Dear listeners,
This is Erin Barker, host of the Story Collider podcast and artistic director of The Story Collider, with a special announcement this week.
As you can probably understand, the pandemic has drastically influenced the way that Story Collider does our work. Normally, all of our stories are recorded in front of a live audience, at events held in cities all around the world. But for the past seven months or so, that hasn’t been a possibility, since we’re committed to following scientific guidelines and keeping our communities safe. And we don’t really know when it will be possible again. Though we still hold live shows online quite often — find out more here! — it can be quite difficult to get a high-quality recording in that format, compared to when we could have venue technicians on hand to set up and monitor equipment.
Initially, we’d been hoping we could coast for a few months on the backlog of stories that we have in the tank -- and we have! But in June, we started to realize that this situation could last until that tank was empty, or longer. And we also wanted to make sure that we were still bringing you, our listeners, new, fresh stories. We decided that we needed to adapt and come up with a new way of doing things.
So for these past few months, we’ve been improvising studio recordings remotely, in our storytellers’ homes, asking them to shut themselves in walk-in closets or huddle under blankets to get podcast-quality sound for all of you, while we monitor the audio remotely from our screens. Have you ever had the experience of telling a brilliant and respected scientist that you need them to surround themselves with pillows and put a blanket on their head while they share their deepest emotional truths? Because I now have. Life in a pandemic is truly wild.
These stories will sound a little different from what you’ve been used to typically hearing on our podcast. There won’t be any audience response. But they will still be true, personal stories about science. And I think you will find that they’re some of the most intimate, most powerful, most inspiring stories we’ve ever recorded.
Because of the time and effort that goes into producing stories in this way, we’re also switching to a series format. Instead of coming to you every single week, Story Collider will now come to you in 10-week series, centered around a theme. But don’t worry -- in between those series, we will bring you periodic bonus episodes, featuring stories that we were able to record from our live online shows and stories that we still have leftover from our pre-COVID live events.
I’m very excited to share with you that our first series will be debuting in two weeks on Friday, Nov. 13, and it is titled “Stories of COVID-19.” That’s right -- we have decided to fully lean in to our circumstances, as they say. So starting on Nov. 13, we’ll be sharing this series of thirty stories from all across the spectrum of experience of the pandemic. From doctors and nurses, but also from researchers, activists, contact tracers, volunteers, comedians, journalists, and more.
And because so many of us, right now, are struggling with what the pandemic will mean for our daily lives and our future, we’re also going to include, with each episode, an interview with a relevant expert who can help us connect these personal stories to the bigger picture of the pandemic’s impact on our culture and society.
Each of our ten episodes will air in two parts, the first part on Friday and the second part on Monday.
I can’t even tell you how psyched I am to share these stories with you after all these months of production -- I feel like I have been keeping this amazing secret that I’m bursting to tell. I can’t wait to hear from all of you with your thoughts and reactions. Please do reach out, whether it’s via social media -- you can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram -- or if you want to drop me a line at erin@storycollider.org. We really want to know what you think about our new format.
As we prepare to debut this series, I want to thank everyone who made it possible. Story Collider’s deputy director Nisse Greenberg and operations manager Lindsay Cooper, as well as our board of directors, for their invaluable support and advice and, in some cases, stories.
I want to thank each of our producers who were part of the team finding and developing the stories for this series: Paula Croxson, Misha Gajewski, Gastor Almonte, Lily Be, Eli Chen, Christine Gentry, Kayla Glynn, Emma Young, Emma Yarbrough, Katherine J. Wu, and Josh Silberg.
As always we are so grateful to Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.
And most of all, I want to thank each of the thirty incredible storytellers who contributed to this series, sharing precious and deeply personal moments of joy, heartbreak, loss, courage, hope, or all of the above.
Stay tuned for our Stories of COVID-19 trailer, which will air on our feed next week. And for the start of the series on Nov. 13!
As always, thanks for listening!
Erin Barker, Artistic Director of Story Collider