Transcript: HER With Amena Brown Episode 134

Amena Brown:

I almost don't know how to start this episode. I'm not going to lie about it, but I have an announcement, and my announcement is that this episode you are listening to is the last episode of HER With Amena Brown. I know y'all. I know at least two of y'all were like, "Oh." I know. I'm feeling that way too. I wanted to have my last episode to be one where I could talk specifically to you as the listeners, and then some of you were like, "Hey, wait, I just got here."

So I wanted to give a little review of how this podcast came to be, what I feel like the podcast has taught me, how I feel I've changed, and what's next for me and what I hope is next for you. So this podcast originally started in 2018, and it's very interesting to think about the full circle moment of this podcast coming to a close, because I remember that the end of 2017, which I think I've talked about here on the podcast, but the end of 2017 and 2018 was probably one of the roughest times in my life outside of the last year and a half of my life, truthfully. But at that time, it just felt like everything was falling apart.

I had my book come out in November of 2017. My team, that I thought was going to help me do my book tour and figure out all of that, walked away about a week and a half after my book came out. So I didn't have a manager, I didn't have a booking agent, I didn't have any gigs for my book tour that was supposed to happen the following year. Then I got this opportunity to potentially be on the radio here in Atlanta. I was being considered to join a morning show here, and it fell through in the worst way.

If I can be honest with y'all, the initial person that reached out to me, I knew him. We had met before, and so he had reached out to me like, "Oh, I think he'd be such a great fit for this, but I need to sit you down with the host of this morning show." And so I met him and the host of the morning show at this coffee shop, and the host talked to me for a few minutes and asked me a couple of questions about myself, wanted to know what I thought I would bring to the radio show.

After I answered, the host kind of turned back to the person that was my original contact, and they just went on having a conversation almost as if I wasn't there. They just ignored me the rest of the meeting. It was very devastating, and it was during a time that a lot of other disappointing things had already happened. So I just remember really being very sad and full of grief during that time, and I had put a lot of my hopes in that radio show opportunity because I thought, "If this radio show opportunity comes through, then that'll prove to me I'll be okay. That'll prove to me that I'm not forgotten in this moment. This isn't the end for me." Or all those things. When the radio thing fell through too, it was just one disappointment too many. So I entered into probably what was one of the worst depressions of my life at that point, just to where I was so depressed that I'm not really functioning during the day or able to get out of bed and things like that. It was very, very hard.

At some point in my depressed stupor, I started to think about radio because I have always dreamed, since I was a little girl, of having my own radio show, which is why it was so personal to me that I was potentially getting this opportunity. It was interesting because once I had some time to myself, I started to think, "Why am I waiting for them to give me an opportunity on a radio show when podcasting is right there? I can have my own radio thing." And by this time, I had started podcasting because my sister-in-law, and I had our podcast together at that time, which was called Here For the Donuts. That was my first foray into podcasting. When my book came out, How To Fix A Broken Record, it had its own limited series podcast that, I think, it just had 10 or 12 episodes to it.

I was considering what I wanted to do, like a solo podcast, and I just started letting myself dream it up a little bit. My initial idea for what would be my solo podcast was, I wanted it to feel like a late-night show, but in the middle of the day or in the morning, I wanted it to have segments, and I wanted it to be the Amena Brown Show. But I got nervous about that because I felt like that would take a lot more ingenuity. I would have to really think through all these segments, and I didn't want my feeling like I needed to have all these ideas together to keep me from just starting, because I feel like there's something about having a show that you just have to start. You have to start, you have to try, you have to see what it's going to be.

So anyway, I had that in my mind. Then the other thing that I had in my mind is, at this time of 2018, I was still working in a white evangelical space. I, over the past couple of years before that, had really built a lot of community with women of color who were also working in a lot of these predominantly white, Christian conservative spaces. Some of it was just predominantly white Christian spaces, even if they weren't conservative, but most of it was. The main thing that a lot of the women of color were talking about when we got in the room, and it was just us, is, we were talking about equal pay, and how could we make sure that we were getting paid fairly and appropriately at our speaking gigs? How could we make sure that a white man wasn't coming in there and getting paid $20,000, but when they book a woman of color, they book all of us for a panel and pay us 200 bucks? So that was a part of the conversation.

