Episode 42: Breadcrumbs
November 28th, 2019
Hosted by Katie Rainey
Guests: Bob Raymonda
Produced by Katie Rainey
Transcript by Jon Kay
Podcast Assistant: Dylan Thomas
Hoppy Thanksgiving, Animals! We'e thrilled to bring you this holiday special featuring writer, podcaster & literary magazine publisher, Bob Raymonda! Bob Raymonda is a writer based out of New Rochelle, NY. In early 2015 he founded Breadcrumbs Magazine, an online literary and arts journal that fosters creativity and collaboration through shared inspiration. The project has grown into a community of over 200 contributors across the world in a wide variety of mediums, with more submitting all of the time. In 2018 he helped co-found Rogue Dialogue, a production company focusing in podcasts with Christie Donato and Adam Raymonda. Join us as we talk Breadcrumbs, his podcast Windfall, and all things self-care in this Thanksgiving special!
>> Katie: Welcome to the 42nd episode of the Animal Riot Podcast brought to you by Animal Riot Press, a literary press for books that matter. I'm your guest host today Katie Rainey and I am super excited because I finally get a chance to sit down with Bob Raymonda. Is that how I say your last name?
>> Bob: Bob Raymonda.
>> Katie: Raymonda. Okay, all right. We've known each other for a little while over email and stuff. A couple of years, but never met in person. When did you read for Animal Riot?
>> Bob: That was, I want to say last...
>> Katie: It was last year.
>> Bob: Last year? Last fall? Yeah, it was gloomy.
>> Katie: Yeah, it was gloomy? We finally met in person. Now I'm excited that we get to sit down and have a conversation.
>> Bob: Yeah. I'm pumped to be here.
>> Katie: Before I officially introduced Bob, I want to say that today's brand of fuckery was brought to you by self care. Brian isn't here tonight because he needed some self care tonight. The last several months have been pretty full and tough and rewarding and just a lot for us. So he needed the night off. Bob, what do you do for self care?
>> Bob: It depends on the day, but I tend to just drown myself in food and television.
>> Katie: Yeah, I know, but I've been watching a lot of Parks and Rec...
>> Bob: There are specific comfort shows that I have, like, The Office I can watch three or four times a year, depending on how depressed I am.
>> Katie: Yeah. But then I find I get into a cycle that gets even more depressed and I have to shake myself out of watching those shows, like waking up and watching Parks and Rec or something like that. I'm forced myself to, like, Wake up and read instead because it can make it worse.
>> Bob: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, it's having to break that cycle of, like, being the show I'm watching versus like watching something new that I can engage with and excited about and like, read criticism of rather than just like Michael Scott again ad infinitum.
>> Katie: Because you can literally watch those shows over and over again. You're like, Okay, here's Friends. It's Friends again. That's a terrible one to watch over, you know?
>> Bob: Yeah, yeah, we're falling asleep to that right now.
>> Katie: It is so bad.
>> Bob: It really is (laughs)
>> Katie: Bob Raymonda is a writer based out of New Rochelle, New York, just for those animals not in New York. His work has found its way into Quail Bell... Quail Bell, Say that five times fast. Quail Bell. Well, I even said that to myself as I was putting your bio into this before. Quail Bell magazine, Peach magazine, Syndicated Potluck magazine and, Yes Poetry. In early 2015 he founded Breadcrumbs magazine and online literary and arts journal that fosters creativity and collaboration through shared inspiration. We will talk so much more about Breadcrumbs. The project has grown into a community of over 200 contributors across the world in a wide variety of mediums, with more submitting all the time. That's exciting.
>> Bob: It's over 300 now. I haven't updated.
>> Katie: Oh, wow! Well, we've had over 300 that we hosted at Animal Riot in New York so far that we kind of started at the same time. In 2018 he helped co found Rogue Dialogue. You’re not making any of these words easy for me. Quail Bell. Rogue Dialogue. A production company focusing on podcasts with Christie Donato and Adam Raymonda... Is that your brother? Awesome. Their first show, a sci fi audio drama called Windfall, launched in February of 2019. Wait, yes, we're in 2019.
>> Bob: We're almost not, But we are still for now.
>> Katie: February is coming up. And then I was like, No, that'll be 2020, Katie. With two more shows in active development, Rogue Dialogue aims to create richly sound designed content in a variety of genres. Welcome, Bob.
>> Bob: Thank you so much for having me.
>> Katie: We're releasing this on Thanksgiving Day. So what are you gonna be eating while you're listening to yourself on this show?
>> Bob: I am going to be eating a tryptophan coma amount of turkey and stuffing and all the other fixings. Yeah, nothing super specific.
>> Katie: So you're not a vegetarian?
>> Bob: My girlfriend's a vegetarian, so I eat primarily vegetarian at home. But her family is not vegetarian, and I am not either. So if I'm going out to eat or I'm with her family then I'm eating all the meat.
>> Katie: What does she eat at Thanksgiving?
>> Bob: So we actually cook stuff for her separately that I eat as well. So this year we're doing a roasted carrots with tahini and a vegan zucchini gratin, Um, which I'm pretty excited about. It looks really dope.
>> Katie: This is inspiring. I'm a vegetarian.
>> Bob: Are you?
>> Katie: Yeah. I'm always like playing around with things. I was charged this year with bringing the stuffing since I don't want Turkey juice
>> Bob: Yeah, yeah, understandably so, yeah. Have you ever used Minimalist Baker at all?
