Concluding The SpokenWeb Podcast : Introducing the Literary Listening Podcast

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Concluding The SpokenWeb Podcast : Introducing the Literary Listening Podcast

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January 30, 2026

Produced by
Maia Harris

In this episode, producer Maia Harris and co-host Emily Stuchbery say goodbye to The SpokenWeb Podcast and introduce the all new Literary Listening Podcast.

With contributions from past team members, a sneak peak at VOLUME!: Sonic Scholarship in Literary Studies, this episode celebrates the 6 seasons of SpokenWeb Podcast and ushers listeners into the new project on the same RSS feed, Literary Listening.

Special thanks to those who contributed their voice to this special episode:

Jason Camlot

Katherine McLeod

Hannah McGregor

Stacey Copeland

Kelly Cubon

Miranda Eastwood

Kate Moffatt

Judith Burr

Thank you to TJ MacPherson and Lou Raskin for help in the booth.


00:00:05	SpokenWeb Intro	[Audio recording begins] Oh, boy. Can you hear me? Don’t know how much projection to do here.
00:00:18	SpokenWeb Intro	[Distorted audio] What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the—
00:00:26	Maia Harris	Hello and welcome to the… um… [Emily clears her throat] The SpokenWeb Podcast.
00:00:35	Emily Stuchbery	No, no — The SpokenWeb Podcast ended. Maia, you already had a whole symposia retrospective episode, remember?
00:00:44	Audio Recording	[Record player clicks] It’s live at the SpokenWeb Institute, 2025. [Record player clicks]
00:00:47	Emily Stuchbery	This is The Literary Listening Podcast.
00:00:51	Maia Harris	Well, my RSS feed begs to differ. And besides, I’m the supervising producer of The SpokenWeb Podcast. I think I should know what podcast I’m introducing and producing.
00:01:03	Emily Stuchbery	Well, The Literary Listening Podcast will be using the same RSS feed as the now-finished SpokenWeb Podcast, and I’m the supervising producer of the Literary Listening pod, so I should know.
00:01:15	Maia Harris	No, Emily, you don’t understand. I have a whole retrospective episode already planned.
00:01:21	Maia Harris	First, we’ll celebrate where we’ve been over the past six seasons and appreciate the production side of things. We’ll hear from past SpokenWeb team members. Heck, maybe even enjoy a sound collage.
00:01:31	Emily Stuchbery	Yeah, that sounds great and all, but I already have a plan. We’ll introduce the brand-new Literary Listening Podcast and clearly outline what listeners can expect on the feed.
00:01:42	Maia Harris	Well, this is a bit of a pickle, isn’t it? Should we just stalemate? Pack up, go home, call it a day?
00:01:49	Maia Harris	TJ, cut the mics.
00:01:49	TJ MacPherson	[Cutting the microphones]
00:01:51	Emily Stuchbery	No, TJ, keep those mics on. I think I have a better idea. Why don’t we do a little bit of both?
00:01:56	Maia Harris	Both?
00:01:57	Emily Stuchbery	Yeah — why not celebrate The SpokenWeb Podcast and introduce the new Literary Listening Podcast?
00:02:03	Maia Harris	So, like a transition episode between the two?
00:02:06	Emily Stuchbery	Exactly.
00:02:07	Maia Harris	OK, I dig it.
00:02:09	Maia Harris	Let’s try that again from the top with a very special introduction from some past team members. [Record player clicks] [SpokenWeb theme music begins]
00:02:21	SpokenWeb Intro	Can you hear me? Don’t—don’t know how much projection to do here.
00:02:35	Emily Stuchbery	What does literature sound like?
00:02:37	Maia Harris	What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive?
00:02:41	Stacey Copeland	Welcome to The SpokenWeb Podcast.
00:02:43	Stacey Copeland	Stories about how literature sounds.
00:02:51	Hannah McGregor	My name is Hannah McGregor.
00:02:53	Stacey Copeland	My name is Stacey Copeland.
00:02:55	Kelly Cubbon	My name is Kelly Cubbon.
00:02:56	Judith Burr	My name is Judy.
00:02:57	Kate Moffatt	My name is Kate Moffatt.
00:02:59	Miranda Eastwood	My name is Miranda Eastwood.
00:03:01	Katherine McLeod	And my name is Katherine McLeod.
00:03:03	Stacey Copeland	And each month, we’ve brought you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature.
00:03:10	Judith Burr	And history.
00:03:10	Miranda Eastwood	Created by scholars, poets.
00:03:12	Kate Moffatt	Students and artists.
00:03:14	Katherine McLeod	From across Canada. [Record player clicks]
00:03:16	Maia Harris	Hello and welcome again to a bonus retrospective episode of the now-finished SpokenWeb Podcast and a special preview episode of the incoming Literary Listening Podcast.
