Q&A with Threshold’s Amy Martin and Erika Janik
This March, Threshold turned seven-years-old. In celebration, we hosted a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into making a season of our show. Listeners who joined had great questions for our production team, and we wanted to share our answers with the community!
Q: Amy, can you give us your background for those who are new to the podcast?
Amy Martin: I learned audio journalism by doing it at WVIK FM while at Augustana College, with my mentors Herb Trix and Kai Swanson. I graduated from college and looking back, it probably would've been really smart to go immediately into radio news. But I didn't do that. I taught English in Latin America and was a freelance writer for a while. Then, I had a whole career as a musician, and I kind of found my way back to audio journalism about ten years ago.
Q: During production, do you ever feel pressure to outrun your evolving ideas—that you have to produce this product quickly because any new fact might transform the idea and throw everything back to the wind?
Amy: I've definitely felt like I had to get it done as fast as I could. I felt more pressure, especially in Seasons 1 and 2, because of money. I didn't know at what point I would be unable to do this anymore because I was going to run out of money, so I just got it done.
I don't think I ever really worried about the facts changing because I think if you're going to report on anything long-term, you just have to expect the story's going to change while you're making it. And it's easier for me, for example, reporting on what life is like in Arctic Russia versus what Vladimir Putin did yesterday. The time horizon stretches longer for the kinds of stories I'm telling.
But there have been things that have changed in the process. It's like, "Oh, I have to redo that," or "I have to cut that," or "I have to put in a disclaimer about that." So, yes, I always feel like I'm kind of running.
Q: Have you kept in touch with anybody, particularly from Season 2, and have their situations changed?
Amy: Yes, I'm in touch with several people from Season 2. Not regularly because people have busy lives, and I don't want to pester them. While I've become allergic to it, that's the one thing that is actually fun for me to do on social media—besides looking at our own social media, which is awesome (thank you, Sam)! I've covered a lot of folks, especially in more rural places, and they share a lot, and it's a way for me to see what's going on with them.
Honestly, for almost everyone that I met whom I've been in touch with, the changes, they're coming fast all the time. I did most of that reporting in 2017, and that was true then. The Arctic is warming fast, and the changes have been evident to the people there a lot longer than in other places. So, by the time I was there, people were already like, "Yeah, old news."
Of course, everything's changing because of the climate. But my sense is that people in the Arctic are a lot further down the path of recognizing that this is reality. This is not the future; this is now. And it was yesterday. And it's big, and it's hard, and now we just have to figure out how to deal with it.
Q: How do you change the view of nature as more than a vacation spot?
Erika Janik: Great question, and it's one, I think, that gets at something we try to convey through our stories—that nature isn’t something over there, something you visit and then leave. Nature is all around us, no matter where we are. And we humans are a part of nature, not separate from it.
At Threshold, I think changing this perception of nature as a vacation spot rather than our whole world is showing how interconnected everything on the planet is—telling stories about that. And not just the concrete things like which bugs help us do this or that but also the forces at play: how history, politics, sociology, and literature can help us understand this moment in our ecological story. That’s something we really strive to do through our stories at Threshold. None of the stories we tell are one thing because there’s no such thing as one thing that can be fully understood without the context.
“I want that process of discovery that listeners have through in a season to be authentic … we have to be on the journey together, and I'm still on that journey.”
Amy Martin
Q: How do you approach folks who do not believe in science?
Amy: Yeah, how do you engage people who don't believe in science? It's an excellent question. I don't know.
It's easy to make assumptions about what people know and then talk in a way that makes it sound as if a listener doesn't know, then they're dumb. I think that happens a lot—unconsciously—in journalism with a lot of science in it.
I am not a scientist. I love science, but I'm not a scientist by any stretch. I hear things from scientists' mouths, or I read science that I don't really understand. I keep digging, ask questions, and am not afraid to be like, "I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it" ... until I get it. Or until I get that, I'm not gonna get it. But that's okay because I kind of got this other thing, which was the coolest part. So, I will save the physics for somebody else, you know?
I try to keep myself in the position of the learner, the beginner, the person who doesn't know but has the capacity to know. That's most people, whether they went to college or not, whether they're from another country, whether they're a different age, or have different politics. Most people, if you explain things to them in plain language, can understand most things in a way that's enough to grasp the heart of an interesting story.
