Should you tell your own story? Navigating the tricky art of memoir

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

Elaine Appleton Grant

Welcome back, storytellers. It's season four of Sound Judgment, and I'm so glad to be back. 

Today, I'm tackling the kind of story you may have reported yourself—or thought about sharing, and maybe even chickened out on. And that is a deeply personal, emotional story of something that you went through—and that you want to use as an example, or a lens into a bigger issue. Maybe it's one that matters to millions of people. I've been tempted to try this myself, a few times. When it's done well, it's riveting. But pulling it off is hard. It can be painful, for one. And it can be tough to know whether your story actually illustrates a broader issue, or whether it's simply your story. Those are just two of the obstacles that producer Maribel Quezada Smith grapples with in her piece, “The Latino Expectation of Pregnancy: a Story of Pregnancy Loss,” for the Pulso Podcast. It's one of the hardest stories almost anyone could imagine doing: It's the story of the death of her daughter, Azul, just moments after the birth of her son, Renzi. 

From the get go, Maribel had her eye firmly on the issues pregnancy loss raises for the Latino community—expectation, guilt, and shame.

Clip from The Pulso Podcast

Maribel Quezada Smith: I’m looking at the screen now, watching both babies, and Doug and I start breathing easy again. As I’m watching the ultrasound of my two kiddos intently, I’m not noticing that the technician quietly excuses herself to leave the room. When she comes back, the doctor is with her, and she has a look of panic on her face. And I think her hands are shaking. Her first words are: “There’s a problem with Baby A.”

Elaine Appleton Grant

Maribel is a bilingual writer, producer, and director with many years of experience in TV and audio. She runs her own production company, Diferente Creative. She also cofounded BIPOC Podcast Creators, an organization devoted to amplifying the voices and stories of people of color. 

And one word of caution. This episode discusses very sensitive topics and the death of an infant. Please take care when listening.

This is Sound Judgment, where we investigate just what it takes to become a beloved audio storyteller by pulling apart one episode at a time, together. I’m Elaine Appleton Grant.

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Elaine Appleton Grant

And now, to my interview with Maribel Quezada Smith. I asked Maribel, of all the podcasts she’s produced for Pulso and other media, why did she choose this one to share with me?

Maribel Quezada Smith

I think it's the one that was the hardest for me to produce and I go back and forth on things that I could have done better, things that I could have changed. For me, it was a natural. You asked for one of the hardest episodes I've ever made. This is definitely it. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Oh, that's so interesting that you interpreted it that way because I said—what I say to all of my guests is share an episode that you loved or that you found very challenging. And listen to the way you were like, Oh, I've got to find one of the hardest episodes I've ever made.

Maribel Quezada Smith 

Well, I’m Mexican. So everything I do has to have some sort of pain and strife to it, or it's not worth it, okay?

Elaine Appleton Grant

I love it. I love it. 

So, let's get to this episode It's called “The Latino Expectation of Fertility: A Story of Pregnancy Loss.” Before I play a clip from it, you told me earlier that it took two years for this episode to come about. Tell me, why two years? What happened?

Maribel Quezada Smith 

In those two years, I think I needed a lot of time to heal and process. And to be honest, I'm not totally healed from it yet. I still have to work through a lot of things, but I just needed time to organize my thoughts and make sure that I was ready to be able to put the story together in a way that made sense. I also think that I needed a deadline. I knew that I wanted to do something with all of this information and all of these things that I had kept, but I didn't know where to start. And I needed guidance and I needed a deadline. That was something that I have to be very thankful for because my producer—my fellow producer Charlie Garcia—was very good at supporting me in that regard. You know, he provided a lot of insight and feedback and I had deadlines and I couldn't go backward.

Once I said, okay, I'm going to do this, everyone at Pulso Podcast expected me to deliver that, including my cohost Liz Alarcón and the entire team. So there was no going back. 

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Let's just set the stage. What happened was that you had gotten pregnant and you found out, to your joy and the joy of your husband and presumably many of your many, many relatives—you say you have 32 first cousins—that you were going to have twins. But not too far into the pregnancy, you discover that one of the babies is not developing properly and will not live after birth, but that you basically have to go through the entire pregnancy in order for the other child to survive. 

And for whatever reason, and I'm really curious about this, you documented all of this in audio. You did voice memos, you brought recording equipment into the hospital room…At what point did you say, I need to document all this in audio? 

