Work Stew Podcast

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For most people, attending a funeral falls somewhere between ‘pretty grim’ and ‘completely gut wrenching.’

So I got to wondering: what is it like to attend funerals almost every single day? What is it like to have death at the very center of your life’s work? Who would make such a choice, and how on earth do they keep themselves from getting depressed?

Funeral Director Ashley Cozine of Cozine Memorial Group in Wichita, Kansas tackled all of these questions and more. He struck me as cheerful, genuine, and motivated above all else by a desire to be of service to people in pain. I came away from this interview convinced that I could never be a funeral director myself—but I also came away feeling very grateful that there are such people standing by to guide us when we need them.

About Ashley Cozine: Ashley was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas. He is a third generation funeral director and has worked in his family’s funeral home since he was in high school. He received a B.A. from the University of Kansas, a diploma in social studies and political theory from Oxford University in England, and an M.B.A. from Friends University. He is a past president of the Kansas Funeral Director’s Association and currently serves on the Executive Board of the National Funeral Director’s Association. In addition, he has served as a volunteer group facilitator for Three Trees, a center for grieving children and their families.

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This episode features an interview with Carolyn Nash, the author of a newly published memoir called Raising Abel. 

In Work Stew’s young life, I’ve profiled quite a few writers: an investigative reporter, a screenwriter, a speechwriter, and a writer of short stories. (I’ll admit to a weakness for people who work with words.)

What intrigues me about memoir writers in particular is the lack of separation between their life and their work. Most of us distinguish between our professional selves and our personal selves, but for the writer of a published memoir, life is work and work is life.

About Carolyn Nash: Carolyn Nash (not her real name) is a California-based writer. As a single 37-year-old, Carolyn adopted Abel, a three-year-old who came to her as a foster child having endured horrific abuse at the hands of his biological parents. Raising Abel is the story of the extraordinary path Carolyn and her son have travelled together over the last 18 years.

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For the most part, I interview people about the work they do to make a living. After all, it is that challenge—how to find work that feels meaningful and pays the bills—that preoccupies so many of us. But occasionally I also talk to people about the work they do for fun. Nancy Gohring, for example, picks fruit.

Nancy is the co-founder of City Fruit, a non-profit that coordinates the harvest of thousands of pounds of fruit every year from Seattle backyards. A small portion of the fruit is sold to neighborhood restaurants to help offset the organization’s operating costs, but most of the haul is donated to local soup kitchens and food banks.

Some jobs are hard to understand and difficult to justify, but the rationale for backyard harvesting can be grasped in an instant. That’s why I wanted to speak to Nancy: I wanted to know how she found her way, in this same crazy world that the rest of us inhabit, to such eminently sensible work.

About Nancy Gohring: When she’s not picking fruit, Nancy Gohring works as the Seattle correspondent for IDG, a news service dedicated to technology coverage. Nancy’s reporting has been featured in The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Wired, The Dallas Morning News, and other media outlets. Nancy began working with City Fruit in 2008, when Gail Savina (the organization’s current Executive Director) assembled a group of like-minded people interested in developing a new approach to fruit tree harvesting.

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Wrestling with my own career doubts, I’ve often found myself thinking wistfully about the field of medicine. In these moments, I start to think that physicians—despite all their sacrifices—have it easy in at least one respect: they must feel utterly fulfilled by their work, I’ve thought. They must feel so confident about the path they’ve chosen! I’ve sometimes imagined, with no small amount of jealousy, that doctors the world over are all very tired but gloriously angst-free.

This is of course ridiculous: some doctors love what they do; others have serious reservations.

In Mimi Lee’s case, being diagnosed with breast cancer caused her to completely re-think her work life. Over the past year, she’s put on hold her successful medical career (two decades in the making) in order to pursue at long last her abiding passion for music.

About Mimi Lee: Before heading off to college, Mimi studied at the Juilliard School of Music. While at Harvard, where she focused on Chemistry and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Mimi continued her musical studies at the New England Conservatory of Music.

As if all of that were not enough, Mimi holds a MD-PhD in Neuroscience from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She has served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesia at UCSF and as a Partner with the Anesthesiology Consultants of Marin as a Board-Certified Anesthesiologist.

These days, Mimi focuses on her work as the founder and pianist of Bella Trio, a San Francisco-based group dedicated to playing—and reinterpreting—chamber music. Bella Trio’s news and performances can be followed via Facebook and Twitter.

Photo: Mimi Lee on her 2010 wedding day. She describes this instant as “ten days after our diagnosis, seven days after my first surgery, and moments before the ceremony.”

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Scott Urner makes a living writing closed captioning for adult films. That’s a pretty unusual job, which is one reason I wanted to interview Scott. But I also wanted to talk to Scott because I think he’s part of a wider theme in the work world, which is that many of us end up in jobs that we never planned on doing. In fact, many people land up in roles they never even knew existed. And yet, as Scott says about his own work, sometimes things turn out just fine: Scott enjoys what he does, and he appreciates the fact that his flexible, work-at-home schedule allows him to pursue his own creative projects. And, no, “creative projects” is not a euphemism. Stop that.

About Scott Urner: Scott Urner has a B.A. in English Literature from UCLA and a MFA in Film Production from Loyola Marymount. He has produced, written, and acted for National Lampoon (a short film), TBS (Burly TV), Playboy (the hidden camera show “Totally Busted”), and Fox Sports Net (a sports comedy pilot).

