Emelia Symington Fedy is many things: writer, comedian, yogi, actress. The Chop Theatre co-founder’s select artistic credits include creating a dark comedy about parenting called Motherload, appearing in the Jessie Award-winning play Assembly, and even writing a cover story about Vancouver’s hippest hipsters for this very publication.
She also regularly contributes to CBC Radio, and can now add community radio host to her lengthy resumé.
The show is called Trying to be Good, based on Symington Fedy’s popular blog of the same name, and deals with all the things we’d rather not. Functioning partially like an advice column and partially like diary, Symington Fedy takes her no-holds-barred approached to blogging and satire, and uses her own outlandish, painful and personal experiences to get her guests to open up.
It’s one of many unique local programs on the lineup at Roundhouse Radio, the newly minted radio station in Railtown that features local people and local issues via talk shows with hosts like Cory Ashworth, Janice Ungaro, Terry David Mulligan, Kirk LaPointe and Martin Strong, to name a few.
None of the shows are quite like “No-Filter Fedy”’s self-produced, nightly tell-all, though, so we caught up with the dirty laundress to learn more about the art of baring it all on the air.
How did you come to join the cast at Roundhouse?
So, I’ve had a blog called Trying to be Good that’s been going strong for close to five years now. It’s podcasts and videos and writing, and it’s usually just speaking about my own personal experiences with something. It might be about feminism, it might be about parenting. And, in the blog, I’m the clown. I’m the person asking the questions that everyone asks – or wants to ask – but is a bit too shy to ask. I put myself in the vulnerable position of asking the kind of stupid questions so that we all culturally can maybe learn. And, long story short, there is a producer at Roundhouse Radio who loves my work who brought me in. So it went from writing form to live conversation, which is so fascinating and wonderful.
And how does that take shape?
My secret goal in every interview is to see, “How close can I get? How intimate can we get in this conversation?” For example, this one recent guest we were talking about her musical career as a hip-hop artist, and then we got into her recent diagnosis with MS. And then we got into her beliefs around God and death. So we just kept going deeper and deeper. Having these guests who are really willing to open their hearts and souls, completely candidly, I think they’re able to because I do it, too. And we have this really intimate, brave conversation on live radio, which is pretty rare, I think.
How does that fit in with the vision, or mandate, of the actual radio station?
From what I know of Roundhouse, their initial desire or mission was to have a more community, kind of hyper-local feeling. Almost like community radio: accessible stories. But, paid for with private funding, so not having to rely on government grants. And they’re taking a lot of cool risks, like the Janice & Cory show has got lots and lots and lots of LGBTQ2S conversations going on. They’re doing some interesting programming, which I’m really proud to be a part of.
You’ve done nearly 100 shows now. How do you choose your guests?
I started the reach by, “Who do I want to talk to? Who do I think is amazing? Who do I want to learn from?” And I made a huge list of all the people I thought were awesome and interesting, and so now four months into the show, my search is getting broader, because I’ve done my initial most-amazing-people-I-know conversation. Now people write in to me saying, “Hey I know a great guest.” Or I’ll ask my guests if they have anyone they think would be great.
Have any of your guests every been too uncomfortable to continue?
That’s a good question. And I say at the beginning of the conversation that, “You’re in charge. Anything I say that you don’t want to talk about, just tell me you don’t want to talk about.” It’s really straight-up and honest. Sometimes I’ll say, “I’m going to ask you a question right now, it might be really intense, and you don’t have to go there.” For example, I had a woman on who hears voices, and struggles with multiple mental illness diagnoses, and so I wanted her to tell the particular story of finding herself standing in a train station, not knowing how she got there, preaching the Bible. Like, kind of a vulnerable thing for her to expose, she’s kind of a big deal in the theatre community, so I asked her on air, are you willing to go there. And she was like, “Hell yeah, let’s go.” And the listener is getting this in real time. Like, she could have told me no and we would have been kind of stuck for a moment [laughs].
The other funny thing – I did a segment called Talking Like Men Aren’t Listening. So, how do women talk if men aren’t listening. Is it different? I don’t know… I hadn’t really thought about it before. So I brought a woman in and we started getting really crass. Like it was kind of gross, and it was different. How we talked was a lot less feminine and soft. So I told this story about how me and my teenage girlfriends used to watch each other fart. Like, spread the butt cheeks apart and watch it happen. And I got in trouble. The station was like, that’s too much, you’ve gone too far [laughs]. So that was a live example of failure. Talking like men aren’t listening is a great thing to do, but then, “Hey Em, it’s live radio, there might be kids listening.”
So it’s not Talking Like Kids Aren’t Listening…
Ha. Exactly. So for me it’s walking the tightrope, walking the line, and I always put myself out their first. I start the conversation with a story about myself, and it’s a vulnerable story, and it’s a story I might be ashamed to tell. It’s going to relate somehow to the theme of the conversation of the night, the guest listens to the story, and then usually they’re like, “Ohhhh okay, I’m safe. She just told something totally ridiculous. I’m going to be able to go there.”
How did your theatre career prepare you for this role? Especially interviewing other people?
It’s fascinating, because the theatre work we’ve done for 10 years naturally gravitated to talking to real people. It wasn’t very theatrical. It was interviewing real human beings about their real experiences, and then turning that into shows. So I’ve always been fascinated by the regular human and why. Why are we here? Why do we keep going? It’s so painful, how do people survive? How do people keep going after major tragedy? The “What keeps us going?” question. And then in my personal solo shows, which I’ve done four of, they’re all questioning. One of the shows was a yoga show, where I take the audience through an hour yoga class, while I talk to them about embracing darkness, embracing pain. So instead of all this light, bliss, happiness stuff, I go to the opposite end of the spectrum.
And how did you become this person who feels so comfortable being exposed?
I think I’ve always been a bit of a brash one. But the truth is for me is it’s an active choice to put myself in the position of the clown, the innocent, asking the questions, pointing out that I think the emperor is wearing no clothes. I think it’s a political act. I’m doing it for the purpose of change making. For example, I had a yogi on, and we were talking about the privilege of being able to eat meat, and how in this society, the way the world is going, maybe we should all be vegetarian. And I kind of put forward the thought that if you can’t afford really sustainable, healthy, happy meat, maybe you shouldn’t be eating it. And then she slammed me and said that is so classist. That is such a classist, privileged thing to say. And so I put forth that question intentionally, so that she would have the opportunity to educate us all in that moment about classism. It’s a subtle form, and I use it in my theatre work too, of being political. But it’s in a way that the audience can laugh. They don’t feel judged. They think I’m kind of the dumb one. But then they go home and they think about it.
Trying to be Good airs from 9-10pm weekdays on 98.3FM or you can stream online at RoundhouseRadio.com/TryingToBeGood.aspx
