Kimberly Hirsh

When I decided to come back to tarot and get to know it better, I looked at tens and tens of decks. None of them resonated with me. My first deck, the Mythic Tarot, gifted to me by my mother almost 20 years ago, was basically classical mythology layered on Rider-Waite but I never used it for more than ad hoc crisis readings. I bought the Thoth deck but its imagery felt dense and more obfuscatory than illuminating. I learned about this deck months ago now and with each piece of sample art felt more and more that it was the deck I wanted, but I didn’t want to wait. So I picked up the Tarot of Pagan Cats, because it’s basically a cuter Rider-Waite and I know Rider-Waite is good for beginners. It has been immensely helpful in my learning process. But now The Moonchild Tarot (@moonchildtarot) is available for pre-order and just looking at the box feels like a sacred yes. Neverending Story vibes combined with art nouveau and art deco influences? Yes please.

Yesterday I mixed and mastered the first episode of my upcoming Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast, Things of Bronze. This is a great example of a personal project that is helping me gain skills I can use professionally. Connected learning in action! Here are action steps and resources that have helped me along the way.

Finding podcasts

I’ve been listening to podcasts for… a while. I don’t know how long, but at least four or five years. Maybe more. I really got into them for a bit when they were experiencing their renaissance around the release of Serial’s first season. Back then I heavily favored Gimlet productions. I also dipped into The Indoor Kids from time to time and listened to the first thirty or so episodes of Kumail Nanjiani’s X-Files Files, watching along before listening to each episode. That was the show that made me want to start my own podcast; as I listened, especially during the segments where Kumail would dig up old posts from Usenet, I started developing the idea for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast that would, alongside rewatching, draw on my experience as a poster at the official BtVS posting board. So this podcast I’m just starting has actually been in development for four years. More on that later.

You can certainly listen to whatever podcast is trendy at the moment. (In the past year: Missing Richard Simmons, S-Town, Dirty John, The Daily.) Or venerable standbys (This American Life, Radiolab). You’ll definitely learn a lot. But I think you’ll do better with something that you’ll really love. That may be one of those podcasts I already mentioned. But it may be something else. People have written a lot about how there’s a discovery gap in podcasting, and I think that’s right. Until listener’s advisory in libraries expands beyond audibooks and music and starts to include podcasts, you’re going to have to do some legwork. Here’s how I’ve done that.

1. Get recommendations from friends and loved ones. My husband, Will, recommended Pop Culture Happy Hour to me forever before I finally listened to it and loved it. It was a lot like that Modern Family episode about wedge salad. (Sorry, Will.) It kind of seems like everyone I know adores Welcome to Night Vale. Podcasts have a viral-like spread through my community of comedy friends, which is how many folks I know got turned onto The Dollop and Hello from the Magic Tavern. And a recommendation from a friend is how I learned about Buffering the Vampire Slayer, which directly influences some of the topics I choose for Things of Bronze.

2. Let the internet tell you how to start. tl;dr: check out your favorite websites and other media sources to see if they have podcasts, ask your friends (see above), Google a topic plus the word “podcast,” use in-app lists of top or new or trending podcasts, find podcast directories. Or, what I’ve really enjoyed, check out this handy list of podcast newsletters from Bello Collective (more on that later, too). I used the in-app lists to find my current favorite podcast, The Hilarious World of Depression, as well as the super fun bomBARDed.

3. Pay attention to people you like - authors, comedians, actors, whomever - and check out podcasts that feature them as guests and podcasts they recommend. I’ve been dabbling in woo-woo as sort of an emotional antidote to the rigorous intellectual standards of empirical research, spending time especially in the Tarot end of the pool, and through following Bakara Wintner I found her guest appearance on Tarot for the Wild Soul, and via the website The Numinous I learned about Self-Service.

Keeping up with podcasting news and trends

Again, that Bello Collective piece is really handy. The top resources I’ve enjoyed for news are Hot Pod and podnews. They’ve kept me up to date on valuable projects like Preserve This Podcast and debates about recording loudness standards.

