Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Ashley Rodriguez, and I produce Good Beer Hunting's podcast.
Jamaal Lemon is a writer, photographer, podcaster, and GBH contributor, and he wrote his piece, “Mutated Anxieties — Living (and Parenting) While Black in the Face of Law Enforcement and COVID-19,” in under an hour. It’s impressive enough to write a full-length article in such little time, but even more so because the connections Jamaal makes are incredibly deep and nuanced—between United States history, his own lineage, protests for civil rights, and the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on Black people in America—it’s all in this story.
In this episode, I talk to Jamaal about what it took to write a piece that’s so personal, and we delve into his background as a storyteller and educator, and how teaching others about the world around you forces you to think differently about how to layer a story.
Building connections and talking in broad strokes to illuminate a point are strategies that naturally manifested in this story, and that’s in no small part because of who Jamaal is. Before we talk about his piece, we’ll start at the beginning, tracing his background in craft beer and how he got into writing and media. Here’s Jamaal.