BONUS: Season 2 Q+A Retrospective: Part 1

Well, hey there, family.

If you love old gods of Appalachia and want to help us keep the home fires burning, but maybe aren't comfortable with the monthly commitment, well, you can still support us via the ACAS supporter feature.

No gift too large, no gift too small.

Just click on the link in the show description, and you too can toss your tithe in the collection plate.

Feel free to go ahead and do that right about now.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly.

Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

The ocean delights us.

Some marvel at the colorful world below the surface.

The ocean feeds us.

Others find nourishment in its bounty.

The ocean teaches us how our everyday choices impact even the deepest places.

The ocean moves us, whether we're riding a wave or soaking in its breathtaking beauty.

The ocean connects us.

Find your connection at Monterey Bay Aquarium.org/slash connects.

Hi, everybody, family that might be out there in the darkness.

Welcome to the season two recap of Old Gods of Appalachia.

Question and answer.

I'm here with Steve Schell and Cam Collins, the creators and writers, and I am Jordan Shively,

another writer on the show.

We're going to be answering some questions that you have sent in, and they may or may not give us the answers, and they may give us cryptic replies that have been whispered to them from the darkness.

Cryptic replies are a specialty.

And Jordan Shively is not just another writer on the show.

Jordan Shively is of Dread Singles fame on Twitter, master of Void Merch, and a million other cool products and things that they have done.

So

put some respect on your name.

The rent makes me do it.

I know, but put some respect on your name, family.

That's all I'm saying.

Don't be shy.

Okay.

So should we just jump right into these questions, y'all?

All right.

So the very first question on this list of great questions is from Sarah in Havelock, North Carolina.

How did the addition of cultural sensitivity consultants help shape this season's final episodes.

I'll start on that.

We have, since the beginning of the show, wanted to make sure that voices that have not been carved into stone in Appalachian history, because Appalachia, everyone, when you think of Appalachia, if you're not from here, and even if you are from here, know it's a pretty white and homogenous place in a lot of stretches.

But there are black folks here, there are brown folks here, there are folks from all over in small pockets sprinkled throughout this region.

I'm here to tell you that the 1970s, people would not have survived

in the coal boom without doctors from Iran and Pakistan and places that came over during that migration.

So there are,

Appalachia, while not like openly diverse, has a lot of stories that don't get told.

And we wanted to tell those, but we also wanted to stay in our lane.

culturally.

I cannot like, I'll use Barlow for an example.

I can tell the story of black miners murdered by a mining company, but I can't point a view right from like a young black miner coming to Appalachia, writing about what that's like, because I culturally have no idea what it's like to be a person of color.

I am a white cis straight dude, not straight dude, sorry.

I'll re-edit that.

I have no idea what it's like writing as a person of color.

I'm a white cis dude who grew up in Appalachia with every golden ticket I could have punched.

So I can't assume to know what that is.

So for a long time, we wrote about the things that happened to these people and we tried to give as much agency as possible, but we never wanted to assume the mantle that we could write about what it was like growing up black in a rural environment or anything else.

So when it came time that we knew we wanted to introduce the Underwood family, who had been kind of in the, in the works for a little bit, I knew I had the ideas for the abilities and we had talked about what they were going to do.

But writing, we didn't want to assume writing that voice.

So I reached out.

I come from the, as some people know, I come from the slam poetry community and spent many, many years, which is primarily a very queer, very POC space, especially in the South.

It's almost, there's like three white people.

It's like me, Justin, and Adam, and that's it.

So it was a matter of, I had a deep well of writers and friends who, if not necessarily Appalachian, could talk to me about small-town life as a person of color or as a black person.

And we reached out to two, DJ Rogers, who is an educator and

scholar of black history and is a master of these things in the Durham Chapel Hill area.

And

Catalyst Alcinder, who is a slam poet I've been friends with for a long time.

And also just both these guys are just black nerds extraordinaire in terms of like represent, like knowing how to operate within those cultures.

And Catalyst Alcinder, amazing poet from New Orleans, we brought them in and ran script points by them,

ran story notes by them, ran tropes by them, things we wanted to avoid.

And they did a fantastic job of just number one, being patient and open and

letting us be vessels for their knowledge and also letting us pay them because we want nobody nobody does emotional labor for this show without without being compensated.

And it really helped inform.

Tam, if you want to talk about the thing we actually talked about, we were just at dinner talking about this the other night, about the mama versus mother.

thing that Kat and DJ took us.

Yeah, one of the things that they pointed out to us when they were kind of looking over our scripts was there's a scene

where

when Melvin meet first meets the Underwoods and Ms.

Underwood's daughter is like do you know who that is that is my mother and when we had originally written it it you know we had written that's my mama

And they they kind of walked us through it and explained, there's these, she's talking, you know, this is the matriarch.

This is the head of this family, someone, you know, she treats with the utmost respect.

And she's talking to a stranger, not just a stranger, but a white stranger.

She's not going to say, my mama, she's going to say, my mother.

It's going to be much more formal, much more respectful.

And that's something that, as you know, as white people, it's not, you know, we don't really have that.

We had no way of knowing that.

And that's just one example of the ways that, you know, they were able to help us and explain things and make what we wrote in this, in this case in particular, just a little more authentic and I mean it was just so so helpful and just informative down to word choice down to word choice

mysterious we used the word mysterious at one point and they're like yeah that's just a red flag for the magical negro trope y'all need to re you need to reword this and we did and it was a better script for it ultimately

Yeah,

DJ, DJ especially took us through a lot of like, there are things that

black folks are looking for when they're seeing their culture written about by white people.

They're like, are you going to do this?

Are you really going to, oh, you did that?

You know, oh, are you going to really, are you going to describe us this way?

Oh, you did that.

And they really helped us work around that.

And DJ, I know, is submitting a script for Porchlight, which is still coming on Patreon.