Publishing was a part of the conversation because, in that part of the Christian conservative industry, books were really the end all, be all, almost. It was like, if you wrote a book, that's how you could get more speaking gigs. That's how you could seem official or legitimate to the people who might book you for their big churches or whatever. For a while, it was even a struggle for women of color to just even get book deals. But by the time you got to 2016, 2017, there were more women of color starting to get book deals. But then, can they get literary agents? Can they have someone to help them negotiate a good book deal? And even if they get the book deal, do they actually have the support of the publisher? Does the publisher even know other platforms outside of white folks to help promote these books to? Do they even know how to promote these books to other women of color or other communities of color?

So I was having lots of conversations with women of color around this, and I started to think to myself, "The quicker idea that I know I could do tomorrow is, I could interview women of color on my podcast." And there was a lot about white evangelicalism as an industry that was unethical and inequitable. So there was a lot about that, that I wasn't going to be able to change the way that system was set up. But if I had a platform of my own to offer that to women of color, when their books came out, when they had initiatives they wanted to promote, that I had a place where they could come and share.

So that was the original impetus behind HER With Amena Brown. The podcast actually had a different name that I won't say. It had a different name that I had been holding onto for years for another project I wanted to do. When I went to look up that name in the podcast app, these two other women had posted five episodes and then abandoned it, and I was like, "Oh." I don't know. I just felt like, now, I want to just use something else. So I said, "If I use HER then it's clear that this is a podcast that centers women, and there's only going to be one HER With Amena Brown." I just couldn't imagine there'd be another podcast with that, with my name. So I started the podcast in the spring of 2018, not far from my birthday, and the original premise of the podcast was that it was all interview-based, and I interviewed women of color based on a theme. I think my first season's theme was Body. Then I had another season that was Lost & Found, which was really interesting to dive into.

I can't even remember what my third season was now, but I had three seasons, and I'm trying to think. I remember when I did Body, I tried to approach the theme with a poet's lens. So I think I interviewed a personal trainer. I interviewed an Anowa Adjah about how to train the body, but then I interviewed my friend Deidra Riggs about the Body of a Paragraph, and then with Lost & Found, that that was just very poignant to me because I got a chance to really think about interviewing a woman of color who could share stories of getting lost, of losing a job, could be finding yourself or finding a new role. So I got to work around with themes like that.

So we did the first two seasons, and then, so this was 2018. Then I went into 2019, and I did season three then. I cannot even tell y'all what season three's theme was now. I did season three in 2019, and then when it got to be... I think maybe we ended up doing season three closer to the end of 2019 because of the way some other scheduling things had gone for me. Then we were planning for season four. The season four theme was going to be Taste, which I was so excited about because y'all know I love to talk about food, and I was looking forward to seeing how many women of color in the food industry can I interview. We were just getting ready to start approaching that when the pandemic tipped.

So we were on hold and trying to figure out what, and I think I had reached out already to a couple of... I think I had reached out to one photographer. Shout out to Phyllis Iller, also known as Melissa Alexander. So I went ahead and interviewed her while we were in the lockdown period, interviewed her via Zoom, and then my friend Kaitlin Curtice, who I have had here on the podcast many times, she had a book that was coming out in the spring of 2020. So she and I... I was supposed to host her live event, which didn't happen. We couldn't meet in person. So I hosted her and interviewed her on Instagram, and then I told her if it was okay with her, I could record the audio and release that as an episode.

Now here's what's interesting. When I think back on the journey of the podcast, I'll say one of the questions I wanted to cover here is like, "What do I feel like I've learned in the process of doing this podcast?" And I think I learned pretty quickly in that first season that I wasn't trying to have a Christian podcast. Of course, I can look back on my last five years of life or so, five or six years, really, and see that the writing was on the wall with me about where I wanted my career to be headed, where my spirituality was headed, that I wanted my spirituality to be broader than being evangelical or being conservative in that regard.

