In this installment of Behind The Streams…

Dreaming of Broadway

After falling in love with straight plays and studying the art of acting under a supportive high school teacher, Lauren decided to pursue theatre at William & Mary.

From the Stage to the Stereo

That was when The Bright Sessions was born from a belief in the podcast medium, the thread of an idea for a character, and a love for science fiction.

The Secret Guide

Since beginning The Bright Sessions, Lauren has begun going to a therapist to deal with an anxiety issue and has come out to her family as bisexual. The show has made her a lot more comfortable talking about those more private parts of her life, especially because she was writing a show in which people receive help from a therapist.

Talking Fandoms

Lauren might be more a fan of her fans than her fans are of her podcast.

New and Exciting

If you keep your eyes out, you’ll be sure to spot the name Lauren Shippen in more and more places, from tv shows to self-care tips, and there’s a really good chance that all of it is worth checking out.

Behind the Streams #4: Lauren Shippen

Lauren Shippen was one of Forbes 30 under 30 in media in 2018; she has become a voice for self-care and mental health as well as for the LGBTQ community; she has had a varied career as a writer, actress, and musician; and her podcast, The Bright Sessions, has been downloaded seven million times and has earned seven Audio Verse awards. And as amazing and intimidating as that all makes her sound, she was really nice about the fact that I called her at seven in the morning her time instead of one in the afternoon because I am really bad at time conversion.

Once I got the time right and started the interview, Lauren only got cooler. Before she was all of those awesome things, she was just a theatre kid that loved Broadway and Hamlet. And, in a way, she still is. Lauren still makes time to see plays and musicals, and she finds the act of singing and accompanying herself on her ukelele incredibly relaxing.

There’s a long story that connects Lauren’s first Broadway show at ten and her award-winning podcast and it is time for the storyteller’s story to be told.

Dreaming of Broadway

Lauren Shippen grew up planning to become a marine biologist because she loved water mammals (which makes a lot of sense because otters are possibly one of the cutest animals to breathe the air on Earth). Then she realized she had “no aptitude for science,” and moved to something she felt she was a bit more gifted for.

When I was in my adolescence I would go back and forth between wanting to be a novelist or an actor. I saw my first broadway show when I was ten years old, and fell in love with – I grew up on musical theatre and was performing stuff in my living room from a very young age, but actually seeing it on stage and getting to see these incredible performers represent the pinnacle of that medium, of musical theatre, was so invigorating. And so I thought, that’s what I wanted to do and then, sort of on the side, I was always writing little stories and reading tons of books and thinking maybe I should live in the woods and write books for the rest of my life.

The fact the Lauren fell in love with musical theatre isn’t surprising. She’s been studying voice since she was thirteen and had been in choirs years before that. “Singing is probably the first thing I remember doing. Singing and reading were probably the biggest parts of my upbringing.”

After falling in love with straight plays and studying the art of acting under a supportive high school teacher, Lauren decided to pursue theatre at William & Mary.

In a jazz history class I fell in love with ethnomusicology, which is the study of how music is influenced by and can influence society and culture. So I ended up kind of diverting a little bit and becoming a music major and doing musical scholarship. And there was a brief period of time in my late teens where I thought I was gonna be a music journalist, but I kept being drawn back to performance and to crafting story. And I realized I didn’t necessarily want to be someone commenting or criticizing art, I wanted to be creating it.

So Lauren moved to LA, the land of angels and dreamers, to learn about the more technical sides of entertainment. She had fallen in love with television, though in a different way than people like me fall in love with it. Me loving television means I watch way too much of it and am baffled by the fact that other people don’t laugh when I quote Parks and Rec. No, Lauren fell in love with the way television told stories, but she wanted to see how it all came together.

So I got a job at an agency and I was doing that for a few months when I first moved out here and then realized that I still miss performing.

Lauren can see now that what she has always been drawn to is character. In acting she could “give characters physical form,” while in writing she creates the characters herself. Both provide ways for her to hunker down in someone else’s (fictional) mind and see what happens there, and that is what makes stories happen: characters thinking, feeling, and doing things.

Working on the “broader perspective stuff” was cool, but Lauren wanted to be really immersed “in the trenches” of storytelling, so she returned to acting as her main focus.

From the Stage to the Stereo

By the time Lauren had moved to LA she had been listening to podcasts for a while but, oddly enough for someone so obsessed with stories, she had only been listening to nonfiction series. She ended up landing an acting gig outside of LA that required her to drive an hour and a half outside of the city in the dark and she needed something to listen to. A friend suggested Welcome to Nightvale (apparently a starting point for many fiction-podcast creators).

I’d never really enjoyed audio books. Just for me as a reader, I really like being the person who’s actually reading the words. I enjoyed audio books for nonfiction but I had a hard time with it for fiction. So I sort of assumed that fiction podcasts would sort of be the same for me.

So, she was a little wary of Welcome to Nightvale and was pretty sure she wouldn’t like it. Then she started listening. And kept listening. And couldn’t do anything else because she was so focused on listening.

I was totally wrong, it’s totally a medium that I love to consume that way.

Lauren had discovered a love of fiction podcasts and just in time. She was not happy with the roles she was being categorized for and the auditions she got weren’t encouraging either. Plus, she was getting tired of the patience required in acting and her agent was encouraging her to put out her own content. However, even putting together a small video campaign would require more skills, time, and people than Lauren had access to.

And so I thought, well, this thing works. This Welcome to Nightvale thing works…. Maybe I can make something in this medium work.

In a way, everything coalesced perfectly: “For me, it was really just the combination of finding out that audio fiction was a really viable thing and wanting to make something of my own that I could make entirely by myself and then finding a way to put those two things together.”

