How Storytelling Can Heal Your Life

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On this episode, Emily Silverman and host Elaine Appleton Grant discuss: 

— Why she thought starting a live storytelling event for physicians should be her next step as she was coming to terms with being in the wrong career while also searching for her biological parents and considering becoming a mother.

— How leaving the full-time practice of medicine felt like an "identity death" to Emily — and how journalists and podcasters navigating media in 2024 are also experiencing identity death, and 

— How Emily found her way to a new career through her love of theater and storytelling, and how bringing the arts to medicine is serving the Nocturnists' goal of shattering the myth of the physician God and humanizing medicine. 

Emily and Elaine break down two episodes of The Nocturnists:

"Pass/Fail," Episode 4 of the 10-part documentary series Shame in Medicine: The Lost Forest, takes listeners into the stressful world of medical students taking an exam that has the power to dictate the rest of their lives. Put yourself in the shoes of students wondering if this one test will prevent them from becoming a doctor — or if it will bar them from pursuing their passion for their specialty? Emily gives us some lessons on getting listeners to contribute personal stories — and how her team weaves them together in heart-stopping fashion. 

We also examine the the power of novels to help us deeply understand the harmful consequences of medicine practiced for the wrong reasons, and how art can help us empathize in a way that journalistic accounts of history do not. In "Conversations: Dolen Perkins-Valdez" Emily learns more about the 1973 case of the Relf sisters, who were forcibly sterilized at a Montgomery, Alabama health clinic. We discuss strategies for how to hold intimate, revealing interviews — and when you should break the rules. 

Plus: Emily shares the single most important key to producing sound-rich, highly produced longform audio stories. 

Emily Silverman, MD is an internal medicine physician at UCSF, writer, and creator/host of The Nocturnists, an award-winning medical storytelling organization that has uplifted the voices of 450+ healthcare workers since 2016 through its podcast and sold-out live performances.

The Nocturnists' work has been presented on CBS This Morning and NPR's Morning Edition, and at Pop Up Magazine and South By Southwest (SXSW). In 2020, its "Stories from a Pandemic" documentary podcast series was acquired by the U.S. Library of Congress for historic preservation. The Nocturnists has been honored by the Webby Awards, Anthem Awards, Ambie Awards, and more.

Dr. Silverman's writing has been supported by MacDowell and published in The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, JAMA, CHEST, and McSweeneys. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and daughter.

Follow the show on Instagram @Thenocturnists
and on Facebook and LinkedIn at The Nocturnists

 

Improve your storytelling Check out our popular workshops on interviewing, story editing, story structure, longform narrative, audience engagement, guesting, scriptwriting and more. 

Hire Elaine to speak at your conference or company. Subjects include: Effective Storytelling; Communicating for Lead