Her Article Went Viral. Then She Realized It Was a Great Topic For a Podcast
Writer Laura Cathcart Robbins was inspired to start her podcast after receiving an overwhelming response to her HuffPost essay about being the only black person at a writer’s retreat.
Writer Laura Cathcart Robbins shares the journey that inspired her to tell stories about being the other on her podcast, The Only One in the Room.
Writer Laura Cathcart Robbins was inspired to start her podcast after receiving an overwhelming response to her HuffPost essay about being the only black person at a writer’s retreat.
The strong response made Laura realize there were many people who “just identified with feeling other, with feeling alone in a room full of people.” So she launched a podcast to share more of these stories.
Laura emphasizes the value of authenticity in podcasting — something she has learned through years of sobriety.
In September 2018, freelance writer and storyteller Laura Cathcart Robbins attended a writing retreat in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains headlined by two of her favorite authors, Elizabeth Gilbert and Cheryl Strayed. A long-time fan of both writers, Laura was excited and hoped to walk away from the experience with some newfound inspiration.
But while listening to Gilbert and Strayed speak, she was taken by surprise as she looked around the room. Of the 600 attendees at the retreat, she was the only black person.
This was hardly the first time she’d found herself the only person of color in a given space, but something about it felt different.
“It’s not something I usually even notice or take with me,” Laura says on an episode of Outlier On Air. “I usually don’t let it impact my experience. But I had never been at an event with 600 people and been the only black person, so I wrote about it for HuffPost and it went viral.”
Hours after the essay went live, Laura received hundreds of messages from people who “just identified with feeling other, with feeling alone in a room full of people,” she recalls. This overwhelming response inspired her to channel her storytelling chops into a new podcast project, a now fully-formed show aptly titled The Only One in the Room, which invites guests to share their personal experiences of being — well, the only one in a room.
“I figured this is a niche that’s obviously not being filled,” Laura says of starting the podcast. “For me to get that much of a swell of messages within 48 hours of the article being released, there’s something happening here. People want to hear these stories and they want to share them. I was excited to tell those stories.”
Read on for more of what Laura’s learned in her storytelling and podcasting journeys.
Pay more attention to the messages — ignore the comments
You’ve already heard about the influx of support Laura got when she shared her personal story on HuffPost. But let’s get real — we’re talking about the Internet here, so it wasn’t entirely positive.
“I got a lot of negative feedback,” Laura says. “I stopped reading the negative comments about a week after the article published. I made a decision to stop reading them.”
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