Maribel Quezada Smith 

Right before I got pregnant with the twins, I had gone through a miscarriage a few months earlier. So when I got pregnant the second time, I decided that I wanted to journal in some sort of way and keep track of my progress as a way to kind of deal with a little bit of the emotion that was happening. And I was dealing with anxiety, I was scared. I think a lot of people can relate to that feeling after having had a miscarriage. So I was like, you know what, I'm going to document this because I think that—I'm having a moment here, because I'm thinking—back then, I thought this will be such a triumphant moment when I have this baby and everything goes well. Imagine all of my fears, and whatever I've had, and anxiety—will go away. And this will be a great story to tell my kids one day. That was my thought, that it was going to be a really happy ending kind of story.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

How far along were you when you discovered the truth? 

Maribel Quezada Smith 

I was about 13 weeks, something around that. 

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Okay. So relatively early on. Did it occur to you, should I continue documenting this? Do I want to continue documenting this in audio? 

Maribel Quezada Smith 

I took a big pause. I remember I took two months off, where I didn't record anything. Because I had a combination of writing and voice memos and videos. And in fact, I'm not even sure I talked to anybody much at all about it, other than my husband and close family members. Then I let people know. As I was kind of crossing into the final trimester, I started talking more about it and I started to feel the need to continue to journal and continue this thing that I had started, because I thought, if nothing else, I think my son will want to hear this one day.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Let's get into the details a little bit here. I want to start by listening to a kind of a disclaimer that you give at the very beginning. of the episode. 

Clip from The Pulso Podcast

Maribel Quezada Smith: I grew up hearing the stereotype that Latinos are fertile human beings, expected to produce large families. And this stereotype was mostly confirmed everywhere I looked. My grandparents all came from large families, and my maternal grandmother had eight children. I have 32 first cousins. Yes, I know all their names. Suffice it to say that in our Latino community, there's a familial expectation for procreation. Many of us who come from Catholic upbringings are taught that children are a blessing and a part of a step in fulfilling our purpose in life. This is my personal story about the guilt we feel when we're not living up to those expectations. It's also a story about loss, grief, and finding courage. There are experiences in this story that many can relate to, but few are often invited to share. You're listening to the Pulso Podcast. We'll be right back. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

So, I play that for several reasons. I have a lot of questions about that introduction. The first is that, as we said, the title is “The Latino Expectation of Fertility: A Story of Pregnancy Loss.”

And you start out by telling us about those expectations—not just of the community, but by implication of you yourself. And, every now and then, you mention the word guilt. 

Tell me how you decided to frame this story, because you could have framed it in any number of ways, but you chose, at the very least, to make the title about the Latino expectation. I'm curious about that. 

Maribel Quezada Smith 

As I mentioned in the intro, I have always kind of carried this weight of family duty that I know that is something that's very common among many Latino families and individuals. When I talked to my fellow producers about it, everyone agreed, like, yeah, yeah, we feel the same way. There's a certain expectation of procreation and you gotta have a family. When are you having kids? So it felt natural to say that. There's also this relief of being understood by the larger community. Like: other people understand, other people go through this and feel the same way. There's this expectation and it feels heavy on your shoulders. So that's kind of where I was coming from. 

Because even when I got pregnant and had these babies. People still didn't think it was enough that I went through a traumatic experience to have these babies and that I was able to have a happy, healthy baby out of that experience. They still pressured me and still continue to ask to this day when I'm having more kids. There's this continued expectations. Why wouldn't you want to have like more kids? How dare you not do that? How dare you not give your son siblings? How dare you not bless us with more family? And it's almost accusatory, to a point. I mean, I actually had a moment at the kitchen table with my uncle last year where it got a little bit contentious. Where he was just coming at me, like, well, why? But why not? And I just don't think that's something that I should have to explain, but many people understand. Once I talk about like expectation and family duty and the fulfilling of procreation, it's like, yeah, we get it. We know.

Elaine Appleton Grant

It's framed as a story about guilt, but really, it's very lightly touched. There's no moment of tension between you and a family member. There's no voice memo where you're saying, I can't believe I'm going through this, and I feel guilty about it. It's not a heavy hand. Was that on purpose or is it simply because you didn't—once you'd mentioned it, you didn't need to? 