So I started to feel a little nervous, like, "What if I want queer folks on my podcast? I don't want that to seem strange to my audience. I want it to make sense to my audience that anyone who is a woman of color is welcome here on this podcast." So I realized I was going to have to be really clear about the tone of what I was doing to make sure that it was clear that this wasn't a podcast that was for Christians or to produce any sort of Christian content or anything like that, and I hoped that the people that were following me or following along that were Christians might still want to, but that it would be clear that this is a podcast that I hope you listen to, whether you're a Christian or not, whether you were raised in church or not.

So that meant I had to interview people a little bit differently to not assume that everyone listening understands Christian jargon or understands certain terms that, if you grew up in the church, that you may say, making sure to explain some of those things. Then that generally started to make me think, of course, a lot of the women of color I featured at first were women of color that I had met being in church environments, but then realizing I wanted to broaden the scope of who I was interviewing, and my experiment was working for me in the sense that I realized I really enjoyed what I was doing. I enjoyed interviewing women of color. I enjoyed the conversations that we were having, and I wanted to do this more.

So February of 2020 comes, and I had the opportunity because of Together Live, which is a tour that Jennifer Walsh and Glennon Doyle put together many years ago. But what ended up being the last tour of Together Live happened in 2019, and Jennifer Walsh, Glennon Doyle, and Abby Wambach invited me to be a part of that tour. Then the few of us who were a part of the Together Live tour were also invited to attend MAKERS, which is a global women's summit that typically always happens in LA. I was very excited to attend. I had heard such good things about MAKERS, and so we were doing a Together Live segment there.

Together Live as a tour, one of the partners or sponsors for the tour was P&G. So I had met some of the folks that work with P&G and I just decided in the green room while we were at MAKERS, I was like, "I'm going to ask one of them if they have information about how P&G, could possibly become a sponsor for my podcast." And so I asked one of the women there that I had been working with, and she was like, "Oh, I don't help with that." But she was like, "Oh, I do know somebody that's starting a network, and I think you should talk to her and see if that would work."

So the woman who's over the Seneca Women Podcast Network was there at MAKERS. And so the woman from P&G introduced me to her, and we stood outside and talked together for 20 minutes. I shared with her the vision of this podcast, and she was like, "Hey, I'm starting this network. Maybe this will be a good way we can partner together." And so then I had to rush off to the airport and she had to rush off to a meeting. I got home, and I think I had a couple more gigs, and then a few weeks later, we were all home because of COVID.

So I thought at that point, "Wow, really cool that we had that conversation. But that's it. That's all. There's nothing that's ever going to come of that." And the woman who started Seneca Women Podcast Network did a few months later follow up with me and say, "Hey, yeah, the podcast network's still happening. Are you still interested in bringing your podcast over to this network?" And I said I was still interested, and we went through all the particulars of everything, and she was like, "The only thing is we'll need to change your podcast from seasonal over to a weekly." So I was going to go from 20 to 24 episodes a year to 40 some episodes a year, which was a pretty big change, but I was open to it, and it was very helpful for me not having the road as much because everything was so shut down.

So in September of 2020, is when this podcast relaunched to be a weekly, which meant I was still centered on interviewing women of color and wanting to share their stories, but I also had more episodes to fill. So I tried out some segments and stuff at first, and then I just got caught up, honestly, in the rigor of producing a weekly podcast. It was a lot of work. So then I started doing solo episodes, which I had never thought about before the podcast relaunched and became a weekly. So I started doing solo episodes like these and figured out that I liked them, and the listeners were responding to some of them. It took me back to some things that I love about the stage, which is storytelling and getting a chance to pick these stories out and tell them. So it was very great because I had a space where I could tell stories.

It was also hard because I was sort of telling stories when you're doing podcast things, like you're telling the story, "I'm here talking to y'all in a room with a mic. You're wherever you are listening, but I can't see you. I can't hear your responses, your reactions. I can't hear anything." And as a stage person, that's very hard because I'm used to being on stage and not even just what people assume is the ego gratification of just having a room full of people to clap for you. It's not just that. You're getting a chance to have a conversation with the audience. You can say something and know if the audience thinks it's funny or not, and know if the audience identifies with what you're saying or not. You can feel all of that in the room. So it was hard to go from that to recording this. Sometimes people listen to a podcast episode and love it. They just don't tell you. So every now and then, when somebody would put a review out there or send me a DM, I would be so excited to get it. I would be so happy.

