A Gather of Gatherings

What do you call a group of hawks? A kettle. Rattlesnakes? A rhumba. Orangutans? A buffoonery.

Welcome to A Gather of Gatherings, a story-rich, curiosity-fueled podcast exploring the wild and whimsical world of collective nouns. Each episode begins with a single phrase—like a murder of crows—and unfolds into something much bigger: interviews with experts and artists, imagined conversations with historical voices and animals, immersive soundscapes, folklore, poetry, and plenty of animal facts along the way.

From language and literature to nature, culture, and the mysteries of meaning, this podcast is your invitation to wander where words take flight.

Hosted by Kellie Raines—a writer, artist, and lover of linguistic oddities—this show celebrates the poetic strangeness of how we gather, name, and know the world and each other.

Contributors

Host

Kellie Raines

I’m Kellie Raines—a trained theatre actor, writer, director, and self-taught visual artist. I’ve built a career in public media, but at my core? I’m a storyteller.

Theatrical performance and storytelling are my first loves, and I bring that passion into every episode of A Gather of Gatherings—a nerdy, poetic, sound-rich podcast that uses collective nouns as a gateway into language, nature, history, and human curiosity and connection.

What’s your favorite collective noun? It’s hard to choose just one… but if you ask me? It’s a charm of hummingbirds.

Guests

Guest

Dame Juliana Berners (fictional)

Dame Juliana Berners was a 15th-century English prioress, writer, and sportswoman best known for her contributions to The Boke of Saint Albans (1486)—a treatise on hawking, hunting, and heraldry that includes one of the earliest printed lists of collective nouns, or “terms of venery.” Though her authorship has long been debated (because heaven forbid a woman write about falconry in the Middle Ages), Berners remains a legendary figure in the history of language, literature, and linguistic flair.

She joins us via an entirely imaginary audio filter, made possible through the fine art of make-believe time travel, podcast theater, and a sprinkle of poetic license.

Guest

Kate Marden - West Coast Falconry

Master falconer and founder and owner of West Coast Falconry.

https://westcoast-falconry.com/

Guest appearance on:

02: A Gather of Gatherings: A Kettle of Hawks – Feathers and Figures of Speech