And I really hope Kat will as well.

I can't wait to see.

I can't wait to see those.

Yeah, and

we are actually working with, and I can say this out loud,

that if you guys enjoyed Dr.

Ray Christian in the finale as Brother Bartholomew, we're actually in the process right now of working with Ray Christian Jr.

We like to refer to them Ray's child, and they are submitting a script for Porchlight.

And

they are a person who has grown up in Boone, North Carolina, home of the law practices of one Dougie Walker, and has and has just finished their degree in creative writing from Appalachian State.

So I'm super stoked to work with them and to get that story produced for Porchlight when that series is ready to launch.

We are.

It's a great story.

I'm really excited about it.

I love it.

We are still not accepting open submissions, but we are always open to meet and discuss with horror authors of color, particularly if you are

a person of color, black person, brown person,

just not a generic folk like us from Appalachia, specifically from Appalachia or with ties to Appalachia or rural America in general.

If you got it, if you, you know, holler at us, you know, info at old gods at Appalachia.com.

We'd be happy to talk to you.

And like I said, we're not opening for submissions, but we are looking, we are always looking to connect with

writers of color of these backgrounds because that's it's a very unique story.

It's different than being

a person of color or a black person in just the South.

Appalachia is its own unique thing, but rural life is rural life in a lot of ways.

It's a story that we can't tell.

We shouldn't try to tell.

And also, just to point out that, you know, DJ and Catalyst, you know, were amazing, amazing help, and we appreciate them so much.

And any mistakes that we've made, in any way that, you know, we fucked up,

all those mistakes are our own.

They are no way to blame them.

They were wonderful and very kind and helpful.

So

I hope that answers that.

I think it does very much so.

Moving on to the next question.

This came from multiple shadows in the dark.

And they all want to know in their whispering chorus, which episode was your favorite to write/slash perform?

Hmm.

That's like asking me to pick my favorite child that has betrayed me.

Yeah,

I always just say it's the next one.

Which episode would you like to sacrifice upon the altar of this being recorded forever and thrown in your face?

Probably.

I can't name a a favorite, but I can tell you the particular things that I loved in terms of writing.

And I'll pick one that I wrote and one that Cam wrote.

You can think of it, you can do the same thing.

So, my favorite stuff that Cam wrote this season was definitely what we internally code as the murder ballad arc, which was the Coralie arc.

I wrote one little segment of that, but Cam created this world of

just,

it's, I can feel the cell that Coralie was in when they were holding her.

I lived in that room.

I, I, I could feel that cot.

I could feel everything about that and how Dougie is brought in and how Dougie is dealt with.

I enjoyed creating Dougie's voice, but there is just something that entire arc just to me feels very lived in.

Uh, that church and the, and all of that feels very, just feels very real.

Out of ones that I enjoyed writing and creating out of this season, um,

I have a deep, deep love in my heart for the scene with the Underwoods and Melvin.

But my, if I had to choose the Death Island arc,

that's my childhood.

Like, I would just put out the shirt that has the boys' names listed on it.

You know, Archie and Kurt, and those.

Yeah, a group of boys going out and getting into some creepy adventures is such a good setup.

Multiple people, and I'm not saying like, yeah, me, but it's called it like an Appalachian standby me.

And I could not ask for higher praise.

I mean, that's like, you know, that kind of coming of age stuff.

And a lot of, and those characters, with the exception of Cowboy and Floyd, those are invented characters for the story.

Archie is based on a real friend of mine.

So is Curtis.

Dallas is my cousin Dave, who if he's listening, hey, buddy.

And I'm Shane Shepard.

And I try to write myself as not a flashy part, but a funny part at least.

And those are the group of us.

There were a few others, but those were the main group.

And Sam the dog, the best boy.

the goodest boy was a real dog.

That's my cousin Dave's dog.

And he has tons of merch with Sam on it that we sent him as a thank you for his help.

He lives up in West Virginia and serves as a West Virginia consultant.

So y'all really like would sneak out and go fishing?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was

the guys that Archie and Kurt were based on, I would wake up and they would be like in my bedroom because we never locked our doors and be like, hey, man, we're going to Dungan and you want to go.

And sometimes I'd be like, no, that's a because that's not over the hill.

That's a 45-minute drive to a river.

I don't even like fishing.

I like hanging out.

It's three in the morning.

I've got, you know, so like we would, they would sneak out.

They would go fishing.

I would just sit at the lake and just hang out with my friends.

But Death Island, as we know it now, is underwater.

They redid a dam to where all of that is underwater now.

But that was our place.

Whenever we wanted to get away from everything and sword fight or just be, you know, play or do whatever.

We always thought, oh man, we're teenagers.

We're going to come out here and party.

You don't do that.

That lake's not for that.

The cops don't give you any opportunity for that.

But it was.

So Death Island lies slumbering.

It does.

It does.

It wasn't Willian Island, but it was Death Island.

And it was

like

described in the story.

It's like a little sort of peninsula with water on two sides.

But when tide went up, it would connect to where there was just one little strip leading into it, coming down a hill.

So you would have water all around you until you went back to the walkway to climb back up.

So it felt like an island when you were a kid.

But I have a special love of that.

And in fact, the laughter that is in the episode where they start joking about Dirk Rockbone

is a sample.

Some of of that laughter is my cousin Dave laughing into his cell phone.

He has this ridiculous, cackly laugh that I grew up with.

And it felt good after.

I haven't seen that dude and we've talked and stuff, but I haven't seen that dude in probably

since 2008, 2007 on tour with my band.

Was that somewhere close to him?

So if we do this, there's a potential con appearance if Delta doesn't shut everything down that we might do at Marshall University in West Virginia, which I hear is 20 minutes from his house.

So maybe

we'll hang.

We are like opposites in so many ways.

It is best that we only talk about Best Home in the Show, Back Home in the Show, and things that we love because we are very, very opposite in a lot of ways.

