Meet Emma Lehman

We recently connected with Emma Lehman and have shared our conversation below.

Emma, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

The first podcast I produced, I began on a whim during COVID. I had finished all but the easiest classes for my degree, gotten laid off from my job, couldn’t really go anywhere, and generally had a lot of time on my hands. I had developed a fascination with the actor Shelley Duvall after a film GE had me analyze the film “Three Women,” and in this new free time, I fell down the rabbit hole of researching Shelley.
I discovered that there was precious little information out there, especially for a woman who had kind of been killing it in the industry: pioneering the format of scripted TV originals, owning multiple production companies, producing season after season of culturally significant children’s television, and starring in several feature films. Even her Wikipedia page failed to mention some of her most impressive accomplishments. Not only that, but there were no leads on why she seemed to have disappeared after her last film credit in 2002. I was itching to know what had happened to Shelley – not just because I was curious, but because I was inspired by her career, especially as a woman in the hellscape that was 1970s and ’80s Hollywood.
I assumed I would be recording myself reading some research I found. Maybe add some music. Possibly even talk to a few fans. But what started with a Rhode mic on sale and a YouTube crash course on Logic Pro eventually ended up taking me from LA to Texas (in my very small and under-powered car, because COVID meant I couldn’t take a plane) to meet Shelley’s brothers, neighbors, and colleagues. I recorded interviews on my phone, edited audio on a laughably under-equipped laptop, and eventually produced “Texas Twiggy,” an 11-episode investigative series about the life and career of Shelley Duvall.
Nobody told me to make Texas Twiggy. A few people specifically told me not to make it, actually. But the deeper I got into it, the more I found purpose in the fact that I was doing it because I wanted to… And because Shelley deserved this deep-dive into her work that seemed not to exist. To have the privilege of sharing a detailed account of Shelley Duvall with the world, and to do so with no mandate purely from passion, was so rewarding. After production, a member of our team got a new job that found her living only an hour from Shelley, and the two remained close friends until Shelley’s recent passing.
After Texas Twiggy, I produced Gooned, another investigative podcast which went on to win a Shorty Award. Just like my first podcast, Gooned started with no mandate, with nobody asking (or paying) me to create it… And just like Texas Twiggy, Gooned gave me an incredible sense of purpose. Even now that I have paid gigs in the industry, I think I’ll always feel the most driven and purposeful when I’m making something simply because I know it needs to be made.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I am an independent podcast producer and investigative journalist. I produced, wrote, and hosted Gooned, a Shorty Award-winning, Ambies-nominated, and Webby-nominated limited-series podcast now available on all platforms, and am also the creator of the Texas Twiggy podcast, released in 2022. I graduated from UCLA in 2022 with a B.A. in English and minors in Global Studies and Professional Writing.
I grew up outside of Washington, D.C., and now live in Los Angeles with a cranky asthmatic cat named Garlic. When I’m not making a podcast, I’m usually embroidering, rollerskating, or eating pickles straight from the jar. If you’re in LA, you can find me and my embroidery at a lot of local art markets!

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

One of the biggest things I learned (arguably way later than I should have) was to outsource, delegate, and network. As cool and rewarding as it is to try and do everything yourself, it’s almost always beneficial to recruit people onto your team. There will always be someone you can learn from, and there will always be someone you can teach; when you’re militant about doing it all yourself, you miss out on building that network and expanding your skills. I hate the word “networking” because it implies a breathless and rabid climbing of some endless social ladder, using everyone you meet as a tool to advance your own goals. But without that implication, “networking” is so important: think about it, everything you haven’t learned from experience, you’ve learned from someone else. Asking the “dumb” questions, putting yourself out there to help or to request help, and putting in the work to establish and maintain relationships is ALWAYS a good move. The worst that happens is someone says no, and the best that happens is you make a lifelong friend or insightful professional connection, alongside whom you get to grow yourself.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

I recommend Lewis Raven Wallace’s book “The View From Somewhere” to every single person who asks (and plenty who don’t.) It was truly a life-changing book for me, both personally and professionally. Wallace begins with the story of how and why they were fired from Marketplace, and uses that as a jumping-off point to discuss the myth of journalistic objectivity, and, more broadly, how our lived experiences inform our work.
As a journalist, “The View From Somewhere” perfectly expressed so many things I had always felt, but could never put into words, and certainly not with so many salient examples. As a person, this book opened my eyes to the importance of acknowleding rather than attempting to set aside bias. I could write a book of equal length describing why I liked this book so much, but let’s just say that when I discovered that the author has a podcast by the same name, I was unreachable for a week.
The biggest thing that “The View From Somewhere” taught me was that bias is not something to try and set aside. In fact – especially in journalism – attempting to “be objective” is actually misleading and even dishonest. We all have biases, because we have all lived different lives. Knowing the experiences that have informed the media you’re consuming is key to understanding that media, digesting it, and applying (or discounting) it. The negative connotation of the word “bias” has made us as reporters and as people very quick to claim “objectivity,” to want to speak truth to both sides. But “bias” is a neutral word, a word that means “everything I’ve ever done and experienced, and how it influences my perspective on the thing you’re about to read.” When your audience knows where you’re coming from, they’re going to understand much more deeply what you’re reporting on, why you’re reporting on it, and what your opinion means in the context of the issue.

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