🎙️ To Feel It Anyway

On Choosing Hard Histories, and Staying Human in the Telling

There’s a moment in every episode when I hesitate.

Not because I doubt the work — but because I know what’s coming. The stories I tell on Gateway Books by Crestance aren’t light. They’re often violent. Often buried. And always real. Even when wrapped in fiction.

And yet, again and again, I choose them.

Sometimes, it’s a quiet instinct — a tug toward a forgotten name or a shadowed headline. Other times, it’s like being struck. Like something inside me says: This one. This wound. This truth.

What follows is usually a week or more of immersion. Reading, note-taking, cross-referencing. Piecing together real histories behind fictional characters, real voices behind fictional scenes. And inevitably, a moment comes — late at night, or mid-script — when I feel it in my body. That gut punch. That wave of sadness. That crack in the voice I haven’t even recorded yet.

The Cost of Knowing

This week, I’m working on Episode 19. It centers on the Armenian Genocide — a history that was denied for generations, a silence that nearly succeeded. I’ve spent hours with survivor memoirs, with academic research, with a novel that pulls memory from the grip of denial. And the further in I go, the heavier it gets.

But here’s the thing: I don’t turn away.

Because I believe — deeply — that feeling it is part of the work.

You can’t honor the dead if you numb yourself to what they lived through. You can’t tell stories with integrity if you won’t sit with the weight of them. And you can’t call something “historical fiction” if you’re unwilling to face the history inside it.

Why I Keep Going

Every episode, I try to walk that line — between intellect and empathy, between research and reverence. I am not a historian. I am not a scholar. I am a reader, a writer, a woman who believes stories are sacred. And that telling them well means remembering the people who lived them.

Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.

Because staying human in the face of horror is an act of resistance.

So yes, sometimes the episodes feel like a gut punch. But I keep writing. I keep reading. I keep telling. Not to sensationalize — but to understand. To witness. To connect.

To say: You were here. And I see you.

This is the work. And I’m honored to do it.

This reflection was written during the research and production of Episode 19 of Gateway Books by Crestance, which explores the Armenian Genocide through fiction, memoir, and academic study.

🕊️ You can find the episode on YouTube or at crestance.com.