Meet Elizabeth Spencer, creator and co-host (with me, her mother) of That's a Thing?! , "a sometimes belated, already outdated guide to your teens, tweens and everything under 20." That's a Thing?! is a podcast that grew out of various conversations around the dinner table and elsewhere. Elizabeth and her brother, Jon, would start talking about something in the media they pay attention to, and realize based on their parents' confused reaction that "Oh my god, adults don't know about this!" So we...
Jan 22, 2018•36 min•Ep. 85
Meet Kat Griffiths (again!), a fangirl of the highest order who shines a light on the artists who make the songs she loves with a podcast called Start the Music . I say "again" because I had Kat on the show way back in Episode 19 to talk about her experience as a member of the rotating cast of smart women who discuss Doctor Who on Verity! . She continues to appear on Verity!, as well as on an improv show called Doctor Who's Line, Is It?... Anyway! . Those are both the products of ensembles, wher...
Jan 08, 2018•35 min•Ep. 84
Meet Dan Shessel, co-host and co-creator of the Northern Nerdcast , a showcase for the geeky, nerdy people, groups and events in and around the Edmonton area. The Northern Nerd Network started as a YouTube channel in 2013, but it was killing Dan to leave so much on the cutting room floor, which he found himself doing a lot with video. Podcasts can be longer, and Dan loves podcasts himself, so it made a lot of sense to swivel to audio in 2014, with a little bit of video in the mix. Dan co-hosts t...
Dec 18, 2017•26 min•Ep. 83
Meet Josh Shenfield and Alan Techsmith, two prolific nerds who talk about video games, movies, TV, comics and "more geekery than you can shake a joystick at" on Press Start to Join . Like many podcasts, Press Start to Join began because friends who met in high school kept having interesting conversations and decided to put them on the internet. That was five years ago, and more than 160 episodes later, they have learned a lot, and are still having fun. Some episodes are deep dives into video gam...
Dec 04, 2017•36 min•Ep. 82
Meet Meredith Bratland, a writer and traveller who has turned her curiosity about people from elsewhere into a podcast called Migration Patterns . Meredith talks to people who have immigrated to Canada about their homelands. Her approach is personal rather than political, and her first season is full of lovely conversations with interesting people that collectively demonstrate her thesis, without weighing down each episode with such gravitas, that immigration makes our country stronger. Meredith...
Nov 20, 2017•36 min•Ep. 81
Doug Hoyer has written more Edmonton podcast music than anyone I know, even though he doesn't live here any more. So when he came back to Edmonton for a few days in October, I grabbed the opportunity to ask him about that work at the Edmonton Podcasting Meetup . This is an edited version of the live audio from that session at Variant Edition on Oct. 21, 2017. We talked about three circumstances in which Doug's music would be used on a podcast: Commissioned work: You can hear original music that ...
Nov 06, 2017•39 min•Ep. 80
This week I bring you something completely different — instead of the usual interview with a local podcaster or blogger, or the audio from one of our podcasting meetups, this episode features the pilot for a new podcast called That's A Thing?!, "a sometimes belated, already outdated guide to your teens, tweens and everything under 20." This idea came out of a series of conversations with my daughter, Elizabeth, about phenomena that were completely common and normal to her, and utterly foreign to...
Oct 23, 2017•35 min•Ep. 79
Meet Sandra Sperounes and Agnes DeMarco, the music writer and the rock-n-roll mom who shine a spotlight on creative people with their podcast, Agnes + Sandra's Three-Way . Their relationship started when Sandra, then a writer with the Edmonton Journal , interviewed Agnes, "a personality in her own right" (which you will definitely hear in this conversation) who is also the mother of musician Mac DeMarco. Their podcast started with a conversation over a dirty Martini, and that cheeky name came fr...
Oct 09, 2017•36 min•Ep. 78
Meet Caleb Caswell, who combines his background in journalism and music to have sincere conversations about Edmonton's music scene on The Tear Down . Caleb studied both music and professional writing at MacEwan University, and was looking for a way to combine those experiences. He had done enough freelance writing to know he was leaving a lot of good quotes uncaptured in interviews with musicians. A podcast turned out to be a way to get into more depth. He goes to a show with his guest, and they...
Sep 25, 2017•33 min•Ep. 77
Meet Sylvia Schneider, co-host of the Equinely-Inclined podcast for Canada's horse community, and a pioneer of Alberta podcasting. Sylvia wanted to do a podcast before the concept was even a gleam in anyone's eye — she just didn't know that was the name for what she wanted to do. She started finding fellow horse-lovers on message boards, before the World Wide Web made it so much easier for us to connect with each other. And she started a blog, for which she would interview people in the equine c...
