The Art Of Lingering: Ellen Riccio and First Creatures Podcast
By Kayleigh Crandell · September 30, 2026 · 36:16 read
Category: Local News
Show: Creator Spotlight
Meet the violinist behind the Richmond podcast that asks us to linger a little while longer. Ellen Riccio has played violin with the Richmond Symphony for almost seventeen years. On the side, she's sp
Meet the violinist behind the Richmond podcast that asks us to linger a little while longer.
Ellen Riccio has played violin with the Richmond Symphony for almost seventeen years. On the side, she's spent over a decade finding ways to put music in places it doesn't usually go: bars, backyards, a library staircase overlooking the woods.
Her latest audio project, First Creatures, is a podcast and an event series built around a single word: lingering. Staying somewhere past the point when the visit is supposed to end.
She started First Creatures as events before it became a podcast, and the shift happened after two months on an artist residency in Paris, watching a culture that doesn't share America's discomfort with sitting still. Ellen's preparation process is a part of the podcast. She reads widely, follows her curiosity into freewriting, and scripts nearly every word before she gets near a microphone. She aims for thirty minutes and never lands there. Getting one episode from idea to publish takes close to 2 months or longer.
We talk about what that pace costs and what it protects, the difference between building a body of work and chasing download numbers, and why Ellen would rather protect her energy for the work than push First Creatures toward some vague idea of "bigger."
We also get into the DIY side of podcasting: learning Audacity from scratch, editing her own episodes, and writing (and recording, with her Richmond musician friends) the show's original theme music.
Offline, Ellen runs a wordless concert series called "Unseen" at the Varina Library, plus a project with her string quartet, Rosette, called "So Hot Right Now." It's hot because it's a musical program by living composers, played in six to eight different Richmond venues over a single month, from bars to churches to recording studios. Hearing a piece of music once tells you almost nothing about it. Hearing it five times, in five rooms, is where it starts to open up.
We close on where the name First Creatures actually came from: a line from Vladimir Nabokov about the first creatures on Earth to understand time, and the first to smile because of it.
Timestamps
Resources
First Creatures: firstcreatures.com
First Creatures on Instagram: @firstcreatures
UnScene Concert Series: https://firstcreatures.com/unscene
So Hot Right Now: https://firstcreatures.com/so-hot-right-now
Reveler (Carytown): https://www.revelerexperiences.com/
Curt Sydnor: https://www.instagram.com/sydnorigami/
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Cast: that asks us to linger a little while longer.