Category: Podcast

Where to Start with Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree

Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree won the 2023 Association for Mormon Letters Podcast Award! Check out our favorite episodes, and watch for new episodes resuming in August.

Last week, Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree was awarded the Association for Mormon Letters Podcast Award for 2023! You can hear the announcement as part of the livestreamed awards ceremony or read the citation on Facebook. Obviously, I’m really excited and deeply honored by the recognition from the Mormon literature community.

We’ve been a bit off the radar because Carl broke his knee and also moved his family to Utah, but this award has given us some steam to get back on the horse. Look for more new episodes to come starting in the second half of August. In fact, if you’re in the Provo area on August 9th, we’re going to be attending the BYU library’s screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey and recording a short episode about it. We’d love to say hello and get your thoughts on the film!

In recognition of the award, I thought I would put together a post with some of our best episodes as a place to get started with the podcast. I meant to get this up right after the awards, but summer happens. Anyway, we highly recommend each of these episodes. You don’t have to watch the film before listening to the episode, as long as you don’t mind spoilers. In fact, I think it could be useful to listen to the episode first as a way of enhancing your watching experience.

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Introducing Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree: A New Podcast Taking A Mormon Perspective on Pop Culture

As you may remember from my Writer in Review post, one of my goals this year was to start a podcast. Well, I’m happy to announce that Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree is now ready for your listening pleasure! It’s a podcast where I have on a group of guests and we discuss a film or movie (maybe books some day!) from an LDS perspective. My co-hosts and I talk about gospel lessons and moral implications through story with that “Mormons ruin everything you love” twist. Ha ha.

What’s that you say? “Why a podcast?”

Well for one, I’m a huge fan of podcasts. I’ve listened to podcasts from the very beginning, before smartphones back when you had to manually download the file and upload it to your phone on a cable. Some of my early favorite podcasts were Pottercast and Grammar Girl.

Nowadays, I have almost 60 podcasts on my subscription list. I enjoy the comradery of the podcast format, listening to some knowledgeable, friendly people discuss something interesting that they know way too much about. It’s ideal small talk for introverts!

I’ve idly kicked around the idea of starting a podcast for a few years, but could never really settle on something. All the topics I could think of felt too heavy with too much research involved when my primary focus would always be on writing.

Then, this November when I was pointedly avoiding doing my writing for NaNoWriMo by poking around on Twitter. I stumbled across a podcast where Meg Conley discussed the movie Arrival from a Mormon perspective. This discussion mashing up LDS theology with science fiction was exactly the kind of thing that gets me excited, though I didn’t agree entirely with Meg’s perspective. I shared my thoughts on the podcast on an LDS Slack group I had recently joined. Someone idly suggested that a few of us should start a podcast “Mormonizing” pop culture.

One several-hour-long group-brainstorming session later, we had a 10-page document full of ideas and a great title: Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree. I wasn’t sure I was really going to go through with the idea. After all, I was barely finding the time to write. But the idea just wouldn’t leave me alone.

So in January I got together five friends and recorded an initial episode on Encanto. It was so much fun! It barely feels like it’s work at all.

Hopefully there are others out there who want to Mormonize pop culture, or listen to me talk about it! New episodes release every other Thursday. You can watch video episodes on YouTube or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening!