s contributions alive, I come back to her voice, so powerful that it feels fully present as I listen to it.\n32:59\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tThis, this one really affected me when I was like 19: “I don’t trust you for a single second, but / My bones turned gold in your hands’ warm holding / in the dark or in the bright heart of the morning. / And suddenly the days are longer than anything, / Longer than Tolstoy, longer than Proust, longer / Than anything. / But the days are also diving into nights, and / I told you our end lay in our beginning / So we drink to our end, always remembering / that at the bottom of the goblets of Pompeii / Was the skull; we crawl / Out of the night utterly broken, bruises / All over our souls, / But this pain returns me to the world. / Even in the end your perfidy serves me, so / The cry we made when we came, love, / Will sound the same and is the same / As the cry we will make when we go.” She knew she was gonna die young, I think. I think I’ll love her forever. And I think she never, she never disappoints. Every time you go back you’re still like, “Wow.” There’s always something else there because whatever is happening in our world or the things that we’re most consumed with, there will always be an element of that in her poem. So it’s the kind of poems that she wrote.\n33:58\tKatherine McLeod:\tThey were everything and everywhere. Playing a recording of her reading, it sounds so live and sounds so present. She’s still in motion. She’s still, she’s still alive. She’s not in the archive. She’s not in a box. She’s, she’s still here in very present. Thinking of the lines from “Past and Future Ghosts”: “Look out, you who inhabit those rooms of my future. I’m coming after you. I’m starting to haunt you. I’m starting right now.”\n34:25\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen Speaking] So listen, I had a great idea that if our voices gave out, we were just going to open up the record and bring a recorder up on stage and place the needle in the proper groove and then just let the record speak for itself. However, I guess the voice is intact.\n34:43\tMusic:\t[Intense Echoing Instrumental]\n34:53\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. I was the producer this month. Thanks so much to Stacey Copeland, SpokenWeb Podcast project manager and producer extraordinaire, for all her help. A special thank you to Jen Sookfong Lee, Katherine McLeod, and andrea bennett for their generous contributions to this episode. [Theme Music] To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":5.872171},{"id":"9647","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S1 Trailer, Welcome to SpokenWeb, 18 September 2019, Mcgregor"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/trailer/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creator_names_search":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah Mcgregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/e7410595-5a7c-4602-9105-dfab11d89b95/spokenweb_teaser_draft_2_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"spokenweb_teaser_draft_2_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:01:05\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,043,270 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"spokenweb_teaser_draft_2_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/trailer/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-09-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"contents":["(0:03)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\tCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n(00:16)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like?\n(00:19)\tRoy Kiyooka\tThose possibilities of utterance that is more than parochial.\n(00:25)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat stories will we hear if we listen to the archive?\n(00:28)\tG. McEwen\tPlace the needle in the proper groove and then just let the\nthe record speaks for itself.\n(00:34)\tHannah McGregor\tThis is SpokenWeb, a podcast about how literature sounds. I’m Hannah McGregor and every month I’ll be bringing you stories from across Canada that take us into the archives of our literary history.\n(00:50)\tDorothy Livesay\tMostly, I like to sort of go back over the years and trace the\ndifferent, uh, things.\n(00:56)\tHannah McGregor\tI hope you’ll join us at spokenweb.ca or wherever you get your\npodcasts.\n "],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549762342912,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":5.872171},{"id":"9649","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5 Trailer, Welcome to Season 5!, 18 September 2023, Harris, Healy, McGregor, McLeod and Mix"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-5/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Maia Harris","James Healy","Hannah Mcgregor","Katherine McLeod","Zoe Mix"],"creator_names_search":["Maia Harris","James Healy","Hannah Mcgregor","Katherine McLeod","Zoe Mix"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maia Harris\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"James Healy\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah Mcgregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Zoe Mix\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/6511fd80-29e0-41f2-8ad9-dda3420119fd/audio/a6369593-95d4-46c0-a56e-c005845f0179/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"trailer-v5-master.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:02:47\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"2,675,682 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"trailer-v5-master\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-5/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-09-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["The SpokenWeb Podcast is back for another season as we continue our quest to uncover “what literature sounds like.”\n\nWith a whole new line-up of episodes created by researchers across the SpokenWeb network, we’ll explore the sounds of translation, the act of uncertain listening, audio pedagogy, the intersection of computing, voice, and poetics, and much much more.\n\nOur fearless host Katherine McLeod is back and will be joined by Hannah McGregor, host of Seasons 1-3. Welcome back Hannah!\n\nWe have something for everyone curious about the affordances of literature, sound, history, and the amorphous “archive,” so join us for monthly episodes of innovative audio scholarship.\n\nSubscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And don’t forget to rate us and send us a shout! Cheers to Season 5 ~\n\n(00:03)\tHannah McGregor\t[Soft strummed guitar music plays and ends]\nWhat does the SpokenWeb podcast sound like?\n\n(00:10)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Quiet percussion music begins to play] In the fourth season of the SpokenWeb podcast, we conversed with a living archive.\n(00:15)\tComputerized Voice\tHello, and welcome to the Fred Wah Digital Archive.\n(00:19)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe listened to firsthand perspectives on living with wildfires in the Okanagan Valley.\n(00:24)\tSharon Thesen\tBy the time, I think, they started trying to put it out, it was out of control.\n(00:29)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe dove deeper into the sounds of data.\n(00:32)\tAdegbola\tHow much more a role will language play in the information age?\n(00:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe asked, what is sound design?\n(00:40)\tMiranda\tText, forms, travel, forms constrained, various forms overlap and intersect.\n(00:46)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe explored the impact of recording technology on how poetry finds its audiences.\n(00:53)\tFred Wah\tIn those days, that was really a surprise to be able to hear the voice of a poet who you had been reading off the page.\n(01:01)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe considered the stakes of inviting audiobooks into the literary classroom.\n(01:06)\tJentery\tWe might want to, for good reason, debunk the idea that listening is cheating or that, you know, books are not meant to be listened to.