>> Katie: No
>> Bob: So that's a vegan... Well, she's not vegan anymore for dietary reasons, but she was vegan and she still posts vegan recipes. But we it's like all of her stuff is usually like 10 ingredients are under and less than an hour to prepare, and she's got a huge, like Thanksgiving roll up entree side and dessert ideas that she rolls out. It used to be yearly. Now I think it's just like one she has, since she's not strictly vegan anymore. But there's a ton of recipes on there that are really great.
>> Katie: Okay, this episode was brought to you by Minimalist Baker.
>> Bob: Yeah, absolutely.
>> Katie: I want to meet someone who's made a tofurkin like a turducken, but it's like I even forget what it is.
>> Bob: It's like tofu. Satan. Seitan, However you say that.
>> Katie: Satan.
>> Bob: And something else. But I don't remember what. Oh tempe.
>> Katie: It doesn't sound very appealing to me. I don't eat a lot of those fake meat in general. They're pretty bad for you.
>> Bob: Oh, they're terrible. I think there's this common misconception that, like, I tell people that Sam and I eat vegan food a lot, and they're like, Oh, he must be so healthy. And I'm like, You don't know the vegan places that were going because it's all just like delicious garbage junk food that you shouldn't be eating. It's just not made with meat.
>> Katie: Yeah. Yeah, it's real easy to eat shitty as a vegetarian. Especially like when you go out with people when it's like, OK, the only thing vegetarian on this menu's fries. I guess I'll eat a basket of fries.
>> Bob: Yes.
>> Katie: Yeah. So yeah. So this will be out on Thanksgiving Day.
>> Bob: What are you doing for Thanksgiving?
>> Katie: So we are going to Brian's Parents house in which I will be making a vegetarian stuffing.
>> Bob: Very nice.
>> Katie: And, yeah, we're driving on Thanksgiving Day. Eggs I don't fuck around with Wednesday before Thanksgiving getting out of New York.
>> Bob: No, no, Sam's sister lives in Westchester. So it is a 15 minute drive there in a 15 minute drive home, and it is so easy every year.
>> Katie: So are you originally from New York?
>> Bob: I'm from further upstate. So I grew up in a town called Herkimer, which is, like, halfway between Albany and Syracuse in the middle of New York.
>> Katie: Okay. We were just up in Rochester and Niagara recently visited Niagara Falls for the first time.
>> Bob: I love Niagara Falls.
>> Katie: The town was underwhelming. The town is terrible.
>> Bob: No, not the town. The falls.
>> Katie: The casino sucked up all the resources in this town.
>> Bob: Yes. No, it's very sad, but the falls themselves. They're nice.
>> Katie: They're beautiful. Yeah, Yeah, we did. We took the dog, did a lot of walking around. It was great. But the town itself was a little like, oh...
>> Bob: Yeah, it's sad. We went for the first time... we did with Breadcrumbs will get more into all this, but we did a small press book fest in Buffalo and it was their 10th year. And I think it was their last year, unfortunately, But it was a really awesome event. And because of her and my father were like, might as well just go to Niagara. Only another 45 minutes. Driving through that town is just like, Oh, this is a place where time forgot.
>> Katie: Yeah, yeah, we were in Rochester, which is a pretty cool town. I really liked Rochester because I was there for work, and then we just zipped over. Well, neither one of us had ever been to visit. It was fun. I mean, we had a good time. Speaking of which... ok. Do you know what Rainforest Cafe is?
>> Bob: I do.
>> Katie: We had never seen a Rainforest Cafe and Brian was feeling a little down the first night we got there and we just stopped to eat somewhere and I was like, This place looks ridiculous. Let's go in here. And we walked in in the middle of a thunderstorm going on with all the animals going crazy. And Brian turned into like a five year old kid and started running around with his like phone videotaping all the animals and sending them to all our friends. And then we come to find out that that's like a chain and everybody knows about it.
>> Bob: Oh, yeah, I definitely grew up going to like one in Florida when I went to Disney as a kid.
>> Katie: I had never been up. Brian ordered everything safari on the menu. He even got his, like, monkey smoothie mug thing over there. So it was a good time. We'll start patronising rainforests kept face.
>> Bob: Did you ever go? And, you know, I don't know what years this year this closed, but it was like a similar experience. Um, in Manhattan called Mars 2112
>> Katie: No.
>> Bob: Wow. It was such a weird, weird little pocket of my childhood that we'd go to like, every time we visit the city where you go on, it's like the ride. It's like the Star Wars ride at Disney World, where you go in and they're like moving the room around. So you're like going into a spaceship while you're waiting to go inside, and then the other door opens, and it's like a basement restaurant. Everyone's dressed up in like, alien clothing. And there's just like UFO memorabilia everywhere. And it was just so weird, and I was obsessed with it.
>> Katie: It's gone now?
>> Bob: I don't think it's around anymore.
>> Katie: What's it called?
>> Bob: It's called Mars 2112.
>> Katie: We got to get a live report here. We just gotta know. It looks like it might still be.
>> Bob: Oh, it's still there?
>> Katie: Whoa! Oh, no. Oh, right now. No gone. Space tragedy. Times Square tourist trap Mars 2112 is dead. Yeah, that's a headline right there.
>> Bob: Yeah, that was a weird, weird place.
