So, at the end of last week, I met comic writer Ales Kot for the first time, and we ended up talking for a couple of hours about… Well, a lot of things, really, from gossip-y comic industry stuff to the importance of fearlessness in both creativity and everyday life (and also what “fearlessness” actually means as a concept to both of us). It was a great, really enjoyable conversation that happened at just the right time; earlier that week, I’d been thinking about an idea I’d had a year or so earlier and completely abandoned, only for it to pop back up for a couple of reasons last week – An interview podcast or radio show with no agenda whatsoever; just two people (Me and a guest) talking about whatever comes to mind during the conversation. Not aiming to stay on any particular topic or plug any particular project or whatever, just… a conversation that’s almost purposefully all over the place.
(Those who listen to the Wait, What? podcasts that I do almost-weekly with Jeff Lester will recognize this as, essentially, what the two of us do every episode. And that was the inspiration, as well as listening to the Nerdist Writers Panel and, perhaps less obviously, BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.)
What crystalized this as an idea for me way back when was the name that I came up for it. I wanted to call the series The Freewheeling with each episode being named after that particular guest. So, if I was talking to Ales, it’d be The Freewheeling Ales Kot, and the next episode I’d talk to, say, Jeff Parker and that episode would be called The Freewheeling Jeff Parker and so on and so on. Obviously, ripping off this, but the obviousness of the reference was intentional and part of the appeal.
I’d still like to do this; I kind of dropped the idea when David Brothers was publicly wondering about something that felt very similar (although, looking at what he was writing back then, maybe not as similar as I thought at the time — especially because I was thinking longer conversations and not just with comic people), but I’ve circled back to it recently in light of being on NPR and also just becoming more interested in… freeform conversation, perhaps? Or wanting to play with something less structured, in light of a workload that feels increasingly restrictive in terms of format? (There’s another element that I’m not really discussing, for reasons along the lines of (a) it may not be real and (b) if it is real, I don’t want to jinx it; rest assured that either way, I’ll spill those beans sooner or later.)
But, yeah. The Freewheeling. It could be fun, right? And maybe interesting, and maybe do-able. One of those things that you throw out into the world, just in case.
It was a surreal, but ultimately enjoyable, experience – Although, I’ll admit, it didn’t end up with “ultimately enjoyable” until after everyone had heard the interview. I was (and still kind of am) surprised and unsure that it aired at all; I had managed to convince myself that I had screwed up and the entire thing would’ve been unusable because I was so boring or something. I was also amazingly nervous, because look at that studio I was in. That’s a real radio studio, with multiple mics and someone that you can’t see through the glass working to produce the whole thing, even though I was in Portland and the interviewer was somewhere on the East Coast.
