How Storytelling Can Heal Your Life

This transcript was auto-generated from an audio recording. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Did you ever work and work and work to get to your dream? And when you got there, it didn't look or feel like what you'd imagined? Not at all? Emily Silverman did. She’d wanted to become a doctor since she was a little girl. That goal was such a part of her that she didn't question it. She just put in the long hours and hard work to get to med school, get through med school, and eventually get accepted to a prestigious residency.

Now she was there, living life inside a hospital at UC San Francisco, and she should have been thrilled. But she wasn't. 

Clip of Emily Silverman

It was probably the most challenging period of my—certainly my academic life, maybe even my whole life. I had a lot of questions about why being a doctor wasn't what I imagined, medical culture, and also just my reasons and motivations for going into medicine and examining those a little bit more closely.

Elaine Appleton Grant

So she did the next logical thing. She started a live storytelling event, like The Moth, for physicians and other people in medicine. I mean, wouldn't that be your next step? Years later, that single live event, performed by doctors in the living room of an old San Francisco mansion, has become the multiple award-winning lyrical podcast, The Nocturnists: a show that, as Emily says, helps shatter the myth of the physician god and reveals the truth that healthcare workers are human like everyone else. That our humanity is our strength, not our weakness. On this season of Sound Judgment, we're exploring bravery. And today with Emily Silverman, we're exploring what happens when we need to change direction, but we don't yet know where we're going.

We're exploring how storytelling and community, whether that's live on stage or in a podcast or some other form, might actually be the tool that helps us figure out what we value. And like Emily, how we find the sweet spot where we actually belong. This is Sound Judgment, where we investigate just what it takes to become a beloved audio storyteller by pulling apart one story at a time together. I'm Elaine Appleton Grant.

So I watched a clip, a little bit of you as a guest on a doctor’s podcast. And you were talking about your journey away from this dream of becoming a full-time practicing physician—you are a part-time practicing physician still—in order to do The Nocturnists. And you referred to giving up medicine in that way as an identity death. Did you—I love that term. Did you experience it as an identity death? 

Emily Silverman

I did. Around four years ago, I had a period of time where I was undergoing a bit of a metamorphosis. And it was painful, but I think ultimately led me to a better place. And some of that had to do with my professional life. Some of that had to do with my personal life. A big part of that journey was searching for my biological parents. I was adopted when I was three days old and for the first 35 years of my life had very little information about where I came from. And part of that journey was actually embarking on this search and going out and finding my biological mother and father, which I did. And also opening up some of the repressed issues, I think, related to my own identity and my adoption and my relinquishment and how those may or may not have influenced my decisions in life. And right around this time, my husband turned to me and said, I wanna have a baby. So it really brought up a lot for me about when I was a baby and those sorts of things. And I did get pregnant and have a baby. And my daughter is now two, and I'm actually now pregnant again. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Oh, congratulations. 

Emily Silverman

Thank you. So there was a lot that happened during that time. And I think one thing I realized was the extent to which my pursuit of medical school and a career as a physician was grounded in a desire to perform and excel and be good enough—good enough to not be left or all those kind of Freudian things. Which is not to say that it didn't also stem from an authentic interest in clinical medicine and people and their bodies and their stories. It was both. There was just a lot of, I think, internal excavation going on. 

Why am I doing this? I wrote this down once: Is doctor something I want to do or something I want to be? And what's the difference? And so I'm continuing to grapple with that.

Elaine Appleton Grant

And I'm sure that it's something that a lot of people grapple with, whether it's doctor or journalist. There's been so much upheaval, so many layoffs. I know that this idea of identity death happens in many professions as those professions change or as we realize something that we hadn't realized before about what it's actually like. And at the same time, you're moving towards something that is big in the sense that The Nocturnist is a very big and rich and full experience in giving to so many people.

Why is it necessary to, as you say, shatter the myth of the physician god? What is it that you hope to change in medicine? 