>> Katie: So, damn, I would have liked to go. They're gone there anyway. Okay, so you're going to your sister's and watch us Westchester for Thanksgiving? That's exciting. Yeah. Just take off a couple of days?
>> Bob: Yeah.
>> Katie: What self care things we're gonna do this weekend?
>> Bob: I, um, going to try to read. I haven't done a lot of reading this year.
>> Katie: What are you reading right now?
>> Bob: Nothing right now. I know that for my birthday, my best friend picked me up the Fleabag Scriptures book That's all the scripts of Fleabag with Phoebe Waller Bridges notes on every one of them that's supposed to be showing up today or tomorrow, I think. And then Sam for my birthday. Sam's my girlfriend. I don't know if I've said that already. She got me a book called Movies and Other Things or Something like That. And it's just a bunch of personal essays about weird pop culture questions that I've been wanting to tear into.
>> Katie: Love it.
>> Bob: But I haven't done a lot of enough reading this year.
>> Katie: Well, cool. What's the town you're from called again?
>> Bob: Herkimer.
>> Katie: Herkimer. What's the literary scene like in Herkimer?
>> Bob: There I OK, so we had an open mic at a place called Diane's Cafe, which absolutely does not exist anymore.
>> Katie: That was like places that are just gone.
>> Katie: No, I mean, I don't think there's much of a scene there anymore. This is the Herkimer is not a place I go to very often anymore. Neither my parents live there anymore, but that we would do open mics and it was like a lot of guitar stuff of people would do poetry, too. And I definitely did some poems way back in the day. Other than that, it was just some very specific teachers that were influential and like being interested in that, if not so much of a community there.
>> Katie: I'm from Little Rock, Arkansas. So I get that.
>> Bob: Yeah, absolutely.
>> Katie: Which we actually just hosted the first ever Animal Riot artist salon in Little Rock.
>> Bob: Oh, that's awesome.
>> Katie: At the beginning, in November, I was down there, so we decided to branch out the Animal Riot including all artists with a bunch of visual artists and writers. We even had a mermaid.
>> Bob: Ohhh. How long were you there?
>> Katie: I was just there for a week, and we were doing this performance and it went off really, really well, the whole event and I think they're gonna keep going. We got a team of people down there who really jazzed about it, cause there are no, like, open mic spaces and things like that down there. Really, everything comes from, like the institutional, like, you know, Arkansas Ballet or the Robinson Theater. Things like that. But there's no like DIY spaces like there are here in New York, so we're trying to get out, and it went really well. And so I think we're gonna keep going there.
>> Bob: That's so exciting.
>> Katie: But yeah. So wait, what brought you to New York?
>> Bob: So I went to school in Westchester at SUNY Purchase for undergrad. And then I moved to Ridgewood, Queens, for a few years after graduating in 2012 and then ended up back in Westchester I'd say 2017. So I've been back there for a few years now.
>> Katie: I lived in Pelham when I first moved to New York. I loved it.
>> Bob: Yeah. Pelham's a great little town.
>> Katie: Yeah, I was going to Sarah Lawrence.
>> Bob: And so just I was actually supposed to go to Sarah Lawrence for my MFA, but I ended up not doing it.
>> Katie: Did you do an MFA?
>> Bob: I didn't. I didn't. It was I was just looking at the financial aid documents and thinking about the fact that I just paid off my undergrad. I kind of decided. Maybe not this year, like maybe in the future, but not this year.
>> Katie: We've talked about that before on this podcast. Like you don't know. One needs an MFA. You do it because you want that community in space and time to write. And like I met my thesis advisor and we're publishing his book David Hollander in May.
>> Bob: I met David Hollander at a summer seminar at Sarah Lawrence a couple years ago. A great guy. I was really excited when I found out you were publishing his next.
>> Katie: Oh, yeah. Just today we were talking about his book cover.
>> Bob: That's awesome. That's so exciting. Yeah, I heard him do. I don't know if it's an excerpt from this, but I heard him read a few excerpts at that of works in progress.
>> Katie: Yeah, it might have been. Was it super weird? Maybe had robots in it?
>> Bob: No, this one was also weirdly super personal for me because it had mentions of a New York central rail train. It was like a little boy riding a train. And that is...
>> Katie: When it gets derailed?
>> Bob: Yes.
>> Katie: That's part of his book.
>> Bob: Okay, Yes. So that was the railroad company that my grandfather worked for, actually of a New York central rail train tattoo. So I showed it to him that day. I was like, Oh, this was super like he just hit me today.
>> Katie: Well, there you go. It's gonna be in the book.
>> Bob: That's so exciting. I can't wait to read it.
>> Katie: Yeah, well, anyway, yeah, that's why I wouldn't trade my MFA just for that reason for meeting him and had a lot of great teachers there. But also at the same time, like you're so involved in the literary community here that you don't need an MFA because you're getting everything that you would basically in an MFA. I mean constant teachers that I've met out in our community and, you know, just building that community that you would get in an MFA. And you started Breadcrumbs, which is like the best way to get involved with the literary community is just like starting your own thing. So let's talk about Breadcrumbs. What is Breadcrumbs?
>> Bob: Breadcrumbs is a literary magazine that I started because of a panic attack that I had.
>> Katie: As all great things do.
