WOLF 359
Creator, Head Writer, Creative Director
I created Wolf 359, an original radio drama podcast series, in early 2014. Following the misadventures of the crew of the U.S.S. Hephaestus Space Station, the series is equal parts space-faring thriller, dramatic character study, and existentialist sitcom. I acted as showrunner, lead writer, and director for the series. While the series was running, we developed one of the most devoted followings in the world of indie audio fiction and got to work with some of the most celebrated independent creators in the field.
Over the course of its four-season run, the show grew from a tiny operation to a successful independent web series. It’s gotten over eleven million downloads across the world and been nominated to multiple writing, acting, and production awards. We also evolved in our creative pursuits within the series, pushing the boundaries of what audio fiction can do into largely unexplored formal territory. We've incorporated various techniques from the worlds of film, theater, and literature, such as non-chronological narratives, montages, dream sequences, monologues, and cross-cutting between scenes.
UNSEEN
Co-Creator, Writer, Director
Between 2020 and 2021, me and my producing partners created Unseen, an urban fantasy anthology series. The premise behind it is simple: In a world where magic is real but invisible to almost everyone, the few magical beings that do exist struggle, every day, just to be seen.
Season one of Unseen featured fifteen different stories of identity, connection, and personhood (and, of course, magic) in the modern world. Some were thrilling adventures. Others were sad and melancholic. Some were creepy and unsettling. Each of them featured a single performer, guiding the audience through a new, original modern fantasy landscape.
Unseen was our first Kickstarted project. The first season was made possible by 1,162 backers on Kickstarter, who pledged $40,406 to raise over 400% of its project goal. It went on to win various prizes for its writing, music, acting, and production, and was featured on several “Best Of” lists for 2020.
"… those performances bring that same welcome, lighthearted bit of knowingness, just enough to forge a connection with our own reality.”
- Steve Green, Indiewire: The Podcasts of 2020
Zero hours
Co-Creator, Writer, Director
In 2019, along with my co-producers from Wolf 359, Sarah Shachat and Zach Valenti, I created Zero Hours, a limited-run anthology series. It tells seven different stories about the end of the world - or at least about something that feels like the end of the world. Each episode is organized around a kind of apocalypse, whether the cataclysm is planetary or personal. The stories are also set in succeeding centuries, with 99-year intervals separating each episode. The show begins in the past, catches up to the present, and eventually overtakes it.
From a strange meeting between a Puritan priest and a woman claiming to be a witch, to an explosive present-day confrontation, to a story in the far-off future about two mysterious, powerful beings, Zero Hours is our most ambitious project to date. A shifting, constantly changing kaleidoscope of audio fiction stories, each taking place in richly developed settings and featuring an astounding cast made up by some of the most talented performers in the world of podcasting.
“The best project yet from some of the brightest lights in the audio fiction sphere.”
“These seven stories, spread out across the timeline we know and the one we can only imagine, are lovingly rendered and expertly paced.”
- Ely Fernandez-Collins, Bello Collective
“It’s like if someone made Black Mirror but with a heck of a lot more empathy.”
Time:Bombs
Co-Creator, Writer, Director
The result of a self-imposed creativity challenge called Fear of Public Shame, Time:Bombs is a comedy mini series created, written, recorded, produced, and released in just one week. Developed in conjunction with Sarah Shachat and Zach Valenti, this mini series follows EOD technician Simon Teller on the busiest night of the year for him and his team - a night when business is, quite literally, booming.
It’s a workplace comedy, a show about a profoundly dysfunctional (yet ultimately fiercely close-knit) family, and, at its heart, an exploration about the realities of living in a state of ever-increasing, nearly omnipresent stress. It’s a show about taking the most dangerous job in the world, and finding the way to make it funny. Finding the way to laugh at it. Because if you ever stop laughing... something is going to blow up.
The bright Sessions
Writer
In 2018, I got the chance to write a special, one-off episode of Lauren Shippen’s hit audio fiction series The Bright Sessions. The story that came out of this collaboration - about a talented telekinetic coming to terms with his vulnerabilities and the good that therapy can do for him - was a personal high point for my writing career, as well as a fantastic opportunity to work with two amazing performers, Julia Morizawa and Zach Valenti, and one of the best sound designers working in the field today, Mischa Stanton.
No Bad Ideas
Co-Creator, Co-Host
Equal parts demented gameshow, fiction workshop, and confessional talk show, No Bad Ideas is a new non-fiction podcast I run in conjunction with my two writing partners from Wolf 359. Advertised as, “a storytelling gameshow where we take the worst ideas from the Internet and try to turn them into stories that are actually good,” every week we get together, take a terrible idea one of us finds on the Internet, and turn it into a compelling narrative in thirty minutes or less!
OUtliers
Writer
In 2019, I got to write a piece of historical fiction - a new kind of storytelling for me! - for Outliers: Stories From the Edges of History. This podcast, a co-production between Historic Royal Palaces and Rusty Quill, is dedicated to telling stories from different corners of history, but as related by the kind of people who do not usually feature in the history books. The story I got to write focuses on the early days of firefighting in 17th Century London, and on the fire that consumed the Palace of Whitehall in 1698.
Wooden Overcoats
Writer
In summer of 2017, I was invited to write a short episode of Wooden Overcoats. The resulting Funn Fragment wasn’t just a chance to work with an extraordinarily talented cast and crew and with one of the best editors in all of indie audio drama - the formidable David K. Barnes - but also an opportunity to tell a story very much unlike anything else I’d done up to that point.
Amazingly, in 2022, the Wooden Overcoats team brought me back to write a full episode for their final season. Titled Radio Drama, it was a breakneck screwball farce through the world of sensational journalism, angry mobs, and the difficulties of showing those you’re closest to just how much you care about them.
Life On Pause
Writer
In 2020, I was invited to participate in an anthology series that grappled with the realities of living in lockdown. The resulting series - less a document about the specifics of life under Covid-19 and more a kaleidoscopic journey through the emotions that time elicited - was a truly cathartic and edifying experience. My story, a half-hour-long piece called Mary, about a lovelorn man’s quest to reconnect with someone he met just before lockdown started, was chosen to be the series’ premiere episode.
That Vampire Show
Writer
In 2021, I got to be on the writing staff for the first season of That Vampire Show, a dramedy about fandom, pop cultural obsession, and the challenges of loving art made by a toxic creator. I got to write two episodes for the show’s debut season: Detente, an early crescendo in the struggle between the show’s warring forces, and The War of Attrition, a tense bottle episode set late in the season’s chronology.
Case 63
Script Consultant
Starting in 2021, I got to work as a script consultant for the English-language adaptation of Julio Rojas’s Case 63, starring Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac. I worked with the show’s translator, offering help, perspective, and advice on matters of language and dramaturgy for the first two seasons of the Spotify Original Podcast.
Our Fair City
Writer
One of the highlights of my career came in 2016, when I got to contribute to one of the titans of the audio drama field. Under the guidance of producer and director extraordinaire Jeffrey Gardner, I got to write the Halloween special for Our Fair City.