Visiting Writers Podcast

Spurred by the success of Emporia State University’s Visiting Writers Series, Dr. Kevin Rabas and his colleagues have taken the recurring on-campus event to another medium.

In January, Rabas, a professor in ESU’s English + Modern Languages program, and Bethanie O’Dell, the program’s publishing and media outreach coordinator, produced the first episode of a new podcast — “Visiting Writers Series at Emporia State” — that features a concise format and an embrace of all forms of Midwestern regional literature.

“We're just getting started,” Rabas said. “But the Visiting Writers program caters to all genres so that students can see themselves in what they write. At the end of this school year in May, we should have interviewed most or all of the genres a person could write in.”

Adding a podcast component to the Visiting Writers Series is a byproduct of the decades-long event’s popularity and the continued growth of podcasts in modern media, said Rabas, a past poet laureate of Kansas and the author of 16 books. Each year, ESU invites writers from a diverse genre range — fiction, nonfiction, playwriting, screenwriting, poetry — to campus for classroom discussions with students and to deliver selected readings from their works.

In the fall 2023 semester, Rabas and O’Dell began recording 10- to 15-minute interviews with invitees to the Visiting Writers Series. Featured in the debut podcast episode was Jessica Whitfield, a playwright, screenwriter, producer and actor whose work has been seen at the Kansas City Film Fest and the First City Film Fest. For the second episode, Rabas interviewed Topeka native Dané Shobe, a graphic artist, writer, actor and producer who founded Sun Hero Magazine, which provides “in-depth news, interviews and written features on Black nerd culture.” Other interviews from last fall, which will feature poet Bart Edelman and filmmaker Derek Sellens, among others, will appear in future episodes, Rabas said, with the goal of releasing two episodes a month.

“They're delightful,” he said. “I mean, there are Jessica Whitfield's comments on women in film and the win of “Barbie.” Dané Shobe speaks about Black artists in the arts, making comic books and films, et cetera. He has a Power Rangers homage film that features the original actor who played the Black ranger in Power Rangers. So, it is current and topical and interesting, and it's kind of the news when it comes to regional arts.”

O’Dell, the podcast’s engineer, records the audio in her office with a mobile recording studio from ESU’s Donald Reichardt Center for Publishing and Literary Arts. Rabas cultivates the questions from the classroom sessions with the authors, essentially giving students a starring role in the episodes.

“By and large, we want to involve the students in that way,” he said. “I give some sample questions, I have the students write questions for homework, and then questions come up on the spot when the artist is visiting our class. Then I massage and shape those so that we get the best questions for the moment.”

Though produced on a university campus with questions guided by ESU students, “Visiting Writers Series at Emporia State” isn’t a podcast designed for a limited audience, Rabas explained. It’s a public homage to all forms of writing.

“We're actually looking to reach anyone who's interested in the arts, and that would include prospective and current students, folks on faculty and staff, folks in the area, in the Midwest and beyond who would like to hear ‘craft talk,’ so to speak, with a professional writer, professor, filmmaker or a professional artist of some sort.”

The Midwest’s influence on the podcast is by design, as well.

“We want to reflect the people and the places that surround us and that we inhabit,” he said. “But we also want to open up to new voices that were not traditionally covered in what might be called a regional literature.”

The podcast is available on Spotify at Visiting Writers Series at Emporia State | Podcast on Spotify.