I’m a big fan of podcasts. I especially love them while cooking dinner, walking the dogs, driving places, etc– all those places where my eyes can’t be plastered to a page. As it turns out, it’s really dangerous to handle books and knives at the same time. Who knew?
I could give you lots of recommendations for podcasts (and point you at plenty of people who could give you even more), but I’d like to narrow my focus to two podcasts that hit on my oldest passion: stories and their storytellers.
Singing Bones – Clare Testoni
Singing Bones is still a relatively young podcast, with only four episodes out while I’m writing this, but it’s got a bright future.
So far it’s been focusing on what we think of as the Western canon of fairy tales, stories like Beauty and the Beast, Jack and the Beanstalk, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and the Pied Piper of Hamlin. But Testoni goes a step further and talks about where these stories come from and how they overlap and change, and what significance they have in our modern lives (she also explores how fairy tales changed with their telling, which is a big deal to me). I highly encourage you guys to check this one out, because it’s got a ton of potential.
Lore – Aaron Mahnke
Don’t be surprised if you’ve heard of this one. Lore was awarded iTunes’ Best of 2015 podcast award, and for a good reason.
Lore is all about folklore and folktales. Sometimes an episode will focus on one particular place, like lighthouse with a sordid past. Sometimes it will focus on a single event, like the the vampire hunt that inspired Dracula. Sometimes it’ll compare various incarnations of particular folktales, like those surrounding fairies and little people, that show up around the world with eerie similarities. As an added bonus (for a horror fan like myself, anyway), they veer dark, and most of the stories are either unsettling, eerie, or downright gruesome. I can’t recommend this one enough.
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