>> Bob: So I graduated. Like I said, SUNY Purchase in 2012. And I told myself that the time that I could take a year off of writing I had taken a I worked for my whole senior year and a little bit the year before on a series of personal essays. I was actually we didn't have ah, creative nonfiction major at Purchase. But one of my professors got me really into it and allowed me to do my senior thesis in that genre instead. And so it was like, really personal writing that took everything out of me. So I was like, I'm gonna take a year off of writing, moving to the city like I'm gonna have to figure out how to be that kind of person. And then one year really quickly became three so fast. And it was okay for a while because I used to play music. I don't anymore. But I was in, you know, a couple different bands at the time, and that was like scratching my creative itch.
>> Katie: What do you play?
>> Bob: I play bass and guitar. So the last band that I was in after six months, we had played a show we actually made some money from the first show. Not a lot, but a couple hundred bucks for the first show was pretty exciting. And then our singer, like two weeks later over text, was just like, I don't want to be in a band. And that was that. And so I kind of spiraled for the rest of that year and I was just working for a company called Essence Digital.
>> Katie: That sounds made up.
>> Bob: They were a super data driven marketing agency that our primary client in the New York office was Google. So I was working for Google, specifically, Google Play right around the time of the Sony hack when the interview was released on Google plans that have in theaters. And I was just like it was Christmas time. I was in charge of, like, these obscenely large media buys and just not having a great time there and not doing anything creative, and it was just really bumming me out. So actually I had a panic attack one day sitting on the bed at my girlfriend's parents' house, and I just the idea hit me. I was like, I need to build a portfolio because I want to start getting my writing out there. I want to try to get jobs writing or just like build a community again for my own sanity. And I knew if I tried to just do like a personal blog A No one would care, because I wouldn't care. I wouldn't be excited to do it, and I would give up on it really quickly.
So my whole idea behind it was to not only empower myself to do work that I had spent all this time and money, you know, cultivating and like, trying to get better at and also encourage all these other people that I knew from undergrad to do the same who I knew were all in very similar situations that I wear. It was so rare that any of us was doing anything professionally, anything remotely to deal with, You know, the art couriers that we have dreamed of. So I started just emailing and Facebook messaging everyone I knew and sending them a Google doc. So it was before I had a website for I had a URL. Before I had a name. I just had this Google doc and I was basically just like I wrote a couple pieces. And I was like, The idea is that will you know, we'll just write work inspired off of each other's work. And once there's a working website of the link backwards and you'll be able to kind of follow the trail of inspiration back to the beginning.
And really, it was like a writing prompt for me in the beginning. And so, like my original challenge myself to myself was still like writing something inspired off of every piece that we published, which worked for not very long, but it was a lot. But, you know, by the time we had, like, like, 15 pieces, what I did was I got us a Squarespace and I just started publishing them while I was still finalizing the look in the feel of the website because I figured there was no way that I could launch it and explain to people how it worked unless we had a back catalogs you could actually see the demonstration of like how that inspiration flowed backwards. So we had our official launch after our eighth post was published so that people could click through a little bit, and from there it really just snowballed. We've done so many different types of projects. We had a podcast for a while where we'd have people perform their work and we'd release little trails. So pieces that have inspired each other and we'd have those together. But my brother is also a sound designer, so we do like sound design and light score to just sort of, like, try to elevate it a little bit. And it's been really fun. We have done readings all over. We started in Pete's Candy store in Williamsburg, moved to Cake Shop in Manhattan before that closed, and then now we've been doing it at Sisters in Crown Heights.
>> Katie: How they submit is by picking any piece and writing something inspired? So it doesn't matter if I am a fiction writer and I find a poem I can write something inspired off that poem?
>> Bob: Absolutely. And I think there's some confusion. Sometimes when people submit, I think they assume that they have to go off the last one, and sometimes I get that question is like, Does it have to be the last one? And it's like, No, I have I have like six months of, you know, backlog out ahead of you. So even if you did off, you know, this most recent one I published it is not like it would be the next one coming out, so yeah, really, people are encouraged to just go as deep as they're interested to kind of see all the different types of work.
>> Katie: And they're all to the one that they're inspired off?
>> Bob: Exactly. Yeah, and some are actually inspired by multiple. So they have multiple little hyperlinks at the bottom, so you can kind of take different paths.
>> Katie: So that's part of the submission or you guys through Submittable?
>> Bob: No.
>> Katie: Yeah. Couldn't afford it?
>> Bob: Yeah, I couldn't afford it.
>> Katie: Us too.
>> Bob: So that's all just email.
>> Katie: Yeah. So they just have to say which pieces they're inspired by?
>> Bob: Exactly. So we're our submissions just closed for the rest of the year, but they'll open back up in January on the 15th.
>> Katie: Oh, good. So you do a really cool thing where you have a lot of guest editors?
>> Bob: Yes. So I just started that this year, actually, because I will get more into this later. But because of launching our podcast Windfall, that was really taking up so much of my energy and I didn't want to see Breadcrumbs go away. But I didn't really have the time to be reviewing all of the work anymore. I still run our you know, Facebook and Instagram accounts. I still do all of the, you know, administrative work of actually putting the work into the website. But yeah, I've just taken to reaching out to writers that I admire and asking them to solicit work from people that they know which is actually really helped, cause we were getting to a point where it was a lot of people were submitting... It is the same people submitting, which I love. I have no problem, you know, publishing the same person over and over and over again. But I was kind of, I felt like I was reaching the end of my work that I didn't really, you know, couldn't bring in new voices anymore. That was something that's always been so important to me from the beginning.
