Podcast – C-VILLE Weekly

By Erika Howsare

Lisa Woolfork had been sewing for years when she came to a realization—or, rather, a resolution. “I would never again trade my humanity in exchange for doing something I love,” she says. As a Black sewist, she had too often found herself in a compromising position: trying to participate in white-dominated sewing communities, but unable to “show up as my full, complete, and whole self,” as she puts it.

It was fall 2017, and Woolfork had recently had the harrowing experience of being on the ground for the deadly events of August 11 and 12 in Charlottesville. She’d been nearby when Heather Heyer died. But when she arrived at a sewing event in a different Virginia town, she wasn’t intending to discuss those things with the other, mostly white and conservative, participants.

“When I got there, people started asking me how I was, asking what it was like,” she remembers. “I would just answer, and say ‘yeah, it was hard, it was scary.’ I did not walk in to give lectures or speeches or anything. I just wanted to sew my project.”

Nonetheless, these conversations got her uninvited to the group’s next event. Woolfork realized that her presence was only accepted in this setting if she remained within very narrow boundaries. A friend told her, “‘This is what happens to Black folks when we go from being a pet to being a threat.’”

Woolfork, a professor of English at UVA, decided that she was done playing the role of minority in her creative life. Instead, she would create a new community in which Black makers stood at the center. In 2018, she began using Instagram to organize Black Women Stitch—“the sewing group where Black lives matter,” as she defines it. “Our intention is not to diversify the sewing community,” she says. “The advocacy is to create instead a space where Black women, girls, and femmes are centered in sewing.”

BWS gathered steam over the space of about a year, as Woolfork connected online with other Black women who wanted to talk sewing without leaving their identities or politics at the door. “I was looking for other Black women who had values similar to mine, including things like radical self-love, interest in Black liberation, and interest in racial justice,” Woolfork says.

The next big step was to organize an in-person event in early 2019: Beach Week, a week of sewing and togetherness in the Outer Banks. About a dozen people came, from as far as Texas and California. “We all came looking for the same thing: a sewing sisterhood,” Woolfork says.

They found a profound fellowship—“A friend described it as lightning in a bottle,” says Woolfork—and they emerged with another idea, too: a podcast. Woolfork uploaded the first episode of “Stitch Please” in September 2019. She conceived of it as a space to talk about sewing craft, Black women makers, and social justice, all at once. “There are podcasts about racial justice, womanism, feminism, all of these important practices for freedom and liberation and building a better society,” Woolfork says. “Then there’s podcasts that talk about sewing techniques, sewing celebrities, patterns, fabrics, all of these things. My podcast is the only one that is able to do both.”

Anyone who doubts that these topics belong in the same conversation might start to understand after listening to an episode or two. In one show, Woolfork discusses a controversy that arose within the general sewing community in January 2020 when the National Quilt Museum’s Block of the Month program included a free quilt block pattern that showed a pencil erasing the letters “in-” from the word “injustice.” A number of club members complained about this design, refused to participate, or altered the design with words like “Peace” or a picture of Mickey Mouse. As Woolfork puts it on the show, “It’s a revelation of the white fragility and racism that is prevalent in the sewing community.”

The mix of topics on “Stitch Please” has turned out to be a very potent brew. In one year, the podcast has seen an 1,100 percent growth in its audience, with 110,000 downloads representing 95 countries. Tobiah Mundt, also a Black maker and the co-owner of The Hive Cville, says she attributes that success to Woolfork’s authenticity. “She’s so real and she’s just herself,” Mundt says. “She’s not trying to be anything but Lisa, and she inspires us to have the courage to be ourselves and to live unapologetically.”

Shana Jefferson, a listener and occasional podcast guest who also attended the BWS Beach Week, agrees. “She’s uncompromising,” she says. “She’s been approached to have different sponsors or partnerships, and she takes very deliberate intentional time to think through those. If you’re not there to support Black women, girls, and femmes, she has no problem saying no.”

Woolfork says that sewing—an art she’s practiced for 25 years, and traces back through generations of women in her family—is a metaphor for community building. “This was an ancestral craft for African Americans,” she says. “[Community organizing] is a similar energy of transforming and creating and pulling together and binding.”