Sep 11, 2017•35 min•Ep. 76
Meet Jeff MacCallum, one-half of the team behind two Edmonton podcasts that focus on independent music on the prairies: Cups N Cakes and Inside the Artist's Studio . Cups N Cakes started because Jeff and his friend, Carey Newton, wanted to stay in touch. There are easier ways to maintain a friendship than to make a podcast, however, especially one that takes hours of research. They are well into their third year now, and have big plans for the future. Cups N Cakes has about half an hour of talk ...
Aug 28, 2017•36 min•Ep. 75
Erika Ensign of Verity! and many, many other podcasts joined us at the July podcasting meetup to talk about growing a fandom. Erika is one of the most prolific podcasters I know, and one of the most successful. She has a hand in these: Verity! , where six smart women talk about Doctor Who; Beginner's Puck , a podcast for hockey fans new and old; The Uncanny Magazine Podcast , a companion to the online magazine of science fiction and fantasy (which just won its second Hugo Award !); The Audio Gui...
Aug 14, 2017•39 min•Ep. 74
Meet Sydney Lancaster, the visual artist and advocate who extends the reach of her work through her blog and helps artists learn how to look after the business side of their work through Visual Arts Alberta-CARFAC (Canadian Artists' Representation/Le Front des artistes canadiens). Sydney has been a full-time artist since 2005, with a practice in drawing, printmaking, photography and large-scale sculptural installations. "I call myself jokingly a closet phenomenologist, because what I'm intereste...
Jul 31, 2017•43 min•Ep. 73
I had the pleasure of moderating a discussion about urban planning wishes at a live event put on by Taproot Edmonton, my other adventure in building a future for local media, which I've been working on for the past year with Mack Male. It was an interesting discussion on a profoundly local topic, so I figured it might also be of interest to listeners of Seen and Heard in Edmonton. Here you go. This episode is also available in Apple Podcasts, on Google Play , on SoundCloud or on Stitcher . For m...
Jul 17, 2017•48 min•Ep. 72
Meet Scott and Amy Fralick, the smart and creative couple who are chronicling their adventure with pregnancy later in life on their new podcast, 40 & Knocked Up! You may know them as two-thirds of The Frolics , a surf-punk band that started in Nashville and is now part of Edmonton's music scene. You may also know Scott as a broadcast journalist who is now at CITY-TV. But they are also parents who decided after 40 that they wanted to have another child. It has not been easy, and they had trou...
Jul 03, 2017•37 min•Ep. 71
For our June podcasting meetup, we had a chat with Michael Short of Let's Go Outdoors about how to make a living in new media. I don't think it's a stretch to say that Michael is a man ahead of his time. Long before the Internet made it a whole lot easier to be an independent media producer, Michael was doing it with Let's Go Outdoors, where he covers all kinds of stories to do with land, air and water, and distributed them on radio, TV and now online. His business model on Let's Go Outdoors is ...
Jun 19, 2017•39 min•Ep. 70
Meet Andrew Paul, who uses his journalistic chops to tell stories about philanthropy and good works in Edmonton as part of the team that produces The Well-Endowed Podcast . Andrew came up through alt-weeklies and magazines after he graduated from the journalism program at MacEwan. He shifted into doing public relations for arts and non-profit organizations with his now-wife, Fawnda Mithrush, and ended up at the Edmonton Community Foundation , which encourages philanthropy and funds charitable ac...
Jun 05, 2017•29 min•Ep. 69
I had the great pleasure of talking to Ben Yendall of Tales from the Hydian Way and Trina Shessel from the Northern Nerdcast on stage at the Needle on May 12 during NorthwestFest's LunchPods series . Both Ben and Trina have cultivated a community around their podcasts, and are members of Edmonton's growing and increasingly connected podcasting community. They shared a lot of excellent insights about how and why they got into podcasting, and what they have learned about "community" in all (or at ...
May 22, 2017•35 min•Ep. 68
Our April meetup gave us a chance to talk about the power of cross-promotion by engaging in some cross-promotion — I love me some meta. We had a chance to talk Fawnda Mithrush, who is managing director of NorthwestFest , Edmonton's international festival of nonfiction film, art and music. Fawnda is the brain behind LunchPods , a series of live podcast shows on at The Needle Vinyl Tavern throughout this week in conjunction with the film festival. Fawnda also hosted I Don't Get It, an award-winnin...
May 09, 2017•23 min•Ep. 67
Meet Elliott Tanti and Michael Vecchio, two friends who started sparring about politics for fun and decided to turn their frequent debates into the Highlevel Showdown podcast. Highlevel Showdown started in the Tory Building at the University of Alberta, where Elliott and Michael found themselves engaging in political discussions that spilled over onto the LRT on the way home. Elliott had done a podcast called What's Up UAlberta , and it felt natural to capture the conversations they were already...
