How do you know who, exactly, you ARE behind the mic? What you sound like versus what you wish you sounded like? How to stand out as a host while being your unique self? Not to mention telling a gripping story or weaving a conversation listeners won't stop talking about tomorrow? Laura Joyce Davis, host and executive producer of the award-winning show Shelter in Place has answers...and they're gems. We learn what the rules are for hooking listeners and how to break them, with an example from Laura's interview with her friend, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land, All the Light We Cannot See, and more). You'll hear Laura grapple with how much of her doubts and fears to share, along with how much of her personal life (Kids' names? Fights with her spouse?) and get tips from her Broadway-actor brother on how to get over the dreaded readerly voice on the mic for a natural, conversational, intimate sound. You'll be a better host after listening to this episode — and you'll enjoy it more, too.
Laura Joyce Davis, Host/Executive Producer, Shelter in Place
Laura Joyce Davis is the host and executive producer of Shelter in Place, which won the “Changing the World One Moment at a Time” award at the International Women’s Podcast Awards. She is a full-time lecturer and managing editor at Stanford University's Storytelling Project, the CEO and co-founder of Narrative Podcasts (an online course), and one of Podcast Magazine's Top 22 Influencers in Podcasting in 2022. Her work has been recognized with a PR News Social Impact Award, a Fulbright scholarship, and occasional praise from her three children.
Her favorite project management tools: Butcher block paper, nice markers, post-its, white boards, and gel roller pens.
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A note about Sound Judgment: We believe that no host does good work alone. All hosts rely on their producers, the hidden hands that enable a host to shine. We strive to give credit to producers whenever it’s possible to do so.
The episode discussed on today’s Sound Judgment:
March 2022, Season 3, Episode 25: Cloud Cuckoo Land
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Takeaways from Laura Joyce Davis, host of Shelter in Place
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Credits
Sound Judgment is a production of Podcast Allies, LLC.
Host: Elaine Appleton Grant
Project Manager: Tina Bassir
Sound Designer: Andrew Parella
Illustrator: Sarah Edgell
This transcript was auto-generated from an audio recording. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Laura Joyce Davis spent 20 years of her life as a serious fiction writer. And then the pandemic happened, and she decided to start a memoir podcast. She would do it six days a week while lockdowns were in place. How hard could that be, to do a podcast for two weeks? Right. Two years, 200 episodes, and several awards later, Laura's learned a lot about what it takes to become a beloved podcast host.
She's also applied much of what she already knew about writing, imagination, and connection to her podcast, Shelter in Place. On today's episode, Laura and I talk about the dilemmas all hosts grapple with. How much to share of ourselves, our vulnerabilities, our personal lives, whether to express our doubts and fears. And we go deep into her interview with her friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Anthony Doerr, and learn that even he has imposter syndrome.
This is Sound Judgment, where we investigate just what it takes to become a beloved podcast host by pulling apart one episode at a time, together. I'm Elaine Appleton Grant.
Elaine Appleton Grant
When I decided earlier this year to go on a quest to define the characteristics and skills of the most captivating hosts, I didn't even have a name for this podcast yet. And I didn't know there was a term for that almost indescribable quality of a fantastic host that my quest is all about. Now I do, it's hostiness. But I did know what I was looking for. People you knew, the minute you heard them, had hostiness. And when I first heard Shelter in Place, even though Laura had been at it only a month or two, I heard hostiness in Laura's voice, in the way her stories were structured. I wanted to stick with her to know how she and her family were making it through the pandemic—from the little moments of parenting to the big ones, like dealing with wildfires and anti-vaxxers and job loss and George Floyd.
So when I was ready to start interviewing, the first person I wanted to talk to was Laura. We spoke in July. A lot has changed since then. My show now has a name, and Laura is now a lecturer at the Stanford Storytelling Project and managing editor of Stanford's student run podcast, State of the Human—which in my view is an awfully good name for anything Laura is working on. You'll learn a lot from this conversation, just like I did. Stay with us.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Laura Joyce Davis, welcome to Sound Judgment.
Laura Joyce Davis
Thank you so much, Elaine. I am absolutely thrilled to be here with you.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Well, you know, Laura and I are wonderful friends and I've been watching your podcast journey for the last two years now. I'm thrilled to have you here. And as you know, what we're gonna do is dissect an episode, and you and I together chose an episode where you interviewed the Pulitzer Prize winner, Anthony Doerr.
