Welcome to a special episode of Strong Sense of Place.

Last January, we announced that we were going to rent a manor house and whales and fill it with readers.

And we were going to do it twice, once on the weekend of October 9th and then again on the 16th.

At the time, that sentence felt a little bit like saying, we're going to move into a Gothic novel and invite 40 of our Internet friends to come live there with us.

Dream come true.

It was exciting and a little ridiculous and also a little terrifying.

Would anyone actually sign up?

Would we accidentally invent the world's most introverted house party?

These are questions to be answered.

So fast forward to autumn.

We are standing in Trevor Hall, this big bonkers 18th century

brick manor on a hill above a little village called Langothlin. And we are late.

Completely my fault. We've planned this thing for a year and a half, but somehow we're 10 minutes late.

There is already a coach outside with a

busload of strong sense of place listeners, and they're getting off with their suitcases and

their books and their raincoats, and we're thinking, oh, this is real now. We're doing this.

These are actual humans. We have, in fact, invited them to live in a Gothic novel with us for the weekend.

This little mini episode is our report back on that experiment. But more than that, it's a story about what it's like to step inside of a bookish weekend with strangers who don't feel like strangers for very long.

We are going to talk about why we did it in the first place, what it was

like to gather in Manchester, England, and then roll into North Wales together, what it felt like

to actually live in a manor house for a few days, the food and the walks and the parlor games and

the quiet moments with books, and what surprised us in good and occasionally exhausting ways.

...