Submission Guidelines

photo of a toddler viewed from the back running down the path of a flower garden

Well, the good news is that the first episode of The Queer Cottage Podcast has been downloaded 53 times! Dang! That’s honestly a lot more than I would have expected, given the total lack of promotion I’ve done for this show.

The less good news is that we still don’t have any other episodes in the hopper, partly due to the fact that the people I’ve asked to contribute all lead busy lives, and partly because I haven’t done much in the way of reminding or encouraging them.

So I think I’m going to open this process up to whoever might be interested. If you:

A) Are Queer (LGBTQIA+) and/or generally live a non-heteronormative kind of life…

B) Enjoy talking about your domestic arrangements, including anything and everything along the lines of: Cooking, gardening, entertaining, decorating, making art, raising kids, keeping pets, balancing budgets, cleaning, tinkering, et cetera…

and

C) Have a phone with a voice recorder…

Consider yourself a candidate!

It’s such a simple process. We aim for each episode to be about 20 to 35 minutes long.

So if you want to record a few 5-minute excerpts of your daily routine, while you’re cooking or cleaning or weeding or walking the dog?

Hey, you’ve just made an episode!

If you want to sit down with a cup of tea in the evening and ramble about what you did that day and what you’d like to do the next day?

Hey, you’ve just made an episode!

If you want to come up with a list of things about your life that make you happy, or stroll around your home talking about the art on your walls, or read off a couple of favorite recipes, or take us on a tour of your neighborhood, or let your kid hold your phone while they talk us through their latest stuffed animal obstacle course…

Hey, you’ve just made an episode!

It’s all pretty freeform and unintimidating! If you want to record 45 minutes of audio and send them to me so that I can cut them down to 20-ish, I’m very happy to do that. If you’d rather just send me a half-dozen five-minute files and have me stitch them together without messing around with them too much, I can do that too! I’ll transcribe all the episodes before editing them, so I can supply you with a text file if you want to give input on what to keep and what to cut.

This podcast is all about giving a little glimpse into the home life of a random queer person. You don’t have to have a broadcast-ready voice or a pre-written script or a narrative arc or anything like that. Just show us who you are and how you live.

Feel free to email podcast@queercottage.net if you have audio files you want to submit (a link to a Drive or Dropbox folder would be great, but if you don’t have one we can work out another way to get the files to me).

This podcast format only works if lots of people contribute, so I hope you’ll muster your courage and share some of the small domestic details of your life with us.

We really want to hear ’em!

Defunct?

I’m afraid the podcast seems to be defunct. I wasn’t really able to turn it into the collaborative round-robin project I’d originally envisioned due to logistical reasons, and I’d recorded a second episode with a friend right before the pandemic began, but quickly became overwhelmed in the face of zero childcare for a year and a half. When my kid finally went back to school and I had a bit more breathing room, I had to consider whether to try to resurrect the podcast. Ultimately I worried that the whole “cottage” vibe had been co-opted by certain unsavory elements, and while that sort of thing is always worthy of reclamation, I wasn’t sure that I personally had the grit to do it. Ultimately I wound up discontinuing my libsyn account, and I’ll probably discontinue this site as well, unless someone else has ideas for the domain and would like to take it over. Let me know, if so!

Episode 1: MKK




Download episode here

The first episode of The Queer Cottage is live! MKK talks about her life in NYC with her wife and kid.

This episode’s topics include: Budgeting, freelancing, parenting, city living, cooking (including mentions of fish, dairy, and bizarre toddler menu items), cleaning, art, cats, gender nonconformity, queer community, and, as always, queer domesticity.

A toddler's painting of, apparently, some narwhals
Sarah the Red Narwhal Eating Blueberries and Percy the Purple Narwhal Eating Cake and Bill the Blue Narwhal Eating Blueberries

Episode transcript

Links to stuff mentioned in this episode!

Beeminder

Habitica

YNAB

The French Republican Calendar

PlanToEat

This podcast’s general ambience was inspired by The Empty Bowl