You’re reading Unsettled Americans, an interview column with writers and other creatives living outside America’s major cities. For today’s Q&A, I spoke with Hayley Heninger, co-creator of the fantastically spooky podcast Palimpsest. Hayley is an actor and writer living in the mountains of North Carolina, and I hope you enjoy our conversation about ghost stories, acting methods, and the power of creative collaborations!
When Hayley Heninger first moved to Asheville, she started taking acting classes and soon landed an agent in Atlanta. But it wasn’t long before she realized that the opportunities she was finding, like the chance to audition for NASCAR ads, weren’t helping her grow as an artist. So, in 2017, Hayley started a horror fiction podcast called Palimpsest with writer Jamieson Ridenhour. “Horror creates a safe environment to revisit scary things in a controlled environment,” she told me of her interest in the dark, atmospheric audio drama, which she voiced for five seasons.
Over the phone, Hayley and I discussed the allure of ghost stories, starting a podcast with limited resources, and how artists can thrive anywhere by making lasting connections in their local communities. You can find a condensed and edited version of our conversation below.
Where are you originally from?
I’m originally from Old Forge, Pennsylvania. It’s a short distance from Scranton, which is better known, especially if you’re a fan of The Office. Old Forge is the self-proclaimed Pizza Capital of the World, and I love that for them.
When I was 19, I moved to Asheville. A few months before I moved, I’d been sexually assaulted and it changed my whole outlook on everything. I had PTSD and was really having a panicky time. I needed a place where I didn’t know anyone, where no one knew me, and where I wasn’t getting these weird sense flashbacks. I spent my whole life in that small town in Pennsylvania, but the assault really put a bad taste on everything. I wanted to throw out the whole experience, the good with the bad.
Moving to Asheville, I gained a sense of freedom to explore who I was with a fresh start. Changing my name through marriage felt like a similar venture. Sometimes I still think I’ll change my name back, but in the beginning, I remember the joy I found in Googling my name with no search results.
Have you gone back to the town you grew up in?
Yes, I’ve been back multiple times. There was one time I went back and went out with my siblings for drinks around town, and all the names of the bars had changed. We were joking and laughing and then I noticed something about the street light on the corner, and I had a full-blown panic attack. My body was reacting before my brain even realized that it was because we had gotten to that spot. To end up there again without intending to felt like, “fuck.” But I think it was important to be there and realize I’m okay, I’m with people that love me, and I’m in control of my body.
Trauma, and the way trauma manifests through visitations from ghosts, is one of the major themes of your audio drama Palimpsest. Did your experience with trauma inform the creation of the podcast?
Absolutely. When Jamie, the primary writer, and I first started talking about Palimpsest, trauma was one of the big themes. It’s about how unresolved experiences can still surface, like me getting the panic attack before my brain was even thinking about it. On Palimpsest, we like to turn those unresolved pieces into a physical manifestation with a ghost or a sound or a haunting. Horror creates a safe environment to revisit scary things in a controlled environment.
How did Palimpsest first come together?
We wanted to make a podcast and we had limited tools. Jamie had a recording setup because his son is a musician and was still living at the house, so there was a microphone and some recording technology. Jamie would have a concept or an idea for a character. I would get to embody this character and come up with questions like, “Well, what is her life at home like? What does her home living situation look like? What does she do for work?”
It has been really sweet getting to create so many female characters. There was a guy that I collaborated with creatively in the past, and I remember one time he said to me, “I would love to write more female characters, but I just don’t know what they would do.” What? He couldn’t imagine what they would do, like they’re aliens.
As a woman voicing women characters, do you help shape the writing on the show?
Yeah, that’s big. Palimpsest has come to a close now, but when we were still making it, I would say, “She wouldn’t say that.” Jamie has always been pretty good at writing to my voice. I remember one interview where he said something like, “Hayley is the voice of my imagination.” He could just hear the way I would say things.
So you get to Asheville at 19. How did you start writing and acting?
I liked poetry, and at the time I really liked Buddy Wakefield. I liked slam poetry and the big feelings you got from that, but my writing was mostly for myself. So, I took classes at A-B Tech to finish up my associate’s degree because I’d gone to a community college back in Pennsylvania, but I didn’t go to class. I stayed outside smoking cigarettes in the gazebo when I should have been in class. I realized, like, “Oh, I have to pay for this on my own. I need to actually show up.”
