Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

The Feelings Frontier: A Review Of No Feeling Is Final, Britta Jorgensen

RadioDoc Review

No Feeling is Final faces a two-fold “feelings frontier” in an age of extreme podcast intimacy and empathy: navigating (1) how to convey the kind of deeply personal “big feelings” that are still often seen as off-limits and (2) how to maintain a hyper-awareness about the listener’s feelings. Taking place almost entirely within her mind, No Feeling is Final is a six-part memoir show about host Honor Eastly’s experiences struggling with mental health and what one mental health professional diagnoses as “too many feelings – about four times as many as the average person”. The ongoing tension between creating resonance …

Intimate Moments: Dispelling The Cancer Myth With Real Life - Summer Rain By Nanna Hauge Kristensen., Sophie Townsend

RadioDoc Review

Nanna Hauge Kristensen’s Summer Rain is a small piece in length and in scope. It is intimate, almost fragmentary. It is simply a story of a woman, who is a mother, and a daughter, and who has cancer; a woman undergoing treatment, and raising her child, and dealing with the ramifications of what cancer treatment means. An anthropologist by training, Kristensen’s observational, almost distanced approach style, allows us to glimpse her life, but also to feel it. There is something very empirical about what she’s doing in this piece, and she allows us no room to pretend that her cancer …

‘Swansong’ And ‘ Losing Yourself’: Meditations On Life, Death And The Liminal, Cristal Duhaime

RadioDoc Review

This article considers two very personal audio documentaries that reflect on love and identity via the liminal space between life and death. Swansong, by award-winning UK radio producer Hana Walker-Brown, is set in a hospital, as Hana and her father bear witness to her grandmother’s dying and celebrate her joyful life. Losing Yourself, by US producer Ibby Caputo, is a revelatory account of dealing with a cancer diagnosis.

Swansong is a picture of a person fondly remembered but Hana elevates it beyond eulogy into a multi-layered meditation. Her grandmother Joan’s voice flutters in and out of ethereal recreations of …

Will Kate Survive Kate: Review 2, Kate Montague

RadioDoc Review

Masako Fukui’s radio documentary Will Kate Survive Kate is a tender portrait of a young woman’s battle with an eating disorder. The use of conventional interviews, recorded conversations, audio diaries, and fly-on-the-wall style observational recordings, contribute to a rich and layered documentary work. The anonymity of radio provided Kate the opportunity to articulate her experience without the distraction of her visual representation. And the use of intimate audio diary recordings, and script from written diaries, allowed Kate a degree of co-authorship in the documentary. Fukui’s compassionate approach is reflected in the deeply personal quality of the storytelling that is shared. …

Will Kate Survive Kate? Review 1, Laura Starecheski

RadioDoc Review

To craft a narrative with a dramatic arc out of an onerous battle with illness, when no sure recovery is in sight: this was the task facing Will Kate Survive Kate? producer Masako Fukui when she set out to document a year in the life of 'Kate'—a 29-year-old Australian woman battling—and at times tightly holding on to—anorexia nervosa. Kate’s family wants her to eat—to triumph over her illness—and for complicated and frustrating reasons, she can’t bring herself to do it. For Kate, this is a matter of life and death. At the heart of Kate’s story is the acknowledgment that …