What have I learned since starting this podcast? I guess I should say the rest is history. This podcast relaunched in September of 2020, which means at this point, this podcast has been around for almost five and a half years. Oh my gosh, that just sounds wild. What have I learned since starting this podcast? I feel like one thing I learned is, my main rule for choosing people to interview is, do I feel curious about them, like when I read their bio, when I go to their Instagram, do I want to know more about them? And if I don't feel that way, then I don't need to interview them because it will make for a bad interview. It's like I have to come into it curious about you wanting to know more about who you are or how you do what you do, and I think that makes an interview really warm. I feel like I learned that.

I feel like I learned how to, I don't know if I want to say, be more honest, but I feel like because I was doing this podcast weekly for the last three years of it, I feel like in a way, this podcast gave me a space to say and express certain things and process through certain things and talk about certain things with guests and talk about certain things with y'all on a solo episode that I probably would never have thought to share. So I think, in a way, there were some things that I was processing in life that this podcast gave me an opportunity to find my voice and figure out how to say those things. So I feel like I learned that.

I feel like I also learned that I love podcasting, but I am primarily, and with priority, a writer and a stage person. So I realized as time was going on, eventually I'm going to want to write books again, go back on the road again, and have to figure out how will I navigate that while having a weekly podcast. I learned that you need a team to do this. So big shout out to my assistant and my friend Leigh, who has been with me since the very beginning of HER With Amena Brown, the podcast. A big shout-out to my husband, who became the producer of this podcast.

Really, Leigh and my husband have been with me from the beginning of this idea germinating. So I can't do this thing by myself. The reason why it goes well is because of the team that I have with me. Shout out to my manager, Celeste, who was there, and my, attorney Michelle, who was there to help with the negotiations that we needed to do when it was time to negotiate this podcast deal. So I learned I needed a team, and because I had a team, that's what made things go so well.

How have I changed? Oh, are we wanting to be in my therapy sessions? I think in the five years that I've had this podcast, I have grown more and more comfortable in my skin. I have become less preoccupied with being who I think other people think I should be. I completely let go of remaining in white evangelical space and all the ways that I would've had to continue to make myself small to stay over there. I discovered that I am way more progressive than I could say I was 10 years ago, theologically and politically, in a lot of ways. My politics have changed. My theology has changed since starting this podcast. My self-care practices are better since I started this podcast. So I feel like this podcast sort of entered my life at a time where a lot of things were in flux, and so I feel like I have grown, broadened, and evolved a lot in the five years that I've been here talking to y'all.

The other question is, "What's next for me?" And I think I will say it's emotional talking to y'all, and I guess before I go into what's next for me, I just wanted to say a really, really big thank you. I said I was not going to cry on a podcast, but I just want to say a big thank you to all of you who have been listening to this however long you have. I know some of you are OG people. You were listening to this podcast when I was still doing seasonal stuff.

Some of you just got here, maybe. Bless your heart if you just got here. There's still some old episodes you can go back and listen to. There's a lot of great stuff here. But however you came to this and however long you were here listening, it has meant the world to me to be able to share my stories with you, to every guest that I've had here that trusted me to interview you, trusted me to share with me about what was happening in your life or in your work. But I want to take a very specific moment and thank all of you as the listeners. This podcast would not be without you, and I appreciate you listening and I appreciate your support.

This is a bittersweet moment. This podcast is ending a bit before it was my plan for it to end, but I wanted us to have a moment where we could actually have a way to commemorate all that has happened here. So I'll just thank you for listening to me at your job. Some of you, I know, were listening to me when you were staying with your families during the holidays, just trying to stay in the right frame of mind there. Some of you listen to this podcast on your commute or as you're walking or taking a jog or whatever exercise you like, and just know it has really, really meant the world to me to know that even though I'm in this room by myself, that you're there on the other side actually listening to all of this.

So yeah, what's next for me? I want to say, there's a little bit of creative rest that I think is next for me. I think that it will be good for me to have some time off to see what other creative stuff wants to come out now. I am transitioning over to the Substack platform, so I'm looking forward to exploring that, and the link to my Substack will be in the show notes for this episode as well as in the description.

