Director's Notes: 170 - To the Family and Friends

Before I start, I just want to flag that we are doing a live streamed performance of our fan favorite live show “Condos”. This will be the first time we’ve performed this script since 2013. It will feature Cecil Baldwin, Meg Bashwiner, Dylan Marron, Symphony Sanders, and Mara Wilson, and it’s going to be a great time. It sucks that we can’t all sit in a room together right now, but we still want to bring the weirdness from our home to yours. Tickets are pay what you want, starting at $5. Hope to see you there. https://noonchorus.com/welcome-to-night-vale/

Ok, now into the episode:

This episode marks the eighth anniversary of Welcome to Night Vale, a fact which I struggle to wrap my head around.

Eight years ago I was unemployed, and writing paragraphs about a weird desert town where every conspiracy was true. I didn’t know what those paragraphs would add up to, but I knew that they felt right, and I liked them. I remember telling my girlfriend (now my wife) “I think this could really be something.” But I had no idea what that something was.

Seven years ago we put on a free live reading of episode 25, One Year Later, at Webster Hall in the East Village. An early fan (thanks Mike!) got us a small bar space there for free. 115 people showed up. My mom flew out to see it, and helped sell merch (thanks mom!). It felt like the pinnacle of where this show would take us, and it felt great. Of course, it wasn’t even really the start.

Six years ago we did our anniversary live show at Town Hall in Manhattan, a 2000 seat Broadway room. We sold out a two show night. Our only experience with live shows had been in tiny downtown rooms, and we did our best. The backstage was all nervous energy. The onstage was all ecstatic energy.

Five years ago we were putting finishing touches on the first Welcome to Night Vale novel. We didn’t know how to write a novel, were not certain we would be able to do it. But it was our lifelong dreams, and so we gave it a shot. And we did it. A whole novel. It was one of the entire Harper company’s top-selling books for the year, and we were given a contract for another.

Four years ago we were becoming a tried and true touring live show company, having already traveled around the world a couple times. Meg Bashwiner, our touring manager, and the whole ride or die touring crew, were used to the hours in the van, the late nights settling the merch, the early mornings at Hampton Inn breakfasts. It was not a life we thought we would ever have, but here it was, and we were getting good at it.

Three years ago we were in our second year of running Night Vale Presents, our new family of podcasts. It was hard and it was scary, expanding beyond the one show, but a lot of good work came out of that. Back in Night Vale, we wrote a series of episodes that delved deep into the history of the town, and came as close as were ever going to come to “explaining” its strange nature.

Two years ago the first attempt to put Welcome to Night Vale on television fell apart. These things happen, especially in the TV world. So Jeffrey and I started over, and made our own pitch. A version of Night Vale on TV that would be entirely ours. This would go well, with lot of promising steps forward, until a pandemic shut down that entire industry, but what are you going to do?

One year ago we were deep into planning The Haunting of Night Vale, Cecil’s last live tour. It was going to be the triumphant goodbye to the current Night Vale live experience, and we wrote and rehearsed an amazing show that we, so far, have only gotten to perform twice before we had to shut it all down indefinitely. But again, what are you going to do?

And what next? I have no idea. I’ve given up trying to plan for the future. I can only tell you this. We still love writing Night Vale for you. And we’re going to keep doing that. 

We had planned, several months ago, for this anniversary episode to be a long and ambitious episode, one that we would need all that time to properly execute. But then the pandemic came, and it was clear to us that this wasn’t the right time for a big and flashy episode. So instead I wrote this story. It’s a short story about the value of a life. 

I knew that I wanted to write something about the interns, a long standing joke that we had never looked at very closely. I brought that idea to Jeffrey and he suggested the basic outline of the story you see here. I went away and wrote it. It’s quiet and it’s about community and I think it’s what we need right now.

Thank you to all of you who have listened and seen the live shows and read the books over these eight years. Whether you’ve been with us from the start or just found us last week, we are so grateful to you. You’ve changed our lives forever. 

I don’t know what this next year brings. But I know we’ll get through it together.

-Joseph Fink