The first thing friends and acquaintances ask when you say you’ve started a podcast is “What’s it about?” Ugh, that’s such a good question. To answer, I need to introduce myself a little better. TL;DR – I love telling stories. This is just another way to do it.
Listen to the episode here or wherever you listen to podcasts* Transcription is below.
S1 E3 Transcript (with Minor Variations)
The first thing friends and acquaintances ask when you say you’ve started a podcast is “What’s it about?” Ugh, that’s a good question. To answer, I need to introduce myself a little better.
My name is…not really Belén, and I’ve been telling stories longer than I’ve been able to write them down. Probably even before I could read I was scribbling across pages and pages of paper, filling notebooks with imaginary cursive. My parents say that after writing like this I could walk through every page and tell them the story unfolding in my head.
I love telling stories. And I love writing. In college, I majored in creative writing: not for the job prospects, but because there was nothing else I could imagine studying for four years (though neuroscience and Spanish both came very close).
A podcast is just another way to tell stories. They may take the form of:
- Music I’ve written or arranged
- Short stories or poetry I’ve written
- Conversations with friends
- Or any other thing that will do well in this medium
I love the SPOKEN word, too. There’s nothing like being with a person and seeing their body language, but you can convey so much with just a voice. Pages and pages of text can struggle to convey the emotion in just one word SPOKEN.
Text makes me nervous sometimes. I’m not the world’s best speller. When I get rushed (when I get lazy) it ain’t pretty. I average 3 errors per thousand words, even with editing (which I know because I used to work in a job where I wrote a lot of blogs in 300-ish word increments and there was an error in every one).
Voice has its own challenges (as you can maybe tell from the different audio quality in just these three episodes) but in some ways it’s more forgiving. Or maybe perfection is so much harder voice the spoken word that I give up faster. I can spend hours fiddling with one word or sentence or paragraph or page. I can spend years NOT showing anyone a story because I know it’s not perfect.
But sometimes you just need to speak something into the void and see if anyone is listening. So here I am, speaking. A gentle voice in a very loud world. Hoping to make you smile or think or laugh. Hoping you enjoy a good story, and trying to tell one, every time, in a dozen different formats.
This is Known As Belén, coming to you in the first breath of September, saying: Thank you for listening.
*As of writing, Known As Belén is available on the following podcasting platforms: Spotify, Anchor, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic, Stitcher, and Amazon Music (please let me know if this one doesn’t work), , If more platforms are added, that will be reflected in future post updates.
