My senior year of high school, I began creating the audio drama Back Again, Back Again, a narrative audio drama about the end of adventures, alternate realms, and queer girls with swords. Growing up in Gainesville, Georgia, I didn’t see many queer people in my life or in the fantasy books and shows I adored. This was my solution — when what you’re looking for doesn’t exist, make your own. 

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I got to put all of my favorite things into the show — I created a conlang (a made-up language, think like Elvish in Lord of the Rings) called Rhysean, got to write at length about sword-fighting (which helped get me into HEMA), and was able to explore my own take on the portal-fantasy/Isekai trope. 

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One of the coolest things to me was watching the show grow — there is a whole fan community online for it, which is absolutely crazy for me to think about. There’s fanfiction and fanart, a forum where folks who have listened to the show talk, cosplays, and even someone who has gotten a tattoo of the main character’s sword — something that seventeen-year- old-Gale, just starting to dream up the story, could never have imagined. 

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Back Again, Back Again gave me a chance to become comfortable in the way I wanted to tell stories and helped me realize that stories that so completely centered queer people could be successful. Because of the community response and my own delight in telling the story, I went on to write a prequel series, called Sword and Spinner, with my friend Chloe Peterson, who produced an original bard song for each episode of the show (the songs are SO GOOD). After working on the show on my own for so long, being able to collaborate with a friend to create something I couldn’t ever do on my own was really cool to discover.

 

Through this show, I also learned a lot about how to self-motivate and manage deadlines — episodes come out on the 1st and 15th of every month, which means that in the two-week gap, I have to edit my script, find the quiet time to record, do several rounds of audio editing, and then create the publishing packet for each episode. It’s a thing that CANNOT be put off till the last minute (ask me how I know). However, this has served me well as I’ve moved into other create and remote jobs — I’ve been managing my own deadlines for years!

 

Back Again, Back Again won two international Audio Verse Awards in 2022 and passed 60k listeners in 2024. S1 and S2, which sit around 30 episodes each, have both been completed, which you can check out here!

Here’s a timeline of events and a few of my favorite pieces of fanart + memes:

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November 15, 2021: The Back Again, Back Again Relaunch — after a long break because of starting college and moving across the country, I was back, baby!

 

July 1, 2022: The S1 Finale of Back Again, Back Again.

 

November 1, 2022: S2 of Back Again, Back Again begins!

 

November 20, 2022: Back Again, Back Again becomes an Audio Verse Award finalist.

 

March 10, 2023: Back Again, Back Again wins “Best Existing Story-Based Production” and “Best Storyteller" in an Existing Production.

 

July 5, 2023: Sword and Spinner debuts.

 

January 5, 2024: S1 Finale of Sword and Spinner.

 

April 15, 2024: S2 Finale of Back Again, Back Again.

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