But yeah, so that was what I love.

Cam, what about you?

When it comes to your episodes in Story Arxa,

although you kind of similar, you and I collabed on The Siege of Pleasant Evenings, but

the railroad, you know, the Railroad Man and Friends is definitely my favorite.

I love that character.

And I also love the work that Yuri and Corey

did as voice actors.

So yeah, that would be my favorite.

That was really fun.

And

that's such a lovable villain.

Yes, Moove Talking Evil is such a good trope.

Everyone loves a dapper evil that

you know you're in trouble.

But

my favorite thing is I wrote is when I is out of that him, sorry to interrupt, but when I wrote Yuri essentially being like, oh, we're going to do it the old way.

And he switches into like the elder speaker.

But never loses the smarm.

Never.

He never, he doesn't become like, I will read this stately.

He is just like, well, I will devour your infants and burn your house to the ground for capitalism because that's what I do.

And what was your favorite?

What was your favorite thing that you wrote?

My favorite thing that I wrote.

Well,

that's kind of a complicated answer.

I'm really proud of the work I did on the murder ballad story arc.

That writing about Coralie's experiences was

challenging.

It was hard.

I didn't want to make, I wasn't going to do just gratuitous violence where you see this woman be like physically abused.

But,

you know, I couldn't entirely avoid it.

And so what I ended up talking about more was sort of, you know, the psychological abuse and, you know, how he limited her activities and things like that.

And that was just, you know, it's an uncomfortable topic to write about.

And I, you know, I felt like I did a good job with it.

And I've gotten some feedback from some of our listeners that they thought

I handled it well.

So I'm really proud of that arc.

At the same time, it wasn't the most fun thing to write, other than, you know,

massive monster violence with the with the dead queen that was fun uh yeah you set someone up like that that's so you hate them so much then you get to kill then you get to kill them it was great yes but actually uh i also i

i really loved the paradise storyline It was really fun to write something that was a little more lighthearted and at times funny.

You have, we have fire-breathing geese.

And also it was a bit of a challenge to, you know, to write a really um a classically structured story where you have a character who is in service to this um

being a sort of being of legend and and he has to complete these trials and things like that that was really like it was it was both you know it was fun and a bit challenging and i i yeah i i thought that was i also i also love that one so that's probably my favorite um

i have a question to insert into this.

Absolutely.

When I was listening to that, were those trials and the geese and stuff, was that based off of actual fairy tales?

Yeah, those are based off of actual jack tales.

Oh, yeah.

So I got the vibe.

I remember like the goose and I was like, are these following like a series of jack things that actually happened in the old tales?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because it had the cadence and everything of like, I am being told a fairy tale.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the uh, the axe and the land actually appears in Build Mama a Coffin, too, when Jack,

spoilers for Build Mama a Coffin, when Jack disposes of a certain body,

he uses a rusty old axe.

There's a story of, there's a story, this evidence that the Jack Tales carried over from the old country is just like in a lot of the early Jack Tales, Jack, one of Jack's rivals is a king.

who rules a set of mountains.

And as we all know, there are no kings

in Appalachia, you know, but like those stories.

Kings that rule beneath the mountains.

Exactly.

Yeah.

In fact, one of those, like there was, there's one king who always bet Jack couldn't clear this piece of land and Jack would do it and it would grow back and he would do it and it would grow back.

I like that story a lot, actually.

And that would only be a good story because that is so fucking creepy in the most mundane way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just like, yeah, it's just like, and then I love that Cam

went further with it.

And like when, when, when Home Dude drove by later, Jack had suckered somebody else out there.

And like, what is he getting out of that?

Like, what, what is he, is he feeding something off that?

Is it, you know, is our trickster energy being generated?

How creepy would it be?

Like, you do your dishes in your house and you come by the next day and they're dirty and you haven't eaten anything.

Like, what the fuck is going on?

Yeah, yeah.

And then the geese, of course, are the geese that lay the golden egg.

Fire breathing might have been an accentuated point to make it a little more old gods, but

it was funny, though.

I laughed.

Yeah, when we were discussing the story, Steve, you know, Steve made a suggestion.

He's like, oh, you know, you could also have, you know, like Jack have this hired help.

And

they're like searching him every time he comes to feed the geese to

make sure he's not stealing the eggs.

And I'm like, dude, would you try to rob a goose?

Yeah, and also

I think he wanted him to steal the egg.

Like he was like wanting him to fail all these things.

Yeah.

Kind of a little bit.

Yeah, it's always, it's always a roll of the dice with Jack.

And I'm really proud of that character because,

yes, he is Jack from the Jack Tales, but to me, he's kind of like Jack in a lot of the Jack Tales is presented as the young trickster.

Yeah.

And our version of Jack is millennia old, and he is like a little more jaded.

The one bit that I wrote out of some of that was Jack facing down the boys who had come to collect from his previous incarnation.

That was a good one.

And he found.

and he found, and he reveals, like, no, I own you.

Your daddy gave you to me so that that land would grow.

But you know what?

You're right.

That's an unfair contract.

So I'm going to give it up to the people who originally wanted you.

And that was the Jack,

who is maybe a little gaming version of Jack.

Like if I always think, like, if there were

an American God's version of Jack, well, there have been some American Gods comparisons, very flattering comparisons made lately.

But our Jack is millennia old.

And I think it takes the tricks to make him young.

That's not canon or anything, but like, I think in his mind, otherwise he would have

died.

I like the idea that there is some type of like

concept that keeps reasserting itself into reality.

That is

the concept of a jack.

And it keeps like pushing itself into reality to be born.

Yeah, I think he's in a way he's he's necessary.

And,

you know, there is

there is an interesting,

and our Jack is not necessarily informed by this, but when you said that, Jordan, you made me think from Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book.