Maribel Quezada Smith 

Like I said, I think that we understand each other in the community. You don't really have to go deep into the feeling of what it's like to feel guilty about something. We feel guilty about stuff all the time. As I said before, I'm Mexican. If I'm not doing something that's taking strife and pain, then it's not worth it.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

I'm from a Jewish family, I understand guilt. I get it. 

Maribel Quezada Smith 

Yeah. Unfortunately, that's something that kind of crosses a lot of boundaries when it comes to cultures. It goes beyond the Latino community. As a mother and as someone who went through pregnancy loss and miscarriage, et cetera, I just knew that people would understand what that was. I thought about mentioning certain things that did happen around that guilt, specifically with a conversation that happened between me and my mom. I just don't know how relevant it will be to the story and if it's going to really carry it forward. So much of what we do in production and in writing has to do with what propels the story forward. Is it going to pay off? Is it serving the audience, and how? And I didn't think that that would. So that's why we didn't include it. 

It's funny because I do wish that I had gone more into statistics and numbers that are out there. I wish I could have found more figures that would show me how many people have miscarriages who are Latinas or Latino. And I couldn't find them. I couldn't find official breakdowns by race or ethnicity. What I found was very loose, and older. And I did read some articles that talked about how it was actually hard to estimate the amount of miscarriages that happen in the U.S. every year, because so many people don't report them. Because there's shame around that. So like, how do you even report on pregnancy loss accurately if people aren't actually fully reporting it? 

Elaine Appleton Grant 

It's fascinating. And a little bit of personal history here. So years ago, I did a story about the opioid crisis in New Hampshire, where I was a reporter at the time. I did a series about it. And I thought going into this series that it was going to be really hard to get people to tell their personal stories because it's so painful, it's so horrific. And that the statistics would be easy to come by. And it turned out to be exactly the opposite. And that's basically what you're saying here. Speaking of statistics, I've got a clip to play for you and a question about that. 

Clip from The Pulso Podcast

Maribel Quezada Smith: Only this time I don't feel excited. I feel scared. Because I've already gone through a miscarriage. And even though I've been doing all of the right things, even before trying to get pregnant again—like taking my prenatal vitamins every day, exercising, and even avoiding alcohol—I still have no control over the outcome.

And like me, many other people out there have experienced this feeling. According to the National Library of Medicine, 25 percent of known pregnancies in the United States end in miscarriage, which is a pregnancy lost before 20 weeks. After 20 weeks, the CDC estimates that about 24,000 babies are stillborn every year.

Knowing that the odds of miscarriage increase after the first one, I am compelled to record this journey as a way to help me process all of the feelings and thoughts currently inside my head. And so, there I am…

Elaine Appleton Grant

It's very interesting to me that you just said you wished you could have gotten more statistics, because conventional wisdom is that it's very difficult to give listeners numbers and dates and statistics in audio, because we can't rewind the tape, right? And so there's a danger of losing people with too many statistics. And you go back and forth a little bit between this very raw, very emotional tape. And then you'll pull back as you did here, to say, okay, let me put this in context for you. I imagine that you thought about different ways to widen this lens and open up to these other stories. 

Maribel Quezada Smith

Telling a story like this is so challenging in a short amount of time, because there were a lot of things that I could have added to help bridge those gaps. But you know, my editor was like, ah, we got to cut this. We got to cut that. Let's propel forward. Let's not get stuck here. I could have gotten stuck in the nitty gritty of the numbers. And I could have been like, okay, I'm sharing these numbers because when I called my doctor on the first time that I found that I was pregnant and I told her I was pregnant, her response was, oh, that's great. But just so you know, about one in four pregnancies end up in a miscarriage. I don't know why she felt compelled to tell me that, but she did. It was almost like, don't get too excited. And I was so angry because I felt like she was jinxing me, even though I know that's not true, but it felt that way. So I could have done that, right? I could have told that story and been like, my doctor told me this, based on these statistics. 

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Right, right, exactly. 

Maribel Quezada Smith

In that moment, again, given that I didn't have tape, or journaled about that specific moment, I didn't feel like it was the right thing to add. It didn't feel a hundred percent necessary. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

It wouldn't have pulled you forward, if what you're looking at is momentum and what's absolutely necessary to tell this story, that's always going to push it forward. Which I think is a wise framework, especially in a story like this, where, as you said, you started out with, I didn't know where to start. I could have gone in so many different directions. 

