Anne Helen Petersen & Melody Rowell

Anne Helen Petersen is a writer, author, and podcaster — she’s written four books (with a fifth on the way), wrangles the newsletter Culture Study, and is now co-producer of the Culture Study podcast. 

Melody Rowell is a podcast editor and producer living in Kansas City, MO. In addition to her work on the Culture Study podcast, she edits and produces Strict Scrutiny, a weekly podcast about the Supreme Court.

Describe Culture Study in 10 words or less.
AHP: Smart weirdos trying to prove that everything is interesting.

Anne, how is the mission of Culture Study different from Work Appropriate?
AHP: Work Appropriate was a podcast built around one of my favorite sub-interests: the culture of work. Culture Study borrows the format and expands it to all of culture (conveniently, culture can be pretty much anything you want it to be — even though one of our listeners tried to argue that infrastructure is not culture, to which I say: false)

Fill in the blank: You will like Culture Study if you like ________.
AHP:…the ethos of Ezra Klein, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and your favorite celebrity gossip site COMBINED

MR: …the meandering conversations that happen late into a book club gathering.

How are you two similar?
AHP: We are both detail-minded, try very hard to suffer no fools (but are also people pleasers), and grew up around some flavor of Evangelical Christianity (and have since moved away from it). We both think that good work should be compensated fairly. We both have workism tendencies that we try to battle. Melody is SO much better at Google Drive organization. 

MR: We like a lot of the same things! Good books, cute dogs, gardening, stupid TikToks, cool vacations. I think Anne is more chill than I am, which I definitely need in a creative partnership. I need someone to remind me that there’s no such thing as a podcast emergency.

Anne, you are an expert in burnout, what are your observations of podcast burnout and do you have any tips to combat it?
AHP: Podcasting is a passion job, and passion jobs will take everything we’re prepared to give them….until the point we’re huddled on the floor in a blobby mess incapable of giving any more (or just angry and rancid towards everyone we encounter and can’t manage to reply to even the most straightforward of emails — both are signs of burnout). When it comes specifically to podcasts and audio in general, I think a lot of people are stuck in jobs that demoralize and demean them but they’re terrified to go freelance, and I can’t tell you how much I understand that. But you have skills, and chances are very high that you’re being underpaid for them. Even if you’re not burned out now, you might be in the near future. Try as best as you can to cobble together an emergency fuck-you fund so you can quit when it becomes necessary and figure out what the future looks like, whether that’s independent and in-house. That’s the practical side. The philosophical side is remembering, over and over again, that your job is not your value as a person, and the insistence on putting guardrails around the rest of your life is not being bad at your job. If anything, it’s being good at your job — because if you’re working all the time, your ability to do your job well (to edit well, to catch things, to get things done) decreases. So much of combating burnout is working to silence that voice in your head that says that working all the time is being good at your job. 

Describe Culture Study listeners.
AHP: We naturally have a ton of crossover from the newsletter, and the average listener is willing to think deeply — think more — about the world that surrounds them, even when it’s challenging. They also think it’s worthwhile to take “pop culture” topics seriously!

What’s the single best thing podcasting has brought you?
AHP: Going to geekily say: meeting Melody. Who also convinced me to read A Court of Thorns of Roses (and doing a forthcoming podcast ep on it) which has been buoying energy of my January and February.

MR: Friendship!! The years I’ve been podcasting have also coincided with years full of personal challenges and crises, and the people I get to work with have been so supportive and encouraging. A very close second is the free luxury mattress I got from a sponsor that has transformed my sleep.

What do you do to grow the show?
AHP: Crossposting to Culture Study is the way and the truth. Hopefully it’s expanding from there, but we’re also getting cohosts with built in listenerships as well (Sam Sanders, Jane Marie, etc.)

MR: We’ve DIY’d a few promo swaps with other podcasts, but the thing that’s worked best for us is creating a free version of the podcast that gets cross-posted on Anne’s newsletter once a month.

Were your newsletter readers already podcast listeners or did you turn them into podcast listeners?
AHP: Definitely podcast listeners. About once a quarter we do a subscriber thread about podcasts (usually like a podcast concierge, where people can say what they’ve listened to before and liked and what they’re looking for…..and it reliably tops 500 comments) but I do think having a slightly broader focus (than Work Appropriate) has been useful in bringing more readers into the pod.

How do you come up with episode topics?
MR: When we started talking about making this show, Anne started a spreadsheet with like, 30 episode ideas off the top of her head. She has such an eye/ear for making the most mundane things interesting, and it’s contagious! We generally just text each other “We should do an episode about ____!” and then think about a guest, or we think of a guest we want and ask them what topic they’d want to do. Our listeners are also really communicative and submit great ideas and questions that help guide the direction of each episode and of the show as a whole.

If people haven’t listened yet, where should they start?
MR: The “Why Do Clothes Suck Now” episode haunts me in the best way-- I’m so glad we chose it to go first! The Paw Patrol episode is also so funny, even for people who aren’t parents. And of course I loved the nostalgia invoked by “The Curious Return of 2000s Music.”

What’s a podcast you love that everyone else already knows about?
AHP: My go-to is The Ezra Klein Show. Ezra has a team of producers helping him figure out how to guide the show but I know that he also does the fucking work — he reads the books, he takes the notes, he knows his shit inside and out, which is why the show is such a tour de force. 

MR: My all-time favorite is Criminal, especially for road trips. For walking the dog, I’ve gotten really into You’re Wrong About.

What’s a podcast you love that not enough people know about?
AHP: I still feel like not enough people know about Stolen, by Connie Walker — the first season is about the disappearance of a Native woman outside of Missoula, which happened while I was living there, and the second season centers on Walker’s father’s experience in the Canadian boarding schools that forcibly removed and abused thousands of Indigenous children from their homes.

MR: Fated Mates is very much a IYKYK podcast-- all about romance novels. One of the hosts, Sarah MacLean, is one of my favorite authors, and it’s the only show longer than 60 minutes that I can listen to in full. During the pandemic I found a lot of solace in Aria Code, a podcast breaking down the storytelling in opera’s most famous arias. The combination of analysis and personal experience is so moving.

Are there too many podcasts?
MR: People who make this argument are some of my least favorite people on the planet. Has anyone ever said there are too many books? Too many shows?? Too much music??? Too many movies????

AHP: Melody fucking said what she said.

If you could start another podcast, don’t worry about the logistics or whether or not anyone would like it, what would it be? Your budget is $1M.
AHP: This is so out there, but the group of kids I was tight with from Evangelical-tinged Presbyterian youth group in the early 2000s in small town Idaho….people with parents from all sorts of backgrounds….we have all turned into flaming liberals. Some of us are social justice Catholics, some of us are deeply atheist, some of us are trans, some of us have moved hundreds of thousands of miles away and some have stayed put. But what was it about our experience that taught us to interrogate and figure out our own paths forward — instead of the one suggested by the often regressive and always contradictory teachings of our church? Niche audience, but wow is this the podcast I want to make for me.

Anything I didn’t ask you that you want to say?
AHP: I asked Melody to do this Q&A with me because the producers and engineers are out here doing the work in a way that’s not always or even often recognized — she is the co-author of every episode of this podcast, and I’m proud that we’ve figure out a 50/50 profit-sharing deal that reflects that.

Thanks!