>> Katie: So are people. How did they become guest editors? If they're interested in that.
>> Bob: So right now it's been This year has been the only year that I've done it our first couple times it was just one editor per genre, and I reached out to people specifically that I wanted to work with and they're still a degree of that. But I'll also usually post just from our social media accounts and my personal social media accounts that I'm looking for people and have people send me some of their clips and let me know why they want to join and take part. And then I pick from there. And usually, you know, I know it's this most recent one... We did three people per genre, which was great, built even more of a backlog than before. But I tend to really like so many of the people that are reaching out so that even if I'm saying no to you this time, chances are yeah, on our next you know, on our next run, I'll have you come take part.
>> Katie: What are the social handles for Breadcrumbs?
>> Bob: This frustrates me to no end because there is somebody who had a food blogged in maybe 2014 named Breadcrumbs mag that got all the just Breadcrumbs mag handles. So on Twitter and Instagram we're @Breadcrumbs_Mag.
>> Katie: And they won't give him up. But they're not doing anything?
>> Bob: No, not at all. They haven't posted in years. But I've tried to petition both sides toe, you know, have the handle relinquished to me. But it hasn't happened.
>> Katie: Well, I know I get asked all the time by people who just move here or even in other states who are, like, kind of their writers. And they're just kind of trying to break into the literary scene at all and without, like, going to get, you know, interning at a literary agency or something like that, cause who wants to do that? Unless you want to go into publishing, you know? And I'm constantly like you should just reach out to these magazines and say like, I want to be a reader or I want to do this for you. People need the help because it's so much.
>> Bob: Yeah. I'm going to start, probably asking for even more help in the next year. Like trying to get a, you know, a social media manager to shoulder somewhere of those burdens for me. So there will be more opportunities, especially in the new year with Breadcrumbs specifically. So definitely keep an eye on all of our handles cause I'll announce those opportunities as they come up because I'm definitely looking for help, and I'm happy to work with people that are, you know, new and don't have a ton of, you know, credits to their name. I'm just happy to work with people that are passionate and want to be a part of the community.
>> Katie: And it's a really quick wait a like in your foot in the door with multiple literary magazines or just different people in the community and, like, start getting your name out there and get to know people cause that's like the quickest way to get published anyway.
>> Bob: Absolutely.
>> Katie: Yeah, well, what about Windfall? What is Windfall?
>> Bob: So Windfall is actually inextricably linked to Breadcrumbs? Okay, so I'll go back to our very beginning. My brother, as I mentioned, is a sound designer and a composer, and we ran a podcast for Breadcrumbs. But before we even launched our podcast every 25 pieces for the first two years of the magazine we were doing short form audio drama, so, like radio play style. I had become very obsessed with fiction podcasts. Welcome to Night Vale, specifically. And then there's a show called Ars Paradoxica that I really love.
>> Katie: You would like not to interrupt you, but you have to check out Episode 38 of our podcast. I think it's Episode 38 called Under the Shroud with Ian Humphrey.
>> Bob: Okay.
>> Katie: He has a podcast called Under the Shroud that you would really really like.
>> Bob: Awesome. I will check that out and I will check him out. I'm always searching for fiction podcasts specifically.
>> Katie: Yeah, he does an incredible job.
>> Bob: That's awesome. Yeah, I love I love the medium in general because it's you're able to do so many exciting things with sound design and storytelling like, for instance, this I'm getting on a tangent here, but this show that I was listening to earlier this year called the AM Archives they actually had deaf characters signing in sign language and they were able to convey it like incredibly and the wild things that people are doing in audio story of storytelling are really nuts.
>> Katie: So there were people signing in the room and then people speaking there?
>> Bob: And like interpreting for them. But you could hear them signing and they were working with deaf actors. It was an awesome, awesome, awesome episode. So regardless, we were really interested in that kind of work. And, you know, my brother really thought he could sound design it and and score, and I knew that I could write it. And we had made a really close friend named Josh Rabino who was working at the Apple Store in the WestChester Mall with my brother, who was just an incredible Impressionist. So our first piece, it's just about this trucker and he's sending notes to his sister on a tape recorder. And he just does this real Sam Elliott voice. And it was super fun. And then we kind of got bigger and bigger from there. Our hundredth piece actually was a collaboration between 14 people, so we had seven actors. My brother contributed original music. A friend contributed original music. Then we had a bunch of artists do art of each of the main characters of the short. It was like a 25 minute piece that I co wrote with one of my co founders Dan, who's a wonderful guy, and that was so exciting. But my brother the whole time was really hounding me and saying, Basically like we need to make a serialized show. We need to make something bigger and, you know, larger and specifically huge because so much of the audio fiction space, especially at the time, was using these... they were using narrators and they were using formats where it was... You had a reason for why it was only audio. It was archival footage or found footage or or a podcast within a podcast, which is wonderful and I love, but we also were just like let's make something that's like massive with a ton of characters and just trust people. And so it took us a while to come up with the idea. But my girlfriend Sam, actually said to me, Why not Argus? Argus is a character that I had been writing about for Breadcrumbs since the beginning. So Breadcrumb number 11 is the first story I ever wrote about this character. Argus was one of our main characters.