For my final semester, there weren’t any more creative writing courses available, so I took Acting I, and Peter Carver was my teacher. Two weeks into the class, I told him I needed to drop it because everyone was so funny and outgoing, but I would almost be in tears from being so nervous. He convinced me to stay, and at the end of the semester, he wanted to put on Hamlet. He wanted Hamlet to be a girl, and he asked if I would consider it.
At first, Peter wanted me to shave my head. I had to put up this defense of my hair and be like, “Look, you’re saying you want Hamlet to be female, but now you want Hamlet to look very masculine. What are you saying, that a feminine Hamlet can’t exist?” So, I saved my hair.
From there, it kind of just flowed. Jon Menick attended one of the performances. He’s since passed away, rest in peace, but he ran and started a little acting school called the Screen Artists Co-op. Jon came up to me at the end and was like, “Hey, you should come check out my acting school.”
And I did. It was a good experience, despite some of the things Jon said. He really wanted you to go to dark places. We would do exercises on the rug of shame. For me, still coming from this place where I’d pent up all this trauma and didn’t tell anyone, I would get on the rug and cry. And he’d be like, “yes, excellent.” But afterward, I was shaking and feeling terrible, and I learned that’s not what you need to create good art. It’s good to be in touch with your feelings, for sure, but you don’t just need to retraumatize yourself.
Oh, wow. Sounds like a caricature of acting school, like a method you’d see on TV.
Some people really think that's what you got to do. For me, it caused more harm. There was also this big push to change my name and come up with a stage name. Jon was like, “Well, nobody’s going to want to hire someone whose last name sounds like lunch meat.” My last name before I got married was Karbowski, and he thought it was too ethnic, I guess.
There were other comments like, “Hayley, I think you’re so great. I think you’re really going to make it. And once you get bigger, people are going to tell you to get a nose job. Don’t do it.” And I was like, “Oh, okay. I didn’t really think that before, but now that you’re saying it, okay.”
At the time, were you trying to book around Asheville?
The goal at the school was to go bigger than Asheville. I signed with an agent in Atlanta. But in that short stint when I had a commercial agent and was trying to do commercial acting, it just didn’t jive with my life. I had to be ready at a moment’s notice to drop everything and drive to Charlotte or Knoxville or Atlanta. I hated the auditions I was going out for. I didn’t want to be auditioning for Hot Girl #3 in a NASCAR commercial. I was getting the $500 head shot because it was top quality, and there was this big pressure that it was really going to make or break me. So much was going to make or break me before I even showed up. Like, “What the fuck? Why? They don’t even see me yet and I already feel so behind.”
Some people thrive on that pressure, though. They see things like that as stepping stones, but it felt really disjunctive for me. I think that experience created a shift in figuring out what I wanted from art and performance. Yes, the $500 headshots were good quality, but I realized it was not what you need.
You could have relocated to Atlanta or one of those big industry hubs. What does living in Asheville give you as an artist that you wouldn’t have gotten elsewhere?
For one, there’s all the natural beauty around us, and there are so many creatives that live here and are creating in so many different ways and art forms. For my creative career—you can call it a career even if you don’t make money, right?—I just love that it’s been the opposite of the path projected for me at first.
Back then, I was all nervous, hoping my head shot looked right, that I got there in time, that I’m wearing the right colors. It’s the opposite with local projects where I’ve been able to make connections with everyone on set. They’re people you’ve probably met in other scenarios or live near you. So, you talk to them more, and they want to work with you again. They would be like, “Oh, you should meet so and so. You would be great for this job.” It just became organic. Not pressure, but synchronous and kind of meant to be.
This column is about trying to find home in America and the difficulties of feeling settled in any one place. Do you feel settled in Asheville? On a scale of 1-10, how settled are you currently?
5? I love the natural beauty of these mountains. Sometimes I sit outside at night and catch shooting stars while black bears and foxes silently paw by, and I really feel the magic of it. I love gardening, and I try to add as many plants from my mother’s childhood home garden as I can remember—dinner plate hibiscus, wormwood, echinacea, and lamb’s ear.