The Jacks of All Trades, The Fraternal Order of Wizards, who are all jacks from different nursery rhymes.

There's Jack B.

Nimble, who is just the guy who jumped the candle.

And then there's Jack Ketch, who is a world-famous strangler who murdered so many people.

And there is Jack Tarr, who is an African bull legend, and like all these jacks that every culture has one.

Springhill Jack, Jack the Ripper.

Exactly.

There's a lot of Jacks.

And there's just, I've read that book aloud a million times to kids and in classes and for fun.

And

there's just the way they refer to himself.

And then when the jack of the story, the man jack of the story of the graveyard book, realizes all the others are gone, that the Honor Guard have defeated them, he describes himself, oh, look at me, I'm a jack all alone.

And that's not an idiom.

And that's not an idiom, but he makes it like, I, I, one of my goals, I aspire to do that thing that Gaiman does, to where common phrases take on capital letters

and kind of like occupy a heavier space in the, in the air.

And if you've, if you've not read Gaiman's The Graveyard book, it is a children's book that is not a children's book.

It will take you an afternoon to read at Tops.

And I, in my opinion, it is singularly the most complete and best thing he's ever written.

I always love seeing Jack being inserted into stories.

Like, I wrote one a while back that was

there is a prime jack of doors.

Oh, nice.

And every Jack that we find is like a version of him that's gotten stuck in a reality and is sick and dying, like Jack the Ripper is like him, but getting who got stuck in that reality.

And there is a Jack of Doors who is the Jack of the Doors to Everywhere.

Nice.

I like it.

But I like,

I like that.

But yeah, moving on because we are three questions in and 26 minutes recording.

Yeah.

So we can do part one.

Family kick this.

It's going to be a long one.

Settle in.

Settle in.

So our next question comes from Katie from Long Island.

What storyline from season two are you most excited to continue in the future?

Steve, before you open your mouth, I told them not to ask for spoilers.

And a lot of people did it anyway.

It's kind of spoilery.

So let me start.

Let's caveat.

This is a, this, okay, let's rephrase their question.

What storyline would you be most excited to continue, but that maybe you are or are not going to ever continue?

I mean, I would say

we've already said, you know, publicly before that the Underwoods will have a role in season three.

And I'm really excited to see where that goes.

They're, you know, they're fascinating characters.

And, we're finally actually introducing some diversity into our world.

Yeah, that's what I'm most excited about.

I'm excited to see where their story goes.

For me, I'll double down on The Underwoods are super exciting, mainly because some of those voice actors are also some of my really good friends,

and

I look forward to working with them again.

I'm excited to, I'm excited also, maybe, I don't know when we'll get there, and I'm not not even going to say it's season three, but I'm excited to see where Nathaniel Locke and his new Jack-inspired ward are going to end up.

I love that bait and switch, by the way.

That was one of my favorite things that we pulled off that we kept going, talking about Jack's friend from the railroad.

Yeah.

And everybody thought

it was going to be the railroad man, but I'm like, it's way too soon.

And also, to clarify for those who were confused,

no, Lathaniel Locke and the railroad man are not the same.

They are two separate characters.

We were fucking with you.

Completely.

Nathaniel Locke, and I have a feeling you're going to know a little bit more about the Locke family.

This season was the railroad season, but I feel like we didn't do a lot with the Locke's outside of the Halloween.

No, we really didn't.

There's definitely more to tell about the Locke family for sure.

Yep, yep, yep, yep.

I think I've got some.

We got some ideas.

All right.

Well, the next question is from Nadia from Atlanta.

Will we we get more backstory on the ones who came before?

The first ones?

Oh, you mean the ones who put those who sleep beneath, beneath, I'm assuming is who they're asking.

I think my advice to that would be to keep listening.

The answer is maybe.

Keep listening.

Yeah, maybe.

I don't think

eventually.

I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know

who we would entice into writing something.

Might be a joke.

Some fucking fucking sucker.

Somebody.

Person who you would entice to write.

Some person.

Write some kind of trilogy about that.

So moving on, multiple knives in the dark have asked, what was your inspiration and desire to start the podcast to begin with or to begin podcasting generally?

We can both talk about podcasting, but I'll knock out mine real quick.

I started podcasting actually in 2005 when Apple podcasts, when Apple and iTunes made podcasts and RSS feed reading, I was on an old hardcore message board called instrife.com.

And it was like, and somebody,

there was a thread about it.

So just to see how it was, if I could do it, I made like a radio show playing like hardcore band.

Yeah, and then I made like, we made jokes about users.

I interviewed the guy who was like the admin who started the board, and it was just like a one-episode thing.

And I'm like, oh, that was pretty fun.

And then when I got back into the Society for Creative Anachronism, I was dabbling online, but not showing up places yet because I wasn't sure I wanted to do that.

I started looking for an SCA podcast.

I couldn't find one, so I started one.

That's the Known World Broadcast.

It's only on like Apple podcasts and Stitcher.

It's not on Spotify.

And it's literally a radio show for medieval reenactor music.

And that honestly started making a little Patreon money for me, just a little, not a whole lot, but help was helping pay some doctor bills.

And I started getting ideas for other shows because I was listening to stuff like the Black Tapes and Night Vale and

Orphans and

a lot of the stuff that was out there that was good, but

I don't want to be so arrogant to say, like, I could do that better.

I looked at it and said, like, oh, I think I could do that.

And I started kicking around ideas.

And

I ended up driving back and forth between North Carolina and eastern Kentucky for an appearance for the Moth storytelling show.

And just started realizing I hadn't driven through coal country in forever and saw these areas that were super drained out and sapped out from strip mining and areas that were super lush and overgrown.

And one of the things I've always been jealous of, like in modern Appalachia or living in modern rural society, was that we didn't have a mythology.

We didn't have like gods that were of the harvest or that were of these things.

You know, everybody was just white, homogenous, and Christian.

