Atypical Artists is finally on Tumblr! In many ways, we've been here for a long time, given that @thelaurenshippen is constantly posting, but this is now a more official spot for all our podcasts!
If you're new to our shows, here's a very quick rundown:
The Bright Sessions - a 7 season story that follows people with supernatural abilities in therapy. complete
Two Thousand and Late - a dark comedy about our current moment that tries to find hope in the havoc. ongoing
New Year’s Day - an ongoing yearly podcast about two immortal rival magicians. follow @chambersandfogg ongoing
In Strange Woods - a 5-part original folk musical about family, grief, and survival. complete
Life With LEO(h) - a two season sci-fi(ish) romcom about a starring a repressed lawyer, a criminal client, a pesky sister and her fiance, an infuriatingly sexy coworker, and an android in the mood for love. complete
Look Up - a summer teen romance about reconnecting childhood friends. complete
Greenhouse - a soft, sapphic romance about becoming open to love. complete
Maxine Miles - a choose-your-own-path YA mystery with an epilogue in the form of a retro html game.
Breaker Whiskey - a microfiction podcast about shouting into the void at the end of the world. ongoing
Surviving Hawkins - an official Stranger Things podcast all about Robin Buckley. complete
Phantom Pulse - a 90s rock audio drama about a band that can exorcise ghosts with their music - follow @phantompulseband for updates. upcoming
We're also extremely passionate about audio drama as a medium! We offer free resources to help you make your audio drama and Lauren Shippen does a live office hour on the last Wednesday of every month to answer all your questions.
This tumblr is mainly for posting episodes, big announcements, aand Official Stuff. For reblogs of fanart, asking questions, goofing off, @thelaurenshippen's got you covered.
Find all our shows wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to our free Patreon!
Atypical Artists is finally on Tumblr! In many ways, we've been here for a long time, given that @thelaurenshippen is constantly posting, but this is now a more official spot for all our podcasts!
If you're new to our shows, here's a very quick rundown:
The Bright Sessions - a 7 season story that follows people with supernatural abilities in therapy. complete
Two Thousand and Late - a dark comedy about our current moment that tries to find hope in the havoc. ongoing
New Year’s Day - an ongoing yearly podcast about two immortal rival magicians. follow @chambersandfogg ongoing
In Strange Woods - a 5-part original folk musical about family, grief, and survival. complete
Life With LEO(h) - a two season sci-fi(ish) romcom about a starring a repressed lawyer, a criminal client, a pesky sister and her fiance, an infuriatingly sexy coworker, and an android in the mood for love. complete
Look Up - a summer teen romance about reconnecting childhood friends. complete
Greenhouse - a soft, sapphic romance about becoming open to love. complete
Maxine Miles - a choose-your-own-path YA mystery with an epilogue in the form of a retro html game.
Breaker Whiskey - a microfiction podcast about shouting into the void at the end of the world. ongoing
Surviving Hawkins - an official Stranger Things podcast all about Robin Buckley. complete
Phantom Pulse - a 90s rock audio drama about a band that can exorcise ghosts with their music - follow @phantompulseband for updates. upcoming
We're also extremely passionate about audio drama as a medium! We offer free resources to help you make your audio drama and Lauren Shippen does a live office hour on the last Wednesday of every month to answer all your questions.
This tumblr is mainly for posting episodes, big announcements, aand Official Stuff. For reblogs of fanart, asking questions, goofing off, @thelaurenshippen's got you covered.
Find all our shows wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to our free Patreon!
We have a totally new look, including a brand-new website! If you've always wanted to dive into our shows but haven't known where to start, we made this helpful little quiz:
Find your perfect fiction podcast fit by taking this quiz about what you love in an audio drama
TWO THOUSAND AND LATE is crossing over with Forgive Me! and we're doing a live reading of the episode in NY next month!!
That's right, Harper and Havoc are headed to confession. You're not going to want to miss it (but don't worry, if you can't come, the audio will be in the TTAL feed).
Welcome to the Latchkey Library, where @briggonsnow and @thelaurenshippen revisit the old classics that raised them. We'll be reading our favorite public domain books, starting with the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and discussing what we love about them.
Released three chapters at a time, you'll find entire audiobooks of beloved young reader books in this feed, with a discussion after each book is complete. If there's a book in the public domain you think we should read, tell us!