But it has been difficult to find a steady working job. Most of the paid work I’ve done recently has been short term or gig work. Finding steady income would definitely make me feel more settled, and I think it would also present more opportunity for change.
I’m comfortable where I’m at, and I also know it isn’t forever. My partner and I bought this house six years ago, thinking of it as a starter home we would move out of in maybe 5 years. I love our location, but wish I could have about double the closet space and an extra bedroom.
Who is your in-person community? Neighbors, family?
My neighbors are some of my closest friends! We bonded over campfires and we watch our kids play together. It’s a dream to be able to have no-pressure porch hangs and borrow an onion or can of beans when needed.
My parents live three miles from my house. They moved here a couple years after we did. I’m very close with both my sisters, who also live in town, and my brother lives in Charlotte. My sister-in-law lives in West Asheville. Between all of them, Florence, my daughter, has eight cousins to form a kid gang with.
I’ve been working on Palimpsest for the last eight years, and we operate out of the studio space in Jamie’s house.
What you’ve done with Palimpsest seems so entrepreneurial. You didn’t wait for a producer to sign on. You work out of your house. With podcasting, it seems like many of the traditional barriers are removed.
I mean, that is changing. There are a lot of different collectives that podcasts will join, with different paywalls and subscriptions. It gets tricky if you try to monetize. The way we’ve made money is through doing workshops and live shows at different colleges, because universities have a budget to bring in writers and performers.
When we started in 2018, there were a lot of podcasts out there, but it wasn’t anything like it is now. We got to know these different creators, and everyone was boosting each other’s podcasts. It just felt so great because everyone wanted to help each other. It was missing the gatekeeping that tends to happen in the arts.
I think it’s amazing that you put your stuff out there and said, “we’ll learn as we go.”
We definitely learned a lot. In our first season, Jamie did go back and fixed some of the sound, but of course, the worst reviews always stick with you. There was one person who was like, “The mouth, can someone get that girl a glass of water? The mouth makes me literally want to kill myself.” I was like, “Oh my god, it’s a free podcast. Calm down.” There are learning curves. That’s part of it. All of your mistakes are still out there for everyone to hear, but whatever, you make mistakes and learn.
Palimpsest Productions has another podcast coming out next called Highgate Wood, about a British prog rock band. We had a cast of about seven people, and everybody but me is from the UK. We just finished all of the recording and we did it on Zencastr. We thought it was going to be so hard, but now we’re like, “Whoa, we could record with anyone anywhere in the world, and it’s actually really simple.”
Is part of the excitement discovering new things that you can do with the format?
Totally. I especially love when art inspires other art. Once you put your podcast out there, it’s out there for everyone all over the world. It was the coolest thing when we started making the podcast and someone in Russia drew fan art and sent it back to us. It was so freaking cool.
That seems like another example of not needing to be in a major city for people to take note of what you’re working on. You can be recording from your house, living where you want.
That’s the real dream. For a while, I didn’t know if that dream was possible, but I really think it is. There’s this idea that you have to do all this shit you don’t really like doing first and compromise your values, but I don’t think that’s really true.
What do you dream of doing next?
I really want to record audio books. We’re finally at a point now where I have my first novella booked to read. It’ll be the first paid audio book gig. It’s through a friend, which is how things always work, but I’m really looking forward to that. Jamie and I are also trying to expand as a production company where we have our own projects, but you can also hire us to help with your project.
I assume you don’t use the rug of shame anymore. What’s your creative process like these days?
For me, it begins with a feeling of being calm and connected, safe in your headspace and at home in your body. I draw a lot of that comfort from being outside, and we’re in such a magical place to spend time outside. One thing I did take from acting school was really just tapping into your senses. I'll do that with breathing. I’ll make sure I'm feeling the whole depth of my lungs.
I’ve spent the last seven plus years feeling attached to my daughter, still tripping over the reality that this person grew inside of me and is now existing in their own story outside me. I think creative endeavors are a practice in that—in finding a home-like feeling and giving it away. You invest the raw or vulnerable parts of yourself in hopes it will connect with someone else. You give it your all, then it’s over. And you have to believe there’s more to give, to create, to find that feeling of home again.