\n(01:12)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd we heard what libraries actually sound like.\n(01:15)\tDan Hackborn\tLike [Dan makes a nasally “wah” sound with his mouth] and like a [Dan makes a continuous “thunk” sound with his mouth].\n(01:20)\tKatherine McLeod\tOh, and we also went to talk therapy. [Percussion music ends abruptly]\n(01:25)\tPhone Voice 2\tOkay, well, why don’t you start by telling me how long you’ve been feeling this way.\n(01:30)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Percussion music begins again] My name is Katherine McLeod and I’m the voice behind Shortcuts on the SpokenWeb podcast feed. And I’ve been the solo host of the SpokenWeb podcast for this past season. This season I’ll be joined by Hannah McGregor, who is back. Yes, you might recognize her voice as the host of seasons one through three. Welcome back, Hannah.\n(01:51)\tHannah McGregor\tThank you, Katherine. It’s great to be back. And I am so excited to co-host season five with you and to work with our new production team: supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healey, and returning transcriber Zoe Mix.\n(02:10)\tHannah McGregor\tThis season we’ll continue exploring what literature sounds like with all news stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb Network. We’ll explore the sounds of translation, the act of uncertain listening, audio pedagogy, the intersection of computing voice and poetics, and much more. Subscribe to The SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And join us for season five. [Percussion music ends and guitar strumming music plays and then ends]\n"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549763391488,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":5.872171},{"id":"9588","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E9, Producing Queer Media, 1 June 2020, Mcgregor"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/producing-queer-media/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creator_names_search":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah Mcgregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/f5b242ab-5995-4284-8650-19a92cd3d654/sw-ep9-producing-queer-media_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep9-producing-queer-media_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:42:38\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"41,006,437 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep9-producing-queer-media_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/producing-queer-media/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-06-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/49.282403/-123.108550\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.108550\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Constellations Audio. https://www.constellationsaudio.com/ \\n\\nGlass, Ira. “Freedom Fries.” This American Life 23 January 2015. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/545/if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-say-it-in-all-caps/act-two \\n\\n“The Lesbian Show.” Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony. https://alotarchives.org/collection/lesbian-show . **Stacey also wished to issue the correction that The Lesbian Show episode discussed not baseball but track and field.\\n\\nMermaid Palace. https://mermaidpalace.org/ \\n\\nNoor, Poppy. “What is ‘sexy baby voice’? We spoke to a sociologist to find out more.” The Guardian 26 Feb 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/feb/26/what-is-sexy-baby-voice-sociologist \\n\\nThe Queer Public Podcast. https://www.queerpublic.org/ \\n\\nEpisode banner image courtesy of the City of Vancouver Archives / BC Lesbian and Gay Archives. Item : 2018-020.4643 – International Women’s Day [The Lesbian Show ‘Dykes on Mykes’ banner]. https://searcharchives.vancouver.ca/international-womens-day-the-lesbian-show-dykes-on-mykes-banner\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549772828672,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, there’s a name you might be familiar with — it’s mentioned every episode — that has so far been almost entirely off-mic. We’re talking about Stacey Copeland, SpokenWeb’s podcast project manager and supervising producer. Stacey helps to make this podcast possible, collaborating with SpokenWeb contributors from across the network to help conceptualize, produce, edit, publish, and promote each episode. But she’s also a scholar of sound in her own right, working on a PhD at Simon Fraser University. This month, SpokenWeb host Hannah McGregor sits down with Stacey to talk about what queer media sounds like, the feminist history of radio and podcast production, and how archival audio can help to build intergenerational intimacies.\n\nThis episode was a special cross-over between the SpokenWeb Podcast and\nSecret Feminist Agenda.\n\n00:00\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, there’s a name you might be familiar with—I mention it every episode—that has so far been almost entirely off-mic. I’m talking about Stacey Copeland, our podcast project manager and supervising producer. Stacey is a media producer and Joseph-Armand Bombardier PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication in Vancouver. During her Master’s work in Communication and Culture, she co-founded FemRadio, a Toronto-based feminist community radio collective. And of course she helps us make this podcast every month. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, I sat down with Stacey—well, we Zoomed—to talk about what queer media sounds, the feminist history of radio and podcast production, and how archival audio can help to build intergenerational intimacies. Here’s me and Stacey with episode 9 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “Producing Queer Media.” [Theme Music]\n \n\n01:55\tHannah McGregor:\tWhy don’t we start at the beginning with how you ended up being a person who researches radio and podcasts and sound?\n \n\n02:06\tStacey Copeland:\tOh, gosh. Well, I was born. No, I’m kidding.\n \n\n02:09\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n02:10\tStacey Copeland:\tI mean, the way that I kind of look back on the start of everything was just the amount of media consumption I did as a teenager was a big start of it.\n \n\n02:21\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n02:22\tStacey Copeland:\tSo I was actually a YouTuber for awhile when I was a teenager, [Laughs] which got me into doing covers, like posting covers of me playing guitar online. And then eventually joining a couple of LGBTQ queer teen collaboration groups. So we’d have like, you know, I was Wednesday, and my friend Daniel was on Tuesdays, and we’d have like Micah on Fridays, and those kind of classic YouTube community forums. So–\n \n\n02:57\tHannah McGregor:\tSo as you say classic–\n \n\n02:58\tStacey Copeland:\tClassic. [Laughs]\n \n\n02:58\tHannah McGregor:\tI am, I am too, too old to know any of these things.\n \n\n03:01\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n03:02\tHannah McGregor:\t“Oh, is that how it works? Great.”\n \n\n03:04\tStacey Copeland:\tSo yeah, back when YouTube was more community-based and less lots of very high production videos, there was a lot of these like collab channels that people were part of and so that’s what really got me into being more creative with sound and with video. And then I actually wanted to go to university to make music videos, originally. I was way more a visual person than I was a sound person.\n \n\n03:29\tHannah McGregor:\tOkay.\n \n\n03:30\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd so I applied to the RTA School of Media, which is a four-year undergraduate program at Ryerson University in Toronto. And it kind of gives you a great background… Used to be called Radio and Television Arts now is Media Production because who would wanna only learn about radio and television these days.\n \n\n03:49\tHannah and Stacey:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n03:51\tHannah McGregor:\tThis is old-timey media for hipsters.\n \n\n03:53\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah! [Laughs]\n \n\n03:53\tHannah McGregor:\tThat’s what they teach you.