Interview highlights
How the podcast got started
Sara Corben: I started the podcast during the pandemic … And I was used to working in an office with a lot of voices around me. So I was listening to podcasts for like six hours a day, Pretty much all true crime, which was a mistake. I started to get really paranoid, so I had to cut that out.
But I was really inspired by what people were doing with this type of storytelling. I really like a more, you know, polished, produced type of podcast, and I wanted to try and do that myself. And I think I initially envisioned the podcast being more truly weird stories. My first episode was more of a mystery, but I quickly realized that history is weird enough on its own and really fun.
How growing up in Plymouth, Mass. inspired a fascination with regional history
Corben: My mom worked for a long time for the Plimoth Plantation. So I spent most of my childhood sneaking in the back gate with her and just wandering around and, you know, talking history with people. So it’s probably why I’m really interested in doing this now.
When I was a kid, I would have never guessed that I’d be writing a history podcast now. When you’re a kid, you’re not really that interested in school and what you’re learning. It just seems like what everyone has to do. But now looking back, I think the stories that I learned from my parents and from other people that I met at the Plimoth Plantation or at the Mayflower, and getting to, you know, sail on the Mayflower and having these experiences not a lot of kids had – I think it just made history feel so much a part of your everyday experience.
Now living here in Rhode Island, seeing older buildings, you know, having that history be really present, I think it enriches my everyday life in a way that I’m just really excited about still.
On recent episode “Ida Lewis: The Keeper of Lime Rock”
Corben: Ida Lewis was a female lighthouse keeper in Newport Harbor in the mid-1800s. She actually took over responsibilities from her father when he had a stroke and could no longer do his job, and she spent her whole life really being a lighthouse keeper. She performed a number of daring rescues and saved 18 or more lives throughout her life.
And she became known as this national hero. Everybody knew her name. Everyone knew her story. She received visits from the president and from famous, famous industrialists. And all these people were really invested in, you know, the story of her as a brave and daring woman.
On recent episode “The Providence Ladies’ Sanitary Gymnasium”
Corben: For the past 10 years or so, I’ve spent a lot of time in gyms, and I was really interested when I came across this article about a gym that was opened by a woman in the 1880s in Providence.
I just thought that was so ahead of the time, and I was really interested in learning more about it. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is known today for her short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but during her lifetime she was really well known as a feminist thought leader and a philosopher, an economist. And she spent her youth in Providence. She developed into this really motivated, unusual young woman who wanted to break the mold of what women could do and could be.
Even in the 1880s, women would really be breaking the mold by running or lifting weights or sweating or exerting themselves in any way. And Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she wanted to do something a little bit more bold than calisthenics. She was interested in the gymnastics pieces, and she was interested in lifting weights. So she would have kind of been pushing the boundaries of female fitness.
The Weird Island podcast can be streamed on Simplecast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.