Emily Silverman

We talked about this a bit on our series, Shame in Medicine. There was one episode, I think it was episode two, called The Ideal Doctor, where we unpacked this myth of the ideal doctor and how almost comically unrealistic it is, somebody who's infinitely intelligent, infinitely emotionally intelligent, infinitely emotionally available, doesn't need sleep—you know, so on and so forth, and is perfect and never makes mistakes and learns everything immediately and never forgets and doesn't ever fail a test and all of these things. And what we've realized, I think, and this may sound obvious, is that that's impossible. And we all come to the table with different strengths, different areas of growth, different biases, different personal narratives that we bring to the table, ways in which we connect, ways in which we have blind spots. There was an amazing story I'll never forget in our Shame in Medicine series, of this woman who was a diabetes educator. She spent much of her time educating patients with diabetes on healthy foods and so on. But she disclosed in the interview with us for Shame in Medicine that she had anorexia. 

Clip from Shame in Medicine

Woman: The area that I work in, we encounter shame every day. I work in a community diabetes team and our patients are often experiencing a lot of shame because the—kind of the media around diabetes. But people carry that weight when they come. Also, I carry a lot of shame because what my patients don't know is that I have anorexia. And I've been living with it for a long time, so probably about 30 years to varying degrees. So I've kind of varied between being very unwell, being—probably in the street you just think I was slim, to yeah, barely able to function. And this is something that I actually have shared with my manager, who's fantastically supportive, but I would be very loath to share with the rest of the team and definitely need to protect my patients. So it's really complex.

Emily Silverman

I just thought that was so unexpected and such an interesting way in which, you know, what the world may see as a disease or a flaw or a mental illness actually brings something to the encounter that leads to understanding and connection and empathy.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Let's get to the Nocturnists, to the first episode that you shared with me. It's an episode from the series that you just mentioned, Shame in Medicine. The episode is called Pass/Fail, and it's about standardized testing in medical school, specifically step one of the United States Medical Licensing Exam, or the USMLE. I should say that the Shame in Medicine series is a partnership with a project called The Shame in Medicine Project at the University of Exeter. So before I play the clip, just quickly, how did the Shame in Medicine series come about?

Emily Silverman

The series came about when a philosopher in the United Kingdom, Luna Dolezal, sent me an email out of the blue that she had been listening to the show and noticed that the theme of shame was coming up again and again in the stories, but that nobody was saying the word shame.

And she said, I happen to be a shame researcher in the United Kingdom. And I'd love to partner with you on perhaps doing some medical storytelling around shame. And immediately I knew I had to do it because even though nobody talks about it, it's everywhere in medical training. And then we embarked on this two-years-long journey, collecting shame stories from clinicians around the United States and the United Kingdom, and listening back to them and figuring out how to organize them by theme and sort of how to put the series together. And it was a lot of work and really challenging, but ultimately, I think what came out of it was really powerful. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Well, and you're not alone because it won a ton of awards. Okay, so what I'm going to do is just play the very introduction to Pass/Fail.

Clip from Shame in Medicine

Emily Silverman: You have this dream, kind of a common dream, where you're in a nondescript building. Nothing on the walls, no windows or clocks to tell you the time of day. You walk through a maze of hallways toward a security guard. He pats you down, removes all your belongings, and leads you to a computer terminal. The walls are gray. Your nose burns with the smell of cleaning solution. As you sit down at this computer, you look around and realize there are other people sitting at computers. Dozens of people, all hunched in front of these screens. They're all clicking their mice. No one speaking. There's a set of headphones on the desk. You put them on. At the top of your screen, you notice a timer counting down. And then you remember, you're taking a test. And not just any test, a test that will determine your future. What you can do and who you can be. Have you been studying for this test? Studying enough? Suddenly you feel an urge to escape, but you can't. You're locked in and time is passing. If you don't start now, you'll never catch up.

So you do the only thing you can do. You start the test.

Robotic Voice: Complete.

Emily Silverman

It's so scary. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Now hold on. You wrote that, right? Who wrote that? 

