SpokenWeb Podcast

Season 4 Trailer

Welcome to Season 4!

Hello and welcome to another season of The SpokenWeb Podcast! We’re back with a new line-up of exciting episodes created by researchers across the SpokenWeb network. The SpokenWeb Podcast asks, “What does literature sound like? What stories do we hear when we listen to the archive?” In this season, we have episodes that dive into the lives of archival objects—university poetry events—what it means to read an audiobook—and so much more. This season has something for everyone from lovers of literature and history to sound studies scholars, so come and join us as we continue listening to literature and the archives.

We would love to hear your reactions and ideas to our stories. If you appreciate the podcast, leave us a rating and a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.

00:00	Hannah McGregor:	What does The SpokenWeb Podcast sound like? [Start Music: Acoustic Strings] In our third season, we revisited Myra Bloom’s episode about Elizabeth Smart from Season 1—
00:11	Myra Bloom, S3E1 “Podcasting Literary Sound: Revisiting ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart’”	It suddenly occurred to me that I actually never heard her voice. (Underlaid Archival Audio of Elizabeth Smart: “I thought, if it was agreeable to you, that I’d read a chapter from By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.”
00:17	Hannah McGregor:	— heard the voices of poets and writers across Canada —
00:21	Archival Audio, Phyllis Webb, in S3E10 “‘starry and full of glory’: Phyllis Webb, in Memoriam”:	…stars, stars, stars! [Repeats, fading out]
00:23	Interview Excerpt, S3E2 “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive”:	Is it the glimpse of mortality that makes you feel a bit differently about it? Well, it’s quite literally seeing your friends die.
00:29	Faith Paré, S3E5 “The Show Goes On: Words and Music in a Pandemic”:	This is not the poem I wanted / It is the poem I could.
00:33	Hannah McGregor:	And thought about how we listen.
00:36	Stéphanie Ricci:, S3E6: “Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium”:	How do we discuss the sounds of human beings
00:38	Hannah McGregor:	We asked, what does scholarship sound like? and revisited last year’s virtual SpokenWeb Symposium—
00:46	Stéphanie Ricci:, S3E6: “Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium”:	How do we listen virtually?
00:48	Mathieu Aubin, S3E6: “Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium”:	How do you listen virtually to a conference about listening?
00:52	Hannah McGregor:	—and the 1983 Women and Words conference held in Vancouver.
00:56	Archival Audio from S3E7 “The archive is messy and so are we”:	“[…]our subject this morning is women facing traditional criticism, criticizing criticism.” (Clip continues under Hannah and resurfaces, underlaid with the next clips)
01:01	Hannah McGregor:	We explored how collaboration and conversation are central to the research and work that we do.
01:07	Kelly Cubbon, S3E9 “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity”:	Kelly: Well, the process of transcription sounds like collaboration, like a conversation
01:12	Katherine McLeod, S3E9 “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity”:	It is a process that invites access to content through multiple voices and multiple senses.
01:18	Kate Moffatt, S3E7 “The archive is messy and so are we”:	[Warped Archival Clip Plays With Some Words Audible] And it’s funny, cuz you can almost hear it. Like you can almost hear something being said.
01:26	Hannah McGregor:	This past season took us to new places and spaces, from the plains of Northern Alberta–
01:32	Michelle, S3E3 “Forced Migration”:	[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] But the bull dragged the man, and the rope lacerated his hands, cutting to the bone.
01:37	Hannah McGregor:	–back to the 80s, to the student-run campus radio shows of the CKUA network.
01:44	Terri Wynnyk, S3E8 “Academics on Air”:	We once found a boa constrictor that had escaped. Because up above us was all sorts of science labs and buildings and rabbits and cockroaches […]
01:52	Hannah McGregor:	My name is Hannah McGregor, and I’ve been the host of the SpokenWeb Podcast since its inception. But I’m stepping out of this role for the next year, and I have the pleasure of passing the mic to this season’s host: Katherine Mcleod.
02:08	Katherine McLeod:	Thank you Hannah! [Music Swells to Atmospheric Chords] My name is Katherine McLeod, and I am so excited to host this new season of the SpokenWeb Podcast. You’ll recognize my voice from ShortCuts – our deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives that you can find right here on the same podcast feed. This season on the podcast, we have a line-up of episodes that we can’t wait to share: we’re going to hear more about the “Drum Codes” we listened to in Season 2; we’ll be thinking about audiobooks as a literary medium: what is it like to read an audiobook? What is it like to teach with an audiobook in the classroom? We’ll be re-listening to university poetry events, diving into the archives to converse with the archival objects themselves. We’re going to experience environmental sound with an episode on fire and ecopoetics; and we’ll be thinking about literary environmental sound, and even exploring the soundscapes of libraries. Whether you’re a lover of literature or a sound studies scholar, this podcast has something to share with you. Subscribe and join us for Season Four of the SpokenWeb Podcast, coming to your podcast feeds on October 3rd.

Kate Moffatt, Miranda Eastwood, Hannah McGregor, and Katherine McLeod

Kate Moffatt is a PhD student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s book history, and women in the book trades and book trade archives. In addition to being the supervising producer of The SpokenWeb Podcast, she also produces The WPHP Monthly Mercury podcast for the Women’s Print History Project.

Miranda Eastwood is a Montreal-based transmedia artist studying towards their master’s degree in English Literature and Creative Writing at Concordia University. Focused on sound design, they are developing a radio drama for their thesis, and is the audio engineer for the SpokenWeb Podcast.

Hannah McGregor is an Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, where her research focuses on podcasting as scholarly communication, systemic barriers to access in the Canadian publishing industry, and magazines as middlebrow media. She is the co-creator of Witch, Please, a feminist podcast on the Harry Potter world, and the creator of the podcast Secret Feminist Agenda. She is also the co-editor of the book Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Book*hug 2018).

Katherine McLeod @kathmcleod researches archives, performance, and poetry. She has co-edited the collection CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Jason Camlot, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). She is writing a monograph (under contract with Wilfrid Laurier University Press) that is a feminist listening to recordings of women poets reading on CBC Radio. She was the 2020-2021 Researcher-in-Residence at the Concordia University Library and, at present, she is an affiliated researcher with SpokenWeb at Concordia, where she is the principal investigator of her SSHRC Insight Development Grant, “Literary Radio: New Approaches to Audio Research” (2021-2023).

Clips Featured:

Myra Bloom and Elizabeth Smart from S3E1: Podcasting Literary Sound: Revisiting ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart’

Phyllis Webb from S3E10: “starry and full of glory”: Phyllis Webb, in Memoriam

Julia Polyck-O’Neill and Lisa Roberston from S3E2: Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive

Faith Paré from S3E5: The Show Goes On: Words and Music in a Pandemic

Stéphanie Ricci and Mathieu Aubin from S3E6: Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium

Kelly Cubbon and Katherine McLeod from S3E9: Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity

Kate Moffat from S3E7: ‘The archive is messy and so are we’: Decoding the Women and Words Collection

Michelle Wilson from S3E3: Forced Migration

Terri Wynnyk from S3E8: Academics on Air