THE PODCAST

PART III: THE OTHER FEAST

ABOUT MISS EXPERIENCE WHITE

Miss Experience White is a surreal, seriocomic audio drama about white privilege, produced as a three-part podcast, based on the political poem cycle of the same name. Through a series of mystical visions and revelations separated by a decisive ancestral inventory, the eponymous narrator comes to a new understanding of her inner landscape, along with the outer landscape of America. Beginning in 2018, impelled by the hideous logic of Donald Trump’s election and cruelty of his reign, Milo researched and wrote the poems not just to manage her daily rage and angst, but to address a sometimes crippling confusion caused by white privilege and guilt, and to explore these complex issues in depth.

Milo came across the name “Experience” while doing genealogical research on her Puritan lines. She found stillborn babies with the name, suggesting it was a Puritan version of John/Jane Doe. But eventually she found a man, “Experience White,” possibly an ancestor, who had lived to age 25. Although the characters in Miss Experience White are inspired by and based upon Milo and her family, they are more “truthy” than truthful. Having wanted to write about some of her ancestors for decades, she didn’t know how until the current political scene revealed plenty of connective tissue, forcing yet another radical examination of herself and predecessors.

“As a result of writing this, I shed some ancestral guilt, and feel more flexible when the need to question assumptions arises. The only time a person can change is in the now, which can’t be found if you’re lost in some past. If we don’t keep evolving as a country, after centuries of violence, oppression, and waste, what has it all been for?”

CREDITS