Baobab Builds A Podcast Network

Piyar Delerme and Kayte Corcoran, hosts of Midwife Crisis, sat in front of the microphones in New Haven’s new podcast hub, Baobob Tree’s storefront studio on Orange Street. They debated which genre to choose for the theme music. Corcoran offered punk music. Delerme demurred. Corcoran quickly offered ‘90s R&B.

“We can get together on ‘90s R&B,” Delerme said. “The punk is not going to work, despite the fact that I kill Doc Martens.”

From the control room, Rev. Kevin Ewing, CEO of Baobab Tree Studios — today running the board as producer — gave Delerme and Corcoran instructions they could hear in their headphones.

“The microphones should be right in front of your face,” Ewing told them.

Delerme and Corcoran adjusted their microphones accordingly.

“We’re babies at this,” Delerme said. ​“I’m just trying to get a sense of what’s normal.”

“There’s nothing normal about this process,” Ewing joked. ​“And we’re rolling.”

Ewing hit record on the very first episode. Maybe for the first minute, Corcoran and Delerme, old friends and colleagues, weren’t entirely sure what to say to each other. But they were soon through their introductions.

“This is the Midwife Crisis,” Delerme said.

“Because it’s not just you,” Corcoran said.

“What does it mean, ​‘Not just you’?” Delerme said, a little edge in her voice, relaxing into the strength of their friendship.

“Hang on, we’re getting there,” Corcoran said.

Midwife Crisis, focusing on midwifery, birthing and women’s health, is one of over a dozen podcasts that are part of Baobab Tree Stories, a new initiative from Baobab. In recording their first episode, Delerme and Corcoran joined over a dozen other podcast hosts in the new network, which seeks to become a gathering place for podcasters from the New Haven area to be able to make professional episodes and broadcast them to the world.

“The podcast platform is a whole new medium for us,” Ewing said. ​“When I first created the space, my hope was that it would create TV programs. That was four years ago,” he said with a chuckle. ​“It takes big crews to shoot good television.”

Having created a studio, Ewing also considered radio, possibly a partnership with WNPR. ​“But now,” he said, ​“we’re really starting to target producing podcasts.”

Baobob held a pitch night in November 2018, fielding 17 ideas that evening alone. Other ideas came in from Baobab Studios’ website, or through word of mouth.

Among the network’s shows is the already popular Between Two Rocks, focusing on New Haven issues from arts and culture to biking and exercise and back again. Another podcast is called Adulting 101 with hosts Ashleigh Scahill and Sara Luft, about navigating life in your twenties. Curator Sarah Fritchey will have a podcast called Inside Artspace, about the gallery just down the block from Baobob Tree Studios. WNHH’s own Markeshia Ricks, Babz Rawls-Ivy and Michelle Turner are slated to host Ma’am, What?, described as ​“a podcast about life, liberty and the pursuit of whatever it is women in our age groups — 40s, 50s, 60s — want right now.”

“We’re community oriented, but we’re a for-profit business,” said Nikki Katz, who is managing the podcast network for Baobab. ​“We’re trying to build a real business out of it.” They are working on getting advertising for their podcasters and recording ads. ​“We’re hoping to share profits with the podcasters,” Katz added. The overall aim is to replicate the general feel of a TV channel or a radio station. ​“We’re somewhere in between WNPR and WTNH,” Ewing said.

Except that, as a podcast network, Baobab can offer content free from FCC standards regarding explicit language and subject matter — something Ewing and Katz are embracing.

“We really support free speech,” Katz said. ​“We have a little bit of a pirate radio feel to it.”

“And that’s how it should be. That’s real life,” Ewing added. ​“You have the right to say what you want, even if I don’t like it.”

Though that’s in the context of developing the shows to begin with, which Ewing and Katz take a hand in. ​“We’re curating culture,” Ewing said.

After hearing pitches from prospective podcasters, if Ewing and Katz want to hear more, they work with podcasters in developing their ideas, from the general scope of each show to the graphics, title, and other marketing aspects involved with helping it connect with an audience.

“It all comes back to the basic theory behind this,” Ewing said. ​“The way we become a functioning, all-inclusive society is by getting to know each other and seeing each other as human, and the way we do that is by telling stories. We’re creating a platform to do that.”

Delerme first learned about Baobab’s podcasting network when she saw a card for it at ConnCAT’s storyteller series. ​“So I went home and started texting Kate,” Delerme said. She and Corcoran had met while working as midwives at Yale-New Haven hospital and had become close friends. Delerme is black and Corcoran is white; they have very different backgrounds and personal histories.

“I thought she would be the perfect pairing — a voice at the opposite end of the spectrum,” Delerme said. At first she and Corcoran thought that a potential podcast would thrive on those differences. But the more they talked, the more they circled back to their jobs, and their calling, as midwives.

Finally, Delerme said, her son Felipe intervened. They could talk about race and class, feminism and health, but ​“you are an authority because you have credentials” as midwives, she recalled Felipe saying. ​“Use them.”

So they made an appointment at Baobab and made a pitch. ​“We said masturbation and the room got nervous,” Corcoran said.

“Oh, come on now!” Delerme said.

But that topic would wait until the third episode of Midwife Crisis. A half hour after their microphone check, Delerme and Corcoran were halfway through their first episode in Baobob’s storefront studio, relaxed and confident as they talked about midwifery and the very different roads that brought both of them to the same place, to talk about women’s health, race, class, and the culture surrounding it all, the myths they hoped to dispel and the information they sought to impart, because, as Corcordan said, ​“it’s not just you.”

“We want everybody in New Haven to tell their story.” Ewing said. ​“Let’s get it out there.”

To find out more about Baobab Tree Stories and how to get involved, visit its website.