Queer-led podcast company hears from people who wrote letters to their future selves in Hope This Finds Me Well
Editaudio came to life in response to the lack of women, queer, non-binary, and trans people in the industry
Steph Colbourn created editaudio to make the podcast industry more reflective of what the real world actually looks like.
With Chloé Zhao becoming the first Asian woman to win best director at this year’s Oscars for Nomadland, the historic moment was a reminder of the lack of BIPOC representation mainstream entertainment, whether it’s behind the camera or on-screen.
The same could be said for podcasts.
Editaudio is out to change that.
Steph Colbourn created the platform in 2014 to make the audio industry more reflective of what the real world actually looks like. She developed it as a direct response to the lack of women, non-binary, and trans people in the industry, either in the studio or behind the mic.
The queer-led, all-woman, non-binary, and trans team—with members based in B.C., Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, and the U.K.—has worked on podcasts for brands like Cosmo, Cheerios, Google, and Harper’s Bazaar.
Now, editaudio has a new show to add to its roster. Hope This Finds Me Well is the first original podcast to its own indie network.
In the show, hosts connect with people who have recently retrieved their FutureMe letters to themselves. They delve into why they wrote the letter and why it’s important to them. These are stories from real humans grappling with things like identity, grief, heartache, but who also contemplate joy, love, resilience, and growth.
“Someone from our team had been using the website FutureMe.org for over a decade,” Colbourn tells Stir. “She’d write a letter to herself and get it back a month or years later. Turns out tons of other people had been writing letters to their future selves too. Our team at editaudio started reading letters that other people had chosen to make public on the site and couldn’t believe how many amazing letters there were. We became curious about their personal experiences and unanswered questions and set out to find some of those letter writers and answer our questions.”
Ka'nika Codrington, a Surrey-based producer and editor at editaudio.
The team got to sit down and talk to each of them and find out what had changed in the weeks, months, or years since they wrote to themselves.
“It started out as curiosity about random strangers’ lives and turned into amazing stories of humanity and shared experiences, emotions, sometimes huge life events, but more often than not, it was just about everyday situations,” Colbourn says. “Each conversation showed us authentic human connection, in a time where we are craving it most.”
The series resonates with people because the unfiltered stories are so relatable: they touch on things we all experience but generally don’t talk about through the guise of talking it out with our future selves, says Ka'nika Codrington, a producer and editor at editaudio who’s based in Surrey.
“We are a diverse group of people trying to uplift the stories and people who have traditionally been left out of the podcasting industry,” Codrington says. “This show proved that that authentic representation is truly necessary.”
More information is at Hope This Finds Me Well.
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