00:03:28	Maia Harris	My name is Maia Harris.
00:03:31	Emily Stuchbery	And I’m Emily Stuchbery.
00:03:33	Emily Stuchbery	Let’s start with some retrospective. So, to catch everybody up: since 2019, the SpokenWeb Podcast from the SpokenWeb project has been a monthly podcast all about how literature sounds, co-created by Hannah McGregor, Katherine McLeod, and Jason Camlot.
00:03:49	Maia Harris	Our fearless leaders Hannah, Katherine, and Jason are also all the co-editors of Volume: Sonic Scholarship and Literary Studies. This book will be a peer-reviewed collection of scholarly sound works drawn from the first four seasons of The SpokenWeb Podcast.
00:04:04	Maia Harris	It will be a sonic book, and that means that the editors are busy working through the affordances of what a sonic book can do and what the peer-review process will look like — or rather, sound like.
00:04:15	Maia Harris	But for now, [soft beat music begins faintly] as we say goodbye to The SpokenWeb Podcast as a podcast, let’s hear some clips about the SpokenWeb pod from a sonic introduction to Volume that Hannah, Katherine, and Jason are working on right now.
00:04:33	Jason Camlot	[Record player clicks] Three, two, one.
00:04:34	Katherine McLeod	So we should probably introduce ourselves so people know whose voice belongs to whom.
00:04:39	Hannah McGregor	Excellent call, Katherine. I’m Hannah McGregor.
00:04:42	Katherine McLeod	I’m Katherine McLeod.
00:04:44	Jason Camlot	And I’m Jason Camlot.
00:04:45	Katherine McLeod	One origin of this project is the intersection of podcasting and peer review. Another is SpokenWeb’s long-standing interest in the development of new forms of sonic scholarship through mixing archival, critical, and creative methods. Jason, can you tell us where the idea of a SpokenWeb podcast came from?
00:05:05	Jason Camlot	Yeah. I think it’ll be useful to say more about the kinds of scholarly work with sound we were doing that led to The SpokenWeb Podcast as a particular kind of experiment.
00:05:16	Jason Camlot	From the very beginning, starting around 2010, research pursued under the banner of SpokenWeb was interested in developing collections of literary sound recordings for use in research, study, and creation. This included the archival preservation of analog assets like tape recordings, but also the activation of those assets in different ways to make them relevant to people in the present.
00:05:39	Hannah McGregor	I have a sense of what archival preservation entails, but what do you mean by activation?
00:05:46	Jason Camlot	Activation means finding different ways to engage with recordings to get them out there for other people to experience and use them. It’s about access rather than just preservation.
00:05:59	Jason Camlot	The SpokenWeb Podcast series emerged from a fairly long period of previous experimentation via events and productions that combined performance, listening, and critical reflection. [Record player clicks]
00:06:13	Maia Harris	The SpokenWeb Podcast has contributed to research across fields from literature, sound studies, history, cultural studies, media studies, and more. What unites all of that is a recognition of podcasting as research, podcasting as pedagogy. Here are Hannah, Katherine, and Jason talking a little bit about that. [Record player clicks]
00:06:33	Hannah McGregor	You know, something that often emerges in conversations around scholarly podcasting, about the vulnerability of sharing this kind of unfinished work, is the idea that vulnerability, or lack of authority, is something that you earn in academia. You can only actually embody uncertainty once you are otherwise propped up by other forms of authority.
00:06:58	Hannah McGregor	So once you’ve got tenure, you can be as vulnerable, uncertain, and process-based as you want, but up until then, you need to perform your expertise in conventional ways.
00:07:10	Hannah McGregor	But I feel like the actual making of The SpokenWeb Podcast over its six seasons has really demonstrated that podcasting can be a mode of scholarly inquiry that’s really open to and supportive of, and accessible to, students, because it doesn’t require you to have figured everything out.
00:07:30	Katherine McLeod	Just on that last point, I would say that also The SpokenWeb Podcast allowed student researchers to come to the table with an idea, and even if they didn’t know anything about podcasting, to make a podcast episode. And that was really incredible, that we were able to create an environment that is supportive in the making of an episode, and also that they learn something from it about audio-making.