I was interested when I looked up Pulso and saw that it's part of pulso.org. Which is the advocacy organization, as it says, designed to, quote, increase the political power of the projected 32 million Hispanic voters. And so I wondered—every podcast that we sell or release on our own feeds or whatever, they're for a particular audience for a particular reason.

And that comes with its direction, its constraints, its purpose. And so I wondered, given that purpose, how much of any podcast that you do for Pulso, but using this as an example, needs to be prescriptive in some way? 

Maribel Quezada Smith

There's always a goal to make sure that we're reflecting the Latino experience. So that's very important and it's a big focus for us. There's also a goal of making sure that we are not necessarily answering questions or settling facts, but posing questions and leaving them up to the listener to decide for themselves.

With this episode, there was that question of guilt, shame, and family duty. The expectations. Do we feel those expectations? Do these expectations matter? Do we feel guilt around pregnancy loss? Of course we do, right? But maybe some people don't. Why? Why do we feel that guilt? It's about leaving those open-ended questions for the audience to kind of ponder over.

For me personally, I always want to leave the listener thinking.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Glynn Washington says the same thing, about Snap Judgment. He says, I'll never tell you what the story means—because the minute I tell you what the story means, you stop thinking. But if I don't tell you what it means, you're going home and you're talking to your spouse and you're talking to your friend and you're saying, did you hear this story and what do you think? And yeah. 

Maribel Quezada Smith 

Well, again, I try to be really careful about not telling people how to think. Just kind of giving them examples, giving them experiences. Here's how I saw this. Here's what I experienced. Now, here's your chance to think about it. So the stats kind of help a little bit, of like—here's why we're telling you the story, right? More so I just wanted to make sure that I was posing questions as we went through the story, and giving people my experience through it. Because all of our episodes do have a story to them. And we like it when we can find somebody to kind of walk us through that story and especially if it's a first person story. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

I wanted to get into the heart of that first-person story. So I played another clip for Maribel. It's right after she learns that one of her unborn twins has been diagnosed with anencephaly, a birth defect that is nearly always fatal.

Clip from The Pulso Podcast

Maribel Quezada Smith: She says something about the baby's head not forming all the way, but I'm crying so hard that I can no longer listen. What I don't know is that this isn't the worst part.

It's December 15th. I'm now in my—nearing the end of the first trimester of pregnancy. We're scheduled to see the high-risk OB next week. It seems like a lifetime to wait. I found this website, called anencephaly.info, which I'm so grateful for, because I was reading personal stories from many other mothers. What happens is that a lot of the time, the baby will develop, will keep growing. But it won't grow as much as the other one, as the one that's developing normal. So, when they're born—sometimes they're born alive. Sometimes they're not born alive. I know I have to get through it. I know, like—I'm mad and I'm sad and I'm angry and I don't know what to feel. I never thought that this would happen to me.

Elaine Appleton Grant

So it's not unusual for creators to struggle when thinking about when to include their own tears in a clip or when to think about the same thing for a source or a guest. Have you been in the position as a host or an interviewer of deciding whether to include somebody else's tears?

Maribel Quezada Smith 

Many times. As I mentioned before, before podcasting became a bigger part of my life, I produced a lot of TV shows in the true crime genre. So I interviewed a lot of victims’ families. And it will sound cruel for me to say this, but it was almost like a necessary, to make sure that the family or the person being interviewed showed deep emotion and raw emotion. And of course, a lot of the time what that means is tears. So it was almost encouraged by higher-ups, to make sure that we had emotional content. So yeah, I've definitely included and have been told to include that a lot. It's not something that I personally shy away from. I don't think crying is bad, so I try to normalize it. And I think maybe that has to do with our own upbringings. How we see crying. If we see it as a negative thing or as a painful thing. Or you could look at it kind of the way I do. I look at it as a cathartic thing. To cry is to release whatever emotion you're feeling, so I don't find it negative or positive. I just find it that it is and that it is valid and it's worthy to share. Like there's nothing shameful around it or nothing taboo about it. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

So you didn't really give it a second thought, then. 

Maribel Quezada Smith

Oh, a little. I mean, I cried a lot more than what you heard, obviously. It's also a stylistic choice to not necessarily have sobbing in the ears of people. It's not necessarily pleasant, but I think it's important to mark the feeling and the emotion that I was going through. 