Making a fiction podcast was the perfect way to do that. Even though Lauren was aware that she wasn’t on the level of the writers, producers, or designers from Nightvale, at least she could write. So she had a starting point.

I had been having this idea about this character who time travels and she gets these panic attacks. And I was like, well, just her audio journals would be kind of boring but I could do that really easily. And then eventually I thought I’d give her someone to talk to, okay, give her a therapist.

And that was when The Bright Sessions was born from a belief in the podcast medium, the thread of an idea for a character, and a love for science fiction. Lauren had learned to love reading and serial stories from children’s books. While she had branched out to and focused more on fantasy early on, she eventually found The X Files and Battlestar Galactica and fell in love with this genre that “takes these people and puts them in this extraordinary circumstance and then have them deal with very human issues.”

It was these “human issues” and the very idea of what being human means that drove Lauren both to her story and her characters. But something else worked its way into the show and really started to shape everything.

The Secret Guide

That thing is a set of ideas that tend to go unnoticed in most stories and even in our culture at large, but Lauren is committed to shedding light on it in her work.

I’m like obsessed with the idea of masculinity and toxic masculinity and I’m just like, that’s the hill I want to die on in storytelling is how we can unpack masculinity in both male and female characters and nonbinary characters and that sort of thing. It’s a thing that rules so much of our society.

The idea of masculinity is not the beginning or the end of Lauren’s personal passions that appear in the show. Since beginning The Bright Sessions, Lauren has begun going to a therapist to deal with an anxiety issue and has come out to her family as bisexual. The show has made her a lot more comfortable talking about those more private parts of her life, especially because she was writing a show in which people receive help from a therapist.

Lauren took her passions and started shaping characters, knowingly or unknowingly, after those passions. But it took her three seasons to realize that a very particular thing was driving her work and would continue to drive her work for quite a while.

It’s not just sci-fi and mental health and LGBT stuff, but like very specifically masculinity is something I find very interesting.

Lauren isn’t promising that masculinity will be the focus of all of her stories or work from now on, but she has found that the characters in The Bright Sessions, both male and female, continue to challenge masculine stereotypes and to surprise her. She has also discovered that she wants to learn more about the way that government works just from the creation of a few fictional people, and she expects to continue to be surprised.

I think all those passions were there, but they appeared in different ways throughout my life. And of course, I fully count on telling my next story and discovering that I have a totally not yet discovered passion.

The way that fiction has reshaped Lauren’s reality and moved her in different directions is not entirely unique to her. Her fans have also found themselves represented in The Bright Sessions and have made a community for themselves in the space of that story.

Talking Fandoms

For the record, Lauren might be more a fan of her fans than her fans are of her podcast. Her apartment is decorated with fan art and that goes double for her phone background. She enjoys talking to her fans both online and in person, and some of those fans have become real-life besties.

I am consistently and continually blown away by our listeners and by what they’ve given back to us and what they’ve done by standing by us. I feel so fortunate to have such an enthusiastic and loving fanbase.

She even counts on her fans to keep her show genuine as she explores characters that are beyond her own set of experiences. From ace people to Marines, Lauren has a reputation for being open to how people are receiving her show. She believes that when people tell her ways that certain moments or people in the story did or didn’t work for them, it shows that “people are emotionally connecting.”

But with all that said, she is a firm believer in leaving some fan spaces sacred.

The last thing I ever want to do is alienate listeners or get in their way when they’re making fan work. I never want it to seem like I deserve to be in fan spaces simply because I made the thing they’re fanning over, because I don’t think that should be the case.

Why? Because Lauren wants fans to have the space to be fans, without her dictating it or affecting it from the inside, but also because some boundaries are absolutely necessary for her own well being. See, in the beginning, Lauren was so surprised and excited that people were following her work and loving it that she spent a massive amount of time interacting with her fans, exhausting herself in the process.

Eventually I found myself spending so much time tweeting back at people who are tweeting me lovely things or answering Tumblr asks or doing whatever that I’m actually getting drained from that. And at a certain point I had to step back.

That step back in no way changed her love of fans or her understanding of the closeness between herself and her fans. Because Lauren was not famous when the podcast started and for a while there were only ten of them listening, she is still surprised that fans see her as a celebrity (which she totally is).

Now I still have a little bit of glitching whenever I meet a fan and they’re actively excited or nervous to meet me. I’m like ‘no, we both tweeted each other, I’m not anything special.’

Fans of The Bright Sessions will disagree of course and are likely to stick around to see what else Lauren comes up with.

New and Exciting

Lauren’s hit podcast is being turned into a television show, but she is trying to remain calm about that amazing tidbit.

Listen, until I’m on set or I see my name actually on a physical tv screen, I’m not getting excited.

Lauren cites her time in LA as a reason for her pragmatism because five years has taught her that any deal can fall through a hundred different ways. But despite that knowledge, Lauren is having a lot of fun putting everything together and making sure the show is up to snuff.

Lauren also has a trilogy of teen books coming out that adapt The Bright Sessions into a new form, which will fulfill her lifelong dream of being a novelist.

Beyond The Bright Sessions, Lauren is working on a few podcasts (the specifics of which cannot be disclosed yet) and is very excited about getting to be a part of some things that aren’t her own story. She is also taking her own self-care (like taking time to see a play or running or watching Crazy Rich Asians) seriously, playing a game called Time Stories, and hanging out with her friends as often as possible.

If you keep your eyes out, you’ll be sure to spot the name Lauren Shippen in more and more places, from tv shows to self-care tips, and there’s a really good chance that all of it is worth checking out.

Behind the Streams is a new series by Podchaser that explores popular podcasts and the brilliant minds behind them. Email Morgan ([email protected]) to tell her why your favorite show should be featured next.