Weird Island

48. WEIRD ANNIVERSARY: One Year of Weird Island

Episode Summary

I've been making this podcast for a year! So instead of bringing you a normal story, I thought I'd tell you my own.

Episode Notes

I've been making this podcast for a year! So instead of bringing you a normal story, I thought I'd tell you my own. 

Episode Transcription

• Hi, I’m Sara and you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week, I'll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up from my tiny, little state of Rhode Island. And this week, I actually don’t have a story for you. It’s the one year anniversary of me making this podcast. And instead of doing my typical thing, I thought I’d take a step back and introduce myself. It’s a little weird that I’ve waited a year to do it, but I figured you’re not here to listen to me talk about myself. You want to hear interesting, weird stories about Rhode Island. But, if you’ve been here for a while, we’ve kind of built this relationship, and I wanted to tell you a little more about who I am and why I started the podcast. 
• And I’m also giving myself essentially two weeks off from researching. But, I’m not going to leave you hanging! Today will be a short one about me. And next week, I’m going to do kind of a fun celebration of all the past episodes. For each topic I’ve covered, I’m going to share one fun or interesting fact I learned while researching that didn’t make its way into the episode. It might actually be relevant to the topic, it might not be relevant at all. Sometimes when I’m researching, I spend an inordinate amount of time researching something only slightly related. Like the time I read an entire book about apples… while researching the Tree Root that Ate Roger Williams. So, that episode will be a rapid fire list of fun facts I haven’t already shared. So, make sure to tune in next week for that one.
• Alright, without further ado, cue the intro music, and let’s get into it. 
• If this is your first time listening, then OMG, click on another episode. This isn’t the one to start on! But if you’ve been here for a while, well, I just wanted to say hi. And thank you for being here with me. And to kick things off, before I tell you any fun facts about me, I wanted to get my three big secrets off my chest.  
• Secret Number 1. If you’ve been listening since way back in the very beginning, you might have picked up on the fact that while my podcast is all about weird history in Rhode Island, I’m not actually a native Rhode Islander. I’m originally from Plymouth, Massachusetts, and I moved to Rhode Island for college 11 or so years ago, and never left. When I arrived, I was so not a Rhode Islander that I heard the accent and mistook it for a New York accent. I think I called home in my first week of college and said that I wasn’t sure I’d even met a Rhode Islander yet, because everyone seemed to be from New York. I felt like an outsider passing through for years. I was sure this was just a stop on the way to somewhere else. But one day I realized something had changed. Suddenly I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. 
• Okay, Secret Number 2: Not only am I not a Rhode Islander by birth, I’m not a historian. A lot of you have asked that! I’m not anything like it. I have a busy day job in marketing (which you probably wouldn’t guess, given I do kind of a terrible job marketing this podcast.) And I honestly don’t have any special training or qualifications to be talking about history. Generally I’d say that what I’m doing, anyone could do it. I’m using resources that are accessible to anyone (archives, databases, books, google) and I’m aggregating facts and details and rearranging them into stories. I do it because I love learning these stories, but when I looked into them, the information wasn’t always accessible in an entertaining or digestible way. The only special skill I bring to the table is an abundance of focus. I’m whatever the opposite of  a multitasker is. 
• And then Secret Number 3: I started this project with absolutely no idea how to make a podcast. None. My dad got me a microphone for Christmas, and I plugged it into the computer, and I was like “Heck yeah, I can do this.” And here we are. I still have no idea how other people make podcasts, to be honest. 
• So, given that I have absolutely no qualifications whatsoever, you’re probably wondering how we got here. I started this podcast one year ago for kind of a lot of reasons. The simplest one is that I love listening to podcasts. For a time, when I first started working from home, I was listening to anywhere from 3-5 hours a day of podcasts depending on the projects I had going on. Mostly True Crime. And I was kind of inspired by how addicted I was getting to stories. I wanted to know if I could craft a story to be that snackable and entertaining. But, then, the 5 hours a day of True Crime caught up with me emotionally, and I became really anxious. I couldn’t leave my house alone, couldn’t walk my dog on my own, I became convinced a neighbor who was always out walking as well was stalking us. And so, I had to take a break from listening to podcasts. But, I thought, what if I could make one of my own? 
• I love projects. I’m kind of a busy bee. I like having objectives and something I’m working on and I like getting out of the house. And the pandemic and the shutdown was a really interesting time, because we couldn’t really go anywhere. And especially early on there was this feeling a lot of people had that this was going to be temporary and while we waited it out, we could take this time we got back, the time we saved from commuting, from going out to restaurants and bars, from socializing. And we could make the most of that time, be productive, learn something, better ourselves. We were going to be so accomplished at the end of this. 