>> Katie: I'll pull it up so I can read later.
>> Bob: And even before that, actually Breadcrumb Number five there were Wanda and Tin Man who are also central, cast members of Windfall. And it was all sort of surrounding this concept of this alien world where a castle has appeared floating on a cloud in the sky, and it's just sort of hovering over this huge skyscraper to Metropolis. And I just wrote a bunch of vignettes in this world from different characters perspectives. And so I had no real clear idea when Sam said, Why not Argus? What that would look like. But I just started brainstorming and looking at these individual pieces that I had already been writing for over a year in thinking about ways that they could start coming together in a large cast format. So I spend the year. It was August of 2016 to January 2017 where I wrote 10 episodes just totally by myself.
I'm not a big outliner. The most outline I did was I had taken a TV writing class earlier that year, and so I broke out each episode's A, B and C plot, so just a sentence for what each major plot of each episode would be and then I just wrote it, and I had known that I wanted to work with other writers to refine the story because it's so vital to have someone else's perspective, opinion on where the work is going and where it can go. So I actually at our one of our last readings that cake shop before cake shop closed. Christie Donato, who we mentioned earlier had approached me. She was a friend of mine from college. We didn't know each other super well, but we were both fiction majors, so we had a few classes together, and she had been publishing with Breadcrumbs from the beginning. She had read at a couple readings and she let me know I'm burnt out on New York, I'm moving back upstate. I don't really know exactly what I'm doing with my life, but I'm going to have time. So, like, let me know how I could be involved with any of these projects at all. And the first Breadcrumb that sort of became the climax of the season was inspired by the first piece Christie had ever written. So I was like, It's really interesting because I'm working on this whole thing that's tangentially inspired by the work that you published. So, like, would you be interested in, like, coming in and just helping me at it this, you know, 10 episode fiction podcast.
>> Katie: So wait, that climax you're talking out. So you have one season out?
>> Bob: It is one season so far.
>> Katie: And so the climax, when did you air that?
>> Bob: That was on July 10th. It was our season finale.
>> Katie: Okay. Yeah. And so when will you come back on?
>> Bob: So we're right now finishing up the scripts for season two. Then we're going to launch an indiegogo in early 2020. Because we're hoping to pay our actors this time around. We did not get to do that the first time around. We did pay for everyone's travel that came from here. Some of our caste was from New York City. A lot of our caste was from a local theater community in Syracuse where we recorded.
>> Katie: Okay, you're up in Syracuse.
>> Bob: We recorded up in Syracuse at Christie's house, so she had She's got a three bedroom house. She had a spare bedroom that was empty at the time. So my brother had a lot of recording equipment. He bought some more mics so that we could record up to seven people at a time. We had 10 microphones set up in one room. Then we had a control center in the room, right across the I say hall. But it's literally just like the opposite end of the stairway. And so, for a week we recorded with 25 actors. It was 40 hours of recording.
>> Katie: You all just take time off work?
>> Bob: Yeah. Yep, we took a week off of work. We paid for anybody's travel that came from New York City. We put all of them up because that's where my dad lives not far from there. My sister lives not far from there. Christie's parents live not far from there, so we just Everybody was on couches. Everybody was in, you know, spare bedrooms, and it was really like a summer camp experience.
>> Katie: That's awesome.
>> Bob: We fed everybody two meals a day, and one of my brother's best friends from college used to work in marketing for the Ommegang Brewery. They donated 10 cases of beer to us, so we had everybody fed, drunk and happy for the entire week. So we couldn't pay anybody but our hope, now, that we have a little bit more of a following and there's a little bit more of a fan base that we can start opening that up because we'd like to show everyone that we appreciate the time that they've given and the passion that they've given to this project that is so clearly just a passion project of our own.
>> Katie: Wow, you guys really do you have a little production company. It sounds like a movie you're making.
>> Bob: Yeah, it was recorded all it was. All of our call sheets were very specifically trying to respect everyone's time. So it wasn't all recorded in chronological order. It was recorded based on who we had on today. So each day was kind of different, characters, full plot.
>> Katie: Who made all these charts?
>> Bob: My brother. He did that so I helped a little, but he did. He's the one that figured out what your scenes would have to go on which day in order to.
>> Katie: It's a pretty big juggle.
>> Bob: It took weeks to figure it out, have it so that I think the long there was one cast member that had to be there on four separate days, but in we had a principal cast of 16 characters. And then, like I said, there were nine other actors that came in, throughout that week. And then throughout the course of post production, we added another 25 voices from remote recording. So it's 50 voices overall in the course of our season. Granted, like at least 10 of those air, just like background crowd to make it sound like you're actually in a space full of people that aren't named characters with real lines. But we worked with a ton of people, and it was really like an insane, huge undertaking that once we got into the post production of it, we were like, Oh, wow we should have done something much, much smaller, but I wouldn't change a thing. I'm really, incredibly proud of it.
>> Katie: I love that. That's so inspiring right now. I can't wait to listen.