\n \n\n03:55\tStacey Copeland:\tSo I joined that program and in the first year you actually take audio production courses as your first courses, rather than video. And so that kind of gave me a taste for radio production in particular, and I definitely caught the bug. And so from that point, I started taking all of the audio production courses, got an internship at Indie88, which is a radio station in Toronto in my fourth year, and started doing contract production with them for a couple of years ’cause they’re great. And then… It also brought in like my music interests and my–\n \n\n04:32\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n04:33\tStacey Copeland:\t–hipster identity at the time.\n \n\n04:35\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs] Do you have, do you have a sense of why it is the audio production ended up appealing to you so much when you had been so focused on the visual to start?\n \n\n04:45\tStacey Copeland:\tI think at that point it was just because it brought in my interest in music in ways that I found more intimate and more relatable and I got to work much more closely with bands and with artists than you get to as part of a much larger video production team. You really get to be one-on-one and close up in person with the people that you’re working with in a different way. And it’s kind of like this family when you’re working in a group of people on a, on an audio production, a very tight knit family. And so from that, I ended up working as a lab assistant and production staff at Ryerson for, for awhile, for about a year after my undergrad and that gave me the teaching bug. And so I applied for grad school ’cause I said, “Well, how can I do this forever?”\n \n\n05:33\tHannah and Stacey:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n05:34\tHannah McGregor:\tThat is how so many of us get here.\n \n\n05:36\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah! So that’s what really brought me into doing my Master’s at Ryerson York in ComCult–\n \n\n05:42\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n05:43\tStacey Copeland:\t–which brought in the teaching–\n \n\n05:45\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat’s ComCult?\n \n\n05:46\tStacey Copeland:\tComCult, right. Communication and culture.\n \n\n05:49\tHannah McGregor:\tOkay. [Laughs]\n \n\n05:50\tStacey Copeland:\tThat program was great. It really introduced me more to theory and awoke my inner feminist a lot more–\n \n\n05:57\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n05:58\tStacey Copeland:\t–in thinking about my audio production and my approach to it. And so that’s why I ended up deep diving into feminist theory and sound and how they relate and how we can think about it. And–\n \n\n06:10\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n06:11\tStacey Copeland:\t–what does… What is the experience that women are having with their voices in audio production? So that’s what I ended up doing for my MA and then of course, PhD work now is just the next–\n \n\n06:21\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n06:21\tStacey Copeland:\t–chapter.\n \n\n06:22\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs] Ahaha…literally and figuratively.\n \n\n06:24\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah.\n \n\n06:25\tHannah McGregor:\tI… It’s so interesting to me the ways that people stumble across feminist theory for the first time, including those of us who, who might have sort of, looking back, been like, “Ah, I was a latent feminist that whole time, but didn’t have the language to articulate myself as such” or didn’t have any particular sense of what feminism meant beyond, like, “I am a woman and think I should be allowed to do things.”\n \n\n06:47\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n06:48\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich is, you know, a legitimate standpoint for feminism. My first encounter with feminist theory came through a theology course–\n \n\n06:56\tStacey Copeland:\tInteresting.\n \n\n06:57\tHannah McGregor:\t–I took at the University of Edinburgh and I read Judith Butler for the first time, like, against the Gospel of Mark. So it was just this real, like, like it was this weird way that I sort of entered into this theory, but then it’s like, it gets ahold of you and you’re like… I don’t know. I remember after reading Gender Trouble for the first time that it was the first theory book that I had been desperate to tell everybody about.\n \n\n07:21\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n07:22\tHannah McGregor:\tLike, that it broken open my brain so entirely that I just wanted to grab everybody and be like, “Did you hear?! Gender’s a performance!”\n \n\n07:29\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n07:30\tHannah McGregor:\t“I had no idea! But I’m so excited by that!” So, let’s talk a little bit more about gender and voice.\n \n\n07:36\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah.\n \n\n07:37\tHannah McGregor:\tLike what, what does… I mean, I know, but I’m going to go ahead and ask–\n \n\n07:40\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n07:40\tHannah McGregor:\t–the naive question: what did the gender and voice have to do with each other?\n \n\n07:44\tStacey Copeland:\tOh, gosh. So… [Nervous Laugh]\n \n\n07:46\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n07:48\tStacey Copeland:\tIt’s a casual question.\n \n\n07:50\tHannah McGregor:\tAren’t we all just people? Maybe?\n \n\n07:52\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n07:53\tHannah McGregor:\tAt the end of the day?\n \n\n07:53\tStacey Copeland:\tSo I mean, Judith Butler is a great, a great place to start. That was definitely one of my foundational texts, too. And one that got me real riled up… Because Butler doesn’t talk a ton about the voice or–\n \n\n08:06\tHannah McGregor:\tMm.\n \n\n08:07\tStacey Copeland:\t–about sound as part of our construction of gender. Which is fair, that was not very in fashion at the time, you might say.\n \n\n08:15\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n08:15\tStacey Copeland:\tI know my supervisor Milena Droumeva says this often that we’ve really hit this sonic turn–\n \n\n08:20\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n08:21\tStacey Copeland:\t–in the academy and in humanities–\n \n\n08:23\tHannah McGregor:\tMmm.\n \n\n08:23\tStacey Copeland:\t–and social sciences. And what that means is we’re really getting awoken to this idea of how our voices carry so much of our identity and our experience. And it’s often… If people aren’t seeing us in person for the first time, it’s the first thing they notice about us. And if they’re meeting us in person for the first time, it’s the second thing they notice about us. So it’s something that really changes people’s perceptions. And when you start to think about what your voice says about you, it also kind of opens up these questions of the different voices that we have in different contexts as well, and how gendered–\n \n\n09:08\tHannah McGregor:\tMm.\n \n\n09:08\tStacey Copeland:\t–that can often be. So part of my MA work was looking at particularly women’s experiences with their own voices in radio, in Toronto, and how they felt about it. Did they think it was high-pitched? Did they think it was low-pitched? Did they feel like they had a radio voice? What is a radio voice anyways? And what I found was for the most part, women working in the radio industry do have lower or what would be considered almost androgynous registers and pitches in their voices.\n \n\n09:43\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n09:44\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd they may not necessarily present their voice that way in person, but they do when they’re on the microphone. And I mean, even as scholars or as speakers, we often do that, too. We have a different vocal presentation that often–\n \n\n09:57\tHannah McGregor:\t100 percent.\n \n\n09:58\tStacey Copeland:\t–skews lower, which also translates to skewing as more masculine presenting, at least in Western culture.