Hope chest (n.) : a young woman’s accumulation of clothes and domestic furnishings (as silver and linen) kept in anticipation of her marriage; also : a chest for such an accumulation, Merriam-Webster.com

My mother first told me what a hope chest was when I was a teenager. She said women who wanted to marry sometimes stored things in a footlocker or some smaller treasure-chest like storage box. Lingerie and sachets, needlepoint embroidery, scrapes of lace that could later be fashioned into some accent meant to make a house homier, and for the more romantic among the future wives, love letters sealed and bound together for future presentation to an as-yet-unknown spouse.

I’ve never much wanted to marry — or perhaps more accurately, I’ve never been confident that it was a possibility for me. But I’ve always liked the idea of storing up dreams, visions, goals, and love to be shared with a trusted someone, when the time has come. It’s something I’ve been doing for my daughter since I was expecting her and I’ll probably continue that trend until she’s old enough to start reading the work and to tell me whether or not she wants to continue receiving more of it.

When I fell in love with audio production last year, I knew about halfway through the first season of The Rise of Charm City that I’d also want to start an indie podcast that adapted blog posts here. The sort of prose-poetry style of writing I do here lends itself fairly well to audio adaptation, and I wanted to challenge myself to produce a project all on my own. I’ve been learning audio editing in Audition since Summer 2016; it’s what WEAA, where The Rise of Charm City airs, uses. But it wasn’t until spending nearly a week at The Center for Documentary Studies in Durham, NC last August, that I ever produced a draft all on my own, start-to-finish). That piece, “Prince, Philando, and Futures Untold,” which later aired as part of John Biewen and CDC’s gorgeous podcast, “Scene on Radio ” (some John did some additional mixing and polishing in Hindenburg), was the first audio adapted from one of my blog posts. As soon as I finished it, I knew I’d want to make more pieces like it.

Hope Chest is the podcast I’ve created for that purpose. It’s a place for me to store scraps of music and interviews and found sound and singing, woven together with lovingly-penned prose, to be shared with whomever wants to listen. If I were more business-minded and/or marketing-savvy, I would’ve had a more strategic roll-out. But here it is. I’d love it if you subscribed and/or gave the first two episodes a listen. I’m aiming for at least one new episode per month, so be on the lookout. Please rate and review it, if you’re subscribing via iTunes, and if you enjoy it, let me know either here or via some social media space where we follow each other. Thanks!

Episode 1, adapted from this, is here:

Episode 2, adapted from this, is here:

You can subscribe at SoundCloud or iTunes (although, for reasons I have yet to figure out, the iTunes feed doesn’t currently include Episode 1).