Hillary Frank
Hillary Frank is the host of The Longest Shortest Time and the creator of Here Lies Me. Follow her on Twitter here.
Please tell me how The Longest Shortest Time went from a spark to an idea to a real thing to a community?
When I started The Longest Shortest Time, barely anyone was making a living in podcasting — and if you were, you were probably a man. I did not imagine that LST could possibly become my job. I just wanted to prove that I still had chops so that I could continue to get work in radio after having a baby. I had gone through a traumatic birth and aftermath, and I desperately wanted to connect with other people who had experienced struggles in parenthood. At the end of every episode, I would tell listeners to contact me if they had a surprising struggle to share — and to my shock, I started hearing from strangers right away.
The show grew quickly and mostly by word-of-mouth. This was 2010 — before podcasts had trailers or marketing budgets. I didn’t have a regular production schedule because I was making the show in 20-minute spurts during my daughter’s naps. Three years in, I did a Kickstarter to see if there was any way to fund LST. If I didn’t make my goal, my plan was to end the show and find a full-time job — possibly not in audio. I made $10k over my goal by enlisting brands to make challenge grants. So every time I brought in, say, $5000, a brand would kick in $5000. These were brands that I cold-called. They had never considered podcast advertising, but I was able to convince them to contribute to my campaign by leaving messages on their marketing managers’ voicemails. I figured I was selling my ability to tell a story, so I told them my story, including how much their products had helped me as a new mom. I asked if they’d consider supporting my podcast in exchange for ads, and almost all of them called me back and said yes. Soon after the Kickstarter, WNYC picked up the show and I was able to have a producer for the first time. A couple years later I moved to Stitcher.
I think the community piece began really early with listeners commenting on the LST website. There was real dialogue and camaraderie there. It was clear to me that parents were hungry for connection — not “mommy wars.” Later, we had a couple of Facebook groups and we also did “Speed Dating for Mom Friends” events in several cities around the country.
How did The Longest Shortest Time evolve in the years it was running, and the years since?
In the very beginning, my conversations focused on raising babies under a year old. But after doing the show for a few months, I got an amazing pitch from a mom whose toddler outright refused to wear clothes and I upped the age limit to three years old. Soon after I joined WNYC, I broadened the show to be about any stage of parenthood, including adult children talking about their own parents. I also interviewed non-parents (including Terry Gross!) about not being parents. But at every iteration I designed the show to appeal to a general audience, not just parents, because I don’t believe that family is a niche topic.
Pretend I am launching a podcast all by myself in a month. What should I be doing now to plant the seeds for growth?
Think about how you’ll give your audience a stake in your show. Will you interview listeners? Poll them on topics they’d like to hear? Have Q&A or call-in episodes? The more you involve them in the show, the more they’ll want to tell other people about it.
Engage likeminded creators with loyal audiences. Notice I didn’t say “celebrities with huge followings.” Reach out to people who are passionate about the topic of your podcast or share a similar worldview. Ask if they’re down for an interview or some form of cross-promotion. This doesn’t have to be podcast-to-podcast; you can get great conversion rates from newsletters too!
Craft CTAs with specificity. When you ask people to take action, what exactly do you want them to do? Is there a specific question you want them to answer on social media? Do you want them to use a specific hashtag? Is there a specific aspect of your show that you want to encourage fans to mention in reviews? Try to ask for only one thing at a time — and if you have more than one request in an episode, split them up so that they fall at different spots in the show.
Invest in good art. It matters.
Anything else you want to say about growth?
Each year, try to do one or two special series. If you’re lucky, you’ll get media attention when your show launches. But that attention doesn’t last very long. If you want to continue to get noticed, a special series gives you a new reason to pitch the press. Plus, those series are often creatively satisfying.
How did you go about crafting the story for Here Lies Me? I know you collected real stories from people about their awkward teenage years!
Before I started The Longest Shortest Time, I wrote three YA novels. Here Lies Me was going to be my fourth. I developed the idea for it around 2006, but when I pitched it to my agent he told me that if I wanted to write this story I would have to age the characters up to high school. I felt deeply committed to making this story about middle school, so I set the book concept aside.
A few years ago, I started thinking that maybe podcasting was the perfect medium for Here Lies Me because there are no rules in podcasting. I had already done some audio fiction too — I co-founded The Truth with Jonathan Mitchell and had done a fiction piece for This American Life.
The story plot of Here Lies Me really started to come into focus for me with the #MeToo movement. It had always been a story about a girl trying to get a boy to leave her alone. But before #MeToo, I didn’t know that the word for that was “harassment.” With all the stories in the news about harassment in the workplace, in college, and in high school, it dawned on me: Ohhhh, this is a story about harassment in middle school! And I’ve come to believe that middle school is where harassment begins in earnest.
Writing about harassment among children gave me the opportunity to complicate the narrative. This didn’t have to be a clear-cut story of victim and perpetrator; it could be a story with blurred lines, where everyone is a little of both.
And, yes, I did invite Longest Shortest Time listeners to share their middle school experiences with me in a survey. I got nearly 400 responses!
Did you ever use exact language from any of the stories you received?
I didn’t really get dialogue from those anecdotes. It’s more that I was looking for similarities in the responses — ways in which people were harassed or bullied. Or funny, weird things they did when they were coming of age. There are a handful of moments in the show where I wrote scenarios that are pretty close to the anecdotes people sent me.
What do you hope Here Lies Me does for people?
I hope this gets people thinking about harassment and bullying in middle school — and how we might try to stop harassment in its tracks, while kids are still young enough to be receptive to adults. I want people who have been harassed to feel validated. And I hope that potential harassers or bystanders might hear this show and change their behavior.
What’s been the most difficult part of making a fiction show?
Managing all of the takes from the recording sessions!
So much of the best fiction podcasts are dystopian, sci-fi, and horror. What did you pull from for inspiration for Here Lies Me? Any non-fiction?
I’m a big TV-watcher, so most of my inspiration came from TV. The big ones are Twin Peaks and Freaks and Geeks… and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. I remember watching those hearings and being horrified, but also fascinated, by how Kavanaugh so masterfully turned himself into the victim. Some of my favorite scenes in Here Lies Me are the ones where Little God (our antagonist) is clearly harassing Noa (our protagonist) but also clearly sees himself as the victim. And the conversations are complicated because in some ways he’s absolutely right.
How much of The Longest Shortest Time is in Here Lies Me?
Just like I don’t think family is niche, I don’t think adolescence is niche. I’m trying to bring attention to topics that are usually treated with condescension and make them compelling to a general audience. I seem to have a knack for creating shows where the reviews are mostly some version of, “I thought I wasn’t going to like this… but now I’m hooked!” (Also, in episode 4, the elderly sex ed teacher has a monologue about vaginal discharge that is full of *very* LST-style information.)
Is there anything I didn’t ask you about that you want to talk about?
Yeah! Here Lies Me is a very pandemic production. Our teen cast came from a performing arts high school in Houston, where they hadn’t been able to perform in over a year. We directed them entirely over Zoom in their bedrooms. When they sang the title themes, they had to go on mute because of internet delay, which meant they couldn’t hear each other — and we couldn’t hear them either. My composer, Casey Holford, magically made them all sound like they were in the same room. Also, nearly the entire show is scored by my 11-year-old daughter on her drum kit. I’ve worked with people remotely in radio and podcasting for more than 20 years, but the pandemic forced me to use the tools at my fingertips and invent new methods for producing audio stories. I think the results make the show sound different from other podcasts — and not just in fiction.
Thanks, Hillary!