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Last week, physics (yes, physics!) grabbed the headlines: a group of scientists at Switzerland’s European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) presented results suggesting that subatomic particles known as neutrinos had been clocked going faster than the speed of light.

The news reports, even for those of us reading them at the most lay level possible, were fascinating, but I found myself even more interested in the lives of the people pursuing this kind of research. At the very same moment that I was banging my head against the wall trying to get a fairly simple software program to work (a program, by the way, that comes with a comprehensive users’ manual that tells me exactly what to do), these people, these physicists, were working on nothing less than cracking the secrets of the universe. I found myself wanting to speak directly with such a person, and Sarah Demers, who appears to travel fairly close to the speed of light herself, graciously agreed.

About Sarah Demers: Sarah Demers (pictured here with her son Jonah and daughter Alina) is an assistant professor of physics at Yale University. She also works on the ATLAS experiment at CERN. Sarah did her undergraduate work at Harvard, and she received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. I like that her To Do list includes things like “Find the Higgs boson.”

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After 15 years spent working as a wordsmith or a spin doctor (depending on who you ask), I found myself wanting to change tracks. I was drawn to mediation because it seemed to require many of the same skills (in mediation, spin is called “reframing”) and yet it has such an appealing goal: rather than working for, say, a few more points of market share, I would be (cue the music!) Brokering Peace. Maybe not *world* peace, but peace nonetheless.

Mediators help divorced parents create parenting plans…they help feuding neighbors arrive at workable arrangements…they help businesses resolve disputes…they facilitate difficult workplace conversations that might otherwise lead to litigation. It’s very, very satisfying stuff. But it turns out that it’s also a hard way to make a living. In my conversation with Tom, we discussed both issues: the incredible appeal of mediation on the one hand, and the difficulty of making a career out of it on the other.

About Tom Melancon: Tom Melancon is a certified mediator who manages the largest ‘shared neutrals’ mediation program in the United States: the Seattle Federal Executive Board’s Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Program. Through this program, a consortium of 80 mediators (most of whom are federal employees themselves) conduct hundreds of mediations and facilitations every year for a wide range of government agencies. The program, which typically achieves annual settlement rates that exceed 85% and is credited with saving federal agencies millions of dollars each year, has now been emulated in cities nationwide.

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I had a lot of questions for comedy writer Nick Malis: When did he get it into his head that maybe he could write jokes for a living? How did he break into the business? What does it feel like to write for other comics versus getting the laughs for yourself?

Nick gamely answered everything I asked, and he even told me about his brief foray into writing porn scripts. Since my aim from the start has been to make Work Stew as wide-ranging and inclusive as possible, that was truly an unexpected delight.

About Nick Malis: As a student at Harvard, Nick Malis worked on the Lampoon, the campus magazine that has jumpstarted so many comedy careers. Nick’s first stop after graduation was The Howard Stern Show, where he had worked as a summer intern before finding his way into a more writerly role. He then went on to work as a joke writer for Joan Rivers. Over the years, Nick has contributed to a wide variety of TV shows including Celebrity Undercover, Spy TV, and The Biggest Loser. In 2009, Nick’s blog Cute Things Falling Asleep (exactly what it sounds like) became a global sensation practically overnight. Currently, Nick works as the head writer and supervising producer of Comedy Central’s hit show Tosh.O. 

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Listen to the interview by clicking the arrow on the audio player below.

John Safkow was a flight attendant for more than twenty years before he left the airline industry to become a gorilla caretaker. (Yes, he reports that, by and large, gorillas are in fact more evolved than airline passengers.)

I wanted to talk to John in part because his career path is unique: he is, it seems, quite literally the only flight attendant-turned-gorilla caretaker on the planet. But I was also struck by the fact that John’s story has lessons for us all: he pulled off a mid-life career change that might have seemed impossible, and just as he pursued his childhood passion for flying in his first career, his second career is also centered around a personal passion: caring for animals.

About John Safkow: John Safkow worked for United Airlines and several other carriers for over 20 years before taking a job at The Gorilla Foundation in Woodside, California. The Gorilla Foundation is home to Koko, whose ability to communicate using American Sign Language has made her the world’s most famous gorilla.

Even though John no longer works as a flight attendant, he remains a close observer of the airline industry’s ups and downs, which he chronicles on his cheeky and informative website MarthaStewardess.com.

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Listen to the interview by clicking the arrow on the audio player below.

You wouldn’t know it from the photograph, but Alethea Black has worked hard at being a writer. Her first collection of short stories, I Knew You’d Be Lovely, came out last month. Since then, her life (at least from the outside looking in) has been one long party: readings at New York’s hottest spots, rave reviews, wine, cheese, more wine! But what was the run-up to the party like? That’s what I most wanted to know. I’ve always imagined that it must be pretty easy to call yourself a writer after your first book comes out…but what do you call yourself, and how do you persevere, in the years and years before that? Alethea was refreshingly frank about her writerly life, and I found myself admiring, and coveting, her gentle strength.

About Alethea Black: Alethea Black was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard College in 1991. Her debut collection of short stories, I Knew You’d Be Lovely (Broadway Books/Random House), was chosen as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick for Fall 2011, and is an Oprah.com Book of the Week. The winner of the 2008 Arts & Letters Prize, Alethea lives in Dutchess County, New York.

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