The Unexpected Benefits of Starting a Niche Anne of Green Gables Podcast
"But if you love the entire series? I know we are kindred spirits!"
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I was named for my grandma (Ann) but the spelling was for another Anne: Anne of Green Gables. When I was of age, my mom read me the first book — and we watched the (now iconic) mini-series. Readers, I hated it. I should absolutely revisit it (the books and the series!) but I also understand that my reaction was a form of identity building: I hated that the most prominent Anne (of Green Gables) and Annie (of the musical) were red-headed spunky unruly girls, not because I had anything against redheads, but because I was obsessed, at that point in my life, with fitting in.
That obsession stemmed from other parts of my personality that flagged me as weird (my bookishness, my lack of sports skill, my short hair) and shadowed me for years. So I understand why I rejected these texts, but am also jealous of people who flocked to them (and, once there, found so much joy and solace). So when Ragon & Kelly commented on my post about starting a small dahlia farm with my friends, outlining their “niche Anne of Green Gables podcast,” and how it’s served their friendship….I knew I wanted to interview them before I even finished reading their comment.
As you would expect from a couple of Anne friends, they submitted their whipsmart answers ahead of time. Of course. I can’t wait to hear about your own relationship to Anne (and/or stuff you do with friends that makes your friendships expand and shine).
I think a lot of people who read this newsletter know what it’s like to love a text so much that all you want to do is talk about it with other people who get it. How did Anne of Green Gables become that text for both of you?
Ragon: Like many people of our generation – I’m at the tail end of Gen X, Kelly is an Elder Millennial – we were both first infatuated with the 1985 miniseries that played frequently on PBS and the Disney Channel. That’s the one with Megan Follows as Anne Shirley and Colleen Dewhurst as Marilla Cuthbert and that beautiful score and all those incredible shots of idyllic Prince Edward Island.
Kelly: And of course we had the same first crush in Jonathan Crombie’s portrayal of Gilbert Blythe from the miniseries. That miniseries captured the imagination of pretty much every bookish kid who liked an old-fashioned setting. Another thing we’ve noticed is that the miniseries very much aligned with a lot of the visual aesthetics of the 1980s, from the bouffant hairstyles and puffed sleeves to the country kitchens. I think a lot of us aspired to live in that version of Avonlea.
Ragon: Enjoying the show quickly led to reading the book and finding a kindred spirit in Anne, even more in print than she was on TV. Because I was a kid who loved nothing more than an endless series to read back to back and who can’t get enough of a favorite character, I was delighted to find out that there were seven more Anne books and many more books by L.M. Montgomery to fill my shelves. I’ve always been an avid rereader–I love revisiting my favorite characters and worlds, especially when life feels hard and the Anne books were some of my frequent rereads. And I think what’s special about these books is the way they reward rereading–every time I go back to them I find something new, I appreciate something different, I identify with different stages of Anne’s life, I discover some new depth. Many people are aware of Anne of Green Gables, from the first book or the miniseries, but if you love the entire series? I know we are kindred spirits!
Kelly: Reading Anne of Green Gables was a really profound experience for me in childhood. To very quickly fill your readers in on the plot of the book, Anne Shirley is eleven years old and an orphan when she is adopted by a middle aged sister and brother, Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert. They live and work on a farm on Prince Edward Island in the early twentieth century, and are hoping to adopt a boy to help around the farm. Due to a communication mix-up, the orphanage sends a girl instead. This girl is the talkative, impulsive, imaginative Anne. The book is about Anne’s tumultuous journey to finding family and home with the Cuthberts at Green Gables.
Like a lot of kids, I felt lonely and misunderstood, and so I identified strongly with Anne as a main character. Using imagination to cope was already very familiar to me, and the book was all about a young girl who did the exact same thing. Anne loved to read, hated her name, was competitive at school, and fell a little bit in love with trees and ponds and her closest friends – it was like seeing a version of myself on the page. Eighty years after L. M. Montgomery brought Anne to life, I felt like she was written just for me. Turns out a lot of other people feel the exact same way, and I’ve been so delighted to find them.
How did you go from “we are two people who really love these books” to “where are two people who are doing a podcast about these books?” Be detailed, you know we love process around here!!
Ragon: Kelly and I had been friends for at least 12-13 years at this point, so the foundation of friendship was strong. We attended each other’s weddings, played endless Dungeons and Dragons campaigns together with our husbands, started a little book club with a third friend and podded during Covid lockdown together. Books had always been a huge cornerstone in our friendship. We could talk about the books we were reading for hours and we both absolutely love a deep dive: like give us the lore, the fandom, the nerdy t-shirts, the fan art for all our favorite books.