Currently reading: Hardy Boys #1, The Tower Treasure.
This month, @thelaurenshippen and @gabrielurbinatm talk about writing their two shows--TWO THOUSAND AND LATE and The Harbingers--and how they approached making stories about power. And you can listen to the other half of the conversation in The Harbingers feed!
We are SO honored to have been chosen for the audio showcase for this year's Tribeca Festival! We'll be sharing the stage with some amazing podcasts :) If you're in NY and would like to hear @thelaurenshippen and other creators speak about making podcasts, tickets go on sale April 28th!
If you were as enchanted by the Artemis II launch as we were, you'll love our soft summer romance that marvels at the stars! Listen to Look Up wherever you get your podcasts!
Today is trans day of visibility! We feel so lucky to know and work with as many trans folks as we do and love all our trans siblings, both artists and audience! 💚🏳️⚧️
My monthly audio drama office hour is tomorrow at 2pm PT! I answer all your questions about how to make fiction podcasts. The best way to watch is by signing up for free on our Patreon (that's the chat I pay most attention to on stream) but you can also watch on YouTube or Twitch!
and other things people have yelled at me (@thelaurenshippen) on the internet
It's Atypical Artists Quarterly time!! There's a looooong newsletter under the cut, but you can also read the whole thing (with embedded images!) on beehiiv or listen to the updates right here:
Happy spring!
Oh boy, 2026 has already been chock-a-block full of exciting updates, creations, and new endeavors. One of those new endeavors is moving all of our newsletter services over to Beehiiv, which we’ve already done! You can read this very newsletter over there right now. If you received both this and a newsletter through Beehiiv, apologies - there shouldn’t be any redundancies, it won’t happen again! And if you want to keep up with these quarterly updates, be sure to sign up for our Beehiiv newsletter.
I had a hard time trying to figure out how to title this newsletter and decided to pull from one of the many all-caps responses I’ve gotten to Atypical Artists’ newest episode release. So let’s start there:
I had a hard time trying to figure out how to title this newsletter and decided to pull from one of the many all-caps responses I’ve gotten to Atypical Artists’ newest episode release. So let’s start there:
New year, new New Year’s Day
That’s a lot of “new”s! For the uninitiated, New Year’s Day is our yearly podcast about two rival magicians in the late nineteenth century who accidentally become immortal. They go from enemies to reluctant friends to…?
I’ve pitched this show as a slow burn so slow and so burn-y that it’ll drive you bananas. So far, so good. The show only releases once a year, on January 1st, so the start of this quarter saw the release of Episode 5. And people on the internet have been shouting (lovingly) at me ever since.
The slow burn is given fuel throughout the year with the monthly missives - journal entries, letters, telegrams, etc. from the world of the show, giving a glimpse at the thirteen years that pass between each episode. And stuff is really kicking up this year. March’s missive had people saying “LAUREN WHY” and there’s going to be a special additional missive that comes out for our paid Patreon supporters on April 1st. And if you’re a fan of this story and thought you were mad at me now, just wait until April 15th. It’s a doozy.
All to say, now is the perfect time to get into this show! A lot of fun stuff is happening in the story before next year’s episode and you can get the missives delivered directly to you by signing up for our free Patreon! More on that below.
Before I move on from New Year’s Day entirely, I have been absolutely blessed to have some truly incredible artists start to draw art for this show. Their enthusiasm came out of nowhere - Noah Dao is the amazing character artist for Phantom Pulse and Léa Charbonnier has drawn Bright Sessions fanart before - but I feel absurdly lucky that they’ve both gotten into this show in particular, at a time when I’m really excited where the story is going.
