New Jersey Stage January 2015 | Page 114

huge impact on your day to day life. Lulu Miller: To understand how those things shape our experience, we talk to scientists and people with really unusual experiences, and weave it all together in a way that we think is compelling, and sometimes just funny. There’s a lot of lightness in the shows even though we sometimes talk about dark stuff. Having come from two successful public radio programs, what was the impetus to create a new one? How long did it take to get from inception to first episode? Alix: Well, we met about two years ago, and when we met, it wasn’t as if we just sat down and decided to create a show. We met at this public radio conference called Third Coast, and at the time I was interested in learning new radio techniques and Lulu knew how to do a New Jersey Stage whole bunch of fancy radio stuff that I didn’t know how to do. So there was this story that I really wanted to do, and I asked her to work on it with me, as a producer. At the time she was finishing up graduate school for creative writing, but was thinking about eventually getting back into radio, so she said yes. And once we went to do the reporting it was just incredibly easy and kind of ridiculous fun, and basically just grew from there. It was so much fun that we just kept on going and our editor/co-creator at NPR - Anne Gudenkauf helped guide it until eventually we just had a show. That was two years ago, and it took a while to get her to move to Washington, but eventually she did. I would say that though we’ve been working on mostly part-time because we were both doing news, it’s taken about 18 months or January 2015 pg 114