What I wanna do is start by dissecting your opening passage. Stick with this, because this is a very long intro. In fact, I'm not even playing the whole thing. It's about three minutes long.
Clip from Shelter in Place
Laura Joyce Davis: 22 years ago, I sat down at a large rectangular table with 15 strangers to learn how to write stories. Our teacher was a 28-year-old named Tony, who'd been awarded a one-year fellowship to teach at the University of Wisconsin, where I was a student. But that first day of class, Tony wasn't there. Our sub was Ron Kuka, the head of the department. Ron would later become a very important writing teacher in my life, and I've talked about him in other episodes. But on that day, Ron calmly told us that Tony had gone to Mexico over winter break, and he'd just phoned to say that he might not be coming back. He was having such a great time hanging out on the beach that he was no longer sure he wanted to return to Wisconsin winter, which was too bad because Tony was a really great writer.
You should think carefully before becoming a writer, Ron went on, in the same can't be bothered tone. Even if you're very good like Tony, the chances of getting published are small. The chances of making money are even worse. You'll face rejection for the rest of your lives. You'll be alone a lot, which is why so many writers throughout history have turned to drink, or worse.
But if you still want to be a writer, Ron said, brightening a little, I'm happy to talk to any of you after class about the creative writing major. If you're lucky, Tony might even come back from Mexico. We'll just have to wait until next week to see what he decides.
This was 22 years ago, so the details of the story have faded into the fabric of memory. I can't remember if Tony was really in Mexico, or if that was all part of Ron's storytelling magic to show us how conflict and tension could make you wonder what will happen next. What I do remember is that I switched my major to creative writing that week. A lifetime of frustration, loneliness, and rejection? Sign me up.
Luckily for us, Tony did come back. That class was the best part of my week. Ron hadn't exaggerated when he'd said that Tony was a great writer. Partway through the semester, he passed out copies of a short story he'd written called The Shell Collector. I'll never forget the way the story gripped me. How every paragraph and line felt like an act of celebration. How it dropped me right into the fragile solitude of a blind man, whose world was more vivid than anything my eyes could see. It turned out that Tony was also a great teacher. He showed us how to treasure the act of revision. How our terrible first drafts needed to go up in flames so intriguing characters could resurrect from the ashes. How gems could be plucked and polished from the detritus of our sentences. It was from Tony that I learned how to write a pitch letter, how to submit my work, how to recognize rejection as a signpost on the journey to becoming a writer. I still have the step-by-step guide that he gave us titled Seven Steps to Submitting—or, Seven Steps to Depression.
But the most important thing I learned from Tony was not just how to be a writer, but the kind of writer I wanted to become. And that kind of writer, it turned out, was him.
Elaine Appleton Grant
I love the way that ends. The first thing I thought was it's interesting that you begin your episode interviewing this very famous writer, this Pulitzer Prize winner, by talking about a class in which he's not there. So tell me about making that choice. How did that come to you?
Laura Joyce Davis
Yeah, well, there's a couple of things at play here. And I think this is stuff that applies to all episodes, not just this one, but it's something that I think about always. One of them is, you know, when you craft a great story, usually you wanna put the conflict pretty close to the front. And conflict in something like an interview episode might be something that is not immediately obvious. It might be more like a question you're answering or a problem to be solved. And in this particular episode, I knew that part of the larger conflict of this conversation that I was having with Tony was this question of why do we do this work in the first place? Why do we create? Why do we write? Why do we make things even though we know we're going to be set up for rejection, and probably face a lot more rejection than success—which is something that Tony talks about. And Tony is hugely successful. So even for him, he still has faced imposter syndrome and all of these things that all of us experience.
So I wanted to set the stage for that. In a larger storytelling sense, I wanted to put that conflict up front. But the other thing that's happening in this opening scene is that I knew, in dealing with somebody like Anthony Doerr, who I'll refer to as Tony, because that's how I know him. You know, Tony has been interviewed a lot. A lot of great interviewers have talked with him. And so I was thinking about, well, what do I have specifically to offer to the conversation that is different than all of those other wonderful people out there who have talked to him? And the thing that I had was that Tony and I met 22 years ago long, before he was famous, long before he'd even published that first book. And we've kept in touch over the years.
And so I knew that that window into that side of him was going to be probably the best and maybe most interesting thing that I as a host had to offer. And I also knew that if people were excited enough about him, that hopefully I would do a good enough job with my storytelling that people would hang in there for this first—you know, for the very long—it is a long intro, you're right. And I don't always make that choice. But in this case, I knew it was a long episode, I wanted to give it a proper lead up that would set up that conflict and show upfront, here's what's gonna be different about this than the usual Anthony Doerr episode.