00:07:55	Katherine McLeod	Because it can be so scary for a student or early-career researcher not only to share their ideas when they’re still in progress, but also to propose a podcast episode when they don’t really know anything about making audio. [Record player clicks]
00:08:10	Maia Harris	Guest producers of all skill levels have since contributed to The SpokenWeb Podcast. These guest producers could not have done it without the support of the SpokenWeb Podcast team.
00:08:20	Maia Harris	From transcription to research and outreach, to scheduling to training to mixing and sound design, there is a lot of work that goes into these productions that you can’t always hear.
00:08:31	Maia Harris	As the SpokenWeb Podcast is now coming to a close, for real this time, we want to celebrate this invisible labour of our past podcast team members. To that end, please enjoy this eight-minute retrospective compilation from some past team members about their experience with the SpokenWeb Podcast. [Record player clicks]
00:09:02	Stacey Copeland	Oh, hello there. It is… what’s that outside? I’ll start again.
00:09:07	Stacey Copeland	Oh, sorry, guys — take three. [Laughs]
00:09:10	Judith Burr	Hey. Hi. Hello. Hello.
00:09:12	Kelly Cubbon	Hi there, this is Kelly Cubbon. I live in Vancouver, where I work in research development for a university.
00:09:18	Kelly Cubbon	I worked on the SpokenWeb Podcast as a research assistant while I was in the Master of Publishing program at Simon Fraser University from 2020 to 2022.
00:09:26	Kelly Cubbon	Initially, I transcribed episodes, and then I went on to do some more behind-the-scenes work, developing resources and timelines as a more regular team member.
00:09:34	Miranda Eastwood	I am Miranda Eastwood. I am currently working in video games as a narrative designer in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal).
00:09:40	Miranda Eastwood	I was the sound designer and audio engineer for the SpokenWeb Podcast starting at the tail end of its third season with Episode 9 in 2022, and signing off in 2023 — Season 4, Episode 7.
00:09:54	Kate Moffatt	My name is Kate Moffatt, and I’m a PhD student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University.
00:10:00	Kate Moffatt	I was the supervising producer and project manager from Season 3, Episode 8 in 2022 to Season 4, Episode 7 in 2023. I knew from working with previous supervising producers Stacey Copeland and Judith Burr that the role would involve supporting folks while they worked with the audio and archives at their institutions, but I hadn’t expected how immersive that would feel.
00:10:22	Judith Burr	This is Judy Burr. I am an interdisciplinary scholar. I study histories of environmental governance. I focus on fire-prone geographies in the North American West, so you may have caught some of my research on the SpokenWeb Podcast in Season 4 — an episode of my academic podcast, “Listening to Fire Knowledges.”
00:10:47	Judith Burr	I joined the SpokenWeb Podcast team as an assistant producer in 2020. Stacey Copeland was the supervising producer when I joined the team, and boy, did I learn a lot from her.
00:10:59	Stacey Copeland	It is Stacey Copeland here, now an assistant professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in media and journalism studies. Back in 2019, I was, I guess, a co-creator as well as the supervising producer and project manager for the SpokenWeb Podcast. And I guess a few hats that I wore back in 2019.
00:11:27	Stacey Copeland	It was right in the middle of my PhD work, and I had seen a call for a podcast project manager from Hannah McGregor, of course. And Hannah, they have been one of my favourite collaborators ever, ever since. It really has changed the trajectory of my life, meeting Hannah and everyone from the SpokenWeb team.
00:11:54	Miranda Eastwood	I remember starting graduate studies with a pitch for an episodic radio drama as my thesis. My supervisor at the time looked at my pitch and said something along the lines of, “You’ve got to meet Jason.”
00:12:06	Judith Burr	Karis, like knowing my interests, connected me to the SpokenWeb Podcast team. We were hugely lucky to be working with sound designer and audio engineer Miranda Eastwood on the podcast.
