The Voice Said Do the Podcast
A year ago today I launched Romancing the Threshold without knowing what it was. Here is where it came from, and where to start if you are just arriving.
Creating the graphics for the next episode.
In late 2023 I sat down for a plant medicine ceremony, my second with ayahuasca, and the message came through with a clarity I was not expecting.
The voice. Do the podcast.
I had no idea what kind of podcast that would be. About what? At that time, I was starting to feel the first symptoms of burnout and the last thing I needed was another project. Plus I had no subject, no equipment, no plan. But that evening, under the embrace of the plant medicine, I had the experience itself, which was this: for hours I became a one-woman jazz band. Not a soloist. Using my voice as every instrument in the room: a whole band, jamming, improvising - playing.
The first plant medicine journey, back in 2022, had as its core message be all about play, and how we are taking all of this - life - far too seriously. That somewhere along the way we forgot, collectively, that the whole thing is meant to be played, and that behind the sense of the Universe as love, is actually play.
Then came 2024, the year that broke me down: death and burnout. Then 2025, my cave year, the one where I laid in the dark with romance novels and slowly got my appetite for life back.
By September I stopped waiting to feel ready. That is often how my creative things begin: before I’m ready. I fly by the seat of my pants because the excitement to create is an itch that can’t wait to be scratched. Great for someone who could easily fall prey to perfectionism’s siren’s call of waiting until it’s all clear and ready. Nothing is fully ever ready.
The name for the podcast came from two places.
From watching my mother’s negotiating with Lady Death and the final threshold. And in my cave year, I found myself being nourished by reading romance novels, devouring hundreds of pages about people meeting the thing that changes them.
Both were teaching me the same lesson from opposite directions: there is a way to cross a threshold that is not bracing for impact. There is a way to meet change the way lovers meet.
So I launched; before I was ready, before it was fleshed out, before I knew what the show was going to be about.
I still do not know sound editing. You can hear it. There was no launch campaign. I am still learning, in public, one episode at a time.
Then I started asking people to come play.
Here is the part I want to say plainly, because I think it matters: I only ask people I have been noticing for a while. I read their books. I sit with their work. And then I reach out. It has never been a cold pitch.
It is closer to asking someone out on a date, except the date is an hour of talking about what their stories know.
Each yes made me bolder. When Layla Fae said yes, an author I had found when I was deep in my cave, and whose books in their wild, at times unhinged in the most delicious of ways I was inhaling, something in me felt bolder. I could keep doing this. I could keep asking.
The nos were fine too. So were the non-answers. I learned to slide into DMs, as the cool kids say, and I keep a running list of people I want to learn from. Yes or no, the asking is the practice.
The asking is the practice of staying curious about where this threshold will lead me.
Clockwise: 1) the sexy work of sound editing! 2) where the magic happens 3) the ‘shure’ phallic instrument of voice 4) learning new sound editing software 5) making IG reels from soundbites 6) my love, inspiration from a recent quote I found & color HEX codes that I need to memorize, but never will 7) the now growing romance library with my altar 7) my office assistant Khaleesi complaining (which she does often!) and 8) what she does most of the time, sleep on the job next to my desk.
And then there is the voice.
The voice is the podcast, and the writing, and everything I am making. But it is also my actual voice, accent and all, the one in my throat, the very throat that almost killed me when I was 6 from a gnarly case of diphtheria.
It took me years to be able to stand the sound of it being played back to me in recordings, and for a long time I could not leave a voicemail without wincing. I couldn’t stand how it sounded. So several years ago I spent a focused year doing a lot of healing inner work to learn to accept it.
Which is the part I still find funny. The message was the voice, do the podcast, and it arrived for a woman who could still have an uncomfortable relationship with hearing her own voice.
That is usually how these things go, because the doorway to healing is through the wound. You don’t need Jung to tell me that.
Nothing about this year of making episodes has been perfect. That was never the point for me.
The point is throwing your hat in the ring and playing, and I am convinced we have forgotten how to do that in a world that loves the porn of performance, but shame imperfections. But the muses of creativity love playing.
All of this is the jam session, not the recital.
So the podcast is me playing and hopefully extending the playground to your own play. And I am grateful beyond measure to every guest who has said yes and come to play with me.
Looking at my roster of episodes, about to hit 20(!), it’s impossible to pick favorites because each one gave me a gold nugget of learning in more ways than one.
But if you are new here, I invite you to check these five doors in (no particular order):
Walking to the edge of Desire: My Husband Reads Romance
My husband isn’t a reader, much less a romance reader, but he took on the challenge of reading a few passages from some of my books and this episode is a look behind the scenes at my book husband. It was a vulnerable episode to record, because we had never made our conversations over these books public, but it was fun to cross this threshold together.
(Psst… we have another episode planned for later this year around our wedding anniversary, and this time it was his idea to come on the pod, not mine!)
When the world gets strange, desire becomes our compass
Start here to see me fangirl (just a little) and meet one of my favorite authors. Plus we touch on AI as our age’s new monster, joy and creativity and her origin story with the monster in the movie Legend, the moment that imprinted something in her long before she had the language for it.
Which Door is Yours?
This episode covers what I’ve been discovering about what romance novels are actually doing underneath the genre, underneath the tropes, that our culture has buried or maligned, while we’re left to do the healing that is necessary. Start here if you want the frame for my work around Forbidden Doors (which is returning January 2027.)
The Bestiary of Unearthing
In this episode I explore what started as escape became something else entirely—a bestiary of transformation. Fifty monsters across a hundred and twenty five romance novels, and the seven who turned out to be guides. Start here if you are in the midst of a molting season.
What Story Are You Telling at the Threshold?
In this conversation, I sit with Ingrid Kincaid —rune reader, author, and self-proclaimed “irreverent wise woman”—to explore what it means to romance the threshold. Together we unpack how the word “romance” originally meant storytelling, and how the stories we tell ourselves about change shape our entire experience of crossing through.
And if you want to hear the imperfection of the first episode in all its glory, it is still up. Launched a year ago on September 26, 2025, made by someone who did not yet know what she was making. But who did it anyway.
If something here gave you something, pass it to the person who came to mind while you read it. That is how this show travels.
Both inspiration and motto for me. Love this poster hubby gave me years ago.