\n \n\n10:05\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n10:06\tStacey Copeland:\tSo even just there–\n \n\n10:07\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n10:07\tStacey Copeland:\t–we can think about some of the gendered aspects of voice.\n \n\n10:10\tHannah McGregor:\tOne of the many terrible jobs that I had as an undergraduate was working for a Rogers call centre.\n \n\n10:17\tStacey Copeland:\tMm!\n \n\n10:18\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd I was maybe six months into that job before I noticed that when I was on calls with men, I pitched my voice a full half octave higher. [Pitches Voice Higher] Like, it just went right up here, like, “Hi, my name is Hannah and I’m calling from Rogers Wireless.”\n \n\n10:32\tStacey Copeland:\tYep.\n \n\n10:33\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd I just like… I, it was, it was deeply unconscious and my voice has pitched lower, I think both naturally and through training as I’ve aged.\n \n\n10:42\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n10:43\tHannah McGregor:\tThat’s fairly common. In singing, we learn this, that our voices don’t sort of fully settle into their lifelong register until our thirties. And I started off singing much… Like I was a soprano when I was a kid and I sing bass now. But I will never forget a feminist mentor of mine telling me that I would have less difficulty in the classroom than other women my age because I had a naturally lower voice.\n \n\n11:06\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n11:06\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd that it’s like both as simple and as complicated as that, that when your voice is lower, it registers as more masculine, which is synonymous with more authoritative. And so it will be easier to make people listen to you and take you seriously because your voice is lower.\n \n\n11:19\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah! And this is a common experience. Like–\n \n\n11:22\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n11:22\tStacey Copeland:\t–when you have these conversations with women, it’s often something that they have experienced in one way or another or have talked to another friend about having this experience.\n \n\n11:32\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n11:32\tStacey Copeland:\tSo we can think of… I know a lot of people probably watched Love Is Blind recently [Laughs] on Netflix. [Laughs]\n \n\n11:39\tHannah McGregor:\tI did not, but continue your point.\n \n\n11:40\tStacey Copeland:\tOh, gosh.\n \n\n11:42\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n11:42\tStacey Copeland:\tAs a, as a nerdy, like, gender and voice scholar, I was like, “Whoa!”\n \n\n11:46\tHannah McGregor:\tOh, oh…\n \n\n11:47\tStacey Copeland:\t“A show where they meet and they don’t see each other in person? They just have to fall in love with their voice??”\n \n\n11:52\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs] Okay, yep. I see why this would have interested you.\n \n\n11:56\tStacey Copeland:\tBut there’s this one character and there’s a great article online when the show first came out by Anne Karpf who’s also a feminist voice and radio scholar and critic [sic: the article was by Poppy Noor, in which she interviewed Anne Karpf]. And it was talking about how this one particular character on the show actually has this sort of baby voice that she puts on whenever she’s–\n \n\n12:16\tHannah McGregor:\tMm.\n \n\n12:16\tStacey Copeland:\t–speaking to the person that she’s dating. And it actually pitches more baby and higher when they’re in person, rather than when she’s behind the screen. So…\n \n\n12:29\tHannah McGregor:\tHuh!\n \n\n12:30\tStacey Copeland:\tRight there’s like this very fascinating demonstration for everyone watching Love Is Blind in the way that we change our vocal performance and interaction depending on who we’re talking to because she wasn’t doing this to her voice when she was just talking to the other women in the social off time that they had, it was only in these particular situations. And so it brought up these really great conversations online around baby voice–\n \n\n12:58\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n12:59\tStacey Copeland:\t–and the long history of that voice. We think of characters like Marilyn Monroe.\n \n\n13:03\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:04\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd why do we think that’s sexy? Why does anyone think baby voice is sexy, right?\n \n\n13:08\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n13:10\tStacey Copeland:\tSo it brings up these really interesting conversations around how we identify what’s sexy, what’s masculine, what’s feminine.\n \n\n13:18\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:19\tStacey Copeland:\tIs it a way to be more submissive in having this kind of youthful sounding voice? And, and it comes–\n \n\n13:26\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:26\tStacey Copeland:\t–into biology, like you said. As we age, we tend to have lower voice. And that also translates to–\n \n\n13:33\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:33\tStacey Copeland:\t–our understanding of what voices have authority, as well, both men–\n \n\n13:39\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:39\tStacey Copeland:\t–and people who are older. And so we then hit this like youth demo using baby voice to be sexy because it’s a little submissive. And then also having vocal fry, which I know I have a ton of–\n \n\n13:51\tHannah McGregor:\t[Exasperated Sigh in Agreement]\n \n\n13:51\tStacey Copeland:\t–because we’re, our voices–\n \n\n13:52\tHannah McGregor:\t[Exasperated Sigh]\n \n\n13:53\tStacey Copeland:\t–are trying to hit those lower registers to seem authoritative.\n \n\n13:57\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm!\n \n\n13:58\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n13:58\tHannah McGregor:\tI…could scream about vocal fry until the cats come home.\n \n\n14:01\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n14:01\tHannah McGregor:\tOne of my early sort of personal encounters with how much I was gonna fixate on gendered voices in podcasting was Marcelle my co-, the co-host of Witch, Please and I were invited onto CBC Edmonton AM–\n \n\n14:18\tStacey Copeland:\tOkay.\n \n\n14:19\tHannah McGregor:\t–to talk about gender and podcasting. In particular, to talk about why there are so many fewer women in podcasting than men. Though, that has change–… I mean, this was like a good five or six years ago.\n \n\n14:29\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n14:29\tHannah McGregor:\tThat demographic is shifting decisively.\n \n\n14:32\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, hot conversation in like 2014.\n \n\n14:34\tHannah McGregor:\tYes.\n \n\n14:35\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs] Yeah.\n \n\n14:35\tHannah McGregor:\tSo it was a hot conversation at the time. It was like, podcasting is 75% men, what’s going on, what are the barriers to access? And so we came on this radio show to talk about this. And we were talking about how one of the barriers to access for women is the policing of women’s voices.\n \n\n14:49\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n14:49\tHannah McGregor:\tThe way that women talk is always wrong. And that… We were talking about that iconic This American Life story, “If You Don’t Have Something Nice to Say, SAY IT ALL IN CAPS,” [sic: should read “If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS”] where they talk about how the top form of hate mail they get is about the voices of their young women producers.\n \n\n15:04\tStacey Copeland:\t[Sadly] Yeah.\n \n\n15:04\tHannah McGregor:\tLike, nothing makes their listeners as mad as the sound of a young woman with vocal fry.\n \n\n15:08\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n15:08\tHannah McGregor:\tLike, just makes them lose their fucking minds. And we were talking about how there’s sort of this pseudoscientific concern-trolling attached to it.