00:12:19	Miranda Eastwood	Getting to meet Kate in person was awesome.
00:12:22	Judith Burr	Stacey was an incredibly patient and calm teacher to my anxious grasping for quote-unquote “the right way” to do everything. She would say, “How does it sound to you?” I’d be like, “What do you mean?” What’s the right way to make it sound right, you know?
00:12:39	Kate Moffatt	I think this emphasis on valuing the process of listening and experiencing the audio materials in our archives was something that I carried with me.
00:12:50	Judith Burr	This is also something that Karis and I would talk about within the work of the AMP Lab, this kind of DIY ethic. Instead of focusing on the knowledge that any one person has, or what fancy technical skills only one of us could have, it made us think about how effective we were at sharing knowledge, at collaborating, at spreading good ideas and useful skills.
00:13:12	Stacey Copeland	So Jason at that time was working with a wonderful producer to create the first episodes that you hear of Season 1. We hear in that first episode Katherine McLeod, and then the producer the wonderful Cheryl Gladu. And I think that really helped set the tone and expectation for what SpokenWeb, the podcast, would really sound like.
00:13:39	Stacey Copeland	Those first episodes are so highly produced, which, yes, set a great tone and bar for the show, but I think also meant we had some work to do around how to make the show more accessible, to have people pitch episodes even if they had never done any audio work before.
00:13:59	Miranda Eastwood	I made an episode despite having no formal audio training — Season 4, Episode 5, “The Affordances of Sound” — and I just, I had a blast making it. It was so fun. It was so much work, but it was also a chance to throw everything I learned about sound design into one chaotic episode.
00:14:20	Kelly Cubbon	So the episode I co-produced with Katherine. Season 3, Episode 9, talking transcription, accessibility, collaboration, and creativity. was an amazing experience, and one that really stands out to me.
00:14:32	Kate Moffatt	It’s actually one of the episodes I had the opportunity to produce myself that has stuck with me the most. Me and another SpokenWeb RA at the time, Candace Searson, created an episode about the Women in Words collection at SFU, which is very large. The title of that episode is “The Archive Is Messy and So Are We,” which came from a text conversation we were having.
00:14:54	Kate Moffatt	And it was because we were working with audio recordings that lacked labels, or were almost audible but not quite. Because we were sharing the listening labour for a fairly disorganized collection that had so many, I think more than one hundred, lengthy audio recordings. And we were having conversations about them that were just full of questions and confusion and delight and frustration.
00:15:19	Judith Burr	I think, like, one of the triumphs of this academic podcasting scholarly method for me is how it foregrounds the emotionality of learning and researching. We’re just in our full-body, human brain and emotion-and-feeling selves when we are doing this work.
00:15:40	Kelly Cubbon	And hearing these interstitial and unscripted moments, such as an audience laughing, or an event host giving instructions to whoever was recording the event, or to say someone was late, or that things were running behind; just these very human moments.
00:15:55	Kate Moffatt	The processes and the wonder inherent in working with and around and in them. The tangible, the inaudible, the affective, the emotional.
00:16:04	Kelly Cubbon	Listening as a technical skill, a creative practice, an invitation to build academic and social community.
00:16:09	Stacey Copeland	The SpokenWeb Podcast as a corpus stands for and represents the multidisciplinarity, the experimentation — I think the joy and radical approach, and critical approach — to pedagogy and to research.
00:16:29	Maia Harris	The SpokenWeb Podcast is a long hallway lined with many doors. Choose a door at random. Whichever one you go in, you won’t come out the same.
00:16:48	Judith Burr	So I just want to say thanks to the SpokenWeb leadership team, to everyone who worked with me on your episodes while I was a producer. This was a tremendous learning experience, and it’s going to stay with me.
00:17:03	Stacey Copeland	A big thank you always to Jason Camlot, to Katherine McLeod; oh my gosh, like just too many people to name. The SpokenWeb Podcast will always, always hold such a special place in my heart.