I was so inspired by Léa’s art that I ended up writing a little story inspired by it that could, technically, be considered canon. I had so much fun with it, that it led to a new series on the Atypical Artists Patreon called “Atypical Asides”. Read the New Year’s Day story for free and read on to learn more about our Patreon…
The Atypipals are thriving
The supporters of Atypical Artists have been called the Atypipals for years and in late 2025, we made the move from Memberful back to Patreon! It has been wonderful getting reacquainted with the platform (which now has many features that make it possible for Atypical to be on there, like having multiple podcast feeds) and now that I’ve got a few months under my belt, I’ve settled into a nice publishing cadence. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s going on each month:
First Monday: Atypical Asides (paid pals only (for the most part))
The 15th: New Year’s Day missive (paid and free, paid 1 day early)
Last Monday: Monthly Mixtape (paid and free)
I’m also doing livestreams every Friday at 2pm PT. Here’s what those look like throughout any given month, with the public livestreams being a mix of chatting, playing video games, and listening to audio drama:
First Friday: Public livestream; playback only for paid
Second Friday: Plus pals exclusive Q&A
Third Friday: Public livestream; playback only for paid
Fourth Friday: Public audio drama office hour
And then, of course, there’s our discord and all the other stuff I do throughout the month as things come up, both for paid supporters and free subscribers. It’s already such a fun community and it’s growing every day, so be sure to sign up if you want more frequent insights into what we’re doing beyond these quarterly newsletters!
Ready to make your audio drama?
The line between lover of audio drama and creator of audio drama is very thin and one that is frequently hopped over! If you’re someone contemplating making your own audio drama, you may already be familiar with Atypical’s extensive resources, but I’m plugging them here again because the Production Handbook has recently gotten an update! There are no major revelations, just some refined details and workflows, as well as a bunch of new templates. You can get that here and while you’re on our website, go check out our script editing and story consulting services. Atypical Artists has provided consulting services for years, but we recently overhauled our whole system to include script editing, so if you need your dialogue to shine, I can help you with that!
Recommendation Corner!
If you’re a fan of Atypical Artists then I know you love audio drama, science fiction, complicated women, and queer characters. Well, have we got a show for you!
DERELICT is an incredibly well made, immersive, compelling story about what happens when you dig up something that you really shouldn't have. you can listen to the first two seasons (which take place deep underwater and then up in space, the two most terrifying places to be imho), and then support their crowdfund for season 3!! Which you absolutely should do!!!
Odds & Ends
TWO THOUSAND AND LATE was nominated for Best Fiction Podcast at The Ambies - while we didn’t win (congrats to Red for Revolution!), I’m really humbled that we got the loudest cheer when the nominees were read
We still have our Havoc Wreaker buttons and Wreak Some Havoc stickers in stock! Grab them while you can!
While our 10th anniversary bonanza for The Bright Sessions is over, there are some fun updates! We recently overhauled our website and bonus content to make everything a little easier to find, and The Bright Sessions Compendium is now available in digital form!
Briggon Snow and I are currently working on something that I’m pretty excited about…a new show that’s a departure from anything Atypical Artists has done but that’s been a joy to make so far. It’s not a fiction podcast, but it does involve fiction stories. We’ve talked a bit about it on our Patreon livestreams, and there’s a preview of the lovely show art by Shae McMullin (who also designed the TBS Compendium) in the Beehiiv post!
Every complete Atypical Artists show is now available for purchase on Bandcamp. We launched our Bandcamp by doing a fundraiser for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota and we raised over $500!! Which was pretty awesome!
Finally, take a good look at the header, because that may be the last time you see it in a newsletter. I’m in the midst of doing a major Atypical Artists rebrand to better reflect the kind of studio we are now and by the end of next quarter (when you’ll next hear from this mailing list), we should have done a full launch of the new look!
I hope everyone’s 2026 has gotten off to as good a start as it possibly can! No matter what, we’ll be here giving you stories that make you feel all kinds of things - thank you so much for listening to them and we can’t wait to bring you more!
Christopher Dole, co-creator of the wonderful Arden says, "Darkly funny and viciously entertaining, Two Thousand and Late is a delightfully barbed take on modern rage and powerlessness."
All The Bright Sessions bonus content has a new home!
We've absorbed our old website into @atypicalartists' website and gathered all the bonus content that was there (as well as a bunch of other stuff) into one, hopefully easier to navigate place!
Click on the photo to be brought to the collection or check out the Table of Contents post to see what's in there, what's free, and what's just for paid patrons.
And, of course, the best one-stop-shop for all bonus stuff is The Bright Sessions Compendium, which you can now buy as an eBook!
you can now buy our entire catalogue on Bandcamp and, just for today, all our sales go directly to us, with no Bandcamp fees! own your favorite series forever today!
