Usually, our conversation is long and languorous, and lasts between three and five hours. When I release it, I divide it into two parts (if we recorded for three hours) and four parts (if we recorded for five). The first half of the conversation is available in all the podcast places, and the second is available exclusively to patrons of the horizontal arts.
You can become a patron for access to The Full Horizontal by signing up on patreon.com/horizontalwithlila
At the end of each conversation, I ask my guest to tell me a story, and the story marks the conclusion of our final episode together. It can be any personal story that falls under the broad umbrella of intimacy — sex, love, or relationships of any kind. In episode 102. you can’t have dibs on a person, Dennis’s story was about how he met his biological father. In episode 97. let me show you what I can offer, Leidy’s was about the best sex of her entire life. I’ve had stories of being carried down a mountaintop, watching your wife have a miscarriage, giving your parent’s body to science, a friend breakup, and a particularly epic tale about the Cretan Resistance, thievery, journeying, and a skull.
When I ask them to tell me a story, I say that it can have any kind of tone or outcome, as long as it’s a story that they truly desire to tell me — because if they have the impulse to tell it, and they’re also just a bit afraid to do so, it will be the right one: a narrative that others need to hear.
My live event, the horizontal storytelling pajama party, is an eveningful of these stories. I get horizontal with my guest just like we do when we record a full episode, wearing robes, sharing a pillow, microphone above us, gazing upward as though stargazing, or post-coital, or whispering in the wee hours of a really good sleepover.
This quickie was recorded live in June 2019 at horizontal storytelling: the summer pride edition. We all donned rainbow pajamas, noshed on milk and cookies, and curled up together, all 50 of us, to listen to five storytellers from across the LGBTQIA+ community, one after the other.
In this quickie, I lie down with Kaleena. I asked her what I should share when I introduced her that night, and this is what she told me: Kaleena is a pansexual poly kinky Latinx woman, and a first generation Dominican American. She loves 80’s horror movies, powerlifting and dancing. Her favorite author in elementary school was Edgar Allen Poe. She played roller derby for 7 years, skating under the name Sugar Smacks. She was one of the few Latinas in derby when it was making a comeback. She loves dogs, and has a soft spot for the difficult adoption cases. She is a former high school prom queen (although it was completely chosen at random)! She believes food is a great expression of love, and enjoys cooking (although she cannot bake a single thing successfully). She is currently an office manager, and hopes to try and combine her administrative skills with her love of dogs into a career working with both disadvantaged humans and canines.
This episode was mixed and mastered by Irving Gadhoury, IGrecording.com on the interwebz. My cover art was illustrated by Shana Shay, whom you can find on 99designs. The remix of my original intro music was created by kidmental, an accapella beatbox musician. Get a theme song of your very own by hiring him on Fiverr or becoming his patron on patreon.com/kidmental
Come lie down with us in Bushwick, Brooklyn, for a story called, “If You’re So Proud.”