\n \n\n15:17\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n15:17\tHannah McGregor:\tLike, “Oh, well, it’s bad for your voice. And that’s why you need to stop. Vocal fry wrecks your voice. We’re really just worried about you.” Which every woman has experienced somebody using this kind of like pseudomedical concern-trolling to–\n \n\n15:31\tStacey Copeland:\tGaslighting. [Laughs]\n \n\n15:32\tHannah McGregor:\t–to control us. Ga- precisely. It is absolutely gaslighting with a thin veneer of the medical on top of it.\n \n\n15:37\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n15:39\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd the host was like, “Oh, well actually vocal fry is extremely bad for your voice, though.” And then just launched into like, mansplaining vocal fry to us. We like lost our goddamn minds. [Laughs] What is happening here?? Anyway, all of our listeners listened to the segment and then were really mean to him on Twitter all day.\n \n\n15:57\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n15:58\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd it was very satisfying.\n \n\n16:00\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. I mean, vocal fry is really fascinating that way. And you have to ask the question well, who is being, you know, bothered by vocal fry? What’s the demographic behind that? Because it’s very unlikely that it’s younger women who also have vocal fry. There is–\n \n\n16:19\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, we’re not mad. [Laughs]\n \n\n16:19\tStacey Copeland:\t–the argument that it is a millennial and Gen Y, just, vocalization the same way that we had Valley Girl as a kind of slang and vocalization in generations before us. So, there’s… Part of what I found in my MA work was that a lot of younger women actually really enjoy the sound of vocal fry–\n \n\n16:40\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n16:40\tStacey Copeland:\t–because to them, it sounds like them. It’s, it’s more–\n \n\n16:43\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n16:43\tStacey Copeland:\t–like having a conversation with a friend, rather than a, a formal radio broadcast presenter, you know?\n \n\n16:50\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, yeah. And I wonder if the embrace of things like vocal fry is one of the sonic differences between radio and podcasting, that podcasting has sort of emerged as a space where in fact, because there’s a younger demographic who are hosting sometimes, and because there’s a sort of casualness behind a lot of the recording settings, that you are more likely to hear vocal fry on a podcast than on the radio and that becomes part of what makes it feel like a cozier medium.\n \n\n17:14\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm. Yeah, and it’s easier for vocal fry to come across, too, because there’s not as much high compression on the voice. You’re maybe listening or most likely listening on headphones versus on a blasting car stereo.\n \n\n17:28\tHannah McGregor:\tMm…\n \n\n17:29\tStacey Copeland:\tSo even when you maybe have a vocal fry voice—I’ve had this experience—and are doing a radio broadcast, it doesn’t necessarily come through because it’s smoothed out and compressed, versus on a podcast where we kind of let things breathe a little bit more because it is more conversational.\n \n\n17:46\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n17:47\tStacey Copeland:\tSo I think podcasting, yeah, it’s definitely more conversational, but it’s also produced differently. There’s a different–\n \n\n17:54\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n17:54\tStacey Copeland:\t–logic behind it often.\n \n\n17:56\tHannah McGregor:\tUgh, I love that. Okay, let’s fast forward now to that, to that next chapter. Tell me about what your research is about now.\n \n\n18:04\tStacey Copeland:\tOh, gosh. So I just presented my, and defended my, proposal a couple weeks ago. So…it’s fairly fresh in my mind.\n \n\n18:11\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n18:13\tStacey Copeland:\tBut– [Laughs]\n \n\n18:13\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd still in, in that pure form before you’ve actually started trying to write it.\n \n\n18:17\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, exactly.\n \n\n18:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhen it’s just a, just a perfect idea.\n \n\n18:19\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs] I’m in the ethics stage now and quickly realizing how much work I have ahead of me in the next year.\n \n\n18:27\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n18:27\tStacey Copeland:\tBut it’s exciting. So, basically, the, the one-liner or the elevator pitch version is–\n \n\n18:33\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n18:35\tStacey Copeland:\t–I’m, I’m looking to ask the question, how is gender and sexuality communicated through audio media?\n \n\n18:41\tHannah McGregor:\tMm!\n \n\n18:41\tStacey Copeland:\tSpecifically asking that question in relation to audio produced by queer women in different decades. So the two kind of foundational shows that I’m looking at are The Lesbian Show, which was on Vancouver’s co-op radio in the 1970s, 1979, all the way into the early 2000s. So quite a few decades on air.\n \n\n19:07\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n19:08\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd then Dykes on Mykes, which is a community radio show out of Montreal, CKUT. And these are kind of my foundational shows of thinking about the production of audio and radio by queer women for queer women talking about queer identity. And from these shows, the goal is to create an intergenerational analysis where I interview these, these particular producers and then make linkages to contemporary podcasts that are making content either connected to or influenced by or reflecting back to these, these foundational shows. So for instance, I’m sure a lot of people, if they’re into queer podcasting or just like more intimate feminist podcasting, have listened to The Heart.\n \n\n20:00\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n20:01\tStacey Copeland:\tIt’s a great podcast. But what a lot of people don’t know unless they dig deeper is that podcast, The Heart, was actually a community radio show audio smut on CKUT at the same–\n \n\n20:13\tHannah McGregor:\tHuh!\n \n\n20:14\tStacey Copeland:\t–community radio station as Dykes on Mykes. So making these kind of linkages to where are we finding these groups of feminist and queer community who are making audio either in the same spaces or together or are influencing each other and how does that transition from historical understandings of community radio, and how that was produced,–\n \n\n20:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n20:35\tStacey Copeland:\t–into podcasting today? So with shows like The Heart… There’s another great one, Asking For It, by the same collective, which is Mermaid Palace. And… There’s quite a few out there there’s, there’s Queer Public, which is another great podcast out there, also someone from Montreal CKUT-background who’s producing that. So making these kind of connections early on made me wonder what the intergenerational overlap is in–\n \n\n21:04\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n21:04\tStacey Copeland:\t–the experience and underlying desires in producing queer media as queer women.\n \n\n21:11\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n21:11\tStacey Copeland:\tWho is it for? What’s the intention behind it? What does it sound like?\n \n\n21:16\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n21:17\tStacey Copeland:\tWhat’s queer media anyways? And what, what is that when you’re doing it on the radio, when both queer politics and feminist movements have this very long history of visual metaphors, of visibility, of coming out, right? What does it mean when that’s being done only through sound?\n \n\n21:36\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n21:36\tStacey Copeland:\tSo that’s what I’m really interested in exploring over the next year, anyways.\n \n\n21:40\tHannah and Stacey:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n21:40\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, yeah. I love this focus on the intergenerational, which is such a necessary and often fraught conversation when we are talking about, I think, both feminist and queer, intergenerational solidarity and divisions.