Reflections on Why We Need the Friends We’ve Never Met

Back in the days before I knew what a podcast was, I used to attend a lot of literary events—readings, workshops, and most notably, the AWP writing conference, where every year, 12,000 introverts got together to schmooze with agents, editors, authors, and educators. The conference itself was something of a scheduling phenomenon: for eight hours a day four days straight, there were dozens of options for how to spend your time. There were panels on publishing, pitching, and craft, experts speaking about everything from grant funding to critical theory in the classroom.

But every year I debated about whether or not I would go. Many years I decided to skip it all together. Because while I valued the experience of the conference, I also found it overwhelming. Never did I feel so acutely aware of my own imposter syndrome as when I was meeting the agents and editors who all of the attendees were fawning over.

Even after I won a big literary award that got me meetings with some of those people, I was horribly nervous to be speaking with them. I thought to be good at networking, you had to be slick and smooth-talking, so naturally charismatic or talented that everyone wanted to meet you. That was never going to be me, and so for a long time I gave up on networking.

No one is more surprised than me that networking has gone from being the thing I dreaded to one of my absolute favorite parts of doing this work. I’m not talking about schmoozing or self-promotion. I’m talking about relationship building, about being a good citizen in the industry, an ally to your fellow podcasters.

If you’re feeling like I did at those writing conferences, then we want to help you make the shift to seeing networking differently. If networking is already part of your creative toolbox, we want to help you expand it even further.

The list of people who have changed the way I feel about networking is long, but if I had to pick a moment that shifted my understanding, it would be a couple of months intoShelter in Place session 1, when I finally got around to sending out a friendly email letting people know about the show. I got an email back from Elaine Grant, a veteran journalist who had spent decades working in public radio and now runs her own podcast production company. Her email was short and to the point. She wrote: “I haven't heard your new podcast yet, but it looks interesting. How's it going?”

I clicked the link in the footer of her email and saw on her website that she was a thoughtful person doing good work—so I wrote her back and told her so. After a few friendly back and forth emails, we ended up chatting on the phone and comparing stories. In the years since then, Elaine has become a friend and ally in this business. She was a guest on Shelter in Place, in our season 2 episode “Remembering Tulsa.” She’s been a dedicated listener of the show ever since that first phone call, and the kind of friend who reaches out often to tell me about some opportunity that she thinks would be right for me or an idea for how we could partner to support each other’s work.

What I experienced with Elaine is now something that happens to me almost every week, because almost every week I send an email to some other podcaster asking them how it’s going, and offering to connect if they’d welcome it. Encouraging people who are doing good work has become a reflex, something I do whenever I can, without the expectation that anything will come of it. Sometimes nothing does, but often, I’ll end up on a phone call like the one I had with Elaine.

What’s so different about these conversations—and why I love them so much—is that the question I ask is no longer “what can you do for me?” but “what can I do for you?”

This week’s assigned episode is my conversation with a fellow podcaster, Alexandra Cohl. It’s a conversation that never would have happened if I hadn’t experienced that shift in how I thought about networking. I met Alexandra because I sent her one of those quick emails when she launched her show, The Pod Broads. I listened to her trailer, told her that it sounded great, and that if she ever wanted to chat, I’d be happy to jump on a call.

A few days later we shared our stories over the phone while I tramped through the snowy woods on a Massachusetts trail. I asked her what I could do to support her, and we chatted about promo swaps and giving each other shoutouts on social media. At the end of the call she asked me to be a guest on the Pod Broads, which was something I hadn’t even asked for, but was thrilled to say yes to.

Sometimes that happens, that in connecting with someone else you do get something out of it—but that wasn’t my goal. I liked the work Alexandra was doing, and I was genuinely glad to be getting to know her and spreading the word about what she was doing. That was true whether or not she ever decided to help me. Changing my goals for those conversations has changed the way I feel about having them in the first place, and it also takes the pressure off of feeling like there has to be some measurable outcome.

Since that first conversation, Alexandra and I have collaborated and supported each other in a variety of ways. I was a guest on her show, and since it didn’t make sense to have her as a guest on my show at the time, instead I released her episode as a feed drop that summer when we were between seasons. We’ve done promo swaps, where we include each other’s trailers, or give a short recommendation for each other’s podcasts using talking points.

One of the exercises for this week will have you create talking points and a short promo trailer for your podcast, because we want you to be ready to do the kinds of promo swaps that Alexandra and I did. We encourage you to make a new trailer even if you did the exercise from an earlier module that had you make one. It’s helpful to have different trailers for different uses, and you may find that you’re equipped to make a better trailer now than you were a few weeks or months ago, because you’ve spent more time on your project and the way you describe it has gotten clearer.

The other reason we’ve included this conversation with Alexandra in this week’s module is that it’s a great example of how we can lean on others when we’re needing support.

Alexandra and I stayed in touch since that first conversation, and over time we’ve become friends. Sometimes months go by between conversations, but on any given week, you can bet that we’ll like each other’s Tweets or Instagram posts, and sometimes we’ve asked small favors, like including mentions of a project we’re doing in our newsletter. The episode you listened to this week came about because we had a phone conversation in December of 2021, when both of us were working too much and struggling with burnout. We brainstormed ways that we could help each other, without creating a bunch of extra work. I told her that for a while I’d been toying with a new idea for promo swaps, where instead of the traditional 30 or 60” swap, we’d record a 5-minute conversation where we each answered the same set of questions rapid fire. My hope was that if we did it right, it could serve as its own kind of promo swap, or even serve as a tiny episode all on its own. Both of us could use it in our feeds in the way that worked best, and our listeners could get to know another podcaster who we appreciated and thought they’d like.

Alexandra was excited about the idea, and so I sent her a list of five questions, and a few weeks later we recorded the conversation you heard in Why We Need the Friends We’ve Never Met, which became an episode by accident, mostly because we enjoyed talking to each other so much and found that we had more than five minutes of things to talk about. This was a gift to us both on multiple levels. I’d been looking for a way to get a break from the overwhelming amount of work that our traditional narrative episodes took, and Alexandra was on a mid-season break, and eager to drop something in her feed, but still too overworked to produce a regular episode. I should note that I did still spend about 10 hours total on editing the audio and doing sound design, but that was a huge improvement from the 60 hours I typically spend on narrative episodes.

That episode sparked a change that continued throughout the rest of season 3. Roughly once a month, I recorded a similar conversation with another podcaster, and then we both dropped it in our respective feeds. Often, this also meant sharing about the episode on social media or in our newsletters, and cheering each other on in a way that felt completely organic and natural since we already had a relationship and genuinely liked each other’s work.

If you decide to do a similar collaboration for your own podcast, you’ll want to be careful to choose podcasts that you like, and people you’re happy to have on your show. Your listeners will trust you more if you only recommend things that you think they’d actually like. But my conversation with Alexandra—and every one I’ve had since then—has made me feel supported and connected when I needed it most. It’s opened up wonderful friendships that I probably never would have had if I hadn’t asked that question of “what can I do for you?”

I recently returned to that same literary conference for the first time in a couple of years, and this time around it was a completely different experience, because I was there as a speaker leading a panel of fellow literary podcasters. We talked about what podcasting has given us that publishing couldn’t, and how one of the best parts of doing this work has been being a part of an industry where people are willing to help each other. We talked about embracing an abundance mindset, where instead of being in competition with each other, we can celebrate that there’s room here for all of us. I hope you’ll say yes to the invitation implicit in this module, to become a part of a growing community that supports and celebrates each other.