So if you are interested in following along with me next to see what's happening, if you enjoyed my solo episodes here, Substack will be a little bit like that, but in writing form and maybe some other forms too, we'll see what we develop over there. But I would love for you to join me there, to go ahead and subscribe there at that link. I think the biggest thing that's next for me is returning to writing and returning to stage, and figuring out what is my voice now. What does it want to say, and what do I want to do with that? What is my new poetry set going to sound like? What is my next book going to sound like? And giving myself an opportunity to explore all of that.

When I was talking on the phone to Leigh and we were talking about me recording this last episode, there have been two meetings that Leigh and I have had. This is now the second creative project that she and I have been talking through, where she said, "What if at the end you did a benediction?" And Leigh is not a religious person, and I'm not as religious as I used to be. So I knew when she said benediction, she really meant it. She knows that that could be a bit of a trigger word to both of us, but in the true spirit of what benediction can be, I knew what she meant. That a benediction can have this way where you can say parting words to one another and what you hope for people as they leave you or as you leave them.

So here's my off the cuff benediction. I think I first want to speak to the women of color that are listening to this. You know that I know what it's like to be in spaces that don't welcome you, to be in spaces that want you to assimilate, that want you to be silent, be quiet, that want you to present in whatever the safe way is to them. For some of you, those spaces are at work. For some of you, those spaces are in your family. For some of you, those spaces are unfortunately even, maybe, in your social sphere. But my hope for you is that you will find spaces where you can open your mouth wide and laugh, where you can be loud or be quiet as you need to, where you are respected and honored, where you are given all of the space, honor, and care that you deserve.

I want to say to you, as women of color, that your voice is important, that your voice matters. You do not have to share your story with anyone. That it's not your job to dig underneath your suffering and share it with anyone, and that you are a multitude of things, that you are allowed to be a multitude of things. That being who you are, whether you are black or indigenous or Latinae or Asian, whether you are queer or trans or gay or bi, whether you're southern, whether you're a city, whether you prefer a rural space, whether you live here in America or whether you don't, that you're worthy, that you deserve wonderful things, that you deserve to experience joy. I want that for you.

I want to also speak to the people who grew up in church like me, some of you that may have encountered me from a church setting. I want you to know that it is okay to evolve, that it's okay and good for your beliefs and your thoughts on your spirituality to shift. If there is any message that I have received very strongly the last two years of my life, it's that wandering does not have to be a bad thing. If you are in a place that feels like wilderness, that feels unsure, that feels uncertain, that does not have to be a bad thing. That you are where you are, and that that's all we can do sometimes is be present to exactly where we are and where life has us at this moment.

I want to speak to the people who feel like you're hanging on by a thread, to the people who feel like you are underwater in your life and you are having a lot fewer moments where you feel like your head is getting above water to get air and to breathe. I want to say to you that it won't be that way always. I want to say to you, when you get your head up above that water to breathe in as deep as you can, to find some people that you can lean on to remember that you are worthy of help, that you deserve to have people that are around you where you do not have to feel like you are alone. Even the times you feel alone as humans, we're not alone. Even the times we feel so lonely that we feel like the thing that we're going through, no one must know it. There is somebody somewhere that does know it. I wanted to say to you, even if I'm here in whatever you're experiencing, I may not know it individually myself, but I hold space with you.

I hope for you as this year is ending and as a new year is beginning. I hope that you can do as I'm trying to do in this episode, even though I'm crying all over it. I hope that you can honor your endings when they come, whether it's a relationship, a job, or a thing you used to believe, a way you used to look, or a piece of clothing you have that may no longer be the right thing for you anymore. I hope that you can honor your endings when they come, and I hope that you can embrace your beginnings too.

Anyway, I love y'all, and I appreciate y'all so much. Y'all have been the best audience that HER With Amena Brown could have, and I hope we'll get a chance to see each other soon. Find me on Substack if you're not already following me on social media. I'm mainly an Instagram girl, so you know I'll be there, and hopefully I'll see y'all soon. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for listening.

HER With Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeart Radio. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.