I thought, how cool would it be if there were these two deities or two demigods who oversaw the blighted and dark earth and the overgrown and lush earth and that planted sort of the alpha seeds for the witch queen and the dead queen.

and they were two very different things and then i started doing mind is it mining disaster and i asked cam if she wanted to be involved uh to write an episode because originally the entire barlow arc was one episode the sarah avery thing was one hour long plus episode and we broke it up and cam wrote the church cycle and then Just from there, it just became about like, cool, we can channel these things we feel about back home into something that's dark and spooky that people, when we lived back home, would hate and be afraid of and fear us for.

And now it apparently seems they like it very much.

Apparently, a lot of people are, there are a lot of fans back home.

Shout out to Wise County, Virginia.

Shout out to East Tennessee and shout out to Western North Carolina and East Kentucky.

Yeah, thank y'all for your support.

Cam, you did your, you had your own thing with podcasting too.

If you want to.

Yeah, I did.

I wanted to get into podcasting just because I'm a huge fan of them.

I, you know, I love them and I thought, well, what could I do?

You know,

I want to make a podcast.

And so I got my start.

I, you know,

developed a podcast called Appalachian Arcana,

which

in which we talked about

true crime from the region.

So like the Knoxville Zooman, things like that.

And also, you know, cryptids and folklore and things like that.

And so that's where I got started.

I may was making that podcast with my friend Sarah.

And

she kind of, you know, she over time got really busy with work.

And that sort of went by the wayside because of that.

And during that time, Steve.

you know, came to me with the idea for Old Gods of Appalachia.

And would you like to write an episode?

Because initially we were going to involve like multiple people, everybody writing like one arc that was based on some sort of disaster, be it a mining disaster, a natural disaster, what have you.

And I'm like, cool, yeah, let's do that.

And like, as Steve described, eventually that idea morphed into what you know today.

Yeah, if you listen to the original prologue, which I know people have a million times on re-listens,

at the end, I have this little straight-laced non-character post roll where I talk about like us and a team of writers.

And we can always tell when people are trying to sell us something or get us to subscribe to a service when they send the email to Steve and team.

Yeah.

And it was originally like there were five or six of us, but one by by one people just didn't stick around.

And thank you for not because that's a lot of people to split money with, frankly.

And those are all wonderful people who I love.

Shout out to Chris and Kevin, Stephen, those people.

But

we're actually probably, I'm going to answer this now.

There is more than a good chance that I'm going to re-record the prologue more in the narrator's voice.

And Cam and I will do a post-roll together to make it clear that it is not the Steve Shell show and friends.

Yeah.

Because that is a mistake.

You want to get ignored or want to get a real snarky email.

Try to sell us something or approach us thinking that I'm the only one doing the show.

Yeah.

Because

I live way back in the cave and Cam is perched in the stalactites right above it, waiting for you to come in and not see her.

That is the way you get your head towards it.

Especially if, for example, you

come to us asking for an interview and say, oh, I'm a fan.

I love the show so much.

But it's clear that you've only listened to the prologue

and that

and that postroll.

And we, we can tell really quickly how, how much of the show you've actually listened to.

It's like,

and not just in, I mean, we've had a bunch of people.

We've had initially like

people who were had, you know, wanted to come to us about a movie deal or a TV deal.

And it.

it became apparent really quickly that when in talking with them, oh, you've only listened to like two episodes.

Or you've seen download statistics, or you've seen how many patrons we have on Patreon.

I've been following your work for a while.

If by a while it means how long it took you to look at the data that was scraped from our feed, I guess that is a while.

Yeah.

So there's that one.

What else we got there, Jordan?

We have

this next one, which comes from multiple whispers from the bowl in a tree that was not there before, that is there now.

Do you plan to explore some Native American themes or myths in future episodes?

That's very similar to

what we talked about earlier with telling the stories of black appalachians.

That's really outside our lane.

So

we try to steer away from that.

We don't want to tell stories that aren't ours to tell.

So I will tell a little bit of a story without going.

The Dead Queen launch was initially supposed to include a story about the ravenmockers um and tie and our whole gimmick with her was going to be that people mistook her for other myths and didn't realize how wrong they were until it was too late and that she was the root for a lot of other myths uh like the witchy woman in the woods the lookie in your window and we had worked with uh one of our consultants uh veronica who uh

is descended from the Eastern Band of Cherokee.

And we had consulted with her and she all the way up to the beloved woman of the Eastern Band, Miss Myrtle, who is a wonderful human being and a true war, like a complete badass in terms of preserving the Cherokee language and just one of the most

like admirable people.

Like I, I didn't just not a person whose word I take very seriously.

And we were referred all the way up to her to talk about language and talk about this.

And they were very helpful and gave us proper pronunciation.

But something was said at the very end of,

you know, and I'm like, well, how do you feel about us doing this?

You know, we are, we're white people trying to lift up Cherokee stories, but we don't want, you know, we don't want to step in at whatever.

And Ms.

Myrtle said something along the lines of, well, you know, if it's not a story being told by a Cherokee in Cherokee on Cherokee land, well, it's just not a Cherokee story.

And that sat in my heart very heavy.

So if there are,

if there are indigenous folk out there from Eastern Menner Cherokee or other Appalachian tribes, you want to get in touch and and either work as a consultant or if you have a story if you have a story that you want to talk about be glad we did include spearfinger uh old sister as brother bartholomew called her in the finale because we did want to reference land back we did want to reference like if the people you know this land had been cleared by eugenics and genocide and just outright slaughter and those people were bitter and angry and you know, having to live the lives our people created for them.

How angry must their gods and monsters be?

And in the Spearfinger legend, Spearfinger is killed at the end of all them, like the heroes always triumph.

So I imagined a version of Spearfinger trapped in that liminal space without a life or a land, and the fuel of that anger and that vengeance being what the union would need to be able to defeat the Dead Queen.

