GTF # 1 Adelyne's Apothecary
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Holden Abigail Osborne and I have something in common. We like to make strange voices and be possessed by them. For me, it’s Echo Johnson and Bobby Bird, for Holden, it’s Adelyne Hutcheson.
Holden has been working with Adelyne for over a decade, and it shows. The strange young woman who concocts powerful folk remedies for her friends and neighbors feels entirely real as she tells her tales in Holden’s podcast, “Adelyne’s Apothecary.”
I had the pleasure of happening across this podcast two summers ago, and consumed the whole thing during various walks and chores. I was thoroughly entertained. Holden’s style of storytelling is both unique and comforting, featuring one of a kind characters who feel nonetheless familiar. I highly recommend listening to the entire independently produced podcast HERE or on your favorite podcast app.
Below is a conversation Holden and I had about how we work.
Thank you,
Carson
Carson: In your podcast, Adelyne's Apothecary, you transform in speech and the way you talk and the words you use into, not a completely different person, but somebody who's quite a bit different than yourself. And I was wondering, as someone else who does that, did the voice and all of that pop into your head all at once or was it something you developed? Or do you even remember how that happened?
Holden: Yeah, I think she just appeared. I mean, she just arrived inside. I think she arrived all at once. But it took me a long time to be able to get it out of my mouth. Because you can hear something in your head, but I'm not a trained actor, so you can hear something in your head but not know how to... I have a two-year-old and I feel like when she was pre-verbal, she would just rage because she knew what she wanted to say, but she couldn't say it. I feel like it was a little bit like that. I couldn't figure out how to get it to come out of my mouth. I also think I probably was a little scared.
Carson: Scared to talk as the character?
Holden: Yeah. I didn't quite know how to do it. But now I've been talking to myself as Adelyne for a long time.
Carson: I have a few characters who I can speak as and become possessed. I have Bobby Bird, Echo Johnson, and some others I haven’t made art with yet. With the first, Bobby Bird, that started because I had a throat infection and my voice sounded so different that I felt like a different person when I spoke. And then suddenly I could access this much more grizzled kind of baby boomer character. I think I was ahead of the curve. I was making poking fun at baby boomers 20 years ago.
Holden: Oh yeah, I got a story called Boomer from way, way back.
Carson: Oh really?
Holden: But now it's like, who cares?
Carson: Now it's like-
Holden: Everybody knows now.
Carson: Yeah. There's going to be a sitcom called “Boomer” soon.
Holden: Yeah. Well, it was a sitcom pretty much.
Carson: So for me too, once you developed one of these voices, the structure of stories isn't effortless, but it feels to me like the details and the words you choose are pretty effortless. Is that kind of how it feels to you too, once you know what story you want to tell?
Holden: Yeah. It just flows out. And then a lot of times I don't know the story I want to tell and it comes out too. And those are actually my favorite stories. Often, it happens because I need to go for a walk or something. I need to get out of the house or some tiny little thing happens and it sparks it, but it has nothing to do with what the story actually ends up being. And then the most fun is when you just start heading out and you don't know where you're going.
Carson: I know, it's funny. It's like, for all of the Echo Johnson stories I have in the world, which I probably put about 20 of them out there, I probably have another 10 that I just rambled to myself on a walk and they're lost forever. I don't know if you're the same...
Holden: Oh yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. I do it all the time, especially when I'm driving and it's loud in a car, so it's hard to record and I often don't even think about it, but I often tell stories and I don't record it. And when you're a parent, you don't remember anything. So those stories are gone.
Carson: It's like John Prine once said, well, first off, he has this great line. He said, "It's easier to write a song on a steering wheel than a guitar. And then he said, "You got to grab a tape recorder with that melody in your head and those lyrics, if you don't, you're a fool because it's just gone forever." But at the same time, I think that's totally okay to let some of them just be your own little ephemeral pleasures.
Holden: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like there's a few things I've lost that I wish I could have back.
Carson: I have a bunch of cartoons of Echo that are half done that I just want to finish so bad.
Holden: But it's so painful to go back and finish half-finished stuff.
Carson: I mean, I will. I will. I'll chip away at them.
Holden: That's golden year stuff.
Carson: Do you feel confident you're going to do another season of the podcast?
Holden: Yeah, I have a lot of another, I call it a book.
Carson: Oh, so you're going to type this one up. It won't be a verbal one?
Holden: No, it'll be verbal.
Carson: But have you ever considered getting it transcribed and turning it all into a written book?
Holden: Well, initially I thought it would be a written book. Now I don’t know if people would have the patience for Adelyne’s strange speech. It comes out in sort of poem form. I mean, a lot of it's handwritten, but let's see. Let me remember now.
Carson: You have it word for word though?