\n \n\n21:54\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm!\n \n\n21:55\tHannah McGregor:\tI’ve been talking a lot with other queer and feminist friends about this feeling sometimes that, I think because we are so invested in a constant movement towards greater liberation, that there is a tendency to, as I usually put it, eat our mothers.\n \n\n22:17\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. That’s, that’s a great way to say it.\n \n\n22:19\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich is to say that in order to articulate our greater liberation, it often involves a kind of disavowal of those who came before us. And we’re seeing that playing out in Vancouver in all kinds of complex ways, especially around the surprisingly [Laughs] vocal TERF movement in this city and the way that a trans inclusive queerness and a trans inclusive feminism feels this need to break with what is not necessarily, but it’s often seen as, a generational divide. I think that’s important to, to distinguish: that it isn’t necessarily a generational divide, but that’s often how we understand it as a like, “Oh, those are like… Lesbians from the ’70s hated trans women. And so we distinguish ourselves from that generation.” And the figuring out ways to find forms of continuity and to build dialogue, like, intergenerational dialogue feels like really vital work…right now to try to sort of, I don’t know, figure out how we can find different ways to relate to the generations who came before us that are not a sort of burn it down, build something new out of the ashes. [Laughs]\n \n\n23:27\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm! I mean, that’s a big part of the issue with the waves metaphor in feminism, that–\n \n\n23:33\tHannah McGregor:\tMm!\n \n\n23:33\tStacey Copeland:\t–everything comes in waves, but we have this first, second, and third, and fourth, and arguably fifth, [Laughs] at this point in the way that we’re micro-breaking it down into almost standpoints or initiatives. So…\n \n\n23:46\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n23:47\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, part of what I’m really fascinating in, in doing is taking a step back and asking, “Well, we can’t just simply dismiss all of the work that lesbian feminists in particular did in the ’70s.” Yes, there are awful stories, there are dark histories, but we need to open those up and see what else was going on. Well, why was this happening at that time? What are the other stories? What were some of the wins that were coming out of that? And how, how was that politics influencing everyone who came in the decade or wave after, and then now, as well, when we start to see this rising of queer feminist work and people taking up even lesbian feminist and lesbian separatist identities—which I found very fascinating—or using the term “sapphist” for instance.\n \n\n24:39\tHannah McGregor:\tHaha!\n \n\n24:40\tStacey Copeland:\tRight?\n \n\n24:40\tHannah McGregor:\tThat I’ve never come across.\n \n\n24:41\tStacey Copeland:\tOh.\n \n\n24:41\tHannah McGregor:\tBut…\n \n\n24:41\tStacey Copeland:\tIt’s new. If you go on Tumblr…\n \n\n24:42\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs] Ah, Tumblr. Fucking Tumblr. Everything I know about gender and sexuality, I definitely learned from Tumblr use.\n \n\n24:50\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs] Yeah, so the term sapphist, it’s there. And it’s making a comeback, which is fascinating to me. So there is this kind of desire I think people have of looking back, of trying to understand where these movements came from and reconnecting to feminists who maybe are from older demographics. And this… You know, it’s not unheard of. When we think of the way that we interact with our grandparents or elders in our lives, this should also be happening within queer and feminist communities–\n \n\n25:24\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n25:24\tStacey Copeland:\t–so that we can understand what people went through and what people experienced before we got to the point we’re at now.\n \n\n25:32\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n25:32\tStacey Copeland:\tHow did we come to a moment where we have, you know, queer same sex marriage in Canada when we have something like the Me Too movement that didn’t just spring up overnight?\n \n\n25:43\tHannah McGregor:\tNo. Okay, I want to talk more about what queer production sounds like, but just a brief aside about intergenerational and queer ancestors: have you watched A Secret Love yet?\n \n\n25:55\tStacey Copeland:\tNoo, it’s on my, it’s on my, my list on Netflix.\n \n\n25:58\tHannah McGregor:\t[Emotional Exhalations] Hoo, whoa. I mean, I strongly recommend it and I also cried so much.\n \n\n26:06\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah!\n \n\n26:07\tHannah McGregor:\tIt’s…\n \n\n26:08\tStacey Copeland:\tMy social media feed is full of people talking about how emotional it is. And I’m like, I need to be in a space where I’m prepared to watch this.\n \n\n26:13\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, you gotta be ready. I was not ready. I thought it was just going to be like fun, like, “Ooh, A League of Their Own.”\n \n\n26:20\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n26:20\tHannah McGregor:\t“Like, look at this, old-timey lesbians!” But it was a full on like five Kleenex situation.\n \n\n26:24\tStacey Copeland:\tMm.\n \n\n26:25\tHannah McGregor:\tIt was, it was intense. But also really exciting to get even this micro history told through a queer lens. I was chatting with a friend—a friend of the show—Cynara Geissler about it afterwards. And she was like, “Isn’t it interesting that the two women being described met in Moose Jaw and moved to Chicago in the ’40s because it was safer.” And she was like, “What narratives do we hear about Chicago in the ’40s? It’s never that it is a safe place to be.” It’s always articulated as this like, den of iniquity, this wildly dangerous city. But all of our definitions of like what makes a city safe are really, really different when you’re like…a couple of lesbians in the ’40s–\n \n\n27:10\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n27:10\tHannah McGregor:\t–doing something that is literally illegal. You know, all of a sudden the big city becomes safe for you in a different way. And it was just like, even in that small register, the way that we understand reality, historically, becomes so, so different when we’re offered different lenses on it. Anyway.\n \n\n27:27\tStacey Copeland:\tNo, completely. So I–\n \n\n27:28\tHannah McGregor:\tRec-, recommend.\n \n\n27:29\tStacey Copeland:\t–I’ve listened to quite a bit of The Lesbian Show so far. There’s a big collection of it as part of the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony, which is an initiative by Elise Chenier here at Simon Fraser. And then there’s a new big collection at the Vancouver Archives, which I’m very excited about. But listening back to these shows, there is so much fascinating history and interesting, very queer sound moments like sexual innuendo commentary over a lesbian baseball game [sic: should read “track and field”] at the Gay Games, you know?\n \n\n28:05\tHannah McGregor:\tYep!\n \n\n28:06\tStacey Copeland:\tOr a tap dancing competition on air. [Laughs] And then like…\n \n\n28:12\tHannah McGregor:\tSo many of the lesbians I know love tap dancing. [Jokingly] Can you explain that to me?\n \n\n28:16\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs] I don’t know.\n \n\n28:17\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n28:17\tStacey Copeland:\tMaybe it’s connected to this ’70s and ’80s fad.\n \n\n28:21\tHannah McGregor:\tOkay, great.\n \n\n28:21\tStacey Copeland:\tI don’t know, right? And then other moments like Valentine’s call-in shows where women could call in anonymously and the host would read out a love letter to the person that they were having a crush on if they wanted to stay anonymous. And so we get all of these kinds of historical points and we also get a lot of discussions around like working class lesbians and Black feminist lesbianism. And they also do discussions on global issues and transgender issues and solidarities, as well, throughout the LGBTQ community and the poor community, because they were also rooted in community radio stations.