And that's why we brought her in and we did not use her Cherokee name because I don't feel worthy of speaking it.

I do know how to pronounce it, but it was just one of those things of just like, I wasn't going to do that.

But people caught it and people know that she's a very specific legend to where our story was taking place.

And I was very happy that the way that turned out and the reception it got.

But again, I can't write what it's like to be an Indigenous person here.

Would love to know some folks who would be interested in helping do that.

So we would love to.

We are not ignoring the myths of this land.

Just like before, we have to, we need the help to tell people

because there's

appropriate them.

Yeah.

And, you know, our mouths are not shaped to say their names with a right amount of weight or wisdom.

So I hope that answers respectfully enough.

Cool.

Next question comes from born in the Pacific Northwest.

Love the show and its soundtrack, which keeps me listening to the very end until the episode rolls over.

How does the team select music for the show?

I started, when I started planning the show, I literally went on YouTube and Googled Gothic Country

and started looking for bands that I could reach out to and be like, hey, I'm starting this project.

I don't have any money right now, but I will have money hopefully one day and I can give you money.

And I found some artists.

I kept finding artists that I liked, but then I would find really problematic things about them.

And apparently, like just that, that genre of music of whiskey and guitars and dive bars leads to dark places.

Fuck it.

Yeah.

But then I met, I ran into those poor bastards and I heard God's Dark Heaven and I Cannot Escape the Darkness and Sick and Alone and a lot of songs Lonesome Wyatt did with the Reverend.

And I reached out to them, like, hey, here are clips, really early clips of what the show is going to sound like.

This is what it's about.

What would it cost me to use

45 seconds of these songs?

I'm like, oh man, go ahead and use them.

It's fine.

So after season one was such a hit, though, we made sure we sent them some money.

And actually, I would like to send them some more money at some point in the near future.

I will say that out loud because I'm more likely to be able to do it.

Yeah, we've

been really blessed that, you know, the artists have been willing to work with us.

They've been so kind.

Steve's known Landon, Landon Blood, who does our theme song, amongst other things, for a lot, you know, for a long time.

They're old friends, and he's just done a phenomenal job.

Yeah, Landon is actually right now mastering a musical project for us that we're going to be announcing hopefully this fall.

People have been asking for music from Landon, so we're going to try to accommodate that.

Blood on the Harp, their original bass player, Russ, was an old friend of mine from hardcore bands.

So really, I just keep an ear open.

And again, we don't accept open submissions.

We get a lot of...

We've known both Jake and Matt forever.

They're old friends.

Jacob Cody Moore Danielson is an old friend of mine.

He did the Railroad Man song and a song called Oyster and Mold that we've used before.

Matt Evans is one of my best friends.

We were in hardcore bands together for the better part of a decade.

He did the music for Door Under the Floor and is currently working on the theme for Porchlight.

I keep shooting things down.

So recently.

He also, he worked with you on your rendition of In the Pines.

Oh, yeah, the version of In the Pines that I said.

That's the version that I demanded they create for me.

Yeah, that was a Kim.

That was a Kim.

I'm just going to say, add to this, that if Landon Blood's real name is not Landon Blood, don't tell me.

Because I'm somebody's given name.

That is such a fucking rad, like a wizard name.

Yeah.

his sister's name his sister's name

i'm gonna i think i can say his sister's name is angel angel blood yes

that is so good isn't it yeah his son i know this is like this is like side characters from like constantine

and i think his i think his his youngest son's name is killian all right i know killian blood too much okay moving on

yeah he's actually got a pirate ship waiting for him right now um but yeah that's how we pick music it's people we know and stuff we hear And I will say this: we do get a lot of music sent our way from folks who aren't from the region, who get the spirit of the show.

We, and those poor bastards, Norlandon are actually Appalachian.

They're just old friends.

But moving forward,

if we like it, we'll ask you to use it.

We'll try to pay you for it.

But primarily, we try to source things genuinely from the region or people with ties to the region at the very least.

So, the next question comes from Nikki in Texas.

What inspired y'all to include so many queer stories in both seasons?

As a queer woman, I cannot express how much this means to me.

You want to lead on that, Steve?

Yeah, we grew up.

Well, for one, we grew up with queer friends who were

closeted for their life,

mainly to the world, because it's Appalachia.

I remember a good friend of ours did their research paper, an anonymous interview with...

their gay best friend and it was i remember reading it in 1992 like i was reading some sort of secret bible And the existence of queer folk in Appalachia over in when I was a kid was super closeted, super, like, unless you were like, you know, you own the hair salon of the furniture store, because that's what you do in Appalachia.

We're talking about our friend JC, and he's like, he's like, oh, yeah, my brother Bo and his husband have a salon because they live in Southwest Virginia and they're gay.

So that's what you do, you know.

And it's just like, and as a bisexual man,

you know, I only came out in my 40s.

I'm in a heterosexual marriage, heterosexual relationship, but like I know who I am.

And as someone exploring that and exploring that part, that, that, that room I always knew in my house that I finally found the key to and opened it and then turned on the light, you know, don't know if I'll put a futon in there or not, but it's, it's a room that I'm, I'm happy to inhabit and happy to be there.

I want to make sure that queer people are seen, particularly Appalachia is built on the back of queer women and no one will ever tell me otherwise.

The number of matriarchs and the number of people who.

Just gal pals.

Just gal pals.

Just gals being pals.

They're just sharing that house just like

life partner friends they're just friends very good friends

next question comes from multiple shadows that have attached themselves to you in your every move cam and steve what is the writing process like as a collab do you send each other pieces and parts you've written do you get together to map it out or is it a little column a and a little column b does someone come through to rewrite to ensure a consistent style

I like to think a little column A and a little column B.

Yeah, with a dessert menu as well.

We will, there are times when I've been like, I have this idea for a story.

