11 episodes
Liminal Flares Maika
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- Fiction
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5.0 • 13 Ratings
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Gather round and welcome to Liminal Flares, an otherworldly podcast of gender-inclusive revisions of eldritch literature, read to you by Maika, your queer, trans, nonbinary narrator.
Needlessly gendered, heteronormative language is everywhere. If you exist somewhere outside the gender binary - non-binary, genderqueer, gender-nonconforming, genderfluid, agender - whatever umbrella term best encompasses your own unique gender identity - there are countless ways the world behaves as though you don't exist.
That won't happen to you here.
Gender-neutral language creates room for everyone, which means that you are included and welcome here no matter what your gender. May these haunted and haunting stories and poems help you and/or people you love feel more valid and seen.
Learn more about the show at liminalflares.com and follow us on social media @liminalflares.
Music by The Parlour Trick (theparlourtrick.bandcamp.com)
Audio Engineering by Meredith Yayanos (patreon.com/TheParlourTrick)
Cover art by Daniel Kern (danielkernart.com)
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One need not be a Chamber to be Haunted by Emily Dickinson
You know how a song or fragment of a song can get stuck in your head? It plays on repeat, whether you like it or not, a personal soundtrack that no one else can hear. I tend to have a number of things haunting my mind at any given time - music, poetry, lines from a book, echoes of previously thought or spoken words or phrases, other thoughts circling in a holding pattern, waiting to be written down.
They coalesce into a dynamic mental kaleidoscope of language and sound. Emily Dickinson's evocative poetry is often part of it. A flickering rhythmic phantom, sometimes a select stanza or two, sometimes an entire poem, always a harmonious element of the protean inner pattern.
In this special mini episode we offer up a few shadowy wisps of my mental atmosphere for your listening pleasure: one of Emily Dickinson's bewitching poems, amended to be gender-inclusive, along with a New Year's announcement about Liminal Flares.
As always, we recommend using your headphones to get the most out of Mer's audio witchery.
New here and wondering what this podcast is all about? Listen to our first episode, "A Prelude at the Threshold."
Please support Liminal Flares by leaving your rating and review!
Writing/Editing & Narration by Maika
Music by The Parlour Trick
Audio Engineering by Meredith Yayanos
Cover photo by Maika
To learn more about Liminal Flares visit our website liminalflares.com
Follow us on Instagram, Tumblr, TikTok, or Facebook @liminaflares
And on Mastodon @LiminalFlares@mastodon.lol
We're pausing our release schedule for a few weeks. Regular episodes resume in February! -
Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker (part 2)
Did you know that Bram Stoker's Dracula (the 1897 Gothic horror novel, not the swoonworthy 1992 Coppola film) originally began with a chapter that was cut from the book before it was published?
That lost chapter was posthumously published as a short story entitled "Dracula's Guest." And today we bring you part 2 of our gender-inclusive revision of that spine-tingling tale.
As always, use your headphones if you've got 'em! Mer bedecked this episode in a heady coalescence of hauntingly beautiful fragments of "Mare Desiderii" from A Blessed Unrest by The Parlour Trick.
And trust me, you do not want to miss out on the full unsettling and titillating impact of an unexpected piece of correspondence at the very end of our tale.
Please support Liminal Flares by rating and reviewing our show!
New here and wondering what this podcast is all about? Check out our first episode, "A Prelude at the Threshold."
Writing/Editing & Narration by Maika
Music by The Parlour Trick
Piano composition in "Mare Desiderii" by Dan Cantrell, theremin and violin arrangement by Mer.
Audio Engineering by Meredith Yayanos
Cover photo by Maika
To learn more about Liminal Flares visit our website liminalflares.com
Follow us on Instagram, Tumblr, TikTok, or Facebook @liminaflares
Or Mastodon @LiminalFlares@mastodon.lol
New episodes every Thursday! -
Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker (part 1)
Time to lose ourselves in the wintry wilds of Gothic horror courtesy of the one and only Bram Stoker. Nothing says cozy winter listening (or cool summer listening, for our friends in the Southern Hemisphere) like gender-inclusive Gothic fiction.
If you like your hygge haunted, haunting, and NOT heteronormative, then you're already home.
Use your headphones if you've got 'em. This week's show is swathed in heady, unearthly theremin. Mer used isolated theremin tracks from the achingly beautiful track "Mare Desiderii" (from A Blessed Unrest by The Parlour Trick) as a sort of sonic collage that culminates in sharing part of the song itself near the end of the episode.
Piano composition in "Mare Desiderii" by Dan Cantrell, theremin and violin arrangement by Mer)
There's more of this phantasmal auditory goodness to come when we conclude "Dracula's Guest" next week! In the meantime, after you listen to this week's show, check out A Blessed Unrest in its preternatural entirety: https://theparlourtrick.bandcamp.com/album/a-blessed-unrest
You can also read my rhapsodizing about it on the Liminal Flares blog: https://liminalflares.com/a-blessed-unrest-ful-bandcamp-friday/
Please support Liminal Flares by rating and reviewing the show here on Apple Podcasts.