Emily Silverman

Our team co-wrote the scripting for this episode and all the episodes. I have to shout out—Molly Rose Williams is one of the people who massaged and helped with the scripting the most. And also a shout-out to Sam Osborne, who's a genius with sound design, as you can hear, and soundscaping. He comes from the world of documentary film and just nailed the audio. And then there's me, and Will and Luna, who were our shame experts. And we had some students involved as well. So it was a team effort. 

One of the things that was so difficult about the Shame in Medicine series is it was a new format. Our stories from a pandemic series and our Black Voices series were very simple. There was an intro, and then almost like a dream-like—just voices fading in and out one after the other, testimonials from healthcare workers, and that would go on for the entire episode. And then there was an outro. And so it was a very simple structure, very minimal narration and scripting, really letting the storytellers take front and center. With Shame in Medicine, we felt that the project called for something a little bit more structured, because now there were three elements.

There was me as the host. There were Will and Luna as the shame experts, which we had never had before. And then there was the primary sources. And figuring out how to mix those all up was a challenge. And what ended up happening is it wasn't the same for each episode. This one, and I think it might be why I picked it subconsciously to send it to you, was one where we had to work a little bit harder and figure out the structure. And it has a unique structure, where there's this dream sequence up top, and then a story from somebody who sent it to us. Then there's a conversation between me and Will, and then there's a couple more stories. So that the anatomy of the episode was just a little different. 

And in terms of the dream sequence, I think we were really excited now that we were bringing more scripting into our work. What can we do with this? How far can we go? Our show takes a lot of pride in being a little weird and off the wall, maybe even a little surreal. And you can see that in some of the artwork and the illustrations on our website. And I think the dream sequence idea came from there. It was like, how do we bring the audience into that pressurized moment of sitting down and taking a test? And I think it might've been Molly, although I can't quite remember, who had the idea of the dream sequence and then it went from there. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

It was very immersive and it was very clever and imaginative, and I think that's incumbent on all of us these days—to try to not do the same thing that the next person is doing, but to bring our own lived experience, strengths, rebellious nature to the work.

As you said, some of this episode consists of non-narrated reflections from physicians and medical students. And I want to play back a clip of a story told by Alessandro Raccioppi. He's gone to see his new pre-med advisor and he's super excited to plan the coursework he's gonna do in a particular special program. But he gets there and she just cuts him off at the knees. She tells him that he is not cut out for medical career, that no med school in the country will accept him with his current GPA, and he's crestfallen. 

Clip from Shame in Medicine

Alessandro Raccioppi: At the end of that meeting, I left saddened, confused, and most importantly lost. You see, a barcode may present you with a standardized value, but it tells you nothing about the journey of the individual.

Nowhere on that barcode did it say that early in my undergraduate studies I was diagnosed with cancer: something that affected me, my mental health, and my grades significantly at the time. Nowhere on that barcode did it say that I am an immigrant, someone who is able to adjust to a new culture thousands of miles away from home. Nowhere on that barcode was my humanity considered, nor my potential to help others. And although there were certainly areas of improvement that I was eager to and should have worked on, this advising meeting was never about that. We did not discuss the ways in which I could improve the coursework that had been impacted by my help, but rather the entire conversation revolved around trying to have me change my mind about attending medical school at all. I was shamed for being a 3.1 who even dared to consider attending medical school.

Although this conversation caused me to associate my self-worth with my past grades and performances for quite some time, I'm proud to share that I will finally be starting my first year of medical school in the fall of 2021.

Elaine Appleton Grant

I could have played any of the reflections from that episode, but that was the one that made me go, oh. It made me really sit up and take notice. Tell me what your reaction is to listening to that particular story. 

Emily Silverman

He uses the analogy of a barcode. I think there's one part where he says, I felt like I was a grocery item at Walmart being scanned through, my value assessed with a laser scanner. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Yes. 

Emily Silverman

And I just thought that was such a great visual, such a great metaphor, for how our test scores really only provide one dimension of who we are, and how everything is best assessed in context. And so to me, that episode really drove that point home. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

I found that from a craft standpoint, I also really liked that it didn't give away the subtext until the right time. So you didn't know why his grades weren't up to par at all until he said that test score, that barcode, didn't show that I'd had cancer, that this had happened, that I would be—you know, my humanity would be a benefit.