>> Bob: I love it so much. When I started hearing the audition files of people reading Christie and I's words. That's something we've been. Attention. Christie originally came in just kind of as a beta reader and became really a co creator on the project. So we rewrote the entire thing together through Google hangouts. We'd meet once a week. We each took ownership over individual characters, So we talk about an episode. As it was. We divvy up the scenes, talk about what we thought needed to change about those scenes and then split up on bright our individual scenes. But then, by the time we got into the third and fourth draft, we started just each editing the entire episode. So by the time you get to the final scripts, I know which characters I owned, and I know which character she owned as far as like their overall arcs. But I'm a sentence by sentence basis, I'm not sure who wrote what more because of how much we edited it, and it's like the most gratifying process that I've ever worked in. Like if you had told me in undergrad that I would rather work with someone else on a writing project by myself, I would tell you that you're insane. But it was so awesome.
>> Katie: Honestly, that's what Animal Riot has taught me to. We do so much collaboration over here that what you're talking about just gets me so excited. How many episodes is it?
>> Bob: It's 10 episodes, so they're all from, like, 20 to 30 minutes.
>> Katie: Okay, Yeah, I'm excited to check that out.
>> Bob: Yeah, I'm super pumped. We're doing it. We're doing 12 episodes for our second season, and we have another show that we have produced. We have not moved into post production yet, so we recorded all the episodes. It's a six episode series. We want to do something on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. So whereas Windfall is this very dystopian science fiction, like lots of world building shows, our new show, Forgive Me, is like High Maintenance, but with a Catholic priest. So every episode is like, tops three people, and it's just a different person confessional each time. So we wanted to go from a big giant thing that took forever to do too much smaller thing that could be done on a much quicker scale.
>> Katie: Yeah, well, you got to do that. Have you guys got any press from AV club or anything?
>> Bob: We tried to get into AV Club, didn't get into AV club, but we did get written about. There's a wonderful group of folks called Bella Collective. Bella Collective is this wonderful group of podcast critics that are building a really incredible on vital community, especially for it's not just fiction podcasting they cover. But they are really doing so much to uplift that community because unless you have Night Vale budget or your, you have like a Hollywood budget, like some of these projects that are getting, you know, famous stars and made by Gimlet, which is great work, and I'm excited about it. But when it's more like what we're doing and it's more indie and you're just trying to get the word out there yourself, it's super exciting that there are people actually giving this work the time of day. So they've written about us a couple times, and we did go to... There was a fiction podcast festival just a couple weeks ago that was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was the first of its kind called Podtales.
>> Katie: Okay, it was awesome.
>> Bob: So basically these guys that make a show that I really love called Greater Boston were approached by MICE, which is Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo, because they had it was their 10th year, and they had booked an extra venue just in case, and they didn't need the space. So they reached out to these folks to see if they'd be interested in doing something fiction podcast specific. And overall, there were, I think, 130 exhibitors. So we had tables I had, we had enamel pins. We had posters, we had stickers. But then there were also panels. So my brother was on one that was about environmental and science fiction, like sound design and another that was about composing for podcasts. And then I was on one about social advocacy through fiction podcasting. So we were well represented there, and that was awesome. And I've really just found, like, a huge community of people just through like Twitter.
>> Katie: Yeah. The podcast community is huge.
>> Bob: It's Yeah. Massive. Yeah.
>> Katie: You get a lot of podcasters listening to each other's podcast. So it goes.
>> Bob: Yeah, absolutely. Lifting each other up. The fiction podcast community specifically has something called audio drama Sundays where everyone will tweet with that hashtag about what they're listening to or what they're making. And so I really like making it... the reason I mentioned earlier that I hadn't really been reading this year and the reason being for that was because we were releasing Windfall. I wanted to listen to as many podcasts as physically possible. So my goal for the year was 1000 episodes and I am at almost 1300 now, So I blew past that. Granted, there is a huge explosion of, like micro fiction in podcasting as well. So some of these episodes are like 3 to 8 minutes long. So it's like it's not like I'm listening to, like, 1300 hours of content. But it's been a lot, and it's been really awesome. And so every Sunday I'm tweeting about everybody that I'm listening to and that I'm passionate about because, you know, that's the easiest way to build and become part of a community of other people.
>> Katie: Yeah, we've hosted several of the other lit podcasts out there on this podcast Amazon Book Club fiction, fiction/nonfiction. All those folks It's been really, really great. Well, what about your own work? Been going from collaboration to talk about your own work?
>> Bob: Absolutely so this year, because it's been Windfall focused, my only real writing this year has been on our scripts were on our fifth draft of the season. It's 12 episodes. It's almost 350 pages that we've been working on all year long. So that's really been this year has been totally podcast focused. Last year I did way more writing in my personal work because we were in post production on our show, so I didn't really need to be writing the second season yet. And I don't know how to do any of the audio editing or the sound designing or the composing. That's all really in my brother Adam's wheelhouse. So I really had this wide open space of time for myself. So last year for National Poetry Month, I wrote a poem every day and I, which was new for me because I spent so many years like not engaging with poetry at all, and now I've really re fallen in love with it again. And I was also at the same time working on a series of micro fiction, like flash fiction vignettes that were sort of like post apocalyptic birthday parties.
So its this one woman over the course of her life, just on her birthday and like the things that she's doing in this post apocalypse. But the whole idea was that it wouldn't be like Mad Max, like big, massive, action packed. It would just be very mundane, like yeah had some, you know, bombs that went off and there are mutants and two headed dogs and, like the world is really weird. But like she's just out there trying to get some cake for her birthday.
>> Katie: Where is that publishing?