00:17:18	Maia Harris	Thank you so much to everyone who took the time and contributed to that compilation.
00:17:23	Maia Harris	So that is where we’ve been. That is what we are saying goodbye to now.
00:17:30	Maia Harris	Emily, where are we going?
00:17:33	Emily Stuchbery	[Soft instrumental music begins] Well, the Literary Listening Podcast is a new audio series dedicated to the history of listening and sounding in literature and beyond that will be premiering in January. We’ll explore sonic approaches and audio techniques — that is, specific approaches to listening throughout time and across disciplines.
00:17:52	Emily Stuchbery	We’ll ask questions like: what did different listening and sounding practices do? What is the history of these practices? How do they change our perception of what we hear and what sound means, and what happens when we incorporate them into our lives and research disciplines?
00:18:08	Emily Stuchbery	Like the SpokenWeb Podcast, the Literary Listening Podcast episodes will be contributed by guest producers, from students, scholars, artists, and makers across disciplines and backgrounds, with the help and support of the Literary Listening team.
00:18:23	Maia Harris	So who’s on this Literary Listening team?
00:18:26	Emily Stuchbery	Well, you are, to start with.
00:18:28	Maia Harris	[Gasps] I am?
00:18:30	Emily Stuchbery	Yes, you’re helping us through this transition so I can take on the new role of Literary Listening supervising producer.
00:18:36	Maia Harris	Cool, so I’m, like, your mentor.
00:18:39	Emily Stuchbery	You could put it that way.
00:18:40	Maia Harris	OK. Who else?
00:18:43	Emily Stuchbery	Well, TJ MacPherson will continue on as the sound designer, and there’s a new person named Lou Raskin that Jason just hired to take on the role of AMP Lab coordinator.
00:18:52	Emily Stuchbery	And Lou will also be able to assist with recording sessions, training for how to use the equipment and software, and stuff like that.
00:18:59	Emily Stuchbery	Oh, and Jason and Katherine will continue to be involved as the directors of the podcast, with Hannah weighing in from time to time as well.
00:19:06	Maia Harris	So a stacked team of veterans and newcomers.
00:19:10	Emily Stuchbery	Exactly. And this stacked team will invite guest producers to explore the podcast’s guiding questions.
00:19:17	Maia Harris	OK, so people can still pitch to produce for the podcast?
00:19:21	Emily Stuchbery	Absolutely. We’ll have more information coming soon about how to pitch, but we encourage people of all skill levels to pitch to us.
00:19:29	Maia Harris	And will the Literary Listening Podcast be monthly like the SpokenWeb Podcast was?
00:19:34	Emily Stuchbery	Not necessarily.
00:19:35	Emily Stuchbery	The plan for the Literary Listening Podcast is to release around six episodes a year.
00:19:40	Maia Harris	OK, gotcha. And how else is this podcast different than the SpokenWeb Podcast?
00:19:46	Emily Stuchbery	Well, although neither podcast was — or will be — siloed in its focus, the SpokenWeb Podcast tended to ask questions about literary figures and literary content, such as audio artefacts.
00:19:59	Emily Stuchbery	On the other hand, the Literary Listening Podcast will be dedicated to asking questions about aural techniques in different disciplines. But let me put it another way.
00:20:10	Emily Stuchbery	You remember the SpokenWeb Podcast slogan, right? The body isn’t even cold.
00:20:15	Maia Harris	Of course I do: “what literature sounds like.”
00:20:18	Emily Stuchbery	That’s the one. So to illustrate the difference, the Literary Listening Podcast slogan will be “listening for listening.” Jason’s episodes will explore questions about listening as a method of analysis and interpretation, based on new research he’s producing about how literature has been studied using sonic and auditory techniques since the eighteenth century. And he’ll also be conducting extended interviews and listening practices with a wide range of sound studies scholars and practitioners about how they think about listening.
00:20:51	Maia Harris	Sound studies scholars and practitioners — so, like, who?
00:20:56	Emily Stuchbery	Well, he’s already hosted people like—
00:20:57	Nina Sun Eidsheim	Nina Eidsheim.
00:21:00	Emily Stuchbery	Professor of musicology at UCLA.
00:21:02	Nina Sun Eidsheim	I think — I’m the most condemned, or the — the way I can summarize it is that listening is the way we make meaning of the world.