Apr 17, 2017•31 min•Ep. 66
Our March podcasting meetup offered a local spin on #trypod, a campaign that started in the U.S. to encourage more people to listen to podcasts. I am, of course, strongly in favour of more people listening to podcasts of all kinds, but I am particularly interested in carving out some mindshare for locally produced shows. That's why I invited Chris Chang-Yen Phillips, creator of Let's Find Out , and Katrina Ingram, interim CEO of CKUA , to give their perspectives on how to do that. Chris's podcas...
Apr 03, 2017•36 min•Ep. 65
Our February meetup was kind of a sequel to an earlier meetup on how to get started . Among the aspiring podcasters in that audience were journalists Trisha Estabrooks and Alex Zabjek. At that point, they knew they wanted to do a podcast, but they had so many questions. They got some answers at that meetup, and found a lot more on their own on their way to launching The Broadcast , a show about women and politics in Alberta. So I decided to have them back to share what it took to pull the trigge...
Mar 21, 2017•32 min•Ep. 64
Meet Lauren Dary, an Edmonton photographer and one-half of the team behind That’s So Maven , a podcast by, for and about female entrepreneurs. Lauren and her co-host, Andrea Beça, discovered in a series of texts that they had both been thinking about starting a podcast. Then they discovered they were both interested in focusing on women in business. Kismet. Off they went. At first they thought it would be bi-weekly, but when they started building their list of potential guests, it was quickly mo...
Mar 06, 2017•27 min•Ep. 63
Our January meetup was billed as a debate between Taylor Chadwick of What It Is against Andrea Beça of That's So Maven on how long a podcast should be. "Debate" turned out to be a bit of a strong term. As Taylor says at one point, "it sounds like we're just going to agree the whole time." I accept responsibility. Everyone's just so nice. They do come from different points of view on what works for the length of their own shows. The sweet spot for What It Is — an arts interview show that Taylor d...
Feb 20, 2017•50 min•Ep. 62
Meet Tyler Butler, the always-learning digital marketing strategist and musician who explores social media on the new podcast Don’t Call Me A Guru . Don't Call Me A Guru is a monthly conversation about social media strategy between Tyler, who works at MacEwan University, and Linda Hoang , who used to work at NAIT and now works at Calder Bateman. They met kibbitzing with each other online, and now we get to listen in on their "conversations we would have had anyway," and learn a lot about social ...
Feb 06, 2017•24 min•Ep. 61
Meet Nick McQuik, the always hustling comic who co-hosts The Quik and Slow Comedy Show , a long-running podcast featuring "comedians interviewing comedians about comedy in a basement." Nick started podcasting in part to learn more about his craft, a good trick I may have adopted myself a time or two. He also jumped in with both feet by buying a lot of equipment, so he kind of had to make it happen after that. I suspect I am too old and square for some of the comedy on Nick's show, which he co-ho...
Jan 23, 2017•26 min•Ep. 60
We kick off 2017 with the audio from our November meetup with Haley Radke of Adoptees On and Wang Yip of The Dip on how to find your niche. In a way, these two podcasts couldn't be more different, in format, audience and tone. Haley's podcast is an interview show that gives a voice to people who were adopted, and Wang's is a conversation with co-host Shawn Kanungo riffing on interesting things they've heard other podcasts about business, entrepreneurship, creativity and the like. But they have a...
Jan 09, 2017•23 min•Ep. 59
This week’s podcast features the audio from our October meetup with Kelly Froese of the Edmonton Nerd List and Jeff Williams of Guerrilla Radio . Kelly and Jeff have each devised ways to shine a spotlight on local creators and ventures. As you know, that is pretty much my favourite thing, so I brought them together and called it "how to reach your audience," because one of the ways to do that is to get noticed by one of these cross-promotion sites. You can also derive some lessons for how they h...
Dec 19, 2016•31 min•Ep. 58
Meet Dave Rae, the comic, sketch comedian and improviser who takes any side of any debate and always wins on The Devil's Advocate . I first learned of Dave and his podcast through the Northern Content Network , a collection of primarily (but not exclusively) comedian-produced podcasts gathered by Dan Clarke and Dan Taylor. The Devil's Advocate quickly caught my attention as a smart, funny exercise that was unlike anything else I had heard. Dave has made me laugh out loud so many times. He did it...
Dec 05, 2016•33 min•Ep. 57
Meet Robyn Wilson, the fearless and empathetic interviewer behind The One , a podcast featuring everyday people and the love stories that make them unique. The One was "spurred out of jealousy," Robyn says. She had been helping her husband, Phil Wilson, with his podcast (more about that below), and decided that she wanted something of her own. Hearing other people's love stories made her happy, so she decided to go with that. In this conversation, you'll learn more about how Robyn approaches her...
Nov 21, 2016•22 min•Ep. 56