The Nocturnists isn't just a documentary storytelling podcast. Emily also hosts conversations with memoirists, novelists, even an oncologist who wrote a musical. They often work in medicine, but not always. Emily and I chose to talk about a conversation she had with the novelist Dolan Perkins-Valdez. I'd fallen in love with Dolan's book, Take My Hand. Here's the author reading a passage from her book on the Nocturnists.

Clip from The Nocturnists

Dolan Perkins-Valdez: A year never passes without me thinking of them. India, Erica, their names are stitched inside every white coat I have ever worn. I tell this story to stitch their names inside your clothes, too. A reminder to never forget. Medicine has taught me, really taught me to accept the things I cannot change. A difficult to swallow Serenity Prayer. I'm not trying to change the past. I'm telling it in order to lay these ghosts to rest. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Before diving headfirst into this episode, I asked Emily to bring me back to the moment when she got the idea to interview writers on the show. 

Emily Silverman

Basically, I was invited to publicly interview Dr. Lucy Kalanathy, who's the widow of Dr. Paul Kalanathy, who died of lung cancer, but not before publishing his New York Times bestselling memoir, When Breath Becomes Air. And I was invited to sit down with Dr. Kalanathy and speak with her about that book and about her husband. And it was just such a great conversation that I thought, well, let's just release this as an episode because it's just so great. And that was the first conversations episode and then it just spun off from there. So what I liked about it was most people had some kind of thing that they had created, whether it was a book or a film or a photography exhibit—some primary source that we could then look back to and reference. Something that we can hold, that's tangible, that we can look at and turn over together and discover together. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Maybe that's why I love it so much, because it's not dissimilar to this impulse that I had to create Sound Judgment. 

Emily Silverman

Yeah, exactly.

Elaine Appleton Grant

So let's listen to how you introduce this episode with Dolan Perkins-Valdes. 

Clip from The Nocturnists

Emily Silverman: You're listening to The Nocturnist Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. As healthcare workers, we have so many amazing tools at our disposal. We have medications, procedures, surgeries, even narratives and data and counseling that we use to help people with their health. But the scary thing is, having these tools means we can also cause way more harm than we ever could have before we enter the profession. We have to be constantly checking ourselves. Are we doing the right thing? Are we helping? Are we harming? Especially when there are so many examples from past and present of medicine inflicting harm on people. 

One of those examples is the story of the Relf sisters—two poor black girls in Alabama who were sterilized against their will by a federally funded health clinic in 1973. It's a story I didn't know much about, but it was the inspiration behind today's guest's latest novel, Take My Hand, which explores how something like that could have happened through the eyes of its main character, a black nurse named Sybil Townsend. The author is the amazing Dolan Perkins-Valdez.

Elaine Appleton Grant

So I played that for you because the way we introduce an episode, I feel, is so important. I found it very interesting that what you did was that you posed, essentially, a moral dilemma. The more tools we have, the more harm we can actually do. 

Emily Silverman

I think I framed the intro that way because I was thinking a lot about our audience and about who they are and why this story is important. There's a joke in medicine that says, don't just do something, stand there. The idea being that if we're always knee-jerk reflexing into doing and intervening, that we might be doing a disservice to our patients and to our professions. And sometimes what we need is just a little bit of time or some monitoring, or seeing how the disease process evolves and just staying calm. Because we know that whether it's a medication or a surgery or procedure, all these things come with risk and with harm. 

And then the example in this book is like a whole nother level, where it's a crime. I also have a friend who's a surgeon, and she's also a writer—an amazing writer—and she and I were buds in med school, kind of kindred physician creative souls, and I went the medical route and she went the surgical route. I remember one time she said to me, I realize now that I have the power to do so much more harm than I did before I became a surgeon.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Remember Emily's goal with The Nocturnists, to shatter the myth of the physician god and reveal healthcare workers' humanity? This ability to create unintended consequences, to do harm, strikes right at the heart of that. Emily's friend, Alessa Colaianni, told a story live at the nocturnist that strips away the emotional trappings of doctoring. Here she is.

