Two Mile Stretch is essentially this, an experimentation to combine various disciplines within the arts — creative writing, poetry, music, photography — into a multimedia type presentation and tie it all together into one cohesive theme. It just so happens that podcasts (using Apple's .m4a format as used within iTunes and their series of iPods) are the perfect delivery for this experiment. You can take them with you, listen to various parts of the podcast at your leisure, and view photographs that help support the theme being presented.
Digging even further, I have been looking for an outlet for myself — an outlet for my creative writing, my songwriting, photography, audio engineering — and after a lot of brainstorming and some inspiration from Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac and to some degree his program A Prairie Home Companion, with how he brings in a variety of musicians and songwriters each week. The difference here, is that I basically choose a topic that might be on my mind this month, write about it in various forms, get out there and take some photos, write and record a song to support it all, and throw it all together. That is Two Mile Stretch, my own expression as I live life and in the things I experience.
Two Mile Stretch is still in its infancy and there are a lot of kinks that I have to iron out yet, but over time I think you'll really come to enjoy what I've created here. If you really like what I'm doing, please take a moment and show your support by buying the mp3's of the songs you like or ordering a print or two from the featured podcasts. The prints are developed on high, archival quality paper through smugmug.com.
If you have any comments, feedback or suggestions, please send them to michael AT twomilestretch DOT com. Thanks!