by Joseph Fink
Dedication
To Bandit, Bear, Brown, Bubbles, Emmy, Madison, Mariel, Miriam, Pepper, Webster, and all the future dogs in our lives
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword by Jonny Sun
Introduction by Joseph Fink
Episode 71: “The Registry of Middle School Crushes”
Episode 72: “Well of Night”
Episode 73: “Triptych”
Episode 74: “Civic Changes”
Episode 75: “Through the Narrow Place”
Episode 76: “An Epilogue”
Episode 77: “A Stranger”
Episode 78: “Cooking Stuff: Thanksgiving Special”
Episode 79: “Lost in the Mail”
Episode 80: “A New Sheriff in Town”
Episode 81: “After 3327”
Episode 82: “Skating Rink”
Episode 83: “One Normal Town”
Episode 84: “Past Time”
Episode 85: “The April Monologues”
Episode 86: “Standing and Breathing”
Episode 87: “The Trial of Hiram McDaniels”
Episode 88: “Things Fall Apart”
Episode 89: “Who’s a Good Boy? Part I”
Episode 90: “Who’s a Good Boy? Part 2”
Live Show: “The Investigators”
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
About the Contributors
Praise
Also by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
Welcome to Welcome to Night Vale: A Welcome
I.
MY FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE WAS NOT through the podcast itself, but instead through their Twitter account. This was in the tail end of 2012, around the time I got interested in Twitter as a creative medium, and the Welcome to Night Vale Twitter account (@NightValeRadio) was one of the first ones that I fell in love with because it made me realize just how many different ways a medium like Twitter could be played with. Joseph and Jeffrey (or, whoever runs the Twitter account—I still don’t know, to be honest!) were doing something really interesting with different recognizable formats—they were taking something familiar and turning it on its side and into another dimension.
Here’s the first tweet of theirs I ever retweeted:
Today is a day to appreciate your family, to think about what you are grateful for, & to ignore that new shape in the sky & what it implies. (November 22, 2012)
Here’s another favorite of mine, tweeted on New Year’s Eve of 2012, which makes it even more strange, yet, somehow, also even more accurate:
Ask your doctor what all these deer are doing here.
They played with formats:
Knock knock. / Who’s there? / [hollow scraping sounds] / [hollow scraping sounds] Who? / [hollow scraping sounds followed by shrieking] (January 8, 2013)
Congratulations! You have won one (1) death. Please allow 1–100 years for delivery. (July 16, 2013)
They tweeted things that made me pause and made me cry:
“Nobody knows what that thing is, or why it’s there,” says the scientist, pointing at everything. (July 12, 2013)
When a person dies and no one will miss them, the mourning is assigned to a random human. This is why you sometimes just feel sad. (November 12, 2012)
Among everything that Night Vale is, there is this constant tension, this eternal play between the everyday and the never-have-I-ever-in-my-life. It is this game of taking something wholly familiar and quotidian and commonplace, mining it for its strangeness, and then, once you are taken through to the other side of it and into an entirely foreign dimension, you see yourself in all the strangeness of the ordinary and all the ordinariness of the strange. This is at the heart of Night Vale. You can see this, as I did, even through their tweets.
Later (an embarrassingly long amount of time later), I found out that this Twitter account was actually the companion to the podcast, the first episode of which was released in early 2012. (Night Vale’s Twitter account’s first tweet, on the other hand, came late in the summer of 2012, and reads: “It is afternoon in America. It is double-noon in Night Vale. Eat your oranges!” This was followed shortly after by: “To clarify: you should only eat the light orange oranges. DO NOT EAT THE MEDIUM-LIGHT-ORANGE oranges. Consequences. #psa.”)
If their tweets contained the DNA of the game at play, then the podcast is the expansive expression of that DNA. It’s the shadowy and shapeless and slimy creature that DNA was taken from: a community radio show, familiar in format, then flipped inward and outward and through-ward, arriving at a place completely unfamiliar and uncanny and strange but still incredibly and deeply and unsettlingly . . . human. To me that’s always been the heart of Night Vale. It’s easy to do strange; to do human is the real challenge.
II.
AS THE WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE PROJECT GREW, GATHERING MOMENTUM and size, first through the podcast, through the tweets, then, through the novels, the podcasting network, these script books, and more, my relationship to the people behind the podcast grew too. Through the Twitter account, I found out that Jeffrey and Joseph both had their own personal accounts. As I became more and more entranced by the work, I found out that, wow, so many of my favorite people were working within the Night Vale world: Mara Wilson! Dylan Marron! Maureen Johnson! Cecil Baldwin! Jessica Hayworth! Meg Bashwiner! And more and more! The more time I spent with Night Vale, the more I saw the community of artists and conspirators and contributors that made up the project, and who became the project, and who give life to the project. At its heart, Welcome to Night Vale is a community of people who want to make a thing together. That’s what makes it so magical.