Elaine Appleton Grant
That completely makes sense to me. And also, you know, it's very interesting because in a sense, you're setting up an interview and a lot of podcast hosts look at interviews purely as two-ways, right? Like I could sit here and say, give me your best advice for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And there wouldn't be any storytelling and there wouldn't be any scenes, but you think in scenes. You said, for that first scene, I knew I wanted to do X. Was this the first idea that came to you? Like, oh, I'm gonna take people right back to that classroom where he didn't show up. I mean, I still think that was kind of a gutsy choice.
Laura Joyce Davis
Yeah, well, I think that—it wasn't the first thing that came to me. I mean, honestly, I don't know how many other stabs at this I took before I came up with that one. Maybe a couple. I thought about opening with some interview tape of his, which is a choice that we've made in other episodes. There's certainly plenty of wonderful interview tape to work with in this episode. And I wanted it to be a little more suspenseful than that. I will often advise people when they're getting stuck with a narrative episode—I mean, obviously this is different if you're just working with straight interview and narrative isn't a part of it. But even for straight interview, you can do a little intro that is a little bit of narrative. And I will often advise people in the course that we teach, if you're running into problems, back up from your story, back up from your interview, and see if you can think about how to describe this in a scene.
And sometimes that might mean that you really zoom in on the moment that feels like the moment of conflict to you, right? So that's one way to do it. Another way to do it is, can you think about a scene that really captures this person or this story or whatever it is you're dealing with? It doesn't have to be a moment of conflict. It could just be a moment that feels like to you, hey, it really captures the heart of this thing that we're gonna talk about. And this was some of both, in this opening scene. It was the conflict, it was also kind of the heart of what Tony and I get into, which is why create? Why keep doing this even when it's really hard?
But I think that that choice for scene, it can happen in your narration—it can also happen in your interview tape, if you do an interview or you kind of prompt that in your guest. And I will often do that when I ask my guest questions. I'll try to ask them questions to get them to talk in scenes. It doesn't always work, but if you can get somebody to describe a specific moment that they're—say they mention a moment that was significant, and you ask them, hey, can you take me a little deeper inside that and describe to me what that was like, in that moment, then you end up with this wonderful thing in your interview tape where you actually have a scene.
There are a lot of different ways to do that that people don't think of as scenes, but that's one of them, is getting your guests to talk in scenes and to describe a specific moment.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Yeah, one of the things that I tell people all the time is that it's all story, and that if you think that way, then you can tell a good story in 30 seconds, or you could have hardcore history that's six hours long, and have multiple stories going from story to story to story to story.
And—but you have to think in stories and you have to think in scenes. And that's one of the things that I love about your show so much. And I just got such a kick out of this intro because it took so much courage. You're breaking all these rules, right? I mean, one of the rules is, oh, you've got to hook people in 30 seconds. And I don't know how long this whole passage is before you ever get to Tony. I'll call him Tony even though I don't know him. And that takes some guts. Tell me about that thought process. Was it okay to do something that was five or six or seven minutes long in total?
Laura Joyce Davis
I think the rules are there to guide us, right? But if you can break a rule successfully, then break any rule that you want. That's sort of the lesson that I learned from creative writing. I learned that from my fiction writing background. You know, I had many, many teachers over the years say that exact thing to me of—yeah, there are rules, but if you can break them and break them successfully and if it works, go ahead and break them.
And do I have a hook in the sense that you get Tony in the first 30 seconds? No, but hopefully people are intrigued enough by that scene in the first 30 seconds that they wanna keep listening. And that's really the hook there, right? There can be multiple hooks in an episode. It doesn't have to be the big giveaway right up front. You can have the hook that sort of teases them along and makes them wanna keep listening. But part of the setup of this episode was, I actually have a relationship with this person. He has been hugely important in my life for 22 years now. And I wanted to sort of highlight that in that intro. But yeah, I mean, I think it's always a gamble, right? You take these chances, you...I like to call them creative experiments. Sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't. And when they don't, hopefully you've learned a little bit from that process and you'll do it better the next time.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Ooh, so I think this particular one works really, really well, or I wouldn't be talking to you about it—but you do something that is deceptively hard to do and you do it really well. You sound, as a listener, to me, you sound like you're speaking directly to me. Not to anybody else, certainly not to a big audience. And you also don't sound like you're reading. But you write these very involved scripts, and you're actually recording voiceover. So you didn't start with a radio background and audio background. You were a writer. How did you get to the point where you can read and read and read and make it sound like you're not reading?