We were just at the point in our friendship where we both had a little more time in our lives — both our careers were solid and while they kept us busy, they weren’t as draining as in early career life. My daughter was starting fifth grade and didn’t need as much intensive parenting so I felt like I had free time in the evening again. Covid lockdown was over which meant our social worlds and obligations were expanding again. Which was great, but we also wanted to do something fun for just us together. Much like doing a book club ensured that we made time to meet up once a month or so, we thought if we did a bigger project together, we would definitely continue to make our friendship a priority.
A podcast seemed like something we could do together that didn’t require us to be in the same space. We live in the same city, but by Los Angeles standards we don’t live that close to each other. So we batted around ideas, first in a joking way and then in a more serious way.
Kelly: It’s worth noting that these conversations took place over a period of months — we didn’t say “let’s do a podcast” one day and the next day bought microphones. It was very much a “wouldn’t it be fun if we . . .” type conversation for the better part of a year. But the more we talked about it, the more we felt like “well, yeah, that actually would be really fun.”
Ragon: Exactly — basically any time we had a really long or profound conversation we said “we should do a podcast!” but it took awhile before we realized it was an idea we were both thinking about more and more seriously. We thought about an advice podcast since we both have careers that lend themselves to giving good advice — I’m a therapist, Kelly’s a lawyer — but there are a lot of those out there, and a lot of them are really good.
We weren’t sure we’d be bringing anything new to the table. Then we thought about a more general book club podcast but there are also a lot of great book podcasts out there. But then the idea of doing a deep dive on Anne of Green Gables came up — we both loved those books and had already spent way too much time enthusing about it together. I think I got out the words “Kel, do you want to do a podcast about Anne of…” before she had already said yes and we were off.
We went out of town one weekend for what we call a “girls reading weekend” to our favorite mountain town. Usually, that involves us bringing stacks of books and reading and eating snacks and talking all weekend. This time, we decided to sit down and see if we could come up with enough ideas to make a podcast. And I think within a few hours, we had planned out the bulk of our entire first season — 18 episodes!
Kelly: We both knew we had something in that initial planning session. We were overflowing with ideas — we couldn’t take notes fast enough. It felt like the podcast already existed and we were just discovering it.
Ragon: The ideas just flowed and we bounced off of and built on each other’s ideas so naturally. Even the name of the podcast seemed obvious! We didn’t even entertain any other title because that just seemed exactly right.
We wanted to do character studies for all the characters in Anne and mapped out themes for each character we wanted to explore. We discussed parenting and motherhood through Marilla Cuthbert, the middle-aged woman who adopts young Anne Shirley under unpredictable circumstances. We discussed friendship through Diana Barry, Anne’s first friend in Avonlea.
We also thought about what type of podcasts inspired us and discussed why we thought certain elements worked or didn’t work to figure out how we wanted to structure our episodes. We liked pods where we wanted to hang out with the hosts — where it seemed like the hosts were good friends who were including us in their conversations. We liked deep nerdy dives into a particular subject area. And we loved recommendations and wanted an excuse to do that on our pod too!
It turns out that starting a podcast is not a very expensive investment. We needed microphones and a podcast hosting platform, and we chose the free level at Podbean to start (a free audio editing software). Then we use Audacity, and a shared Google doc. We record over Zoom so we don’t have to battle LA traffic to record, which would honestly be a real hurdle to recording regularly otherwise!
We script our pods fairly heavily. Our fourth episode was going to be the first of our character study episodes, after doing an intro and a couple of recap episodes of the book. We went in with only an outline figuring “Oh, we know the subject and we love to talk and it seems easy when other hosts do it, it’ll be great!” And it was awful. We talked over each other, started sentences that never got finished, went on tangents and never got back on topic, and left out chunks of content we had intended to cover. So awful we binned it and decided to script the episode instead.
Kelly: Episode Four was a real turning point for us. The recording was awful, but it wasn't unpublishably awful. We could have released it and kept going in that vein, and perhaps we would have eventually found our stride. But we both had this moment where we realized that if we were going to put this much time and effort and energy into this project, we wanted it to be good. We realized that we cared enough about the podcast to do it right, and that it was going to be worth the extra work of researching and scripting the episodes in advance, rather than flying by the seat of our pants while recording.
That was also an interesting moment because we discovered a new layer of our relationship with each other. We weren’t just close friends with a hobby, we were collaborators. And collaborators hold each other accountable and say things like “This isn’t very good, and I know we can do better.”