I just have faith—to some extent—that through that effort, we'll reach some people. If I'm talking to a person who says straight up, "I don't believe in science," that's just not a battle I want to fight.
Q: Do you ever feel tempted to shout your message to match the volume of those shouting opposing messages?
Erika: It’s very tempting to shout, and I’m certainly not personally above it, but shouting doesn’t typically lead to changing hearts and minds. It can be very hard to tune it out or, at the very least, to remain calm yourself, but I think that’s really essential. Even messages I agree with are not generally things I want to experience in shouted form. At Threshold, rather than shouting something, we focus on getting our message through with good storytelling.
Q: So much of the editing process is to ‘kill your darlings.’ Is there anything that landed on the cutting room floor that you really wanted to keep?
Amy: So much. That was especially so with Season 1. I wasn't sure if Threshold was a podcast or a public radio show, and I wanted to keep all my options open. So I cut it to the radio clock, which means it either had to be an hour or a half hour, and I felt like an hour was really daunting, which I shouldn't have. On the radio clock, that actually means like 28 minutes, since we had to fit in breaks.
I remember spending this amazing day fishing with a guy on his boat off the coast of Greenland for Season 2. It was magical; I'll never forget it. There are specific moments that are blazed onto my brain—absolutely beautiful. He was catching cod like crazy, and it just didn't fit anywhere. It killed me because it was like, "I want you to meet this guy!" Johanpele, he was the sweetest guy. His English was not great. My Kalaallisut is even worse. But it didn't matter, we had a fantastic day. And yeah, it didn't fit.
Q: Do you plan on doing anything with material that didn't fit into a season?
Erika: Yes! In previous seasons, we've used some of the stuff that didn't fit to make bonus episodes or for social media. That's only a small bit of the total pile of material we collect, but it's comforting to know that some stories will still find a home or a way to be shared even if they don't make it into an episode.
One of the hardest things is cutting someone or something you love from an episode. For our next season, we have a kind of list of guidelines of the types of things we might want to share in a different way if they don't make it into the season, but it's hard to know what we'll actually have until the season is made.
Q: What is one of your favorite books about humanity's relationship with nature?
Erika: Oh no, this is such a hard question. There are so many I could say, but I'm going to recommend a writer that I've recommended before because I love her. Kathleen Jamie is a Scottish poet who has written three books of essays. Her first—and my favorite—is Findings. Part of what I love about it is that it's about exploring and reflecting on things close to home. The writing is gorgeous—about small, everyday things. I love a story that's big and adventurous, but I think I love these smaller stories more because they make me see my everyday world differently.
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Q: How do you somehow, against all odds, remain optimistic?
Amy: That's a great question. I think there have been so many people who've lived through so many terrible things throughout human history, who've struggled through unbelievably difficult chapters or entire lives, and they've found a way.
So, at a certain level for me, I just feel like I don't have the right not to be optimistic. I'm comfortable. I'm fed. I'm safe. That means I'm probably living better than 99% of humans who've ever walked the Earth. I feel like if I can't find it in myself to push toward the positive, then I'm wimping out. I know it sounds kind of harsh, and I don't mean to say that any of you are wimping out if you can't do that. I can't do it all the time. But when I get into those low spots, which does happen, that's one of the ways I pull myself out.
Maybe in another way, it's the Buddhist mentality of I bow to you, cynicism, depression, and darkness: I recognize you exist, and I'm not going to fight you. I'm not going to say you don't have a place, but I'm going to put my energy, to whatever extent I can, to do some good. To do something.
Q: Can you give us a sneak preview of Season 5?
Amy: That's easy: no. (laughing) I don't want to talk about what the next season is going to be about for multiple reasons. One is purely practical in that it's more enticing for listeners to have to wait. That's like most other shows, you know? You don't hear about the show that you're going to see on Netflix nine months before it comes out. You hear about it a week or two before for a reason.
But, keeping it real, another reason why I wouldn't want to talk about it now is that there's so much in the creation process that's about me figuring out what the next season's about. You have to stay open to discovery and learning, and if I try to make all those decisions too much in advance or narrow the scope too quickly, it can turn into some formulaic thing. I'm determined for it not to be that because it's no fun for me, and it won't sound good. I want that process of discovery that listeners have through in a season to be authentic, and it can't be if I secretly know everything and then just kind of puppet master it all out. No, we have to be on the journey together, and I'm still on that journey.