Laura Joyce Davis
Yeah, well, first of all, I'm really pleased to hear you say that because I think it's something I've worked a lot on and I continually try to improve on. I think in this podcasting work, we're always getting better the more we do it. Right? And that's what I love about the medium, is you just show up and you do it again and again and again. And hopefully you get better in that time. But there are a couple of things that really have helped me speed up that process or maybe just learn it better.
And one of them is actually before podcasting, I wasn't in radio, but I did do literary readings. And so maybe a couple times a year, I'd have a chance to get up in front of a crowd of people live and read a short story or something from a novel or whatever I was working on at the time that was right for that reading. And my little brother is actually a former Broadway actor, and was trained at NYU, and really has been a great teacher for me in this regard for many, many years now. Starting when I was getting my MFA, I can remember that was when I was doing my first readings. And so I would call him up, and he was actually at Tisch at NYU during those years. And so he was learning these things and then would kind of teach me over the phone and coach me on my literary readings. And so one of the things he taught me that I still come back to and I find so, so valuable is to think to speak in thoughts, not sentences. And this is something that actors know, actors are trained in this.
But what I mean by that is, you know, you and I are having a conversation right now. And if you looked at a transcript of our conversation, there would probably be em dashes, there might be ellipses, there would be—you know—all sorts of starts and stops in speech, because we're following our thoughts, not the sentences. We're not doing the natural pause where the period is, where the comma is, whatever it is. We might do those things. But there's also—it's a little messier and a little more windy of a way of talking than the sort of straightforward way that we deliver things if we're just reading.
But you can bring some of that when you're reading to the reading. So if I have a couple of sentences in a row where the thought is—let's take the example of the passage that we just listened to. The thought is, you know, picking a very specific moment from that, that I switched my major to creative writing and you know, a lifetime of depression, and whatever I say there, sign me up. So, you know, that thought…
Elaine Appleton Grant
Very funny by the way.
Laura Joyce Davis
Thank you, thank you. I don't feel like I'm naturally good at funny, so I'm very proud of those moments when it happens. I've been working very hard for them.
Elaine Appleton Grant
That's very funny.
Laura Joyce Davis
But, you know, if you follow the thought there, the bigger thought is sort of why I chose creative writing even though I knew it was going to be hard. And carrying that thought through multiple sentences in that case, it doesn't mean that you won't take a breath in there. You probably do need to take a breath in there. But thinking to the end of the thought rather than to the period can really change your delivery on something. So that's the first thing I think about. The second thing I think about is speaking to a very specific person. I can't tell you that every time I record voiceover, I have a specific person in mind, but if I find myself getting into that habit of, oh, I sound like I'm reading, then sometimes I will call to somebody, call to mind—maybe it's my husband, Nate. Maybe it's the guest.
But picking somebody who I feel comfortable with and just imagining that I'm talking to them directly, that can change the tone of what you're saying and it can make it come off a little more natural and a little more like a conversation.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Yeah, and you really do it so well and it's very warm.
Laura Joyce Davis
Thank you.
Elaine Appleton Grant
And very personal and very real. I love this story about your brother. Who's a former Broadway actor? It just leads to all kinds of questions.
Laura Joyce Davis
It's a whole other story. I know. It would take up this whole episode.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Why would you leave?
Laura Joyce Davis
Yes.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Yeah, exactly. It's interesting because I grew up acting and so I do lean on some of those techniques. One of them is sort of the premise, which is an actor before walking on stage. One way to do it is to go, well, where am I? Who am I? I am in this moment, in this time period, on this day in 1943, in—I don't know—Oklahoma farmstead, and I have this relationship with this person or whatever.
And so you're not putting something on. You're believing. But it's just very much about getting in the moment. I think that probably pairs with that idea of we speak in thoughts. So I like that.
Laura Joyce Davis
Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up because that is another thing that I think about, is getting in the moment. I mean, to borrow a phrase that my brother has said to me directly about this, you basically just do anything to get yourself not thinking about the words you're reading. And so being in the scene yourself, imagine yourself, you know, you are a character, even if the character is you, and you are in a moment and you're talking about something, some scene, some description, some person, whatever it is.
