Episode 24: When the personal is political, with Catherine Saint Louis

Emerging Form

Telling someone else’s story presents a host of pleasures and challenges. In this episode, we interview Catherine Saint Louis, senior editor of podcasts for Neon Hum Media, about “Rubber Bullets,” a podcast episode released on Telescope in early July 2020, about a man who had guided implicit bias workshops for the San Jose Police Department for years, then found himself trying to de-escalate the same police department at a Black Lives Matter protest. He was shot in the groin with a rubber bullet. We talk with Catherine about the process of creating the episode from conception to execution. We discuss how she considers the interview process to be “a journey” that the interviewer and interviewee embark on together, and how Catherine was able to move beyond the facts of Derrick’s story to deliver the heart of it by drawing on her own humanity.

Catherine Saint Louis is the senior editor of podcasts for Neon Hum Media, an L.A. based podcast house founded by Jonathan Hirsch. Her latest podcast that she's edited is Smoke Screen: Fake Priest, a wild story about a man who pretended to be a priest for 30 years, stealing people's money and their faith. Fake Priest is a Neon Hum original as is Telescope, a podcast that tells stories about people living through COVID and later in our first season, the twin pandemics of racism and COVID. This year, she also edited Murder on the Towpath, an eight-episode podcast set in 1964 that features two women who never met but whose lives become linked one of them is killed. Past projects include: Sonic Boom, This Land, The Thing about Pam, Larger than Life, and Break Stuff. She lives in Brooklyn where she runs with a sweaty mask.

Show notes:

Jill U Adams’s delightful comics

Last Word On Nothing

Neon Hum

“Rubber Bullets” episode of Telescope

Fake Priest

Catherine Saint Louis interview about podcast editing on Servant of Pod with Nick Quah.

Catherine wants to encourage more POC to get into podcast editing and would love for anyone who is interested to get in touch. [e-mail]

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe