Nichole Hill
speaker
35 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Nichole Hill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yes, hello. I'm Nicole Hill. I am the story editor for this season. This is my first season with the show. And I would have to say, like, the thing that really stood out to me, this is really, really a very heavy, very emotional, very, like, delicate topic. And I loved...
I mean, for lack of a better term, sort of our writer's room or the editor's room where we talked about how do we want to approach these? How do we infuse as much empathy and understanding into the story and into everybody who's being represented in the story as possible? And I was raised an evangelical Christian. I'm not that anymore, but I am still a person of faith.
And I think that the way that we thought about faith and how to represent it was with so much care, with so much intentionality. And so it just made the story editing. I just feel like I upped my story editing game that much more from the conversations that we had about how do we push ourselves to be even more thoughtful and empathetic and understanding.
This has been like it's a heavy, heavy, heavy project, but it has just been also the way that we've approached it. I think we've taken a lot of care of one another and done our best to take care of the people whose stories we got to tell. So I've loved it.
You want to do like Mariah, like just a hard 180. Yeah, exactly. So I have a Black history comedy storytelling show. It's called Our Ancestors Were Messy. And on it, I'm telling stories that I found in historical Black newspapers and their gossip columns and society pages and looking at both
how our ancestors thought about beating Jim Crow while also just being so messy and just living their lives and making mistakes and figuring out, you know, what is it going to mean to be Black in America immediately after slavery and before the civil rights era. So there's lots of sound design. It's meant to feel a little bit like a movie.
It's meant to feel fun, but also, you know, to make you think a little bit, hopefully. Yeah.
I was going to say the same thing. Those notes, when a Greta note comes in, it's not like you're not leaving a bunch of them, but when you do, it hits.
Yesterday, I was all Quince. I was like a walking Quince billboard. We're keeping it.
I would just add like the story takes place within a context and a culture that you have to understand in order to understand any of the people that we're talking about in this whole situation. I think if you exclude race and if you exclude the role of the church in Sophie's life, you are not going to understand any of the story.
You're not going to understand why anybody moved the way that they did, why the response was what it was. It's all important context to understand the culture in the same way that, you know, if you told a story about people who lived by the sea, you need to talk about the sea a little bit.
So for us, we told a story in which people are deeply involved in the church and in which the people who are... The most important, the people who have the least voice and the least agency are from a place that their mother doesn't know that much about. It's very far away and that's very different and that we're assuming a lot of our listeners also don't know a lot about.
And so it's part and parcel, like you have to talk about these things if you want to understand the story at all. You want to understand the urgency of the story that we're telling at all.
And it was also a lot of the people that were interviewed, I mean, it wasn't just us saying, this is weird. People who were with her, who were around her, who were embedded in her life, who were a part of her, the fabric of her life, were made uncomfortable by these behaviors and highlighted these behaviors for the team.
And so part of this is just reporting out on the little flags that started going up for people about Sophie and her relationship with her daughter. Some of these flags might seem small, oftentimes they are, but they add up and add up in people's minds and start to raise real alarms for them about the safety and the well-being of the girls.
And so I think we documented kind of how those small flags became like blaring alarms in the lives of the people that were around Sophie and her girls. And... I will say like one of them, the way that she cared for them when it comes to their hair, when it comes to things like that, the community that she's surrounding them with and the examples that she's being sure that they have access to.
there's been so much data and so much research and so much study and scholarship has gone into the things that will, that help you to raise a healthy, happy, self-actualized young child and then a young child of color, of any color, in an environment in which they're not seeing people like them. And a lot of the behaviors that she demonstrated just go against kind of what has become
the understood best practices. And I think Chad speaks to that. I mean, I think what we were documenting is just somebody who is acting seemingly in opposition of what we all know now to be a better way to raise a child in that kind of environment.
I mean, I think that's what we kept talking about. It was the everything that's happening culturally, medically, and then not just like you're going to join a team sport. You're going to join it in the most intense way possible.
But it's like from day one. From day one. And so it's just like to imagine anybody, not even just a child, but anyone dealing with all of those factors turned up to like 10. We had to talk about it. It was just as shocking to us, I imagine, as it was to people when they first heard it. And it was really, to Aaron, to the comment Aaron read, it just is like, why?
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