Anything that you can do to get yourself deeper inside that, so that you're not thinking about the actual words on the page, is going to help your delivery sound more natural.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Laura, when you set out to interview Anthony Doerr, did you know that this moment was where you were headed?
Clip from Shelter in Place
Laura Joyce Davis: But the most important thing I learned from Tony was not just how to be a writer, but the kind of writer I wanted to become. And that kind of writer, it turned out, was him.
Laura Joyce Davis
Yes, I did actually. It doesn't always work that way, but something I've said to Tony many times over the years, which embarrasses him, is that he's who I want to be when I grow up.
And what I mean by that is just—he is a beautiful writer. I love his writing. I love all of his books. You know, his writing is what I aspire to in my own writing, that quality, that level of artistry on the sentence and word level. And also story, the stories are just wonderful and imaginative.
If there was one thing that I wanted Tony to take away from listening to this episode, it was that. It was just to honor him, that he has been a hugely important person in my life.
Elaine Appleton Grant
But I wanna point out one other thing about that, that very quote, is that the whole lead up is, we're gonna hear from this famous Pulitzer Prize winner about all of his work and behind the scenes with him, which probably a million people have interviewed him about in a much more straightforward way. Your lead up isn't just about the relationship that you have with him, but it's about you and your desires as a writer. And you know, that speaks to, I think, the personal nature of the whole show, that you've sort of taken us with you on your journeys for the last couple of years.
So friends of mine at Pacific Content call this creative bravery, right? That if you're going to have a podcast that stands out, you need to be creatively brave. It is a creatively brave choice to make. And it's one that I find a lot of people struggle with. Like they go into hosting thinking, I have to be the news anchor and I have to keep myself out of it. And you're very much in it. I mean, almost more so, at least for the beginning of a good part of this episode, almost more so than Tony Doerr. So let's talk about that creatively brave choice.
Laura Joyce Davis
Yeah, it's something that I did not go in knowing that I was going to do when I started Shelter in Place, which maybe seems surprising, since it's a memoir podcast. And for people who don't know our podcast, the very quick backstory is that on March 16th, 2020, after 20 years of being a fiction writer and also a mom of three young children, I was looking for a creative lifeline to get myself through what I thought would be two weeks of the pandemic with my kids home. And I had done just enough podcast work, nothing out in the world, just some sort of learning and dabbling with it a little bit.
I had a podcast mic, I had a DAW, and I knew how to record, and that's about all we can say about my podcast knowledge. I did not know how to edit audio yet. So my thought was I will do this nice little creative project where every day I write essentially what's a personal essay, and I will push myself to write one draft. I will record it in one take, and I will press publish, and I thought: this whole thing will take me like an hour a day, and then I'll be with my kids the rest of the day. And you know, we all laugh at that now because that is completely ridiculous. Nobody does—even if the episode is five minutes long, nobody does a good narrative episode in an hour. Certainly not start to finish. But it did push me to actually put something out there day after day, and what I found by about day two or three was that I had some very hard questions to answer for myself about how much of myself was going to get into this.
It was all fine and well in day one when it was just sort of this—I'm out on a bike ride and I got this idea for this podcast and we'll do this for two weeks together! Every day, six days a week! Not even five days a week. That's how crazy I was.
So what I realized is that I had been mostly avoiding this question for 20 years as a fiction writer. Now, I think fiction writing can be deeply personal, and some of mine has been. But I had essentially figured out how to not have to put myself in the story. And what podcasting kind of forced on me was that question of, well, why not? What are you afraid of? And I realized I was actually quite afraid to put myself out there. I was really afraid that people wouldn't like me, that maybe if they really got to know me, they would be like, no thanks. And that's gonna happen, right? If you put yourself out there, I don't care if you're the most charismatic person on the planet, not everybody's gonna like you. That's real. And then things beyond that. How much of my personal life am I willing to share publicly? Am I willing to have my kids' names out in the world? Or their voices, maybe even? All of these things that come out of that, it just continues and continues.
And I made a decision very early on to keep asking that question when it was needed, but also to say, you know what? I'm gonna put myself out there in the way that feels true and authentic and like the real Laura. You're going to get the real Laura in this podcast. And I'm going to try to be brave enough to say that if people don't like the real Laura, I might feel really bad about that for a little while, but I'll get over it. And that'll probably be good for me to develop a little thicker skin. And so that is what has happened for 200 episodes of Shelter in Place.