I want to take this part of it.

You do the monsters.

Or Cam will be like, I'm stuck with this.

I don't know where this is going.

Can you make something happen

with X and we'll do that?

Or then there are times Cam brings me a completely finished story.

I go through and change like one or two words.

Or I give her a completely finished story and she destroys all my beautiful run-on sentences and and yeah I wouldn't make it consistency that is that is my job I'm you know I am the edit tricks oh yeah you're I am sure Kim is about to tear all my little sentences yeah you're gonna learn this turned in you're gonna learn that's that's specifically why when we propose we're giving a job I like when people fix all my run-on sentences

because it still has to pass through me and if I don't like the changes it just never happened

I wish I had editors on everything I've ever written.

Well, yeah, I'm excited about that.

Yeah.

But yeah, so a lot of times it'll be like,

Cam has handed me completely beautiful finished things I've never had to do anything to.

She always finds something to tweak in mine.

And I don't say that complainingly because she almost always makes it better.

If we disagree on a turn of phrase or something, like, you know, describing a paper rock, scissors.

Yeah.

It's paper rock scissors.

And to be fair, usually you do listen to me about the rent on six.

Oh, yes.

It's like, yes, actually, I should pause here for a second.

Yeah, yeah, because I would pass out.

I would pass out.

You would pass out because you don't breathe.

I kept going.

But we

collab stuff.

Like, we always tend to overwrite.

An average old gods episode is three to four thousand words.

The finale at one draft, we stopped on the finale finale.

It was 9,999 words.

And we tried to keep it.

And then we edited some more and borked it, sadly.

Yeah.

Multiple,

multiple hungry, skittering things have asked, is there any chance your stories we put in book or ebook form?

Okay, so we get this a lot and

here's the answer.

First of all, transcripts of the show are available for free on our website.

A lot of people may not realize that,

but yeah,

we try to make those available as soon as possible,

as soon as we can get the show transcribed after it drops.

And we're looking at what we can do to make that happen faster.

But we do make those available uh on our website in the episode section of the site

aside from that

um

we're not we're not going to like self-publish a book of transcripts that's that's never going to happen

and

we we are not if you have been on our patreon wait list for a while which we are now finally getting cleared out you may understand that we are not have not been the best at being a storefront at packaging and shipping things.

And print on demand services make us almost no money for the amount of books that for the amount of work that gets put into laying out a book for us in terms of that terms.

If someone, if a publisher wanted to publish those with like some dope illustrations from a well-known artist that we love and respect and make it like a fancy thing that you could have on your coffee table, if a publisher wanted to do that, publishers, if you're listening, those kind of books would be really nice.

But we are, I, I, we have no storage space.

I have have a condo cam has an apartment we we do not have a warehouse to put you know 10 000 books in and then and

and ultimately we're not interested in that um

if book if a book is going to happen it is going to be its own standalone world story uh set it in world story uh and also a thing you need to understand if any any sort of published you know print object happens you guys need to understand that uh publishing a book takes years.

It's like two to three years.

And so it's, yeah, that's, we're not saying no.

If the, if, you know, the right publisher approached us and, you know, that it was a good fit.

They liked our ideas.

We liked theirs.

We're not saying no.

I mean, that's something that could happen, but it's not like six months from now, boom, here's a book.

That's, that's not going to be the case.

That's just not how it works.

That's not how the publishing world works.

As someone who has worked in publishing, that is not at all how it works.

But moving on, Shannon, somewhere in the north, mysterious.

You said at the outset that the old gods aren't of hell or the Christian devil.

They simply are.

But it's not nihilistic like Lovecraft.

The good guys'

quotations, though usually flawed, also generally win.

What, in your view, are the moral rules of the OGOA universe?

To what extent extent do you think it's shaped by your own religious upbringing and/or

Steve?

Why don't you start and then I'll yeah?

Well, there are a few moral rules in writing.

Number one, we never kill pets.

The dog and cat always live.

There is a reference to a sacrifice being asked for to bring an old family dog in the church episode season one.

That dog never showed up.

Its owner loved him too much.

He made for the hills and another family found him.

He was adopted.

His name was Carl.

We don't kill animals like that.

We don't depict sexual assault assault on screen.

Bad guys win.

Listen to Door Under the Floor.

If you want to call

Marcy Walker a winner as she lives in a house that was built to be filled with people and music and joy and keeps it to herself and her best friend is the handyman whose daughter she got killed.

You want to call her a winner?

Okay.

You want to call Daughter Dooley a winner?

Yeah, she busted up Hornet Head and she ended up killing a whole lot of people and walking around doing what she did.

Season two spoiler.

I mean, like, our winners are people who are, I've had conversations with people.

We don't have winners.

We have survivors.

Yeah, I'm looking for that.

I'm looking for that Lovecraftian.

I hate that word.

Experience of

how futile the human thing is.

That's not what we do.

Okay, so just going to tell you right now, if you are listening, waiting for us to go like everything is hopeless.

They will eventually escape and they all die.

I can't tell you that.

You know why?

We're not there yet, but that's not what I want to do.

There's no fun in that.

And that kind of just sort of brutalist

style of writing, just of flat, functional, hard stone and whatever, it's totally valid.

It's totally got merit.

It's just not what I do.

Yeah, I mean, like,

and as much as, and I was raised very, very Christian, and I am very, very, like, not that.

I'm something, but I'm not that.

Yeah, I guess maybe that's in there somewhere.

I mean, my own personal code of conduct now and the things I believe in now,

you know, definitely influence the way women are treated and definitely influence the consequences.

A great,

sorry, Cam, I'll wrap this up.

But one of the things when we wrote the episode in

which in Pigiron, the thing attached to the watch eats eats and devours

the.

Yeah, you were, you were really, you were, you were concerned about that one.

You talked to me, you talked to Sister Heather, you got input on it.

