Lizzie Goldsmith

Podcast Producer / Writer / Sound Designer

Photo by james j8246 on Flickr's creative commons.

Advent of Restlessness

November 21, 2015

I have a bit of a crush on Advent.

I buy things for Advent and I daydream about Advent and I want to spend as much time with Advent as possible.

And every year, I am disappointed. This isn’t because Advent stands me up, however, but because I make Advent stand in the snow, and put a Santa hat on her head, and fill her arms with enough books and music and art and calendars to make anyone topple.

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December 31, 2019

Thirty, Flirty, and Falling: How Making an Audio Drama Saved My Life

December 31, 2019

My 30th year on earth was shaped by two forces. The first: A bad thing I did, a mistake I made that hurt people, myself included, and from which I’m still reeling. The second: A good thing I did, a story I lived and breathed and refashioned into an audio drama.

I have never fucked up as badly nor created anything as beautiful as I did this year.

One threatened to drown me, spiraling in the pain and mess of it all; the other kept lifting my head above the water and making me laugh and giving me something to love, something to fight for.

What is saving your life right now? It’s a question Barbara Brown Taylor asks in her book An Altar in the World. I’ve seen other bloggers answer this question, have answered it myself, but never before have I been so sure about what is killing me and what is saving me.

This year, what saved me was telling my story by telling someone else’s story, someone else who grew up evangelical, someone else who got depressed and drank too much, someone else who got hurt by people who claimed to speak for God and stopped seeing God altogether and felt so very, very alone.

December 31, 2019

February 7, 2019

Awake and Asleep: Joy and Discovery

February 7, 2019

You arrange to meet for coffee, to come over and watch a movie, to play games. You are invited to the party and you have a few threads for the person next to you, a few yarns for the whole group, a few revelations to give and receive. You go to the dinner party and you pinch the dumplings closed before shoveling them into your mouth, laughing with three friends across the table, three good friends from across the world.

You page through your journal and realize that these memories are underrepresented, that more painful ones take top billing, that you’ve written about the same hard things over and over again. It was something you needed to do, you admit, but your life this January, this February, holds more than that.

February 7, 2019

January 29, 2019

Awake and Asleep: Depression and Loss

January 29, 2019

You wake up one morning feeling the weight of the world, or the weight of your world. Maybe it was a dream that made your eyes snap open, made your heart sink, but you can’t remember. It’s your first time being rested in days, but you don’t feel rested.

You haven’t been taking care of yourself the way you promised you would this semester, and not just with the whole sleeping thing. Your kickboxing gloves still lie, dusty and cold, in the back seat of your car. You only have microwave dinners and you aren’t reading the library books that promise escape or introspection or both.

You are writing, though, I’ll give you that. You’ve produced an impressive amount of pages in a short amount of time, pages in your journal, pages in the word processor, more files than you can count on two hands, but at this point, sometimes, you feel like you’re just going around and around in circles, as sad music plays and you’re forever swiping left past the faces of Central New York men who couldn’t interest you less.

January 29, 2019

August 16, 2018

Adventures in Odyssey: Moments Like These (written in 2008)

August 16, 2018

I would only have a few seconds with them, and those seconds had to matter, to mean something – if not to them, to me. After a lifetime of devoted fandom that has only increased as I’ve moved out of the target age range, and after months of anticipation, I looked forward to walking through the autograph line, but with a sort of trepidatious anxiety. How could I convey depth of feeling and gratitude in one handshake and a few words? Soon it would all be over, they would be greeting the next person, and I would have lost my chance to tell them how much they had impacted my life.

It was the 20th anniversary of Adventures in Odyssey that was fast approaching. This now-popular kids’ radio program had announced a “birthday bash” to commemorate this momentous occasion, the highlight of which would be a live show in Colorado Springs featuring a dozen of the actors.

August 16, 2018

July 26, 2018

Future Dead Girl

July 26, 2018

It is 113° in Redding, California, and the Carr Fire continues to burn, destroying boats at the marina and buildings to the west, and filling the sky with ash and smoke. Those who haven’t been forced to evacuate stay inside to keep from breathing it in.

Blood-red skies and flickering horizons bring perspective, especially if it’s your family holed up in a motel hoping their home is still their home at the end of it all.

As all fires worth knowing about tend to do, this one leapt out of control quickly. As far as I know there haven’t been any casualties at this time, but there are no guarantees.

July 26, 2018

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