Alternative rock: WTJU and UVA Drama collaborate on a wacky new audio drama

Imagine that an enormous, totally round rock has suddenly appeared in Charlottesville. How would people react? Would the rock be considered a threat, a sign from God, or both?

Replace Charlottesville with the fictional Elkisbourne, and you’ve got “The Perfectly Circular Rock,” a new podcast produced by WTJU and UVA’s drama department. Early one morning, the title object materializes in the center of town. Within hours of its appearance, the residents of Elkisbourne start to project their own ideas onto the rock—using it as a metaphor for a failed marriage, constructing a religious cult around it, even attempting to grind it into an anti-aging cream.

Such an open-ended concept could go in countless directions, but director Doug Grissom says that he and his colleagues ultimately decided on an “all-out comedy.” This decision of tone was just one step in the creation of the podcast, a process that lasted more than a year.

Grissom, an associate professor in playwriting, wanted a reason to work with students in the MFA acting program. He submitted a proposal for a Faculty Research Grant for the Arts, only knowing that it would be an audio story co-produced with WTJU. Once funding was approved, Grissom and his students needed a big idea.

Brainstorming proved fruitful. “On Friday afternoons, we would meet and piece things together,” Grissom says, but their abundance of ideas made it hard to move forward. Winter had arrived by the time they decided on the rock idea, and the subsequent writing lasted through the spring semester. The past few months were spent recording and editing material at WTJU, with Grissom using local connections to fill spots in the cast left by any students who graduated last spring. On November 21, 10 full episodes of “The Perfectly Circular Rock” were released on RockDrama.org.

For the technical side, Grissom enlisted the help of WTJU’s national program producer Lewis Reining. Although Reining has worked in radio for around eight years and has wanted to create audio dramas since high school, “The Perfectly Circular Rock” is his first real chance to do so. In 2012, he co-directed and produced a modernized version of Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” broadcast, but the finished product was only about half an hour. “The Perfectly Circular Rock” episodes run roughly 20 minutes each.

The project brought some unique challenges. For one, most of its 25 voice actors were accustomed to the stage. “In some ways, there’s freedom—you only have to worry about your voice,” Reining says. “But at the same time, these mics are so sensitive that any sort of movement can come through.” He had to discourage the actors from gesticulating too violently or “pounding on the tables.”

His collaborators quickly learned the rules of radio, however, letting Reining focus on the details. Technically, the audio of “The Perfectly Circular Rock” is gorgeous. The podcast’s plot requires some pretty unusual stuff to be portrayed through sound—from a dog urinating on the rock to Slam Hammer, Elkisbourne’s Bogart-esque private eye, getting knocked out with a baseball bat—and in each of these circumstances, Reining delivered.

He loves the challenge of making bizarre sound effects seem realistic, and says he’s grateful for the freedom that modern sound editing technology grants him. Today’s audio dramas are heavily informed by their predecessors, he says, but adds that “you’re able to layer things with a granularity you couldn’t before.”

Even a perfectly edited podcast can fall flat if the content is lacking, though. In the case of “The Perfectly Circular Rock,” there’s no shortage of content—it just might not be what listeners are expecting. Both Grissom and Reining concede that “audio drama” is a misnomer, since the podcast is mainly composed of absurd vignettes created by Grissom and his students during brainstorming. Recurring characters are scarce. Aside from Slam Hammer, whose rambling, mock-noir monologues are some of the project’s funniest moments, the story is framed by competing radio personalities Moe DeLawn and Synnove Olander interviewing members of Elkisbourne about the rock.

Running jokes reappear more often than most characters, which provides a cohesion of its own. Listeners will want to pay close attention to learn if a perpetually unfulfilled request to hear “Stairway to Heaven” is ever granted, or if the rock is ever called “spherical” instead of “circular”—because, as several characters complain, “circular is two-dimensional…a rock cannot be circular.”

While this grant has ended, Grissom and Reining are open to another collaboration. “I loved doing it. I wasn’t sure I would,” Grissom admits. He cites the flexibility of creating an audio drama, as opposed to directing something onstage, as one of its greatest benefits.

“For the most part, it costs the same in an audio drama if you want to set it in space or you want to set it in an old-style Western,” Reining adds. “It’s so much easier to do. You have the freedom to go wherever.”