Clip from The Nocturnists

Alessa Colaianni: I was never supposed to become a surgeon. Surgeons are serious. Surgeons are stoic. Surgeons are unflappable. I am flappable. Before medical school, I thought I was going to become an actor. In my childhood bedroom, before sleep but after bedtime, I would practice scenes from movies that I had seen. I would practice fainting onto my bed from different heights to get it right. I would steel my gaze against imagined intruders at the window. I practiced delivering breezy anecdotes from the imagined couch of a nonexistent talk show. I would host science shows from the bathtub. See, kids? That light on the bubbles, it's called prismatic effect. And I would answer our childhood telephone when telemarketers would call as different people every time. Well, of course we'd love for you to come and wash our windows. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

And if we are all in fact flappable, and now we have fragile human lives in our hands, well, that was why Emily opened her conversation with Dolan Perkins Valdez by posing that moral dilemma. Alessa's comment that once she became a surgeon, she had so much more power to do harm… 

Emily Silverman

That always stuck with me. And I think that's true of medical providers as well. It's not as direct as taking a knife to someone's skin, but the things that we do and say and the medicines we prescribe or don't prescribe—all of that is a responsibility, a huge responsibility.

Elaine Appleton Grant

But I want to get to one more clip, which is toward the end. And it ties the novel to current day. So this is you posing a very important question, I think. 

Clip from the Nocturnists

Emily Silverman: Obviously, this novel is being published at a very important time. We have Roe that's been overturned. There was just a headline on the front page of The New York Times yesterday about maternal mortality in Black women compared to white women, just these horrific statistics. There's a lot happening still, a lot of work to be done. How do you think about fiction and novels as tools for social change? Do you write to persuade and provoke? Do you write because you love art and you're making art for art's sake? Or is it somewhere in between? Or how do you see the role of fiction in this moment?

Dolan Perkins Valdez: It's so interesting because all of this stuff is available online and in newspapers, right? All the statistics about black maternal mortality rates being disproportionate, all of the things about the history of women in forced sterilization. For example, the women in the California state prisons who were sterilized—or even what's happening at the border, right? These women are alleging all kinds of unnecessary medical procedures, not just sterilization. Cyst removal and things that they don't have to have. All of that's available. If you do a Google search, it's there. The New York Times has done a great job reporting on a lot of this stuff, but so have other newspapers, like The Washington Post, et cetera. 

But there is something about reading a novel that allows us to place ourselves in that situation and in that moment. It's a way to cut through the noise of our lives and allow us to hear something in a different way. People always say, when did you first learn about the Relf sisters? Well, I had learned about the Relf sisters, but I didn't really know a lot. And I think there are probably some listeners who knew a little bit about it, you know, but didn't really know know. And then they read this book and now they know know. And movies, right? Movies can do the same thing. You can read about something, hear about something, and then you go into a movie and then it's visual. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

So listening back to that clip, Emily, what strikes you about that?

Emily Silverman

Well, I'm thinking about my interview question. I'm thinking about…I haven't had a lot of coaching for how to be an interviewer. And I know that you've thought a lot about this and have written about what makes for a good interviewer or a beloved interviewer. And that's something that admittedly, I haven't spent as much time thinking about and would love to learn more from you about. But I did have one coaching session with the wonderful Diantha Parker, who's a radio journalist, who was a mentor to me early on in The Nocturnists. And she walked me through just some of my—I guess you could say mistakes, or just things to keep an eye out for. And I remember one tip that she had was not to feed the answer to the guest, or not to, quote unquote, ask leading questions. And so I'm thinking about the question that I asked Dolan and I said, why do you write? Do you write to persuade and provoke? Or do you write to make art for art's sake? Or is it somewhere in between? And it's funny, it's almost like a tic that I have, where I'll often think in polarities and try to locate myself on that spectrum or locate someone else on that spectrum, and really try to imagine like the extreme on either end, and try to figure out where we're at in that extreme. And so I think that's what I was trying to do when posing the question to her. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

I was struck by a couple of things. One is, you did do something that I often counsel people against doing, which is that you asked multiple questions. 