Ragon: So now we are a lot more intentional. We outline the whole season well in advance, and we script individual episodes. Our first couple of episodes were about 10-12 pages and now we regularly write 20 page episodes.
Kelly: There’s probably a book in there somewhere, at this point.
Ragon: We still go off topic and we try not to read word for word. We leave time for spontaneous chitchat at the top of the episode, but the script means that we cover everything we want to cover and if we get off topic, we know where to pick up the conversation. It’s also easier to edit the show in a way that flows naturally.
We release episodes every other week but at the beginning of the season we often try to write and record several episodes well in advance in case life gets busy. That way we always have a few in the can ready to release.
Kelly: We can take off time for holidays and school breaks while still staying on a regular release schedule. Earlier this year we were able to pause for a couple months following the fires in LA. I lost my home in the fires and Ragon was leading the front lines of support for me and many others in our community, so it was nice to be able to pause the podcast in that moment where we needed space to be human beings and deal with this great big awful thing.
Ragon: Building in time for breaks is also important because we both work full time and the podcast is not monetized in any way. And the truth is it’s a lot of work. It doesn’t always feel like work the same way our jobs feel like work, because the podcast is about our friendship and this shared passion, but also, it is a lot of work! It’s time-intensive, even outside of our recording sessions. When we are in the middle of a season, at any one time we are writing and researching one episode, recording another episode, editing still another episode, and listening to a finished episode for mistakes. This is really a project of friendship and enthusiasm that’s taken on a life of its own.
I first heard about Kindred Spirits when you commented on my post about the unexpected benefits of starting a small dahlia farm with your friends. Tell us about the unexpected benefits of doing this pod.
Kelly: We are both Culture Students and avid readers of your newsletter and we love getting lost in your comments section. That particular post about planting dahlias at first for fun and then forming a small dahlia farm with your friends and neighbors hit home for us, because of course that was exactly what had happened with Kindred Spirits Book Club. What started as a friendship hobby evolved into something more expansive than either of us could have predicted.
Ragon: At this point we are about to start our fifth season and our fourth year of the podcast! We have 74 episodes out there and we are on the last of the Anne books. And this ride has been WILD! We truly thought that only our close friends and our mothers might listen — and maybe a few devoted Anne fans might find us along the way.
Kelly: We always hoped the podcast would find a listenership, but we were fine knowing that Kindred Spirits Book Club would be niche. Our goal was never to quit our jobs and become podcasters. We did not have a solid promotional plan in place. We talked it up among our friends, families, neighbors and colleagues; we mentioned the podcast in the comments sections of online communities we are part of, including Culture Study; and we used social media to promote (and by that I mean we started an Instagram account, posted a few times a week, and followed every other Anne fan we could find). Mostly, though, we talked about it. It seemed like every time we met another woman our age, we found out she also nurtured a crush on Gilbert Blythe from the 1985 miniseries.
The podcast started growing by inches. A small publisher of classic books for middle grade readers called Owl’s Nest Publishing asked us to read their annotated version Anne of Green Gables. We loved it and invited them on the podcast, and all of a sudden we were a podcast that had guests?!?
Ragon: A turning point was connecting with the scholarly community who study and teach L.M. Montgomery’s work. A friend in academia told us that the L.M. Montgomery Institute was a uniquely welcoming academic space, so we decided to go to the L.M. Montgomery Institute’s biennial conference in June 2024 on Prince Edward Island, in Canada. At that point, we were finishing our third season of Kindred Spirits Book Club.
Kelly: We had good material and were proud of our show, but we were also acutely aware that the hobbyist-level work we were doing was very different from the career-level work the presenters were doing. We decided to go with open minds, to listen and learn, and to share a few postcards promoting the podcast.
Ragon: PEI is the home of Anne of Green Gables and a major center for L.M. Montgomery tourism, so in addition to the conference, it was a literary pilgrimage. The whole trip was incredible, but the conference expanded our world: we got to connect with and learn from so many scholars with so much knowledge. Our brains exploded with learning: we’d get back to our AirBnb every night and just have to braindump everything we learned. We had been a little nervous about sharing about our pod with the people we met — I mean, these were the most knowledgeable L.M. Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables scholars out there and we are a fan podcast. We still thought of Kindred Spirits Book Club as something that was mostly for the two of us and we were surprised every time we found out someone unrelated to us listened to the pod!
