For the Love of Storytelling

Davy Rothbart has an enviable career as an all around storyteller. As an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, bestselling author, prolific documentarian and podcaster, founding editor of Found Magazine, and contributor to This American Life, he has situated himself at the forefront of human interest journalism. I sat down with this master raconteur, to discuss his latest project; a three part series entitled When Life Gives You Chet Lemon, on the Sports Explains the World podcast.

Davy Rothbart’s latest podcast series, When Life Gives You Chet Lemon, on the Sports Explains the World podcast, in association with Wondery, is a complex and poignant three part series that combines sports, true crime, and human interest– pushing the boundaries of all three genres in surprising and emotional ways.

In the podcast, Davy reconnects with his 6th grade girlfriend, a woman named Alison, whose mother was the victim of a murder during their innocent but formative courtship. The two’s relationship centered their mutual fandom for the Detroit Tigers, and more specifically, an obsession with outfielder Chet Lemon. What begins as a story of adolescent love, baseball, and senseless violence evolves into a nuanced examination of trauma, loss, heartache, and the criminal justice system.

The genius behind this series is that Davy utilizes sports and true crime to propel the story, but then inverts the listeners’ expectations. These astoundingly popular tropes reel the listener in, but as the narrative progresses we become confronted with increasingly difficult concepts and emotions. This is a story that contains baseball and murder, but is actually about humans, living with the cards they were dealt, providing rare and vulnerable perspectives.

A longtime fan of Davy’s work, I decided to track down this acclaimed journalist to learn more about his life, career, and process.

“How’d you originally get interested in radio?” I asked, at the beginning of our chat.

“When I was a kid, TV was kind of demonized in my household,” Davy explained. “We’d watch Sesame Street and things like that, but we didn’t have the TV on much. I had this AM-only radio in my room, and I’d just always listen to baseball games– especially Detroit Tigers games– and weird talk shows. We had these little Fisher Price recording devices, and my brothers and I would make our own radio shows. Super goofy radio shows with commercial jingles and stuff. We loved pretending to be radio hosts. That matured into being a big NPR listener in my teens and twenties.”

“That’s a really cute origin story,” I said, laughing. “But how’d you go from that to working with This American Life?”

“I moved out to New Mexico after graduating college,” he began. “I lived way up in the mountains, far from everything. I got entranced by this This American Life, it was a newish show and hadn’t been around for long. I thought the storytelling was so captivating. I thought to myself, ‘I’d really like to be involved with that kind of storytelling.” As it turned out, a friend of mine from college knew someone who worked at the show. He mentioned that they were looking to hire someone. I applied. Not only had I never worked in radio, but I’d never had a real job before. I was like, ‘How do I present myself?’ Almost as a joke, and to entertain myself, I made a resume that listed the jobs I’d actually had. ‘Pizza Delivery, Ticket Scalping, Marijuana Salesman.’ I did write a sincere cover letter that talked about teaching creative writing in prison and stuff, but I sent it in and forgot about it. A few weeks later I got a voicemail from Ira Glass. He was like, ‘We want to interview you for this position.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. “Submitting a resume like that seems like a risk, but with the amount of applications an institution like that gets, it’s probably better to be risky.”

“I was astounded that it even reached them,” Davy said. “They interviewed three people, including me, for one job and hired the other two. But I was able to share with them a bunch of ideas for stories, and they were really excited by them. I moved back to Chicago and started working on stories for them. That was the beginning of my immersion into radio. I was so lucky to have Ira as a mentor. But it wasn’t just Ira; the producers at the time were Julie Snyder who went on to create Serial and Alex Bloomberg who later created Gimlet Media and Jonathan Goldstein who went on to create Heavyweight.”

“Your goofy resume plopped you right into the room with the godparents of podcasting,” I said. “Why do you think it worked?”

“I asked Ira about it years later,” he said, laughing. “I was like, ‘I can’t believe you responded to that.’ He was like, ‘You know, you might not have realized it at the time, but you were testing us. You were trying to figure out if you wanted to work with us.’ People are way too formal. People want to work with people they want to spend time with. If he hadn’t responded, I would have known it wasn’t a good fit.”

People want to work with people they want to spend time with.

“Yeah for sure,” I said. “Standing out and being yourself at least can get you in the ‘maybe’ pile.”

“That’s all you can hope to do,” he said. “Making it into the maybe pile means a lot. You know how things are, life is long. Down the line you might run into someone who remembers you from something as silly as a [hyperbolically honest] resume.”

“That was such an important time period for the show,” I said, showing my cards as a fangirl. “They must have moved to New York soon after you started.”

“I moved with them to New York,” he said. “I started going to New York to work with Alex. They had found an office space, but it wasn’t set up. It was full of boxes and papers that had been shipped from Chicago. Ira was still in Chicago. Sometimes we’d work so late, I’d sleep there, in piles of This American Life t-shirts and tote bags. NPR cowboy. I was so lucky to have twelve years working with them. Learning so much about storytelling.”

“You also saw the beginning of the transition from radio to podcasting,” I said. “Do you think that that transition has been a net gain for the medium?”

