A Woman is a God: Audio Novel / Podcast
All episodes streaming now; listen here to the prologue!
All episodes of the audio novel / narrated audio drama podcast A Woman is a God are available now! Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.
When Shannon and her queer chosen family turned seventy, they created a communal home, a place for them to live out their days together. But as years pass, and death takes her friends, Shannon becomes the last.
Until one day, when her dead friends return. And Shannon discovers how powerful she has become.
Over the course of one week, Shannon transforms her body into beasts, sees into the lives she might have lived, watches time spool and unspool, and visits a land of myth and legend to meet the original woman. And as the week nears its end, Shannon must grapple with her own life and death, and what comes next.
Content warning: Adult language and discussion of death, mental illness, suicidal ideation, sexuality, and other tough topics.
Behind the scenes: Story
While this story features a woman who's in her 80s, it's deeply personal.
My adolescence was marked by a lot of nomadic friendships. I never knew how to start friendships, maintain them, or avoid ending them. So I'd make a friend and lose them, never knowing how or why. In college, it got easier; I discovered alcohol as the great equalizer, a lesson I took deep to heart in my twenties and thirties in Chicago.
Now I know I'm autistic, and all that difficulty was a common manifestation of autism. But for a long time, I felt very insecure in friendships and relationships, and I was sure even my closest friends had a foot out the door.
I moved back to my hometown of Des Moines in my mid thirties. I didn't have friends back home...except Eric, who I'd grown close to in college and remained in tenuous touch with over the years. He and I had a drink soon after my move, and he informed me that his friends were now going to be my friends. I didn't believe him, but was delighted to have someone in my corner.
He was right, of course, and I became part of a family. Most of us some permutation of queer and childless by choice; all of us darkly funny and smart and real. And for many years, we would often joke-but-not-joke about retiring somewhere together, taking care of one another till the end.
As often as we had that conversation, I knew I would never be able to do it. I could never live with other people, never depend on other people. A life of undiagnosed disability, lived-in partner abuse, and family-learned fear of others made the possibility seem impossible.
And although I wanted that future, I predicted if it did happen, I'd still be left alone. I'd be the last one to die, because someone has to be. And what would happen then?
The book starts with that idea, plus a group of friends that have some similarities to mine, and creates a wild week in one woman's life.
Behind the Scenes: Audio and Music
After creating Midwest Weird, where we make audio episodes out of short narrated fiction and nonfiction from Midwestern writers, I got excited about the possibilities of adapting my work into that format.
And part of that work needed to be original music. While I use royalty-free music samples for Midwest Weird, and used creative-commons-licensed Nine Inch Nails music for my audio drama Wyrd Woman, I wanted to make my own music for this audio novel. So I created a piano-driven score, with a theme song for each character, along with a theme for each day.