Kelly: The community of academics welcomed us warmly and arranged for some really unique experiences for us, including recording an episode of the podcast in L.M. Montgomery’s church. As we began to plan our fourth season, we realized we knew real experts who would guest on our show, answer our emails, provide advice and inspiration, and who loved to talk about Anne and L.M. Montgomery as much as we did.
Ragon: Not only have we had the opportunity to have some of those scholars on the pod, but we’ve gotten feedback that we are really doing something valuable! That feels a little unreal still.
Kelly: And we are learning to hold our own in deeper conversations with people who are approaching these books at a higher level, which has been a wonderful creative and intellectual challenge for us. After the conference, we started to think more critically about growth, whether and how we wanted to grow as a podcast. We met with a couple professional podcast producers, including Jessica Alpert, who we met in the Culture Study classifieds, who gave us advice about how to find more listeners. We decided our goal was to make sure that if someone was looking for a podcast about Anne of Green Gables, they could find us.
And that seems to be working. One person who was recently looking for a podcast about Anne of Green Gables was Kat Sandler, a playwright, director, and producer who had just been commissioned to create a new theatrical version of Anne of Green Gables for the Stratford Theater Festival in Ontario, Canada. While Kat was writing the play, part of her research and immersion in the material was listening to our podcast. Once the show was in rehearsals, she reached out to us. We had her on Kindred Spirits Book Club as our guest, and then she invited us to attend the opening night of Anne of Green Gables as her guests. We were honored to have been even a small part of her creative process. The show is absolutely phenomenal and still playing through November 16, if anyone in the Toronto or Great Lakes region gets a chance to see it.
Ragon: Meeting so many people who want to talk about Anne of Green Gables with us has been such a special, life-affirming and connecting benefit of starting this pod. We recently did a substack live with another Culture Student, Lisa Sibbett of The Auntie Bulletin. Continuing to engage with so many people not just as fans of Anne but as a touchpoint to talk about so many of the themes and issues that continue to resonate for our contemporary circumstances — found family, building community, how to hold high ideals but also live in the real world — we love being a part of these conversations.
We were both so touched when our little podcast community really stepped up to help replace the library of L.M.Montgomery books that Kelly lost in the fires. It was a small, bright kindness during a terrible time that was a little tangible proof of how connection can grow through the airwaves and the internet.
I think another unintended benefit has also been the chance to keep stretching our intellectual brains. Of course both of our jobs require thought and expertise, but you can kind of get into the groove of your career and forget about learning things outside of that realm. I haven’t done literature deep dives since college and I love getting to flex that muscle and remember that I like creative writing and close reading. And learning new skills! I took on the task of learning how to edit the pod; that’s a whole new skill in an area of tech that’s not usually in my wheelhouse and I’m really proud of slowly building that skill.
Kelly: Somehow along the way, we went from two friends geeking out about a beloved book from our childhoods to mini celebrities in a very niche field. Now we are working on our conference presentation for next year and plotting our fifth season. It doesn't even feel real. For us, having this shared passion, this shared goal of creating something we enjoyed and were proud of, and a really solid foundation of respect and care for each other was what allowed this little hobby podcast to grow the way it has. That and time: lots of it; making time and putting in effort have given the podcast the room it needed to grow.
Ragon: I think neither of us could have predicted that we would get this far or that the pod would grow the way that it has but it’s so exciting to think about how we will continue to grow in the future. This has been the best journey to go on and Kelly is the only person with whom I could imagine doing this kind of project. The intentionality, focus and time we’ve brought to the podcast also means we’ve brought intentionality, focus and time to our friendship.
Postscript from Kelly and Ragon:
We are so excited to launch into our Fifth Season, which features an in-depth the last book in the Anne series: Rilla of Ingleside. For those who aren’t familiar with the book, it’s through the eyes of Anne’s youngest daughter and her experience of World War I on the Canadian homefront. It’s also one of the only books about the experience of Canadian women and girls on the homefront during this period — written by someone who experienced it herself. The new season launches October 3rd!
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Additional Reading:
I loved learning about this podcast. I was an avid reader of the Anne books growing up in the 80s, and read all 8 of the series many times over- I loved being able to return to that world whenever I wanted. As a black kid growing up in suburban Arizona there were few places I felt accepted, and Avonlea was one of them =)
Count me in as one of the bookish red-heads with a crush on Gilbert Blythe from the 1985 miniseries! 🙋♀️ Just wanted to shout out Anne of West Philly, a graphic novel retelling of the story (set in West Philly, duh) that I just discovered at the local library and picked up for my two graphic novel-loving boys.