So, Season 1 of Geek Orthodox, “The Deaths of Arthur”, is finally finished! It was definitely, as I say in my concluding episode, an adventure: my first fully-produced podcast, a greatly expanded version of my Doxacon Seattle talk, and my first long-form expository non-fiction work in years. Here, for handy reference, is a listing of “The Deaths of Arthur” podcast episodes in order:
- The Historical Deaths of Arthur
- The First Literary Death of Arthur: Geoffrey of Monmouth
- Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King
- Conclusion of The Deaths of Arthur
The primary reason the conclusion took so long to come out was simply that I was ambushed by report card season (my least favourite time as a teacher!), but a secondary reason was that the experience of putting together the podcast as podcast, as an extended reflection on the subjects I touched on (or, in Tennyson’s case, had to skip over) in my Doxacon talk, got me thinking a lot about the podcast as a medium, how I might be able to use the medium more effectively in the future, some of the obvious shortcomings of how I ended up using it over this first “season”, and what extended conclusions I might now draw from these extended reflections. In the end, I decided to keep it simple and to stick fairly closely to my original vision for both the podcast and my conclusion, despite the obvious shortcomings, in the hopes that the work will still be somewhat worth listening to on its own and that, rather than getting too “meta” by including my reflections on podcasting in the podcast, I may be able to simply apply some of the lessons learned in future episodes of the podcast.
My hope for the next “season” of the podcast is that the episodes will be more episodic, more experimental, shorter, and better planned and produced – but we’ll have to wait and see whether any of that actually comes to pass! “The best-laid plans o’ mice an’ men… an’ a’ that!” In the meantime, if anyone who actually listens to the podcast has any feedback they’d like to give me, positive or negative, privately or publicly, I’d love to hear from you via the comment section below. (If you don’t want your feedback to be published, just let me know!)