I talked to actual sex work folks, I talked to friends of ours across the board, and my wife brought the question home when I was really debating of like how awful and graphic this is to happen to this person.

She's like, well, what's the consequence for him killing and eating that person?

I'm like, oh, well, immediately his anchor to this world is taken away and he dissolves, and everything he ever accomplished was sucked back into the void from which he came.

And maybe he'll be able to occupy this world again, but probably not in that form with that power.

She's like, so there was a consequence for all the evil this thing had done.

And I'm like, yeah.

She's like, that's, I'm okay with that then.

And we had, we had that consequence be immediate.

We had that consequence be like, oh, someone witnessed you doing this thing, and they don't know that

they're dissolving you, but they just did.

So like, so I guess maybe in a way, Cam, you want to know?

Yeah, that, and, you know, similarly,

and we did have a listener reach out about this episode.

What happens in the murder ballad story arc to Coralie and her husband.

Yeah, yeah, he's a terrible dude.

And he treat and he treats his wife and other very badly and other people in town, not great either.

And there are consequences for his actions.

Um, you know, someone had reached out because she, you know, was like, oh, here you are.

You've created all these strong women characters, and then you have this character who's just a victim.

Well, no, she's not just a victim.

Nobody is just a victim.

But I'm not going to sugarcoat Appalachia or, you know, this world,

much less the Appalachia of the 1920s, and pretend that that shit doesn't happen, that people aren't abused and harmed.

Is it, you know, do I wish that that were the case?

Sure, I absolutely wish that.

And so, you know, yeah, I created this storyline and that care and that terrible character basically so that he could be punished.

But, you know, I, I will say I don't subscribe to the current idea that I've seen circulating online, on Twitter some that fiction writers are somehow obligated to attempt to fix the problems of the world through their writing uh or for example that we're somehow normalizing traumatic harm by depicting it in art

like one of the great powers of art is its ability to shine a light on the world both on the beautiful things in our world and its horrors and tragedies you know i think if we can open people's eyes if we can motivate uh some people to change for the better with what we do that's that's great.

But that's not why we wrote the show.

This is a fiction podcast.

Our purpose here is to entertain.

If we do more than that, that's wonderful.

And I'm so glad.

But ultimately, the impetus is on the audience, you know, on the audience to act to make the world a better place and on us, Steve and myself, in our individual lives.

You know, it's not through the show.

It's in the actions that we take every day.

It's just some of the things that I try to create,

you know, through the writing and the telling is, you know,

we want to be

we want to be good stewards of the culture we've been given to write about and that we've done.

And we want to be, you know, for lack of a better term, good people in creating

art

about these things.

Like, you know, I look at,

because I said, I self-identified as a white cis dude from Appalachia.

I've not always been the best human being in the world.

I've been flawed in friendships and and relationships.

And I look at the growth that I've gone through,

you know, in the past decade or so, thanks to fantastic people, mostly fantastic women in my life,

who have been incredibly patient and giving with me.

And I can create the world that we have.

Somebody once said, well, apparently in alternate Appalachia, everybody loves queer people.

No.

Now our Appalachia is

you're guided by a narrator who loves queer people.

You're guided by writers, but like, I promise you, like, you give Frank Tilley a chance to square off against Marcy Walker.

I can tell you the first words that would come out of his mouth if this were existing in a 3D representation of, you know, the whole thing.

You know, like, there's there.

But,

but, you know, going back to the more the moral rules of this universe question, one of those is we don't fridge, we don't fridge people.

Yeah.

You know, we don't kill our queers on this show.

Awesome.

Moving on to the next question: multiple echoing dreams that you forget upon awaking and are only left with a wistful longing.

Ask,

for each of you respectively, which character has been your favorite to write and or perform so far?

Why?

Lavinia!

The most fun, the most fun character to write, the most fun character to perform.

I love my little villainous.

Oh, that's so good.

Anybody who has a skull made of throne, a throne made of skulls, a skull made of thrones would be very impressive as well.

Trevor Henderson, you should draw that.

A skull made of thrones, but yeah.

For me, I enjoy writing Marcy a whole lot.

There are so many women who have been in my life.

My Aunt Teresa, my late friend Sherry,

our friend Shannon, who embody who Marcy is.

And there's so much.

And my Aunt Pammy, God rest her, there is so much love for those.

I have known that woman and that person, and I don't want to gender it in, so that person, this all happened to be in my world, my life.

I have known that person in so many forms.

That caretaker, that shielder, that guardian, that housegiver, that hall builder.

And I love her.

As far as the most fun to do.

Well, I think Jordan's favorite character,

Melvin, is probably one of my favorites just because it's such a ridiculous voice to break out and to do actual nuance to have him like have moments of emotion and sadness and you can tell that big gregarious you know guy with the beard thing is his um

you know is a mask a lot of it is yeah i laughed when you when it first started talking i was like oh fuck it's the cookie monster but then like all the writing around him i loved because like i'm like fuck yes sandwiches yeah boy get that ticket basket yeah and and and then you like, but then he's like, you're like, drops the mask.

He's like about to fuck people up because he actually is secretly like the protector of all.

And I've said it before in a couple other, you know, when I did my, when I would teach up mice and men,

the character of Carlson, who wanted to kill the dog for being stinky and talks the old dude into getting his dog put down, that was his character voice, was a slightly different version of Melvin.

And I just made him happier and gave him,

and Melvin is, and Melvin is a guy,

is a guy who's who's lost a lot and realized like wow i was a shitbag i was an outlaw and a roughneck and i didn't take care of anybody including myself until i found a reason to live for other people and i i identify with that a whole lot

That's going to do it for this first part of the Old Gods of Appalachia Season 2 retrospective Q ⁇ A session.

Join us next time when we answer more of your burning queries in cryptic and confusing fashion.

See you soon, family.

See you real soon.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question: Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly, must be 18 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.