Elaine Appleton Grant
It's one thing to even pose the question, what am I afraid of in putting myself out there? And how much of myself, my personal life, my husband, my kids, my maybe less than perfect choices about various things. I think that is one of the biggest questions in podcasting. Tell me about a moment where you faced that dilemma and what your decision was.
Laura Joyce Davis
Yeah, I think that—first of all, I'll say, I think this larger question really gets at voice, like finding your voice as a writer, as a podcaster, as a host. That term, it's something that's thrown around a lot in the creative writing world. And I really think for myself, what I've come to understand that term as is: this is the way of talking, writing, speaking that sounds exactly like Laura Joyce Davis and nobody else. And I think you don't have to share personal details to get to that, right? It just so happens that in my case I did.
But I think that…there have certainly been moments where I paused on that—a lot of moments where I paused on that, and I wasn't sure about putting myself out there. The one that comes to mind from an early episode is, you know, after the Black Lives Matter protests were really kind of happening all around us, when we were all in that moment, that at least for me in Oakland, California—I mean, I was taking my kids to protests, this was something that all of our friends and community here were deeply, deeply involved in. It felt very, very close and intense in my life, certainly. I've got an next door neighbor who's Black, and they have a son who is our children's dearest playmate since birth. And so we were, we were experiencing these things in a very intense personal way. And so I knew since I was doing a daily podcast, since I was sort of writing whatever was happening in that day, in that moment, there came a point where I just couldn't not talk about it.
But that actually felt, on the one hand, like—well, yes, of course we should all be talking about this. This is our world right now. To not talk about it feels really kind of like putting your head in the sand. But on the other hand, it felt like, what do I have to offer to this conversation that hasn't already been said? Like, I'm not a Black woman. I can't speak to this in the way that even my next door neighbor can. And so that felt actually much scarier to talk about than sharing my parenting failures, which I've done plenty of on the show. You know, the humorous moments where I've maybe made not the best choice as a mom, but all you can do is laugh about it in retrospect. I've shared quite a few of those moments.
Elaine Appleton Grant
And even though my son is 20 years old, I completely appreciate all those moments, because I can look back and go, oh, now I can forgive myself. But yeah, it's so interesting that you bring that up and you made the choice then to share what you were doing, what you were thinking, your concerns. Did you even voice that discomfort? Like I want to share this, but who am I to share it?
Laura Joyce Davis
I did, I did, and you know, I haven't listened back to those episodes recently. I am sure, I'm certain that if I listened back, there would be moments where I was like, if I could do it over, I probably would say it a little differently.
But I did voice that discomfort, and I think that is one of the beautiful things about this medium. As a host, you can put that out there. You can say, hey, I'm doing this thing, and it's kind of scary to me right now. And I definitely had those moments in Shelter in Place episodes where...I just was honest about, I might not get this right. I'm trying really hard to do due diligence to this topic, to this subject matter, to this interview, whatever it is. And I might try and need to do better. That's being a human being in this planet, right? It's like, we are not gonna always get it right, even if we are making every effort that is available to us. So I think that, to me, is part of that authenticity piece, is just being very honest when—
I don't wanna come off as an expert. I'm not an expert on anything except for Laura Joyce Davis on this planet. And maybe even sometimes not then, you know? There might be moments where I need to step back from that. So I can acknowledge how much I have to learn, which is quite often. But I think that one thing that came out of—you know, I mentioned the Black Lives Matter stuff, and I also mentioned the kids. The payoff for both of those and sharing that is kind of the same, right? The payoff is that when you share something of yourself that's vulnerable, it has the potential to connect with people. And you know, you said your son is much older than my children, and you still resonated with those moments and appreciated them.
And I've heard that from a lot of listeners. Including people who aren't parents, but who remember what it was like to be a kid themselves or have some other experience they're connecting with. I think it is potentially the payoff of sharing ourselves, is that our listeners feel more connected and they feel seen and heard and understood by this person that they've maybe never met. But knowing that somebody else on the planet is having an experience that they can resonate with—that means something! It's the same magic that happens when you read a great book and you're like, oh my goodness, this author gets me. Even though of course they don't get you, they've never met you. But they understand, right? They understand that same experience.
Elaine Appleton Grant
I was gonna ask you this very question. To me, a great host—like a great novelist, filmmaker, documentarian—a great host invites us not just into their world, but into a world that we in some fashion make together. And do you agree? What do you think about that premise?