Elaine Appleton Grant 

I want to play another moment for you. You are recording the moment that your babies are born.

Clip from The Pulso Podcast

Maribel Quezada Smith: June 2020. 

Woman: You have to push.

Man: Keep pushing. Keep coming. 

Woman: He's almost here. Push, push, push, push. 

Maribel Quezada Smith: Ahhhh! 

Woman: You can grab him. Why did you hit me?

Maribel Quezada Smith: Renzi comes into the world first. And Azul arrives about a minute later. 

Woman: Push for me. Push, push, push, push, push, push, push. Push, push, push. Oh, you're doing so good. So nice. Good job, Mommy. 

Maribel Quezada SmithA few minutes later, lying next to her brother on my chest. Azul passes away.

Maribel Quezada Smith 

That made me cry. 

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Yeah. I'm sorry. 

Maribel Quezada Smith

No. Hearing my son's first cry is what really—yeah, that was special. It's special. I'm glad I have that. I don't regret recording that at all. And thinking about why I chose that is because—I can tell you that I thought many times, do I really want people to hear me giving birth? 

But I feel it's so, so important to the story to show the strength that it took to get to that point. And to me, that's a culmination of the strength. Like I still had the power and the strength to push two babies out of me. And then there was an executive decision as to whether or not to use both my son's birth moment and Azul's birth moment, because it was like, well, is it necessary? We already heard you give birth. Do we need to do it again? I made the executive decision that I had to make sure that hers was included as well, because I always felt like she came second to everything. Literally she was born second. So I was like, no, this is not going anywhere because she was just as important, and if not even more important, to making sure that both Renzi and I made it out of the situation alive and well. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

And that you had a connection to your daughter. I mean, you had a connection regardless of whether she had been born alive or not, but you had a moment of alive connection. 

Maribel Quezada Smith

Yeah, and to me that's so real and so important because it's so easy to forget that there was another human being there. I mean, it's sometimes it's easy to think like, oh, it's not that big of a deal because you didn't really get to know them, or you didn't—they weren't really around very long.

We make these judgments, but I wanted to make sure it was clear she was there, alive, and she came into this world. 

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Tell me your biggest bit of happiness about or satisfaction about having done this story, and your biggest regret about either having done it or the way you did it.

Maribel Quezada Smith 

I wish I could have had more time to establish a historical throughline a little bit better. My pregnancy was so tied to the global pandemic. I'm having two Black children. I'm bringing Black children into the world during a time where we are under social unrest and Black people are being killed by police, the very people that are supposed to protect them. And George Floyd had just been murdered two, three weeks before I gave birth.

And we were on lockdown, and we were on curfew the day that I gave birth. How can I not mention that? How can I not bring that in? I journaled about it. And there were so many times where I was so afraid to bring these kids into the world. So I kind of wish that we would have had the time to do that a little bit more justice, for lack of a better term. To make sure that the historical throughline was tighter, because that is such an important mission of the Pulso Podcast, is to also have a historical throughline.

As far as the joy, I'm proud that I was able to tell the story and share it with the world. I'm proud that I was able to hopefully help other people through my own experience not feel so alone. That was my biggest thing. I want people to know that this happens to a lot of us. And it can happen to anybody.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Did you get much response? 

Maribel Quezada Smith 

We got a lot of responses, a lot of messages. I heard from people that I've known for years, who never talked about it. Never talked about their miscarriages or their pregnancy losses or what they saw maybe their mothers or significant others go through. I've never received so many messages from women, who I knew and didn't know, about this topic. It felt like I had fulfilled a mission. I do feel like I've honored my daughter by telling her story. That's one thing. It's really not my story. 

Elaine Appleton Grant 

And that's—we could talk about that problem for hours. For hours. 

Okay, well, thank you, Maribel. This is, really moving and very raw, very intimate. And I think it was brave of you to do it and wrestle it to the ground and do it at the right time for you.

Maribel Quezada Smith

Thank you so much. You know, you brought up a lot of things that made me think about this. And now I'm like, how do I fix that? 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Oh, no, it's very good. You don't have to go back and recut it. I mean, that's the trouble with storytelling. Sometimes in my worst days, I say, gosh, I wish that I had loved math because there's an answer at the end of the calculation. 

Maribel Quezada Smith

Yeah. Correct. You cannot argue with that.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Exactly. But you can tell a story 50 different ways. And what's the right way? You know, that's why Sound Judgment exists. What's the right way? 

Elaine Appleton Grant

So, Maribel, lightning round questions. First, who's your dream guest for Sound Judgment?

Maribel Quezada Smith 

Shonda Rhimes. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Oh.

Maribel Quezada Smith

She has a podcast network. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

What's the one thing you would want to know from Shonda Rhimes?

Maribel Quezada Smith 

Shonda Rhimes is an amazing writer. I can tell the minute she touched something. When she touches a piece of content, whether it's for television or for audio, I know that she was involved heavily. I want to know how she writes so well. It's just—she pulls you in, but she also does a really good job putting you in context with the storyline and the characters. And she surrounds you with these worlds that are sometimes very hard to believe in real life, but somehow she makes it easy to believe and to buy into. She's damn good at what she does. 

Elaine Appleton Grant 

The last lightning round question is: Everybody wants to be Ira Glass or Terry Gross or Shonda Rhimes, right? But what are those qualities? In your mind, what does it take to become that beloved audio storyteller? 

Maribel Quezada Smith

If you can make somebody completely buy into the story and feel enwrapped by it, that's a talent. They are in it, they buy it, they are 100 percent into the story without a doubt. They don't question it. I'm coming at it from a fiction standpoint. It's very simple to question made-up worlds. But when you can have somebody just buy into it and bypass the world, just kind of say, I'm here and I'm already in here. I don't need to question why this building looks like that or why this person speaks that way. Everybody and everything inside of this world makes damn sense and goes well together. That's what makes a beloved storyteller to me. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

At the end of every episode, I give you some takeaways. Here are today's. For more, subscribe to our Substack newsletter, also called Sound Judgment.

1. Maribel sees her story as part of a larger problem: common pregnancy loss in the Latino community. She shared it to help listeners feel less alone. That's a worthy goal. But it's tricky to weave statistics into a personal story without creating a herky, jerky pace. One great way to do this is to use your listener's curiosity. Storytellers, lead just up to the climax of a scene, but don't give away the ending. Then break away to sandwich in just enough data to say, hey, this applies broadly and maybe it applies to you. Your listeners will stick with you because they have to hear the end of the scene. Go back and land it. 
2. Have you had a story idea for so long that you're worried it's too late to tell it? Maribel needed a couple of years to heal from the trauma before she could act as a reporter on her own story. The question isn't, Am I too late? It should be, is it too soon? 
3. You need deadlines, and a partner. Without a deadline and a producer, Maribel implies, this story wouldn't exist! Plus, her producer helped her make tough choices about what to include and what to leave out, choices that are much tougher without a producer or a story editor.
4. A good podcast or radio show is clear on its mission from the outset. Did you notice how Maribel easily referred to Pulso's goals? One is to always reflect the experiences of its Latino audience; another is to offer a historical throughline. Maribel uses those goals for true north for any Pulso episode. Does your show have a clearly stated mission?
5. Finally, writing a script isn't a math problem. There are so many different ways to tell any story. At the end, Maribel said we discussed things that make her wonder, "How can I fix this?" Self-doubt comes with the territory of what we do. Working with a supportive partner can help, but ultimately you just have to choose. There's no one right answer. And that's a good thing. 

That’s all for today. Next on the show: for years, as host of both American History Tellers and American Scandal, Lindsay Graham has found himself at the top of the charts. We pull apart History Daily and talk about bringing history to life and navigating the changing nature of the podcast industry. Don’t miss it.

Thanks to my guest, Maribel Quezada Smith. If you loved this episode, you'll love Lessons from a Master Storyteller with Snap Judgment's Glynn Washington. That link's in our show notes, on our website, sound judgment podcast dot com. 

Did this episode move you? It's a great conversation starter, about storytelling and about the toughest things we're forced to face in our lives. Share it with a friend who needs to hear it.

Sound Judgment is a production of Podcast Allies. If you’ve been looking for a listener-first, story-first production partner, get in touch at podcast allies dot com. We’d love to work with you. Sound Judgment is produced by me, Elaine Appleton Grant. Audrey Nelson produced this episode. Editing by Kevin Kline. Podcast management by Tina Bassir. I’ll see you soon.