Willa Paskin

Willa Paskin is the host of Decoder Ring. Follow her on Twitter here.

How do  you get ideas for the stories? Are most of them yours?
We get our ideas all sorts of ways. Listeners have suggested the episodes about the mystery of the mullet, clowns and the Truly Tasteless Joke book series, among others. Colleagues have suggested our episodes about the metrosexual, Truck Nutz, and blue food. My husband suggested the episode about hydration. But I would say that the majority of our topics are self-generated. 

A big reason for this is that our show appears to be about curious cultural objects but it’s really about cultural objects that have good narratives. Admittedly, it's a pretty fine distinction! But we get a lot of suggestions about oddball objects and phenomena that seem totally right for us, except when I start to look into them, they just don’t have the proper narrative to sustain an episode. There’s something curious there, but not a story to go with it.

Another big reason our ideas tend to be self-generated is that we want our topics to be random and surprising and, yet, also feel inevitable, like, “Oh, of course, that’s a Decoder Ring episode!” (Someone once said to me that the topic selection has a ‘you know it when you see it’ feeling, and, boy, I sure hope so.) But that makes it hard for anyone, us included, to come up with ideas because the rembit is: a topic that is totally unlike and yet similar to all the episodes we’ve done before.

I personally come up with episodes in one of two ways. The first is I’ll be sparked by something concrete.  Like I’ll see a tweet about Lord Byron or Bart Simpson, or read about Alberta Canada’s rat war in a newsletter, or notice that Andrew Wyeth was on the cover of Time and Newsweek the same week in the 1980s and wonder: could that be something? And then I dig around and, lo and behold, there’s the story to go with it.

The other way, which is much more chaotic, is that I start with a very hazy idea and see if I can’t find my way to something specific. An example: We did an episode about the Tootsie shot, this camera shot in movies of a person—usually a woman—strutting down a packed New York City street. It’s very specific, but that came out of me doing nearly a dozen interviews noodling on the question, “Why do ‘80s movies feel so different, so much shaggier, than movies do now?” Sometimes I feel like I’m just basically ransacking my whole life, to remember every single thing I’ve ever been curious about, and then seeing if I can turn that into an episode somehow, someday.

What’s your relationship with your voice and how would you describe it?
I know how this sounds but… I love the sound of my own voice. And I think I’ve gotten much better at using it over the run of the show! My background is entirely in print journalism and it takes time to get comfortable on a mic. You not only have to learn how to use your voice to put stuff over, but then you have to get confident enough to be a little playful with it. It’s a performance and I did not think about that very much before starting the show. You know what they say about ignorance.

As for what it sounds like: a little deep, very fast, has a tendency towards vocal fry and occasional heady bursts of a New Yawk accent. If that sounds like I’m being disparaging—please see above!

What’s the hardest part about ending your stories?
Endings are never the hardest part for me. Almost all of the Decoder Ring episodes have a chronological backbone. (It’s basically a history show, even if sometimes it’s very current history.) Often, we’ll do a series of stutter steps on that backbone, jumping back to explore the past more fully before leaping forward again. For me, figuring out that rhythm, particularly at its start, is the hardest part. There’s just so much information that needs to be conveyed to the listener and figuring out how to frame it and mete it out is really difficult. This part of the process— writing the top of the script, after the little cold opens we usually do, when I’m drowning in information — has become even more onerous with time because experience has taught me getting it right allows the whole episode to fall into place… or not. 

By the time I’m nearing the end of the script, I feel fully on the downslope: the less information there remains, the fewer options there are for what to do with it. The story is coming to an end and there’s only so much left to say. Phew. Except… then I also have to say something. As much as Decoder Ring is a stealth history show, it’s also a stealth argument show and the episodes always end on a few graphs of me vamping about what it all means. (I’m not feeling great about those ending right at this moment: I’m worried they have become a little pro forma, hacky, corny—actually just vamping—in part because a lot of the episodes thematically overlap and it’s hard to sum them up in totally distinct ways. I’m chewing it over.) Still getting down those closing thoughts, the good ones and the less good ones, both, doesn’t feel hard to me. There are two reasons for that. The first is that if we’ve done the episode right, there’s a set of ideas that have been threaded throughout that I just have to recapitulate and pay off. The second just has to do with my training. Before I made a podcast I was a TV critic and I’ve had over a decade of practice making meaning out of cultural objects.

What was the hardest episode to make? What was your favorite episode to make? 
I would guess that I’ve had a nauseating flash of “maybe this one isn’t going to work out” while making just about every single episode we’ve ever done, which is to say: they were all hard! For sure, though, some were harder than others.

Pretty early on we did an episode about a conman that came closer than any we have ever done to straight-up not working . It was a great yarn and that’s why we wanted to do it, but we hadn’t thought enough about whether we, Decoder Ring, should do it and why. We thought we could just tell the story, no big, whatever, come along for the ride, but we really had to figure out why are we telling this true crime tale? 

The funny thing is, as with all things that hurt a lot, you don’t really remember the pain. So I honestly don’t remember how sickeningly stressful and difficult that one was, I can just bloodlessly recall that neither Ben Frisch (Decoder Ring’s indispensable producer) or I had any clue what to even try to do with it at a certain point which, well, it’s never happened before or since, thank goodness, and there were a bunch of last minute listening sessions and a pushed airdate before, ultimately, we pulled it off. Or maybe that’s generous! I haven’t ever re-listened to that one. Maybe we just got an episode up, a low-bar kind of pulling it off. 

Without that kind of concrete, defcon, emergency flare up I find it difficult to remember how hard the episodes were. I recall that the one I did about a crazy soap opera storyline contained just so much information and took so many iterations to start getting better that it really wore me down; the selling out episode was also a beast. It’s not a coincidence that those two were made in the last year. I’m sure something older was just as hard, but thankfully it’s blacked out.

Also really hard—the episode I love the most. (The episode I love the second most is about Jane Fonda and Leni Cazden, the woman who created the Jane Fonda Workout.) It’s called The Sign Painter and it’s about an artist I’ve known all my life and why her career hasn’t turned out as she hoped. I decided I wanted to do it years before I did it: when I dove in initially, it felt so fraught, that I backed away from it. But all that time I spent not working on it helped. It’s maybe the only episode we’ve ever done, maybe the only thing I’ve ever done, that turned out exactly how I saw it in my head. The thing in your head—or my head anyway!— always seems so clear but when I try to set it down it reveals itself to be foggy and nebulous and it's apparent I was skipping a hundred steps in my mind. That was true about this too, except somehow, in the end, it became what I had imagined.

Is there an episode you’ve always wanted to do but it just hasn’t come together?
I really want to do an episode about the Saved by the Bell episode “Jessie’s Song” (you know, the one about the caffeine pill addiction) but I cannot get Elizabeth Berkley’s publicist to respond to my emails! 

Thanks, Willa!