Laura Joyce Davis
I do agree. And you know, it's—we're talking about this episode with Anthony Doerr. He actually says something in this episode that I love, and I've come back to it again and again.
Clip from Shelter in Place
Laura Joyce Davis: So I asked Tony how he responds when people tell him that fiction isn't useful.
Anthony Doerr: There's a great paradox that the path to the stars is through the glitter on the pavement.
Laura Joyce Davis: The path to the stars is through the glitter on the pavement.
Anthony Doerr: The way to understand the universe is to study the journey of one person, Laura Joyce Davis, as she moves through the world. And somehow by rendering the idiosyncratic, utterly unique path that she makes through life, you can draw generalizations that make you feel less alone.
Laura Joyce Davis
Basically, the way we can understand all of our experiences is through one person's very specific experience. And I think that's true in podcasting, I think it's true in fiction, I think it's true in any kind of story. Generalizations are boring. Details, specifics, things that we can actually kind of get our claws into and understand in a deeper way? That's interesting. That actually helps us connect—even, paradoxically, if we've never had that experience. That's the cool thing about storytelling.
Elaine Appleton Grant
And that's the cool thing about this kind of storytelling. And when you're talking about, you know, bringing in your—not just your personal experiences, but your doubts? Being able to say, look, you know, I'm gonna talk about this thing and I'm actually even nervous to talk about this thing. And I've had that exact same experience with the same topic, as you know, because you interviewed me on your show about race.
That is entirely different than the broadcast experience as a journalist. So we journalists who come from radio or TV sometimes have a harder time understanding what makes podcasting unique, right? How to use it really, really well. And that's not to say that there's one way, but that intimacy can be hard to wrap your head around. And so I think that this is such a valuable conversation.
I wanna get back to Anthony Doerr. I've got one more question for you about that particular episode. You actually talk about imposter syndrome, and then you asked him about his own.
Audio Clip from Shelter in Place
Laura Joyce Davis: I asked him if after everything he's accomplished, he still faces rejection or imposter syndrome, or compares himself to others, the pitfalls I've most often fallen into.
Anthony Doerr: Oh, absolutely. All the praise slides off immediately because you know it's false. Deep in your soul, your corroded soul, you know they're wrong about all that.
The competitive stuff I don't have as much. Like Hanya Yanagihara, she's an amazing writer and a friend. And I'm just genuinely so pumped for her that her new book is out. She's so cool. I hope she wins every prize and gets every amazing review. And I just—that stuff doesn't affect me as much as a bad review, because when somebody articulates something about your work that's negative, it almost always sticks for me because I'm like, they're right. They articulated one of my insecurities.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Tell me how you responded to that answer. I can tell you something about how I responded and how I imagine other people responded, but I want to hear your view first.
Laura Joyce Davis
I guess it didn't surprise me because knowing Tony this long, I was pretty sure that he would give me an answer like that. He's that kind of person. He's just not—there's no arrogance there. There's no ego.
It was also, though, just deeply comforting to be like, here's my literary hero who has had—almost all of the prizes that are out there, he's either won or been a finalist for it. He's been on the bestseller list for months at a time. All of those things. And even he still feels these things. I think it was like a creative affirmation of, yeah, we are all just people doing this.
Clip from Shelter in Place
Anthony Doerr: I'm always shocked that anybody wants to read anything I've written. I'm like, well, I don't know, I'm just making stuff alone in my stand-up desk in Idaho. I always feel like any minute their call is going to come, and they'll be like, actually, those awards are supposed to go to Rachel Cusk, and you lost out. And I'll be like, yeah, that's right. That's absolutely what should happen.
Laura Joyce Davis
But yeah, it was just a great moment of levity. There was a lot of levity in the conversation, which you can probably hear. But I think it was very comforting to me. I'm curious, how did you feel?
Elaine Appleton Grant
It was very comforting to me. And he is very real. I mean, you can hear it throughout the episode, and I urge everybody to listen to this episode and of course, all of Shelter in Place because it's wonderful. It doesn't come that much as a surprise from him personally. But then when I pull back a little bit and go, oh, well, this is the author that I have read that writes these incredibly insanely complex books—like Cloud Cuckoo Land—who has had all these accolades. It was like, oh. It's this lesson that I think if you're a creative, if—for me, I can't hear it enough.
I want to ask you some questions rapid fire. What is it that makes a great host? The kind of host that—what is that magic that makes us go back to hear a single host again and again and again?