>> Bob: I've got a few of them published. I was actually trying to pull some up today, though the most recent to get published in a magazine called Scarlet Leaf Review. Two more were published in Gravel magazine, although I was looking at that today and it looks like Gravel magazine is down so those links don't exist anymore. And then the 1st one I did was that fiction Southeast.
>> Katie: Okay.
>> Bob: Other than that, it's been my most recent publications have been poems that I wrote in April for Conventional Poetry Month, and are slowly getting published. I want to do that again this upcoming April, because that was a really great challenge for myself, and I was really excited about the work that was made for it. But I just have been so focused on the podcast that I haven't gotten my like more literary work.
>> Katie: Well, do you have anything you'd like to read?
>> Bob: I do. I am going to read one of those post apocalyptic birthday parties and one of those poems.
>> Katie: Yess. That sounds exactly like what I want to hear.
>> Bob: Awesome this 1st one was in Gravel magazine. That link is dead, but it's called Eggs.
===============
"Eggs" by Bob Raymonda published in Gravel Magazine.
http://www.gravelmag.com/bob-raymonda.html
===============
>> Katie: That's the end? I was in. Damn. (laughs)
>> Bob: Thank you. Give me one second. I am going to pull up a poem that I think I may have read a Animal Riot, actually, one of my favorite ones. I published it last year on Philosophical Idiot.
>> Katie: Oh, I've never heard of them.
>> Bob: They're great, and this is one of the poems that I wrote last year in National Poetry Month. It's called "Your House is Full of Potato People and Little Baby Bugs and Rugs".
================
YOUR HOUSE IS FULL OF POTATO PEOPLE AND LITTLE BABY BUGS IN RUGS by Bob Raymonda
I walked in my old front yard today,
it wasn’t ever really my yard—
was just the park across the street,
but it still felt like coming home.
there was a flock of ducks in
that liminal space between
the outfield of the baseball
diamond and the corner of
the soccer field. There had to
have been at least fifty of them;
all huddled together like they were
having a Very Important Business
Meeting. I tried my best to
respect their space, but I
had to take a video to show
all my friends. They walked
en masse in the other direction
and as they noticed me following,
took flight simultaneously, moving
fifty feet to my left. Close enough
to remain on their own turf, but
far enough away to let me know
that I was not, could not, be part
of their Very Important Business—
because, you know, I’m not a duck.
================
>> Katie: Bob is making faces at me while he reads. You're a very good performer.
>> Bob: Thank you. Thank you. That I mean, that comes from having done Breadcrumbs for so long.
>> Katie: Yeah. How often do you release Breadcrumbs?
>> Bob: Every Tuesday and Friday.
>> Katie: Okay. Wow.
>> Bob: Yeah, last year. I challenged myself to do three times a week, and that was fun, but then exhausting. And so that's when it turned into me having to get some guest editors. Because I had really run dry. Yeah, and so after that all ended and the first guest editors came on. I took a little bit of a break where I did not have a backlog anymore. So I think there was, like a month earlier this year. We didn't publish anything, but it's been consistent ever since, and we're booked out to next March.
>> Katie: Weekly anything is a very hard way to do a podcast, which I just looked at because I was like, Wait, it's November. We started this last November our year birthday for this podcast is November 27.
>> Bob: Oh awesome. That's this week. That's so exciting.
>> Katie: Yeah, so thanks for being here on.
>> Bob: Absolutely thanks for having me.
>> Katie: And we certainly I mean, we have 42 episodes that we've missed some weeks in there.
>> Bob: That's fine. There's no one way to be upset about that, but yourself, and that's something that I really had to learn that was difficult, but like realizing that no one's gonna be mad at you if you need to take a break like back to that theme of self care. Like we're people. And we don't have tons of ad dollars to be putting all the energy that we're doing into this work.
>> Katie: Exactly. And we have to work our full time jobs on half of it. So it's really fun when I get to do it and sit here with people like you. And I've had a really great conversation today. Thank you.
>> Bob: Thank you so much for having me.
>> Katie: Thanks for sharing your work too. And I'm very excited to listen to windfall. Now you want to shout out all the things that people can go visit you at Breadcrumbs and Windfall again?
>> Bob: Breadcrumbs is @Breadcrumbs_Mag. On the Instagram and the Twitter BreadcrumbsMagazine on Facebook. And Windfall is just @WindfallPodcast everywhere.
>> Katie: Okay, every platform?
>> Bob: Every platform.
>> Katie: And what is it? Breadcrumbs magazine dot com. Breadcrumbs mag dot com. What's your website?
>> Bob: My website is Bob Raymonda dot co.
>> Katie: Great. Dot co?
>> Bob: My dad's first cousin is also Bob Raymonda, and he's a graphic designer. So he got that.
>> Katie: He got a sweet dot com. Wow.
>> Bob: I'll never get that dot com, but it's okay. He's a great artist.
>> Katie: Well, thanks for being here, it's been awesome.
>> Bob: Thanks for having me.
>> Katie: >> Katie: OK, that's it For today's episode. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and review on whichever platform you're listening. You can get in touch with us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @animalriotpress or through our website animalriotpress.com. This has been the 42nd episode of the Animal Riot Podcast with me your host Katie Rainey and featuring Bob Raymonda. Our transcripts for our Deaf and hard of hearing animals are provided by Jon Kay and we are produced by Katie Rainey… me. And we're produced by me. Katie Rainey. Happy Thanksgiving. Hoppy Thanksgiving, everyone. See you next week.