After our June 15 live listening event in Woodstock, VT, Stories in Sound, we hosted a small reception for listeners. Our informal host and raconteur was Vermont native Margaret Edwards, who delivered the following remarks. We liked them so much we asked her for permission to republish them here.
Thank you so much, Margaret, for demonstrating your passion and support for independent podcasting. You’re really showing other listeners the way!
A podcast is a name that tweaks the word broadcast—as in a radio broadcast. Or as a verb when you broadcast seeds on plowed earth. The idea behind any broadcast is that whatever is being dispersed—and dispersed widely—will have a chance to grow and to have an effect.
A podcast makes me think of a seedpod, a unit stuffed with seeds that, when cast abroad, breaks open to provide all sorts of possibilities. The podcast as a medium of communication is still developing and needs nurturing.
Once long ago, when I was a college student (in the class of 1967), I felt the excitement of being on hand when movies became films. In 1965, when I was a sophomore, there was a “film series”—as it was being called—that brought to campus the foreign films of Ingemar Bergman and Frederico Fellini. Suddenly movies had become untethered from movie theaters—movies were available for hire. You could see a movie you had liked over and over again—even though it had long ago left a movie theater. All you needed was a screen and a film rental budget. And this gave movies the status of poetry collections and novels: they could be assigned and seen, even as books were assigned and read.
Only the easily available, reproducible, and shareable experience can become discussable. Suddenly movies could be discussed: analyzed, compared and contrasted with other movies and with books, and treated as historical artifacts—or rather as artifacts with history.
At that moment of full intellectual embrace, movies had the potential to have the same cultural relevance as literature. There could become part of the curriculum, a course called Film Studies. Movies became films and were treated with the same seriousness as novels.
Think of the many courses now titled: History of Film.
The podcast isn’t exactly a new genre. Radio programs preceded them. But again, think how radio programs were scheduled to use specific air time. You either tuned in or you didn’t. The podcast is liberated from the radio’s air-time schedule. The podcast is…an easily available, reproducible, and shareable experience that can be discussed. It has become serious. It is a cultural artifact coming into its own.
And I find that fact very exciting. I want to help promote podcasts. And toward that end…here is a check!
Margaret Edwards spent 30 years as a professor of English at the University of Vermont. Her specialty was Modern & Contemporary American Poetry. She also taught writing seminars, including one entitled “Expository Writing: the Personal Voice.” On her retirement in 2001, she moved from Burlington to Barnard, Vermont, where she and her husband now live. She earned her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.