• And, I know I’m not alone in saying that expectation caused me a considerable amount of anxiety and depression. I had this constant panicked thought of, “I need a project. I need a project. What am I doing with myself?” If you’re feeling that way, I want to be clear, I am not advocating responding to that thought by just starting a project. However, that is what I did. And while it really helped me to have something to focus on, therapy would have also been a totally cool option as well.
• We had just been aimlessly driving around the state or walking, simply to get out of the house. Which I think a lot of people were doing. And researching the podcast gave me destinations to go explore. And I felt like because other people were also acting like tourists in their home state, the podcast might be helpful to them too, as a guide to unusual places worth checking out. I told myself I was going to make 10 episodes, to prove that I could stick with something. And here we are a year later. 
• Now, I work on the podcast a little bit every single day, from my living room. There’s no studio. I have the most bare-bones podcasting equipment–just a microphone and a computer. I use a Samson Q2U USB microphone, which you can get on Amazon right now for $70. And the process is basically to be laser focused on a different topic each week. I do about 5 days of research per topic, leveraging anything from a simple google search to start to digging in newspaper databases, archives, reading books, sometimes bringing guest experts on. And then the last 2 days of the week are spent writing and recording. Yes, I’m making each episode in real time, and sharing it with you the week I make it. That’s kind of stressful, but it’s also kind of fun. Because I imagine it as this dialogue between us. I’m discovering things, and then coming to you that week like, “Oh, guess what? I learned this really cool thing. Did you know…” And then I’m able to share it right away. 
• That’s kind of my origin story. Hopefully it wasn’t too boring. 
• I don’t know what else is worth sharing, to be honest. Um, I have a dog. She’s a little yellow Chihuahua named Bizzy, because she’s also an anxious Busy Bee. We’re like anxiety soul mates, the two of us. I couldn’t have picked a more quirky and perfect dog. My other big, time consuming hobby is Crossfit, which I’ve been doing and competing at for some years. I like playing board games. I like reading, typically fiction, actually, though I’ve read nothing but non-fiction this past year. And I like doing silly arts and crafts projects. For Christmas, my boyfriend and I collaborated on a project for all of our friends where we turned each of them into superheroes, with elaborate backstories that he wrote and then I painted action figures to look like them. And we designed packaging for the action figures. And they were super cool and it was really fun. But also, the other day my mom came over and she was like, “Is that a stuffed animal made from old gloves and socks on your Christmas tree, which you still have up for some reason?” And I was like, “Yes, what else would you recommend doing with old socks and gloves? And this Christmas tree will probably still be here in April.” So, that’s probably more characteristic of most of my projects. But, anyway, this is all kind of who I am. 
• The biggest thing is I just wanted to say thank you. I wouldn’t have made it a year into making this podcast if it weren’t for all of you who have listened and reached out and encouraged me and shared ideas. Genuinely, thank you. I’ve gotten messages from people who have literally just written to say something like, “You’re doing a great job, keep going.” and it means so much to me that someone would take the time out of their day just to say something kind like that. Whatever it is that you’ve done to support me, from listening to rating or reviewing to writing me a note to sharing it with your friends, thank you. From the bottom of my heart. 
• And, if you’ve sent me an episode idea and I haven’t covered it yet, don’t worry. It’s coming! You all have been incredible. At the moment, in addition to the topics I’ve already covered, I have 70 more episode ideas from you all. That’s 70 unique ideas in addition to over 100 ideas of my own on this ever-growing spreadsheet. That means if I consistently keep up an episode a week, and the list doesn’t grow at all (which it will) I have 3.5 more years of content ahead of me. So, it’s just a matter of time! Here’s a quick sneak peek at some of the topics I’m most excited to dive deeper into: The History of Providence’s Chinatown, the song RI is Famous for You, the Great Hurricane (which I’ve touched on in a few episodes). Chocolatesville, the Cyclodrome and Providence Steamroller, Touro Synagogue, that time the Wrights Chicken Farm children were kidnapped, the Jackson-Carter Memorial in South Kingston, Canonicus’s Grave marker, the Hearthside House. Ann & Hope. An episode on Benny’s? Come on. I could almost just spend the rest of this episode listing every idea that’s been submitted, because I’m excited about them all. And if you have expertise in any of these areas I just listed, shoot me a note! I’m very much open to having guests join me. I’d love to hear from you. 
• So, that’s it! That’s what I’ve got for you today. Be sure to tune in next week for that Fun Facts episode. You’ll learn things like what turtle tastes like. Titanic mania. The first jack-o-lanterns. It’ll be fun. See you next week as we uncover more stories about all things weird and wonderful from the little state of Rhode Island. Until next time!