Whoa!mance is a weekly podcast about Romance Novels and Ourselves. Whoa!mance is also a member of the Frolic Podcast Network!

Morgan and Isabeau unearth the weirdest bits and the sexiest parts of a romance novel each week. It’s like listening to two people you want to be friends with talking about cool stuff, like orgasms and what it means to be a human under late capital.

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Isabeau

Isabeau was named for an 80s movie Ladyhawke, by her older siblings. In the film Michelle Pfeiffer (Isabeau) is in love with the captain of the guard. They are cursed by an evil bishop, forcing Isabeau to be a hawk during the day, and a woman at night—her lover a man during the day and a wolf at night. Always together, eternally apart. In other words romance was written into Isabeau from the very beginning.

She got her BFA in Creative Writing from Stephens College in Columbia, MO. And spent the time after bartending, writing, nannying, and watching a lot of movies. She moved to Chicago in 2015 and fell in love with the Windy City instantly. It’s also where she met Nick and Morgan.

In graduate school Isabeau studied literature, writing, and history with a feminist ecocriticism lens. She wrote an academic critique about genre fiction (sci-fi) being the perfect place to examine compassion, empathy and their limits. It was not a long jump to romance after that.

Isabeau spends her non-romance time brunching extensively around the city, reading about whales, and eating tomatoes from her husband’s garden.

Morgan

My name is Morgan. My interests include murder, fanfiction, modern art, cooking, the American myth/identity, antiquing, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, the desert, astrology, skincare, and my pets and 2nd Wave Feminist texts. I wrote a short story once and feel very self-conscious about it.

I am from western Kansas. I moved to the other side of Kansas to go to school, I got my undergraduate degree in journalism. Since undergraduate degrees are more like suggestions, I worked in higher education for two years before moving to Chicago to get my masters. While I was there I studied film, literature, Nick and Isabeau. I now work in hospitality (basically) and on this project with those guys.

My favorite book as a child was Eloise by Kay Thompson. My favorite tv series currently on-air is High Maintenance. My favorite romantic comedy is It Happened One Night. My decorating style is “Versailles-if-the-French-aristocracy-had-been-more-into-handicrafts”.

I am currently so glad you’re reading my biography.

Nick

Hailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Nick's first introduction to Romance was watching General Hospital and One Life to Live with his Grandma; her "stories" taught him the complexities of love and the plot power of well placed amnesia.  

It was this early exposure to narrative that sparked his desire to pursue both a bachelor's and master's degree in English literature.  Nick's education equipped him with the skills and vocabulary necessary to recant the day's specials in what Yelp reviewers have described as "riveting...a Brechtian display of the human condition" to "that asshole forgot my double Jack and coke".  

When not cutting off drunks or making sure his hosts sound as brilliant and hilarious as they truly are, Nick makes music under the moniker Grave_, gives zero fucks about sports, and tries to read less books by dead white men.

He lives in Bridgeport, Chicago with his partner and cat.