Feature by Seth Robinson

Unfolded, a new podcast from the University of Melbourne, presents audio fictions from some of Australia’s favourite writers with in-depth interviews that go inside the stories’ inspiration and writing.

Short stories are one of the most underrated kinds of fiction. Where a novel might be considered a marathon, a short story is a sprint. They’re weird and wonderful, the perfect place for writers to break genres and play with different forms and ideas. They’re also perfectly suited to podcasts. 2500 words is roughly twenty-minutes. A dog walk, or a tram ride.

There are plenty of podcasts that do this well, some showcase bitesize fictions, or serialise longer pieces. Other podcasts offer interviews with writers, interrogating where they get their ideas from, or going into the details of their writing practice. But there are few (if any) podcasts that bring these two concepts together.

This is where the idea for Unfolded came from.

Record original audio-fictions, then do a deep-dive with the author, to get specific on the ins-and-outs of that story. For anyone who has ever heard Song Exploder, it’s like that, but for stories.

It’s turned out to be something of a beautiful experiment, as season one of Unfolded features stories of a human-fox transformation, a first-date pig hunt, a talking table, a nervous mother, a gardener who lusts after dirt, and an interstellar navigator. Each of these stories were brought to life by alumni actors from the Victorian College of the Arts, all of whom brought something unique, and strangely magical to their interpretations.

‘In a time when the creative industries are changing, and our future seems less certain, it’s been an incredible opportunity to bring these people together and see this project come to life.’

-Seth Robinson on the ‘Unfolding’ podcast

In the follow-up interviews, my co-host novelist Tony Birch and I spoke with each of the stories’ authors: Chris Flynn, Laura Jean McKay, Frankey Chung-Kok-Lun, Paige Clark, Miriam Webster, and Claire G. Coleman.

Each of these conversations were as unique and surprising as the stories themselves, but there were some parallels, including:

  • • the importance of reading widely and drawing inspiration from a variety of mediums
  • • the joy of finding details and moments of specificity that bring a story to life and make it feel ‘true’
  • • how blurring the boundaries between genre and literary fiction allowed our authors’ imaginations to go wild.

There was one other, shared experience across all our authors: the surprise and delight that came from hearing their stories performed. All of our writers agreed that the actors’ readings had brought something new to the piece, whether it was a reinterpretation of the character’s voice, or the story’s mood. The works evolved in the space they’d travelled from the page to their headphones.

They’d become collaborative works, the output of group of artists—writers, and actors, and engineers and editors—coming together.

In a time when the creative industries are changing, and our future seems less certain, it’s been an incredible opportunity to bring these people together and see this project come to life.

For all our listeners, we hope you love it.

All episodes of Unfolded are available now. Subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or follow the Melbourne Public Humanities Initiative to find out more.

Seth Robinson is a writer, producer and academic based in Naarm/Melbourne. He is the Creative Producer for the Melbourne Public Humanities Initiative, and a Lecturer at the University of Melbourne.

You can see Seth Embrace the Cringe at EWF 2025.