Emily Silverman

Right. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

But I loved the question and I wouldn't have you change a thing about it. And I didn't realize why. And I think it is that polarity. You weren't leading her, because you were giving her this range that she could walk around in, or she could say, well, neither of those things. It was this. But what it did was I think it elicited a very deep answer from her, and one that gets to that feeling of immersion where I understand this whole issue in a way that I never understood it. Where what a doctor does or what a system does changes somebody's life forever, either against their will or without their knowledge. That's deep in me now. I now think about this issue. I think about those girls and all the other girls in a way that I never would have had I not read that novel. And I think part of the reason that I do this is because I fear that our art forms are at risk. And we need these. We need these so badly. If you just look at what's happening in journalism, in media, in podcasting right now, we may lose a lot of this beautiful work. And the work that, as you say, humanizes the medical profession, humanizes the people who treat the rest of us.

Emily Silverman

Yeah, I think Dolan gave a beautiful response to that question. But yes, I think the fact that she decided to explore this particular story through fiction was very interesting to me. And the fact that she was able to get us to think about this story from the inside out, from the world of the characters inside of it, and all that messiness and all that complexity.

It really is different from reading statistics and facts. It helps us unravel, I think, some of the murkiness of the world that we live in. And that helps us make the world a better place if we're able to think in terms of actual human experiences and not just in terms of abstract morals and ideologies.

Elaine Appleton Grant

What would you say is the reason, if you had to pinpoint a reason, why The Nocturnists has been as popular as it is? It could have been viewed as a niche podcast, as something that doctors might listen to, or nurses, but it's not. You've won a raft of awards. It moves people. People clamor to get on the show or maybe the live events. Why do you think that is?

Emily Silverman

Well, I think even though healthcare and medicine can be viewed as a niche area, it's also so universal. We all have bodies and we all encounter the healthcare system at one point or another and we all die. So even if you're not working in it, you've been touched by it.

When people tell me that they listen to the show and they're not healthcare practitioners, it makes me really happy because it reaffirms what I believe to be the universality of what we're doing and talking about. And then similarly, when clinicians listen to it, I have to always remind myself that they're patients too. People will sometimes say, well, why do you focus on clinicians and not on patients? You know, on some level, it's true. We do focus on clinicians more than patients, but clinicians are also patients. We also have our own doctors and have our own health issues. And so that line, I think, too, between clinician and patient is also not as stark as sometimes people make it seem. 

And then second, I think the fact that we're choosing to explore these themes through storytelling is what really draws people in. Because at the end of the day, it's entertainment. It's joyful. Even when the stories are sad, there's a joy in the act of storytelling. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

You are very good at getting people to talk to you as if you've known them for 10 years. And they tell you their innermost thoughts, it seems. What's your secret? 

Emily Silverman

I like to think that I'm an active listener. I like to think that I'm a curious person. I like to think that I'm a non-judgmental person. And I like to think that people sense that, and they sense that when I'm asking them a question, it's not to tick something off my list, but it's because I really want to know. Like, why did you do that? Or why did you make this? Or what do you think about this? And this is something I've been thinking about. What do you think? And I find that people show up open when I open my portal in that way. 

And it doesn't always happen. Sometimes I have an off day. But more often than not, I feel like the curiosity in the conversation just takes us interesting places. And so that's the best I can give. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Well, I think it's actually spot on. Because people want techniques, they want hacks, they want the perfect question. And that's not it. 

Emily Silverman

I think a lot of it is energy, which is funny to say because—you know, you and I right now aren't anywhere near each other physically. But like we said, there's a lot of information in the voice going from 2D to 3D. And some of that information is nonverbal. I try to create an environment where people feel that they can be honest and won't be judged and that we can just explore and play. And the audio medium is really forgiving in that way. When you're on the mic, there's a way in which you can puzzle through things together and it doesn't feel like a final draft. It feels like an exploration. And it's a lot harder to, I think, cast judgment on something like a conversation, which is alive, it's active, it's unraveling in real time.