Laura Joyce Davis
I think what makes a great host is getting enough of that host personality that you feel like you know them. And I think if you look at any of the great hosts out there, you can say that even if it's not a memoir podcast. Yeah, maybe I'll leave it at that.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Okay. It's 200 episodes later. What do you wish you had known when you started?
Laura Joyce Davis
I think I wish I had understood earlier the choices that I was making subconsciously at the beginning about my actual physical voice. And what I mean by that is I have what my husband, Nate, jokingly calls my podcast voice, which I'm sort of using right now.
But if I'm talking to you in everyday conversation, my voice gets a little higher, it gets a little more animated, it's a little more all over the place. You've heard some of both in this conversation. It took me a while to understand that I was actually making a choice every time I got in front of the mic. And it was very, very easy for me to kind of zoom into that podcast voice and find that particular resonance that I use in my voiceover. It just kind of happens naturally. I get under my little blanket fort. I'm not joking about that, by the way. We could have a whole conversation about recording set up, but I do still, to this day, record my voiceover under a blanket fort.
And there's something that happens when I get under there, that—it's intimate, it's a little deeper, it's very personal. It's very different than if I walk outside and talk to my neighbor and call to them from across the street.
So making those choices in conversation, I think is something you have to kind of train your brain to learn. Or at least I have had to learn that. I don't know, maybe other people find that easier to slip into. For me, it's a conscious choice in a conversation like you and I are having, to say, okay, I need to find that same or a more similar resonance to my podcast voice than in out in the world everyday conversation. Unless that's the choice I wanna be making, right? There's no wrong choice, but I wish I'd understood that I was making a choice earlier, because I think it would have allowed me to use more of my own voice from interviews. I don't typically use my own voice at all from recorded conversations. I take myself out almost completely, and I record voiceover narration. Now that's been a stylistic choice as well. But that's something that I could have probably had a little more flexibility with earlier if I had understood, oh, I can make a choice here about how I sound.
Elaine Appleton Grant
I agree with you. Like there's this conscious choice about how intimate, how real are you? I've struggled with this. People say, oh, you have a radio voice. And I've been in the radio for years, but it's also like maybe it's some subconscious thing. Like, oh, there's still a little bit of a guard up there. How much do I wanna be out there? So that's a great point.
Who's your dream guest for Sound Judgment?
Laura Joyce Davis
I think Anna Sale would be really interesting. She is somebody that I've learned a lot from listening to over the years, and especially early on. I think she's a fantastic host and makes choices all the time that seem very effortless.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Anna Sale, her podcast is Death, Sex, and Money. It's so great.
Laura Joyce Davis
Kelly Corrigan. Her podcast is Kelly Corrigan Wonders, which I'm sort of obsessed with right now. It's an interview show, but she is such a fabulous interviewer. And it's a very different skillset than what we've been talking about in this conversation. She's very good at just kind of being great on the spot in the conversation. She would definitely be one I think would be fabulous.
Elaine Appleton Grant
That's great.
Laura, thank you. This was really fun. I really enjoyed it. I love hearing your backstory. And I think people are going to learn a lot of things from it. And I really appreciate you being my guinea pig.
Laura Joyce Davis
Thank you so much for having me. I will be your guinea pig anytime for any project you're doing. I want to be a part of it. So thank you so much. This was really fun.
Elaine Appleton Grant
At the end of every episode, I try to give you just a few of the many takeaways from these conversations. Here are a few from today. You'll find many more in the show notes.
Thanks for listening to Sound Judgment. I have a confession to make. I'm not very good at leaving reviews for podcasts I love, but I'm doing yoga every day and leaving one review every day too, and I'm asking you to do the same. Please take just a second and rate and review Sound Judgment on your listening app. And better yet, share this episode with a friend so you can talk about it together. We need to—we need your help to grow this brand new show. Every single one of you matters.
Thanks for listening to Sound Judgment. If you liked this episode, if you learned something from this episode, share it with a friend, talk it over, figure out together how you can use the takeaways. And then let us know. Write to us at allies@podcastallies. We're really curious. And the way to grow the show is through word of mouth, working with it and using it.
Sound Judgment is produced by me, Elaine Appleton Grant. Sound design by Andrew Parrella. Our gorgeous cover art is by Sarah Edgell. Project management—and all the things—by the inimitable Tina Bassir. Sound Judgment airs every two weeks, but two weeks from now is Thanksgiving and we'll be off, so a surprise. Instead, we'll have a new episode in your feed next week.
See you then.