Advice on doing a good job

This piece from my podcast boyfriend Glen Weldon (look, the fact that he will never reciprocate my love is irrelevant as we’re both married and unlikely to ever spend much time together) is my favorite.

Developing, recording, editing, mixing, and mastering your podcast

This book, in spite of being ten years old, walked me through this every step of the way. I used Audacity for recording, editing, mixing, and mastering. I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on equipment, so I just used the same laptop I use for everything else and this cheapie mic - perfect because I wanted to be able to travel with it and record both solo stuff and group stuff.

In the future: hosting and marketing! Since I’m not ready to do those things, I don’t have a lot of advice on them, but I’ll be back when I do.

I have been chipping away at the comprehensive literature review my program requires that I write to prepare for my qualifying examination for more than six months now. My progress has been achingly slow. I am finally in a (slow-moving) groove, though, so I thought I’d share a little bit about my process.

I began by following Raul Pacheco-Vega’s advice. I read each piece, doing his Abstract-Introduction-Conclusion extraction process (a process similar to the advice offered in my doctoral seminar, but his is a bit more streamlined). [A note on tools: I do all of my reading digitally as I have limited printing availability, work in multiple offices, and sometimes need to read with a toddler napping on me. I use Zotero, store all my Zotero attachments in Google Drive, sync files to read on my tablet with ZotFile, make those files available offline using Google Drive on my tablet, then read and annotate them in Xodo.]

After this, at first I started writing a rhetorical precis for each piece but I found it didn’t help me that much. I wasn’t ready to write full synthetic notes, because I didn’t have enough of a grip on the literature landscape to determine what would qualify a study as something I would want to come back to and read later for more detail or expand into a complete memo. So I skipped ahead to the conceptual synthesis spreadsheet dump stage, leaving several of Raul Pacheco-Vega’s columns to return to later - I only used the concept, citation, and main idea columns to begin with. I added a column for which type of library setting the paper was addressing, because I thought that might be important later. I used the concept column not to tell me which concept in my lit review the paper was for, as I’ve created separate tabs in the spreadsheet for each of the five areas I’m exploring, but instead as sort of a tags column.

After filling out these columns for all the readings, I went back and re-read the main ideas column. Then I did some concept grouping (not really mapping yet) and a free-write of brief notes about all of the ideas I was synthesizing based on my reading.

Then, based on my concept groupings and freewrite, I created a preliminary outline.

I typed up this outline, filled in the introduction section based on earlier literature reviews I’d already written, and now I’m ready to come back and go through each study I have in my conceptual synthesis spreadsheet and write a full synthetic note with the ability to tell how helpful it would be to do a close reading and full memo of any given piece.

Loath to spoil this 90s art girl bedhead with self-care, but I’m gonna.

Does the world need another Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast? Yes, yes it does. When? Soonish. thingsofbronze.com #buffyslays20

#Repost @bymariandrew (@get_repost) … Caption from me, Kimberly: I have polycystic ovary syndrome and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. On high pain days, I take the elevator. I have to give myself a little talk about how that’s okay. I also give myself little talks about how it’s okay to work on my PhD slowly and to be a slow mom. I’m constantly reassuring myself that my illness is real and it’s okay to make accommodations for myself because of it.

New glasses.

ME: OMG this book is great, why haven’t more people cited it? checks publication date sees “2017” OHHHH….

(Seriously, though: Sarah R. Davies is the first academic author I’ve noticed connecting the new domesticity to the Maker Movement.)

Me: I don’t know why anyone would hire me to do anything. I’ve never done anything. My only skill is that I can tell you that somebody else wrote a thing about something.

W: That’s an actual job.

Me: Oh. That’s what a librarian does, isn’t it?

[Note: I know that is not the only thing a librarian does.]

As a woman with chronic illness, both physical and mental, who is a prime target for the wellness industry and a person who has spent a fair amount of money trying to fix myself in the middle of a systemic problem with US health care, I found this piece especially resonant. The points about the accessibility of “wellness” and the role of disparate health outcomes for women of color and low-income women are especially worth noting.