As I reflect on what Night Vale means to me, I realize the reason why it works. Why, for all of its potentially cold and alienating strangeness, there is instead a sweet and genuine and human strangeness to it is because of how sweet and genuine and human the people within it are. A few personal highlights of spending time with Joseph and Jeffrey and other Night Vale crew:
Meeting Joseph and Jeffrey and Dylan and Mara and the rest of the live show group for the first time after a show in Toronto, where I found them at a poutine place, and we mainly talked about our favorite joke formats on Twitter.
Joseph insisting I take his tickets to go see the Neo-Futurists (the New York off-Broadway theater group where Jeffrey and Joseph first met) when I was passing through New York for the evening a few years ago. It was watching that show and seeing, like Night Vale, a delightful and human and strange thing put on by a bunch of artists, who loved it and believed in it, that I understood where that spirit within Night Vale came from.
Jeffrey coming to a book talk of mine when we were both coincidentally in Seattle at the same time, and seeing his face in the crowd and feeling instantly supported and seen and no longer nervous to do the book talk.
When I was worried about how to go about doing my own first book, I called Joseph and Jeffrey for advice and they told me everything they had learned, on preparing submissions, submitting to agents, talking to publishers, choosing a publisher (hello, Harper Perennial, aka mom to both myself and Night Vale!), and more. It seems like whatever my next creative step is, Joseph and Jeffrey are a few steps in front of me, and wholly excited about sharing what they’ve learned. I’m extremely grateful for that generosity.
When I hosted Dylan Marron for a conversation at the MIT Humor Series at the Media Lab in the spring of 2016, a director of one of the groups at the Media Lab was so excited that Dylan was coming and we added him to the event so we could all be in conversation with Dylan—Night Vale has fans ev
en among the directors at the MIT Media Lab, it turns out!
Moderating a book talk with them for It Devours!, and focusing the discussion around the follies of religion—the event was held inside a church.
Hanging out with other Night Vale folks, like Maureen and Mara and Dylan, around the world, during chance encounters and finding out we were at the same events—New York, Vancouver, Melbourne, and all over! It feels like there is always someone in the Night Vale family around.
I see all these people as my friends now, and I have to remember that my relationship to them all started from Welcome to Night Vale first. And all this comes down to Joseph and Jeffrey, who had the idea to make the thing in the first place. I admire them as artists who made a thing, and through it built a community: of artists, of friends, of listeners and readers.
III.
WHAT YOU ARE HOLDING IS JUST WORDS. WORDS ON A PAGE. BUT WITHOUT them, none of this would exist. These are the words that everything gets built from, and builds upon.
These words are the starting point, and I hope that by reading them, they illustrate the difference between just the words and the entirety of the world and community built around the words. This is in no way to disparage or discount the words at all—rather, I hope this collection shows just how a community of artists and listeners and readers rallies around the words to make Night Vale real. This collection is a testament to the words, as the utmost necessary foundation to all of this, and all the things that grow and are built from the foundation.
I owe a great deal to the community they’ve grown. I suspect that you may, or perhaps one day might, owe a great deal to their words as well. In one of my comparative media studies classes at MIT, I saw the teaching assistant wearing a Night Vale shirt and instantly felt a sense of belonging and kinship to them. This is just another very small example out of a sea of examples of the power of the community of listeners, readers, admirers that they’ve built through their work.
Every time I go to a Night Vale event in person (whether it’s a live show, a reading, or a book talk that I get to moderate), I am in awe of that feeling of community among strangers, united by their love of a thing together. And every time I come across that community online, there is something powerful about it that you can feel through the screen.
And maybe that’s even more important. While the live events are discrete expressions of the community around Night Vale, the real everyday community exists on the internet, and grew from the internet. It’s where the work of Night Vale lives and where it came from. I think it’s important and exciting to recognize that Night Vale is, at its heart, an independent project, one that was born into this Wild West of the internet, and one that has found its home among its online denizens. And every time I come across that community online, I feel just as connected to the work, and the artists, and to the community, as I do at those live events.
That’s special, and delightful, and wonderful, and rare. And even rarer, it’s a community that’s inclusive and diverse, something that is reflected in their characters, stories, and words.
Despite its absurdity, or maybe because of, what shines through are the very human relationships, the sense of community, the importance of people. Jeffrey and Joseph center and respect characters who are rarely centered and respected in stories like this. That’s what has always grounded this and made it special. Complementing all the strangeness, they are dedicated to our relationships to ourselves and to others. Welcome to Night Vale illuminates that, and shines a light on the most important things in our worlds that we hold dear and close to our hearts within our hearts.
Spending time with what Joseph and Jeffrey have made and continue to make makes me realize something else, too. Perhaps the most important part of Welcome to Night Vale isn’t the “Night Vale” part at all. Rather, it’s the first word that means the world to me.
Welcome.
—Jonny Sun, over the course of being on a number of different planes traveling between a number of different cities, 2018
Introduction
THIS BOOK COVERS THE EPISODES AND LIVE SHOWS THAT WELCOME TO Night Vale performed from June 2015 to June 2016. Those twelve months were an eventful time for both the show and for me personally. I will present that year to you not as a narrative, which our lives so rarely are, but as what it felt like: a series of events, one right after another, without necessarily any connection other than the people they were all happening to.
