Write Here, Write Now: A Vocal Podcast

When I asked Vocal creator RJ Wade whether she found a commitment to writing early on in her life, or whether the development of her gift was a slower burn, her response was immediate and powerful. “It was right away, and it was full-blown and passionate,” she said of her love affair with the written word.

I was interviewing her for Write Here, Write Now: A Vocal Podcast. We’re so excited for its launch, our first venture into the podcast space; I’m delighted to be the host of our first two seasons. Write Here, Write Now is an exemplar of our ambition as a company: to amplify the voices and the stories of Vocal’s creators across transmedia platforms.

Our first season is a nonfiction narrative podcast. From the innumerable pieces on Vocal, we’ve chosen eight personal pieces from some of our strongest, most engaged creators. They’re people who’ve written about significant moments or developments in their lives — experiences that led to change, profound conversations, the real stuff of heart and soul. Each episode will consist of a reading of the entire short essay accompanied by an exclusive interview with the creator.

What a privilege it was to speak to each of them! At Vocal we think of the site as a place where real connection is possible, between creators and readers, between ideas and the manifestation of those ideas, between our curatorial staff and our audience of readers, creators — and now, listeners. Vocal is a place where people can express their hopes, their fears, their choices: they can be who they want to be. It was a truly special experience to talk to Caitlin Fladager about what it means to accept the challenges — and of course the joys — of a long relationship. To hear Dane BH tell me how she went from being a person who was committed to never getting married to being a person who had… ten weddings! To hear Flora Weston discover the moving secret behind a friend’s unlikely sartorial choice. Conversations like these reconnect you to the truest aspects of your own life; listening to J. Delaney-Howe talk about his relationship with his mother, I thought about my own mom, the conversations we’d had, what they had meant to me. Well — I don’t want to give too much away about this first season. I can’t wait for you to listen for yourselves.

And since I know that eight episodes will leave you wanting more, I’m delighted to say that our second season of Write Here, Write Now will be coming in the fall. It’s a fiction-focused show that will serve as an audio companion to the Vocal+ Fiction Awards Anthology, due to be published early next year by our partner, the UK-based publisher Unbound. These are the 25 winning stories that will appear in the book, chosen out of more than 13,000 entries to our Vocal+ Fiction Awards Challenge; we’ll read one complete short-form work every week leading up to the book’s release in February 2023. I urge you to listen to them all — and to read the interviews with each creator posted on Vocal. There’s romance, sci-fi, adventure, horror… sex! There’s something for everyone. We hope too that listening to this podcast will motivate your own creative energies. Go on — what story do you want to share with the Vocal community?

At this point you might be asking: why did we do this? Our creators have Vocal, after all, a place to share their stories, to read and comment. Well, Write Here, Write Now is a way of demonstrating our ongoing commitment to invest in our creators and provide additional routes to build their profiles, audiences, and earnings. The more recognition we can provide our creators — and audibility, I should say — the more successful they can be in telling their stories. As Vocal goes from strength to strength we’re moving beyond our platform to reach into the wider creative world — with plans to expand into the audio-visual world in the not-too-distant future.

A shout-out to Pod People, our production company. I want to make more podcasts just so I get to work with my new friends there! Their deep experience in the podcasting space — producing Bon Apétit's Food People, Vogues In VOGUE: The 2000’s, and Netflix’s Know It All — meant we were in very good hands. You’ll hear the quality for yourselves.

We can’t wait for you to follow our feed. You can find Write Here, Write Now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, RSS — or wherever you get your podcasts. Rate us, review us: we’d really love to know what you think.