On The Hill

Abstract

The podcast form continues to thrive following the mainstream success of Serial (2014), with the numbers of listeners increasing year on year (Peiser 2019). This growth highlights digital audio storytelling as an attractive form for writers (Eddo-Lodge 2018; Mahnke 2015). Vincent van Gogh said, “I keep on making what I can’t do yet in order to learn to be able to do it” (1885). In this spirit, I set out to remediate my prose writing and research practice, applying these text-based skills to podcasting by making the pilot season of On The Hill (García Rangel 2019a). As a creative manoeuvre (Stranger et al. 2014), this literary podcast enabled me to understand, reassemble and retell the history of a maritime Cornish cemetery and the stories of those buried there. Via creative experimentation and remediation, I discovered some of the unique qualities of audio storytelling, the intimate nature of the podcast (Berry 2015, Barrios O’Neill 2016, Llinares 2018) and its potential to alter preconceptions regarding what constitutes an “authoritative” voice (Mottram 2016). In repositioning the sound of the writer’s voice at the centre of creative work, the podcast form can be an enriching extension of practice.