Photo: Carla Green

In what ways does collaboration strengthen the stories we tell? In this bonus episode, Catherine Saint Louis and Carla Green talk about a recent collaboration for Telescope, a podcast that tells stories about people living through COVID. Both our guests work for podcast production company Neon Hum, Catherine as Senior Editor and Carla as Producer. In the episode we’ll be discussing, “Rubber Bullets.” Catherine reported this story about Derrick Sanderlin and Carla was her editor. The story follows how Derrick--a man who had volunteered to work with the San Jose Police Department about implicit bias-- found himself trying to de-escalate tensions with the same police department during a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest and was shot with rubber bullets. We talk about how Catherine and Carla divided work, why trust is so important in collaborations, how details sometimes need to be separated from the dramatic arc of the story, how music can affect a listener and why one might choose not to use it, and how showing our humanness when we tell another’s story might be an essential piece to the story itself.

Carla Green is a Neon Hum producer and journalist. Before coming to Neon Hum, she was the managing producer of the KCRW podcast UnFictional, where she reported and produced a bunch of different stories, including one where she trailed a juggalo across the country on a Greyhound bus. Since she moved to Los Angeles in 2016, she’s covered the city’s homelessness crisis in stories for radio, podcasts, and print.

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:

Neon Hum

“Rubber Bullets” episode of Telescope

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

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