Emerging Form is Back!
Season 3 begins this Thursday with an episode about how a personal narrative can tell a larger political story
What a crazy summer it’s been—and we’re glad to be back!
Preview: Episode 24 with Catherine Saint Louis
Friends, we are thrilled to bring you Season 3 of Emerging Form, and we couldn’t be more excited about Thursday’s episode. Our guest, Catherine Saint Louis, is the senior editor of podcasts for Neon Hum Media, an L.A. based podcast house. Catherine has been a friend of the show from the beginning, and in this episode we talk to her about how she made her unforgettable segment “Rubber Bullets,” a podcast episode released on Telescope in early July 2020. It’s an emotional, political, hard hitting story about a black man who was shot with rubber bullets during a Black Lives Matter event by the very same police officers he had trained in implicit bias. We talk about how to balance facts and emotions, how to find a story's focus and arc, and ways we might include our own emotional responses to a personal story with much larger political and social implications.
Good reads
Christie
· I absolutely loved Emily Willingham’s new book, Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis, which came out this week. She writes about some fascinating and amazing animal penises, sure, but she also gets into the culture of science and society too. It’s a must read for all science nerds! And check out this Q&A I did with Emily at Last Word On Nothing.
· I read Read Sigrid Nunez’s new novel, What Are You Going Through, almost straight through in one sitting, and I cannot stop marveling at how such a compact book could contain to much of this life. I fell in love with Nunez after reading her previous novel, The Friend, and now I’m going to go back and read her previous novels too.
· On Jacqui Banaszynski's recommendation, I recently read Hiroshima, John Hersey's incredible reporting of first person accounts of that first a-bomb, and I can't get it out of my mind. I read it in print, but it's online here. It feels eerily relevant to our current time, and I'm looking forward to reading Lesley M. M. Blume's new book about Hersey's reporting on the bomb.
Some Great Upcoming Online Events:
Rosemerry
· The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival—without a doubt the biggest and most celebrated poetry festival in America, will livestream for FREE! The festival runs from October 22-November 1 and features a diverse lineup of America’s top poets.
· From September 22-October 2, the Collective Trauma Summit 2020 will be livestreaming for FREE. In addition to scientists, therapists, theologians and trauma specialists, there will be poetry readings and discussions of how the arts provide a pathway toward healing.
Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking
On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.
Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.
There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Two Questions:
(share your answers with us here on Substack)
Is it important (or even possible) to remain “objective” when telling another person’s personal story? What does “objectivity” even mean?
What do we owe our subjects when we’re telling their stories? What moral responsibility do we have to them?