Who Gets to Tell the Story (and How)
How podcast host Arielle Duhaime-Ross told a story that pushed their buttons--and the effect it had on her
“What is my legacy?” —Arielle Duhaime-Ross
Preview: Episode 61 Telling Difficult Personal Stories with Kindness, with Arielle Duhaime-Ross
Arielle Duhaime-Ross was surprised, and angry, to discover their relatives had been baptized into the Mormon Church after their deaths—and that this would likely happen to them, too. This unwanted baptism after death was especially upsetting considering that Arielle is black and queer. “It feels like everything about me is not accepted by church,” they say. And for the church to publish their baptism on Ancestry.com, as the church does, feels like “and erasure of who I am.” In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with the podcast host about the choices they made on how to tell the story in an episode on VICE News Reports, including what other perspectives to include, how the form for the narrative emerged, and how (though no facts changed) creating the podcast helped them to find some relief and peace in the process. We also discuss the idea of legacy—what stories will be told about us in the future? And who gets to tell those stories?
Arielle Duhaime-Ross (They/Them) is a correspondent and the host of two podcasts for VICE News: VICE News Reports, a weekly documentary-style news podcast, and A Show About Animals. Arielle was previously the host of Reset, a podcast about technology, science, design and power, from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Before that, Arielle was the first climate change correspondent in American nightly TV news, reporting for HBO’s VICE News Tonight, and a science reporter at Vox Media’s The Verge. They’ve received numerous awards, including the 2019 Science in Society Journalism Award, the Silver 2019 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award. Arielle has written for Scientific American, Nature Medicine, The Atlantic, and Quartz.
What We’re Reading and Listening to:
Rosemerry:
I was grateful someone shared with me this link to LitHub’s gathering of poems by four contemporary Ukrainian poets—they help give a sense of the land and its people.
One of my favorite contemporary poets, the prolific, irreverent and utterly wonderful David Lee, at long last has a book of selected works, Rusty Barbed Wire, from the new Samara Press. If you are not yet familiar with Lee’s work, this would be the best place to start—a sampling of him from across the decades. High comedy, devastation, and amazing storytelling are present in most of his poems—and others about the western landscapes have a transporting lyric beauty.
Christie:
I stumbled upon Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi and was immediately sucked in. The novel’s protagonist is scientist, and the book explores her experience as a child of immigrants as well as mental illness, racism and the tension between scientific and religious approaches to understanding the world. The writing is stellar and the characters are vivid. I loved it so much I’m excited to read Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegowing.
Together
It smacks me, sometimes,
how connected we are—
though we draw boundaries,
build walls, fight wars,
call names, and kill. All it takes
is a photo of earth from space
and I’m stunned again,
how much we are in this together.
And though we’d rather not know it,
every choice we make
affects everyone, everything else.
Perhaps this is why I weep
when the woman I’ve barely met
embroiders me a sweater
with a word she knows I’ll love
and then brings it to my home.
Because it’s proof of kindness,
a confirmation that beauty
not only exists, it will lead us to each other.
How easily two strangers
might become friends.
It can happen anywhere
on this small blue and green planet—
anywhere two people co-exist,
the invitation to be generous,
thoughtful, to think of new ways
to be good to each other.
Each kindness a bridge that spans
the world’s flaws. Each moment,
another chance to build another bridge.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
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This week, we speak with Arielle about how practice makes better practice, how a new way of journaling has made it both more productive and more fun, and about how destressing might improve your creative practice.
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Two Questions:
(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)
What thoughts do you have about your own creative legacy?