00:21:14	Emily Stuchbery	And not too long ago—
00:21:15	Tanya Clement	Tanya Clement.
00:21:16	Emily Stuchbery	Author of Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives. She’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
00:21:23	Tanya Clement	So when I heard about this, I said, well, why don’t we create a project where humanities scholars could use this algorithm to find sounds of interest to them on collections of audio.
00:21:38	Emily Stuchbery	And—
00:21:39	Marit MacArthur	Marit MacArthur.
00:21:40	Emily Stuchbery	From UC Davis, who has developed digital tools called “Gentle” and “Drift” for visualizing recorded poetry readings.
00:21:48	Marit MacArthur	So being able to look at sound, visualizations of these pitch patterns and volume patterns, and also look at some of the numbers around pauses and visualizations of puzzling, like, I think that made me question my impressions.
00:22:05	Emily Stuchbery	And not too long ago, he hosted the internationally renowned sound poet and performance artist—
00:22:11	Jaap Blonk	Jaap Blonk.
00:22:12	Emily Stuchbery	And interviewed him about how he listens when he improvises sound poetry with other musicians.
00:22:18	Jaap Blonk	I put on this record by Archie Shepp, “Three for a Quarter One for a Dime,” in my attic room in Amsterdam. And then when the music was really frantic, I went along and so on, improvising along with it. And I was still doing it when the record ended and was spinning in the inner groove. So that was, it was at least an experience that felt good, but I didn’t know yet if that had any musical or artistic value. At the time, I didn’t know any other vocal improvisers.
00:23:01	Emily Stuchbery	Jennifer Stoever, author of The Sonic Color Line and editor of Sounding Out, the iconic sound studies blog, will be coming in January. And lots more people from different places and disciplines will be passing through to guide listening practices and be interviewed by Jason in the next few years.
00:23:17	Emily Stuchbery	Even though the focus will be on questions of listening, the range of answers, topics, and sounds arising from those questions will be diverse, noisy, and fascinating.
00:23:27	Emily Stuchbery	And that’s just for the episodes Jason will contribute. [Soft instrumental music continues]
00:23:30	Emily Stuchbery	There will also be an open call for contributions from lots of other people who are interested in these kinds of questions.
00:23:36	Emily Stuchbery	So tune in this January for the first of many new episodes to come from the Literary Listening Podcast series. Remember the slogan: listening for listening — right here on this same RSS feed.
00:23:59	Maia Harris	So I guess it’s time. It’s time to say goodbye.
00:24:04	Emily Stuchbery	But only kind of.
00:24:07	Maia Harris	You’ve been listening to a bonus episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, 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.
00:24:25	Maia Harris	[Vocalization and music] This episode was produced by me, Maia Harris, and co-hosted by Emily Stuchbery.
00:24:30	Maia Harris	The team on this special bonus episode is myself as supervising producer, Emily as incoming supervising producer, sound designer TJ MacPherson, and transcribed by Yara Ajeeb.
00:24:41	Emily Stuchbery	Stay tuned on this feed for the Literary Listening Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. From all of us—
00:24:49	Kelly Cubbon	From all of us.
00:24:50	Judith Burr	From all of us.
00:24:51	Stacey Copeland	From all of us.
00:24:53	Collective	Thanks for listening. [Whispered] Was that the end?

Maia Harris

Maia Harris holds a Master of Arts degree in English Literature from Concordia University. Her thesis research investigated Charles Olson’s use of the term proprioception. She is the outgoing supervising producer of the SpokenWeb Podcast. She is also an emerging prose-poet, published most recently in the Canadian League of Poets’ Love, Loves, Our Loving collection (2025).

Emily Stuchbery holds a BA in Cultural Studies from McGill University and spent several years working in communications before returning to school to pursue graduate studies. Currently, she is an MA student in English Literature at Concordia University where she researches whimsy as a literary affect in contemporary and Victorian literature. In addition to pursuing her MA, she is also a playwright, free lance stage manager, and avid podcast listener.

Literary Listening

S1-Episode 0