\n \n\n29:03\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n29:04\tStacey Copeland:\tSo making those kind of connections and hearing those stories really does question and rewrite the histories that we understand.\n \n\n29:11\tHannah McGregor:\tThat’s so exciting. History’s great, right? What a fun discipline.\n \n\n29:15\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n29:15\tHannah McGregor:\tMedia history is the best. So, you mentioned that you’re interested in, like, what does queer media sound like?\n \n\n29:21\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n29:21\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does queer production sound like? And that was like… It really struck me even when you were describing like how podcasting and radio sound differently because they’re produced differently.\n \n\n29:31\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n29:32\tHannah McGregor:\tSo have you started to hypothesize what queer production sounds like?\n \n\n29:37\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, it’s tough, but there’s already some examples that have come out of my kind of initial research into the subject. And some of them are when you’re looking back at community radio, those moments where you can imagine someone flipping through the dial and then all of a sudden they’re hearing two lesbians talk very sexually about another woman playing baseball [sic: should read “track and field”]. That kind of a moment is really, very queer, very queer–\n \n\n30:03\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n30:04\tStacey Copeland:\t–in a way that–\n \n\n30:05\tHannah McGregor:\tYep!\n \n\n30:05\tStacey Copeland:\t–in a way that isn’t the same as podcasting because podcasting, in contrast, someone’s going to be choosing to listen to that show.\n \n\n30:12\tHannah McGregor:\tMm…\n \n\n30:13\tStacey Copeland:\tSo then how are those produced in a more… To create a more queer audio experience? And I think shows like Asking For It that Kaitlin Prest and the collective at Mermaid Palace are, are making–\n \n\n30:25\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n30:26\tStacey Copeland:\t–are great example of some of the queer feminist work that we’re going to see moving forward where we have lesbian, queer, and feminist protagonists–\n \n\n30:36\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n30:36\tStacey Copeland:\t–and taking on more difficult subjects, like same-sex relationship abuse and domestic abuse, but in ways that really bring us into the spaces in new ways. So it’s not just voice-over conversation or a journalistic style of production. It’s actually taking us into those rooms with the couple…\n \n\n30:58\tHannah McGregor:\tMm.\n \n\n30:59\tStacey Copeland:\tHearing both sounds of violence but also sounds of intimacy and sex in a podcast between two women, right?\n \n\n31:10\tHannah McGregor:\tYep!\n \n\n31:10\tStacey Copeland:\tCreates these very queer audio experiences that we aren’t used to hearing. And really, podcasting is perfect for creating that kind of experience in contrast to radio, because little coos from a woman, for instance, or soft crying is something that’s much harder to communicate because of the compression and way that radio is broadcasted in contrast to a podcast.\n \n\n31:36\tHannah McGregor:\tOh, that’s, that’s super interesting. I just finished listening to the second season of Within the Wires.\n \n\n31:42\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm, yeah!\n \n\n31:43\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich is also–\n \n\n31:43\tStacey Copeland:\tI’ve started listening to that. It’s so good!\n \n\n31:45\tHannah McGregor:\tIt’s, it’s really good. And the second season has all of these examples of both crying and also intentional silences where the narrator is supposed to be recording these audio guides to art that was created by her former lover. And she begins to cry and then just stops talking for lengths of time. And as I was, was walking around and listening and I was like, “Oh, this is impossible in any other medium.” Because you can’t… There’s an intentionality to listening and a kind of duration to listening with podcasting where like, I will sit here and listen to a solid minute of silence because I understand you have put it here intentionally.\n \n\n32:27\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n32:27\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd that will register to me. Whereas if you’re flipping… [Laughs] I mean, I imagine if you’re flipping through the radio, ’cause when have I flipped through the radio in my adult life? The answer is zero times.\n \n\n32:36\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n32:37\tHannah McGregor:\tBut I imagine if you’re flipping through the radio and come across a station where there is a minute of silence, you will assume it’s just not a station and keep going.\n \n\n32:44\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, exactly. You’ll assume something’s going wrong and go somewhere else.\n \n\n32:47\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, Yeah.\n \n\n32:49\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. Yeah, moments like that. And there’s also work with groups like Constellations. I don’t know if you’ve heard of, of Constellations, but it was originally an installation—sound art installation—in Toronto and then it was put online as a series of podcasts. And it’s really sound artists and podcasts and audio producers making these pieces that kind of push the boundaries in the way that we understand radio and podcast production and asking–\n \n\n33:20\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n33:20\tStacey Copeland:\t–really intimate questions. So one of the episodes, for instance, takes us into a session where the audio producer is learning how to sing and voc-…and vocalize. But it takes us into these very intimate spaces in a way that sounds quite different because we’re hearing the room, we’re hearing overlap of time, so I think that’s another way that we can think about it: a queering of audio and queering of media is playing with our sense of time and space–\n \n\n33:50\tHannah McGregor:\tMm, mhm.\n \n\n33:51\tStacey Copeland:\t–in a way that we don’t necessarily hear in traditional, linear, radio formats, right? It’s ’cause–\n \n\n33:57\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n33:57\tStacey Copeland:\t–radio is traditionally produced as very linear: you tune in at six o’clock, it’s going to be the six o’clock news. You tune in at five, we’ve got the traffic, right?\n \n\n34:08\tHannah McGregor:\tYep!\n \n\n34:09\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd it’s cyclical as well. So it’s always pre-produced and cyclical every day. Versus podcasting can really play with those senses of time and space in a new way.\n \n\n34:18\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah. So this… Listening to you talk about production in this way… I mean, you are a great example of a scholar who comes into their work with a kind of experiential knowledge because of your background in audio production.\n \n\n34:33\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n34:33\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd I imagine your knowledge of audio production heightens your ability to understand what you’re hearing and the kinds of deliberate choices that people are making when they are producing radio or podcasts. But I wonder if sort of before SpokenWeb and the other work we’re doing together, if you had been thinking about, you know, sharing some of your research as a podcast, like, is that an impulse that you have given that you both work on and think about sound and are also a producer yourself?