Elaine Appleton Grant

How has hosting the Nocturnists changed you in a way that you didn't expect? 

Emily Silverman

I think it taught me a lot, or it continues to teach me a lot, about teamwork. It's easy, I think, to listen to a show and it's a single host and a single voice and you think that it's kind of like a one-woman show, but the Nocturnists is very much not a one-woman show. I couldn't set up a technical computer mic thing without John and Sam. John and Sam saved me on the tech side all the time, and their amazing editing. And Molly Rose Williams is a complete creative genius. She's our head of story development and I could not create the stories that we create without her. She has taught me a lot about not just words and stories and craft, but things like the sound cushion of that testing scene. And how do we create environments? And how do we think about movement in the audio form? And how do we think about silence? And just so much that I've learned from her, creatively and artistically. 

And then of course, on the operations and admin side, my partner in crime, Dr. Ali Block, has taught me a lot about strategic visioning and how to steer an organization. And how to think about hiring, and if and when to bring on new talent. And then Rebecca Groves, and now we have Ashley Pettit, who is our new operations person. I mean, people who are skilled with spreadsheets and organizing data. There are just so many different ways in which the show is buttressed by different people and their talent. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Who is your dream guest for Sound Judgment? Who would you like to be sitting in your seat right now? 

Emily Silverman

Ooh. Someone who I really love is Lulu Miller over at Radiolab. Lulu, she writes and she does audio, so she probably can speak a lot to the differences between those two forms. But I just love her childlike wonder and the topics that she picks for Radiolab and the way that they explore it and how they do it in whimsical ways and how they incorporate music. And I would love to hear you speak with her about her process and how she works to make stuff.

Elaine Appleton Grant

That was Emily Silverman, host of The Nocturnists, which I urge you all to listen to. On every episode of Sound Judgment, I give you a few takeaways. Here are today's. For more, subscribe to the Sound Judgment newsletter on Substack. The link is in our show notes at sound judgment podcast dot com, along with other resources mentioned in the episode. 

1. Our creative work has a huge ripple effect that we can't predict. Like when shame researcher Luna Delazal emailed Emily out of the blue to say she'd noticed that the theme of shame came up again and again in The Nocturnist, but nobody was saying the word shame. Out of that came in the Shame in Medicine documentary series, which won multiple nominations and awards, including a gold medal in the Anthem Awards.
2. Rules are made to be broken. Emily was taught not to ask leading questions, and she didn't like that she'd asked Dolan Perkins-Valdez a question that posed two possible outcomes. Do you write to persuade and provoke, or do you write to make art for art's sake, or is it somewhere in between? But that question worked beautifully, because it offered a range of ideas that Dolan could respond to in a meaningful way. If Emily had instead said, why do you write? Dolan may not have been able to articulate an interesting response.
3. It is through storytelling, the humanizing of issues and events and people, that we gain whole new worlds of understanding. As I said, that comprehension about how doctors or the entire system can change someone's life forever against their will and without their knowledge will be with me forever. Not just because of Dolan Perkins-Valdez's book, Take My Hand, but also because of the conversation she had with Emily.

That's all for today. Next on Sound Judgment, we go behind the scenes for a look at the process of reporting and writing a complex investigative series. Specifically, The 13th Step, a groundbreaking investigation into sexual misconduct in the addiction treatment industry. Listen to The 13th Step. It is so good. It recently won the DuPont Columbia Award, which is often referred to as the Pulitzer of Broadcasting.

Sound Judgment is a production of Podcast Allies. I'm happy to announce a slate of new storytelling workshops based on our work here at Sound Judgment. Sign up at podcast allies dot com slash workshops. Again, that link is also in our show notes. Sound Judgment is produced by me, Elaine Appleton Grant. Audrey Nelson is our production assistant. Engineering by Kevin Kline and podcast management by Tina Bassir.