Square Hole: Neurodiversity in the creative industries

We wanted to know more about Square Hole, a new podcast that investigates neurodiversity, employment and the creative industries. We sent some questions to Producer, Lorna Allan…

Who are you and what’s your podcast about?

Our podcast is called Square Hole and it is a podcast about neurodiversity, employment and the creative industry. Talking around diagnosis and awareness, fitting into the work place, how to start looking for jobs, how to interview well. And then we move into audiences and interpretation and the creative process. So we take you on a bit of a journey, through the whole leaving university, finding out your diagnosis, straight through to getting working, keeping work, and developing and growing in the work place and straight through the creative process and audience interpretation.

Lorna from Square Hole

Why did you decide to start podcasting in the first place?

We came together to do the podcast, but initially it wasn’t a podcast in our first idea. Jhinuk Sarkar, my collaborator, is an illustrator and educator and had worked in disability within arts and within universities, as a Disabilities Officer. And I’m a Photographer and Art Director and I approached Jhinuk to potentially work on a photographic story along with illustrations to build a picture, a sort of visual narrative of what it means to be neurodiverse. And we discussed what that would look like and we wanted to write an article afterwards, but after our first meeting we ended up talking about developing a podcast. So it went from one idea to another, which is always very exciting.

The initial idea still stands that we wanted to make a visual narrative of the content, however we found out that making a podcast is quite hard work, so most of the budget and time has gone into actually making the podcast itself. And hopefully we will get more funding so that we can make our visual interpretations and iterations of the content.

You dropped all the episodes in the series in one go – why did you decide to do it that way?

Because we didn’t really know the best way to do it, I think. We had prepared everything and so we thought we would just release everything. The podcast isn’t really in a linear way. There is a sort-of order, but true to neurodivergent pathways it can be tackled in any way, so we wanted people to approach it in any way they felt they wanted to.

Did you take inspiration from any particular podcasts?

We did take some inspiration from other podcasts, and one in particular is my favourite, Seen On Radio, which I think is a very inspiring podcast. I really, really enjoy that.

Who’s your dream guest for the podcast?

I have to say, I think everyone we already have has been our dream guests. All of our interviewees surpassed our expectations tremendously, they were incredibly generous, incredibly informative, just so inspiring listening to their stories. Jhinuk and I couldn’t have wished for better people to be involved, they were astounding.

Jhinuk from Square Hole

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far as a podcaster?

Making a podcast is a really big deal and there’s a lot of things you don’t think of! Yeah it was a much, much bigger job than we had anticipated, so that’s the big thing we learnt I think.

Where can the Pod Bible readers find out more about you?

You can find the podcast on all platforms. We’re on Instagram @sqhole sharing more information about ourselves and our guests, and the next stages of the project will be through that.

Listen to Square Hole on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other popular podcast platforms.