\n \n\n35:05\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, and it’s hard. [Laughs] So…\n \n\n35:07\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n35:09\tStacey Copeland:\tIt’s very, very… It’s a very different experience ’cause when you’re writing academic work, you’re writing with an academic audience in mind versus when–\n \n\n35:17\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n35:17\tStacey Copeland:\t–you’re creating something like a podcast or a radio documentary, you really want to make it as accessible as possible. And that can often be difficult to do–\n \n\n35:26\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n35:27\tStacey Copeland:\t–as you know, from making this–\n \n\n35:28\tHannah McGregor:\tUh-huh\n \n\n35:28\tStacey Copeland:\t–show and working with SpokenWeb. So I actually… I attempted to do that for a first time during my MA. So I made a three-piece radio documentary that went with my MA work. I think the first part is really good and I think then I got too heady and it’s really still–\n \n\n35:46\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n35:46\tStacey Copeland:\t–for an academic audience in the second–\n \n\n35:48\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n35:48\tStacey Copeland:\t–and third part. But my, my goal is to try and do that again with my PhD work.\n \n\n35:53\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n35:53\tStacey Copeland:\tSo radio documentary, audio documentary is part of the process that I’m going through. So I’ll be keeping an audio diary as a feminist reflexive method–\n \n\n36:04\tHannah McGregor:\tYes.\n \n\n36:04\tStacey Copeland:\t–throughout my research process. So after each interview, I’ll sit down with my microphone and kind of detox and have a bit of a–\n \n\n36:11\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n36:12\tStacey Copeland:\t–confessional moment and work through my material that way. And so I am trying to think through, and I think working with SpokenWeb and thinking about the way that we can translate academic work into something that’s more publicly accessible and just more enjoyable, to be honest. Sometimes reading–\n \n\n36:30\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm!\n \n\n36:31\tStacey Copeland:\t–a lot of large manuscripts and articles can, can be a lot if you want to grasp a subject. I know I’m more of an oral learner. So thinking about the ways that we can use some of these production techniques, and especially when you’re thinking about sound and in something intimate, like queer experience and queer identity, how can I marry these two things together in a way that really makes it useful and enjoyable and also informative, right?\n \n\n36:59\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs] Yeah.\n \n\n36:59\tStacey Copeland:\tAt the end of the day, getting those ideas across is a big part of it.\n \n\n37:02\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n37:02\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd so I do think SpokenWeb is doing some interesting work that way.\n \n\n37:06\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd it’s also interesting, as part of working on this project, to see the places that are challenges and the places that come more easily and maybe whose work lends itself to that kind of translation or mobilization more readily, right? Because there are, there are different kinds and levels of translation that are required for different kinds of fields. And there is… I, I’ve been finding myself… I’m trying to relearn how to write right now–\n \n\n37:37\tStacey Copeland:\tMm.\n \n\n37:38\tHannah McGregor:\t–because I was rigorously trained how to write over a decade of education in a very particular way with a very narrow audience in mind and have come to the conclusion that I personally don’t particularly want to write to that audience. I mean, I don’t want to exclude that audience either, but I don’t want that to be my primary audience. But the ease with which I produce scholarly prose at this point is such that it is like physically difficult [Laughs] to produce anything else. But I have to stop myself and be like, “Nope, okay, nobody understands any of these words and also that sentence was 14 lines long. Why are you doing this?”\n \n\n38:18\tHannah and Stacey:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n38:19\tHannah McGregor:\tA friend of mine once said, “I write as though I’m challenging myself to fit every preposition into every sentence.”\n \n\n38:25\tHannah and Stacey:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n38:26\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich was rude, but true. And podcasting for me, especially sort of over these different projects, has been a way to try to find a different voice as a scholar. That rather than starting with the work and then trying to translate it, by actually doing the thinking through this medium I’m finding the ability to, to articulate a different kind of scholarly voice with a different audience and a different conversation in mind. So I love that idea of like keeping the audio journal as you go, of, of building sound into the process itself so that it’s not a sort of “once all the research is done and I’ve written all of the papers and I know everything and exactly how I want it to sound, then I will translate it.” It’s like, how do I actually think when I think out loud?\n \n\n39:17\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n39:17\tHannah McGregor:\tBecause we think differently, don’t we, when we think out loud?\n \n\n39:21\tStacey Copeland:\tI mean, I know I do. Yeah. And sound does bring this entirely new element into it. Part of the other sound element that I’m bringing into my process is actually playing archival clips for my interviewees to kind of evoke–\n \n\n39:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMm…\n \n\n39:35\tStacey Copeland:\t–some of those memories and experiences back. And I think that’s part of what excited me about the SpokenWeb project, too, is thinking about how can we use sound archives in new ways? How can we take all of these fascinating stories and voices out of places that are usually exclusively for researchers and librarians and archivists and bring them to the public, take them out of the dusty box and into–\n \n\n40:02\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n40:02\tStacey Copeland:\t–the digital space, right, and create this kind of time overlap. So there is some, some relationship between maybe me listening to a lesbian’s experience in 1982 when I’m listening in 2020. And I think–\n \n\n40:18\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n40:19\tStacey Copeland:\t–we have, you know, this very long history of sound recordings, not being archived properly, not being given the same value, but we’re seeing a huge change in the last couple years and it’s definitely exciting times for sound scholars.\n \n\n40:33\tHannah McGregor:\tDo you think that there’s anything behind this, this sonic turn in the humanities? Why are we suddenly taking sound seriously?\n \n\n40:39\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs] I mean, this is a great question. There’s a couple theories behind it, one of them being that we’re finally really used to the visual, we’re bombarded with it every day, the novelty’s kind of wearing off. And so we’re actually finding ourselves retreating into sound in new ways that we never had before. We’re wearing headphones as we commute to curate our own spaces, to listen–\n \n\n41:04\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n41:05\tStacey Copeland:\t–and create these experiences for ourselves in ways that we never had before. Listening used to be very communal, now it’s very personal. So it’s creating new connections and new relationships to sound that we didn’t necessarily have before, which I think, I think gives more value or at least perceptive value to some of these recordings from the past. [Theme Music]\n \n\n42:44\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. This episode was a special cross-over with Secret Feminist Agenda. To learn more about that podcast, check out secretfeministagenda.com. Our producers this month were me, Hannah McGregor, and of course our podcast project manager Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Stacey for taking the time to talk with me. To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":5.872171}]