“With podcasts you have a lot of room to go deeper,” he said. “The longest piece I ever made for This American Life was 45 minutes, my latest piece for Sports Explains the World was almost three hours.”

“And, financially?” I asked. “Do you think journalists are making more money?”

“That’s a hard one,” he said after a thoughtful pause. “It has never been my sole gig. I never got paid much for those This American Life stories. They had a big listenership, but not nearly as massive as today. I know they pay more now. But it really depends on the show and the story. You have to do this for the love of storytelling. For our Found podcast we didn’t get paid much, but I loved it. The industry booms and busts.”

“I was really taken with your latest series!” I said. “What I thought was interesting about it, from a marketing perspective, is that the two most popular genres in radio are sports and true crime, and you kind of combine both, but use them to package a complicated human story. How did this come to fruition?”

“The show was created largely by Tommy Andres, who’s a friend of mine from the radio world– well, Tommy along with some people from Campside Media– Josh Dean and Dan LeBatard and John Skipper and others– all great storytellers,” he began. “They came to me and asked if I had any great sports stories. I told them about my first girlfriend and how we loved Chet Lemon and that there were some unresolved strands from our friendship that I’ve always wanted to explore. I wasn’t sure where the reporting would take me, but I wanted to jump into it. I think you’re smart to characterize it as, ‘Sports meets true crime!’ but that doesn’t encapsulate the whole show.”

 “How did the story itself evolve?” I asked.

“If I was going to do true crime, I wanted to make sure that I was being responsible to the victims,” he said empathetically. “When I started I thought it was going to be about what happened and try to connect Alison and I with Chet Lemon and see if he had any advice for her. I didn’t expect to go so deeply into the story. I didn’t realize the perpetrator was out of prison. I didn’t realize she had such an intense and incredible story herself. I just followed the reporting and saw where it led. It led to some really unexpected places. It was interesting to take such a nuanced view and something I’d only ever seen in such black and white terms. A ‘murder.’ But as the story evolved, I thought the best version of it would reveal the humanity of everyone involved.”

“If I was going to do true crime, I wanted to make sure that I was being responsible to the victims.”

“You treat all of the subjects in this story with such care,” I said. “I generally find true crime to be in pretty poor taste, but this felt totally different. How did you ensure your work wouldn’t be exploitative or manipulative?”

“I don’t want to condemn an entire industry,” he said. “It’s about the tone. These subjects shouldn’t be off limits. They aren’t inherently exploitative. These are just storytelling choices and tonal choices. This was a personal story to me. I just wanted people to share their story in their own words. [A journalist should] be willing to listen. Be open minded to people’s experiences. To the extent possible, don’t dwell on blood and gore. Put listeners in the shoes of the people involved. What would it be like to lose a parent at that young age? How heartbreaking would that be? Could someone else imagine being in a killer’s shoes, if their childhood was as f*$#ked up and hopeless as hers?”

“This was a personal story to me.”

“Something that sets this apart from most true crime pieces is that you spent a lot of time with the perpetrator,” I said. “Her story really made the whole thing so much more painful, complex, and human.”

“I think her story is valuable,” he said. “Her story is beautiful and heartbreaking. I think people who listen will have compassion for her. While not losing sight of the horrible crime she was a part of, or the journey for those who were victimized by it.”

“I think also a good marker in this kind of story is when you feel like the narrator is collaborating with the subjects,” I said.

“I was helped in this story because her dad, Don, happened to be a beautiful writer,” he said. “As a kid, he was the most famous journalist I knew. In retrospect he was ‘merely’ a columnist for a small town paper. But he wrote about his journey of grief in a really clear-headed, eloquent way. He passed away a few years ago, but we still have his columns. It meant a lot to me, as a longtime fan of Don’s writing, to have the chance to share the words he wrote 40 years ago. It was really special.”

“Do you generally try to have your subjects collaborate with you?” I asked.

“Certainly with my last documentary, 17 Blocks, which dealt with gun violence, I employed that,” he said. “The family worked in close collaboration with me for 20 years to make that film. More than anything you can’t go in with an agenda. You have to listen and be okay with the story not being what you imagined it to be.”

“Did producing this series help you heal some of your own trauma from being involved in this tragedy?” I asked.

“When I spoke to Chet Lemon’s son he reminded me that I was a victim in this, too,” he said. “My loss was nothing compared to the loss of people who lost a mother or wife. But I was affected by this.”

“I want justice of course, this deed cannot go unpunished. But a voice from an anteroom of the soul, says, ‘Forgive.’ When we forgive, we are free. We are free to steer by the stars and know in our hearts, as one author said, that it may be alright again. ‘He that forgives first, wins the laurel.’ Let us then try what love can do. And so I am asking myself, ‘Are these the limits to which love and forgiveness are stretched? Is this the summit of one human’s achievement? To forgive an unspeakable evil and to go about building a better world?’ Life is not life when it is lived in fear, hate, and vengeance. There is good around and among us, as there is romanticism and idealism and worthwhile work to be done. That is what Nancy believed in. That is what those of us who love her must apply to our own remaining time together…”

-Don Faber, Ann Arbor News