Holden: Well, it's a complicated process. Sometimes I write by hand, but then it's too slow, so I'll switch to recording. Some of them are just pure recorded, but then all of them I will eventually transcribe because I re-record everything.
Carson: Oh, you re-record it. That's so fascinating, because the way I do Tarantula, the shorts, is I’ll just ramble for 20 minutes and then I'll edit it down to three minutes and that's how I make the cartoons.
Holden: Yeah. I edit in a few different places, but I never edit the first story while I'm telling it.
Carson: You mean try not to self-edit, just be a free ramble?
Holden: During the initial ramble, yeah.
Carson: I would say that your character in the show is a real rambling person, and that's my favorite kind of storytelling, where it's like the character doesn't seem in any hurry to tell their story because you feel like the storyteller's confident if they're taking their time.
Holden: Oh yeah? Or maybe really incompetent. What's the word for not confident?
Carson: Insecure.
Holden: Insecure.
Carson: I don't think that there's any trace of insecurity in your podcast. So if you have that, which I'm sure you have in real life because you're not an ego maniac, but it seems like a very confidently executed thing.
Holden: Well, I think that when you're not thinking about something, so you're not crafting it so precisely, it's not like a screenplay or something. I think that when you're just letting it flow out of you that you're able to, your ego steps out of the way. So it kind of doesn't matter if you're competent or insecure.
Carson: Yeah. Because it's not even you. That's the beauty of working with characters in this way. I feel like it's not even me. It's weird, really weird. Especially because I feel like this is very true of Adelyne too. Both these characters have their own quirks of speech that aren't our own.
Holden: Yeah. And they just kind of take over.
Carson: Yeah, it's almost like a relief, a form of meditation to let them talk.
Holden: Absolutely. It definitely snaps me out of whatever I have going on. Sometimes in life when you're trying to hold onto a bad mood or something. But if I go do a Adelyne story, then I just lose whatever I had. It's gone.
Carson: Yeah, it's kind of a weird window into what self means if you can adopt a whole other self. Because I saw this study where they've been studying people with multiple personality disorder. They stick electrodes on their heads or what have you, and then measure the brain activity, where it's at when they're certain other people. And I wanted to volunteer and be like, let me do one of these. Let me be one of my other characters and see what lights up, because I think it might be a whole different area.
Holden: Yeah, that's crazy.
Carson: You want to get some electrodes on your head with me sometime? Fly over to Boston or wherever they're doing this study.
Holden: I'm not a big fan of laboratories. I would probably kind of start hyperventilating and it would all be lost. It wouldn't matter. Well, that's a good question though, because I do all my recordings on my own and stuff. I don't do them around other people. So I don't know. I think I could pull Adelyne in a laboratory though. It just would have to be the environment that I was in though. I'd be reacting to the laboratory.
Carson: Exactly.
Holden: It wouldn't be life on the farm, it'd be, get me out of here, fella.
Carson: You might yank the electrodes right off. I think Echo would be really concerned with if he was getting paid and how much and what effect the electrodes were having on him. I mean, if these are just taking readings, that's fine, but if they're putting any kind of signal into me, there's no compensation that would make me comfortable with that.
Holden: Yeah. Adelyne would be worried about that and she'd be embarrassed about talking about the money, but she'd want to know, and then she'd want to know what were they going to do with the information they got and where was it going to go.
Carson: She does have a paranoia to her, doesn't she?
Holden: Yeah.
Carson: One of the jokes that I still haven't got to use with Tarantula was that him and his buddy would be walking by a bank and he goes, "Oh, that's my bank right there." His buddy goes, Oh yeah? I didn't know you had a bank account." And he goes, "Oh no, it's where I get my coffee." And then they go in there for the free coffee and everyone's like, "Oh, hey Joe. Hey Joe, how you doing?" And they leave and Echo’s buddy’s like, "Why were they all calling you Joe?" He’s like, "You think I'm going to give a bunch of bankers my real name? Give me a break, man.”
Holden: Exactly. “My name's Carol. Carol-Anne.”
Carson: Well, I'm really happy to hear you're going to do another book of stories. I think there's a bright future for that character. I'll consume any and all media you make with her for whatever that's worth.
Holden: Thank you, Mr. Mell.
Carson: Thank you, Mrs. Osborne. And to any of my readers reading this who like Tarantula, I'm pretty confident you'll like Adelyne's Apothecary. Goodbye.
AGAIN, you can listen to the podcast HERE or on your favorite podcast app.
Brilliant. Great job interviewing. I think I will listen to her podcast.
The internet has so much wonderful stuff to dig up, even as the taste and safety patrol are wiping huge swaths of it out, and telling the archivists what they're allowed to keep.