In June 2015, I got married. Meg is the tour manager and emcee of the Welcome to Night Vale live show, and the voice of the credits at the end of every episode. She’s also the love of my life, and by the time we got married, we had been together for six years. We got married on our anniversary, so we wouldn’t have to switch anniversary dates. We’re efficient people. The ceremony itself was simple, done in the living room of our Brooklyn apartment, with only our immediate family in attendance and officiated by Dylan Marron, voice of Carlos the scientist. We have a taxidermy goat head on our wall, and because a Brooklyn apartment doesn’t have a great deal of room, we ended up getting married under the goat head. From then on, we started referring to the goat head as “the goat of our love.”
In September, we did our second ever UK live tour. We played shows in Leeds and Cardiff, and ended with a three-night run at a centuries-old church in London. Meg, after a brutally long year of touring, earned Hilton Diamond status at a DoubleTree near the venue.
Also in September, we released the first Night Vale novel. Stepping away from the list for a moment, to expand on this:
I have wanted to be a writer since I was four years old. Before that, I wanted to be a storyteller, the kind who shows up at children’s fairs and assemblies at elementary school. Once I learned that there was a very similar kind of job called a writer, and that they wrote something called novels, I decided, Sure, I’ll do that, and started planning out the novels I would write. The first I came up with was called The Traveler, a series of brick-size epics I was planning about a purple-caped hero going about a vaguely Medieval world, righting wrongs and being cool as heck. Later, when I was twelve, after abandoning The Traveler series as childish, I planned out a story about a culture of people who had lived on old-timey wooden sailing ships for centuries, never touching land, and who made a living by seizing and looting modern cruise ships. There was to be a touching romance between a young woman who grew up on the sailing ships and a young man who was a passenger on one of the cruises. I think I got about five pages of that one done.
Through all of this though, the basic goal never wavered: write novels.
A few decades later, Welcome to Night Vale blew up and we suddenly had a “popular internet thing.” What happens when you have a “popular internet thing” is that you get a lot of emails from companies asking if they can please cash in on your “popular internet thing.” Most of those emails didn’t interest us much, but the emails from publishers absolutely did. Jeffrey and I decided we wanted to write a novel, a new story, never told in the podcasts. In Harper Perennial we found a lovely group of people who understood and shared our excitement.
Of course, we then had to write a novel. Jeffrey and I get asked a lot about the difference between writing a podcast and a novel, and the answer sounds flippant but isn’t: a novel is a whole lot longer. A novel is so long. Think of a long thing to write. A novel is longer than that. Thinking out a story on that scale, and then the sheer daily drudgery of hitting the word goals week after week, these were new challenges. But they were exciting challenges, even in their occasional tedium. We were getting to make something we had both always wanted to make.
The release of the novel was a series of surreal experiences. Opening a box of finished books and realizing that this story we told was actually going to be printed and sold in stores. Seeing the book in a store. Being interviewed on Stephen Colbert’s show (I was completely calm until the commercial break before our segment as I waited in the wings, at which point I suddenly was more nervous
than I’ve ever been in my life). Seeing our names on the New York Times bestseller list (we received the news while eating at a delicious Chinese food truck in Portland; I still go back to that truck when I find myself in the city, and eat my bestseller lunch).
In December of that year, Meg and I moved to a house in the woods of upstate New York. The closest neighbor is a half mile away. There is no better ballast to the chaos of touring than a house where the nights are utterly silent and the Catskill Mountains are visible without having to get out of bed.
In January 2016, we toured the live show to New Zealand and Australia for the first time ever, flying some twenty hours from northern hemisphere winter to southern hemisphere summer. I remember one night, before the Perth show, we ate a barbecue picnic prepared for us by our booking agent on the beach at sunset as a pod of dolphins swam by. And we all had to ask each other: How had a podcast gotten us here? I’m still not sure. I only know what happened, not why.
In March, we did a book tour to Germany, as an actor read the translation of our novel to audiences while we politely nodded along to say, “No, we don’t understand, but we believe this is probably close to what we wrote.” The actor, we were told many times in these specific words, was “the German Ed Norton.”
And in June, Meg and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary, and seven years together. We didn’t go anywhere special. We didn’t take a big trip. For once, for once, we stayed home. It was wonderful.
The twelve months covered by this book were busy and often stressful. But it was the busy and stressful I had always wanted. What do you do when you achieve your dreams? I guess you put your head down and get to work making more dreams.
—Joseph Fink
Episode 71:
“The Registry of Middle School Crushes”
AUGUST 1, 2015
BOY AM I GLAD TO BE STARTING THE BOOK WITH THIS EPISODE. THIS IS one of my absolute favorites. Many of our favorite episodes are memorable to us because they have some kind of specific concept that made the writing of them tricky. Or they often have unusual structures, cool guest voices, multiple parts. But this episode is none of that. The only voice in it is our central narrator. There is no other file you need to download to get the story. The structure follows our usual Night Vale format, with the narrative scattered among other town news and bits of radio business, then coming to a head after the weather. So this episode remains a favorite for a simple reason: I think it’s a really good story and I’m glad we told it.
