Laura Joyce Davis

When was the last time you felt the joy of movement? Andreina Febres came to the United States at age 21, with one simple mission: learn English. She made a home and a family in the Bay Area — but it took a pandemic to push her to her life's true calling.

One of my greatest joys in life is getting to help others realize what they're capable of--especially when it comes to storytelling. During my time with the Stanford Storytelling Project, I got to coach, teach, train, and mentor students through the entire podcast production process. Most of these students had no prior experience with audio. 

I had the pleasure of guiding Alana Esposito through this story, about a group of Stanford women who thought they were just climbing buildings on campus at a time when women still had to wear skirts to class. Only decades later did they understand how scaling Stanford's walls transformed them and permanently altered the paths they took.

On March 17, 2020 I began a podcast I called Shelter in Place (named when that term still seemed novel and interesting). I began that work thinking I'd do it for two weeks and that it would be just for me. It began as a daily, and though I didn't yet know the term "narrative podcast," as a lifelong fiction writer, narrative is what I created. Four months in I'd created 100 episodes and was very, very tired.

But something interesting happened. First, I found that I didn't want to stop. I shifted to weekly episodes and started integrating sound design, improving my skills as I created. Second, I started hearing from new producers---mostly women and non-binary folks--that they were listening and wanted to learn what I was doing. Around the same time my husband lost his job, so together we created a training program that would go through many iterations before landing on what it is now: Narrative Podcasts. I knew that new producers would need production credits, and that the best way to learn how to make a narrative podcast was to make one (with a lot of guidance and support), so I invited those new producers to join me in the process, dipping in wherever they wanted to learn, and giving them credit for their work and doing all that I could to help them secure jobs in the industry (which incredibly, all of them did, at places like the New York Times, Stitcher, Headspace, Earwolf, the ACLU, and elsewhere). We made no money and my husband and I had to eventually sunset the training program and get full-time jobs, but it's still one of the sweetest times of my life, and I'm so grateful to know each and every one of those producers, many of whom I still hear from often.

By the time I concluded the podcast in May 2022, I had 200 episodes. 14 of those were created as part of the training program, and they're some of my favorites. This one won the International Women's Podcast Awards "Changing the World One Moment at a Time" award. Special thanks to Sarai Waters for sharing her incredible story and to Eve Bishop for helping me bring that story to life. 

I wrote, created, edited, and produced both the audio and video for Think Fast, Talk Smart's 250th episode. This narrative episode is a departure from the show's usual interview format, and includes sound design, interview clips from the Think Fast, Talk Smart archives, and one of the biggest conflicts Matt has faced in his own life.