Podcast into the wilderness
30 January 2025
By SPL Deputy Director Aly Barr
The SPL has been recording and releasing poetry podcasts as far back as 2008. The origins are slightly lost in the mists of time, but Reader in Residence (and now StAnza director) Ryan Van Winkle was one of the original creators/presenters (with producer Colin Fraser), followed by poet Jennifer Williams, Communications Manager Colin Waters and lately the baton has been taken up by poet (and SPL Learning and Engagement Co-ordinator) Sam Tongue.
The podcasts were recorded and produced in-house then distributed by Podomatic. The way these things work is that we upload the audio file to Podomatic and it, in turn, distributes it to the various platforms such as Apple and Spotify where it appears on your phone.
Two years ago, however, disaster struck. Suddenly – and seemingly without warning – Podomatic deleted a huge chunk of our back catalogue. We’d been demoted to a “free” account with limited storage instead of a “paid” account with unlimited. We called them and it turned out that our credit card had expired. They’d been trying to reach us on an email address for an ex-member of staff, had heard nothing so took action. There was, we were told, no way to get the deleted podcasts back. We downloaded what was left intact, closed our account and that was that.
I spent the next month combing through the SPL archives to try to find the recordings on our own systems. I even dug up an old iMac computer from the basement and had to contact the previous Librarian for the password (amazingly, she remembered it! God Bless Librarians…). I found around 20 of the 70 missing episodes but the rest were gone forever. These weren’t episodes that were ever massively popular, but as an archive they were regularly accessed by Scottish literature students. As a library, it was a keenly felt loss…
Two years pass, and a couple of weeks ago I was clearing out a wardrobe at home when I found two heavy black plastic bricks. When I first started at the SPL 6 years ago, these were passed on to me by the Librarian who was leaving with instructions to keep them safe and off-site. They were the hard-drives on which we backed up the entire IT system of the library, including the catalogue, documents, spreadsheets…and media files. The idea is that there was always a back-up outside the building if there was a fire or flood etc. They had become redundant several years ago when our systems started backing up to the cloud and I had forgotten about them. They couldn’t contain the lost podcasts, could they? I spent the morning raking through boxes of old cables and power supplies and eventually managed to connect the hard-drives to a computer.
Hey presto: podcast back-up from 2014-15!
In all, there were 56 podcasts ranging in date from 2012-2015. And what a treasure trove. Liz Lochhead on the 40th anniversary of her first collection; Caroline Bird way back in 2014 and a number of poets and writers who are no longer with us: Alexander Hutchison, Colin Bell and John Burnside amongst them.
The temptation is to publish them all at once; however this would likely be the cause of some irritation amongst our subscribers as they’d get 56 separate emails all at once, one for each new episode. So, although we’re bursting to share them with you, we’re going to release them one a week for the rest of the year, starting with John Burnside and American poet Allyson Funk in conversation from November 2012.
You can subscribe to our podcast here or if you want to listen to the new/old episode, just click here.