New here and wondering what this podcast is all about? Check out our first episode, "A Prelude at the Threshold."
Writing/Editing & Narration by Maika
Music by The Parlour Trick
Audio Engineering by Meredith Yayanos
Cover photo by Maika
To learn more about Liminal Flares visit our website liminalflares.com
Follow us on Instagram, Tumblr, TikTok, or Facebook @liminaflares
Or Mastodon @LiminalFlares@mastodon.lol
New episodes every Thursday! -
Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti
Time to switch gears from cosmic horror to cautionary fairy tale. What's better than a fervently sensuous Victorian gothic poem with queer subtext? A fervently sensuous Victorian gothic poem that swaps that subtext for beautifully open queerness.
Welcome to an unabashedly sapphic AND gender-inclusive rendition of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market. This is a truly singular and exquisitely decadent aural treat!
By the way, if you aren't already listening to Liminal Flares using headphones/earbuds, we strongly encourage you to do so - in general, but especially for this tantalizing episode.
If you're enjoying Liminal Flares, help it grow by sharing it with others who might enjoy our haunted and haunting, gender-inclusive story time. And please leave your rating and a review for our show!
New here and wondering what this podcast is all about? Check out our first episode, "A Prelude at the Threshold."
Writing/Editing & Narration by Maika
Music by The Parlour Trick
Audio Engineering by Meredith Yayanos
To learn more about Liminal Flares visit our website liminalflares.com
Follow us on Instagram, Tumblr, TikTok, or Facebook @liminaflares
And we're now on Mastodon @LiminalFlares@mastodon.lol
New episodes every Thursday. -
The Yellow Sign by Robert W. Chambers (part 4)
Have you found the Yellow Sign?
Have you found the Yellow Sign?
Have you found the Yellow Sign?
Let's hope you never do.
But we do know two people who have. And they are about to realize it themselves, not that that will do them any good. Welcome to the terrifying conclusion of "The Yellow Sign," in which the cosmic dread peaks, but that dreadful heteronormative exclusion is blissfully absent.
If you're enjoying Liminal Flares, help it grow by sharing it with others who might enjoy our haunted and haunting, gender-inclusive story time. And please leave your rating and a review for our show.
New here and wondering what this podcast is all about? Check out our first episode, "A Prelude at the Threshold."
Writing/Editing & Narration by Maika
Music by The Parlour Trick
Audio Engineering by Meredith Yayanos
Cover Art Illustration by Daniel Kern
To learn more about Liminal Flares visit our website liminalflares.com
Follow us on Instagram, Tumblr, TikTok, or Facebook @liminaflares
And we're now on Mastodon @LiminalFlares@mastodon.lol
New episodes every Thursday. -
The Yellow Sign by Robert W. Chambers (part 3)
When it comes to stories in the cosmic horror genre it often feels as though characters are doomed from the start, even if you aren't sure why, subject as they are to the incomprehensible whims and machinations of unfathomable powers.
Sometimes, however, there are instead clear points of no return within a story when characters' fates are sealed, madness and possibly death are now inevitable. And with that, welcome to Part 3 of "The Yellow Sign" by Robert W. Chambers - all the fun of cosmic dread without the dreadful heteronormative exclusion.
If you're enjoying Liminal Flares, help it grow by sharing us with others who might enjoy our haunted and haunting, gender-inclusive story time. And please leave your rating and (where possible) a review for our show.
New here and wondering what this podcast is all about? Check out our first episode, "A Prelude at the Threshold."
Writing/Editing & Narration by Maika
Music by The Parlour Trick
Audio Engineering by Meredith Yayanos
Cover Art Illustration by Daniel Kern
To learn more about Liminal Flares visit our website liminalflares.com
Follow us on Instagram, Tumblr, TikTok, or Facebook @liminaflares
And we're now on Mastodon @LiminalFlares@mastodon.lol
New episodes every Thursday.
Customer Reviews
A Gem
Maika’s voice is hypnotic. The story selections are well curated.
Sonic midnight honey
Imagine the darkest bronzed honey, harvested during the penumbral glooms of an eclipse; imagine its velvet voice, dusky and low, crooning eerie twilit tales across the ether, eliciting shivers and tingles and thrills. Now imagine never once feeling that jarring sensation when you’ve been abruptly yanked out of the story thanks to outdated, non-inclusive language! Liminal Flares Otherworldly Gender-Inclusive Story Time extends an invitation to slip through a portal like none other, to utterly lose yourself for a sweet, spooky time, in that eldritch, honeyed darkness.
Great listening for winding down
This podcast is so welcoming and calming. I love the sound of the host’s voice, and am really thrilled to recommend this to folks who deserve to feel included in these public domain works. I’ve already recommended it thrice.