Story Lab. Uncertainty in Medicine. In the conversation below, Emily talks with Moazzum about how storytelling brought him closer to his family, the unique challenges his practice and community face in Riverside county, and his vision for the Nocturnists Satellites event coming in MB : Even before I was a physician, storytelling helped me connect with my family. You can read about my grandfather on Wikipedia. He was an important scientist.
For a lot of my life, storytelling was the only opportunity I got to know about the people in my life. Looking back, there were so many times that I was doing performing arts, whether it was stand up comedy or spoken word or Moth storytelling, because I thought it was cool. But in reality, I was just desperately looking for other people to resonate with what I was saying. ES: You mentioned stand up comedy and Moth storytelling. Tell me more about that.
Are you somebody who's super comfortable on stage? Or was that more of a reach for you? MB : The first time in college that I ever did stand up was a complete reach. My roommate signed me up for an open mic event.
He knew that I was fascinated by stand up comedy and the people behind the comedy. There's somebody behind you lighting a fire. I tend to do some of my better work under pressure. It was a low stakes thing but it went really well. So I got to do more of it, even though it was never something that I was going to turn into anything real, and I didn't do much beyond college.
That pivoted into doing more spoken word and slam poetry. Stand up comedy people are very different from spoken word and slam poetry people. The Moth storytelling event was a combination of those things. That was something I had set as a goal for myself, to go to a Moth event and put my name in the hat. This was my fourth year of medical school. It happened to fall on a day that was personally important to me, the memorial of one of my friends who was killed when I was in college.
