We were lucky to catch up with Josie Eli Herman + Michael Alan Herman recently and have shared our conversation below.

Josie + Michael, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

Great question! Without a doubt, our fiction podcast – THE CALL OF THE VOID is the most meaningful thing we have ever made. We started making the show in our living room with a single Blue Yeti microphone and over three years of blood, sweat, and tears the show now has over 1 million global downloads across 150 different countries and was honored at the Webby Awards this year for best-scripted podcast series. We still get emails to this day from people saying how much the show means to them. Seeing how much it means to people around the world is one of the major reasons it means so much to us. There is even fan fiction written about the show. We never imagined in our wildest dreams that someone would write fan fiction about something we made, but we are seriously so grateful. THE CALL OF THE VOID gave us the artistic confidence we have today and we would not be the artists (or the people) we are today without the show.

Josie + Michael, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Absolutely! We are two Webby-honored podcasters and filmmakers in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We are the co-creators of Acorn Arts & Entertainment a multi-media arts company that is dedicated to inspiring stories with timeless messages of hope, redemption, and love. And we just finished post-production on our latest feature film — HOUSE OF KA.

But perhaps the best thing about us is that we are a married couple that makes art together. We met at Eastern Michigan University in the theatre department after both of us were called out for being exemplary students by our script analysis teacher. This single moment sparked a playful rivalry that has carried us through dozens of collaborations — from photoshoots to theatre shows to award-winning fiction podcasts. We were married in the middle of the pandemic on July 11th, 2020, and we currently spend our days writing, acting, and pushing positive stories into the world. We believe it is an artist’s responsibility to reflect and motivate the world around us and we are so grateful for the many mediums that have allowed us to do just that.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

That’s a great question! People often talk about “learning to compromise”, but we think there’s a higher form of collaboration, and that’s calibration — Making sure from the start of a project that we’re telling the same story with the same meaning, that we both know the characters intimately and know where we want to take them from start to finish. This way, it never feels like we’re fighting against each other. Instead, we’re fighting together to make the story work.

We can recall a certain pivotal scene in THE CALL OF THE VOID in which we both had some significant and conflicting opinions on how it should be written. Neither of us wanted to back down. It wasn’t until we took a step back to discuss what this scene meant to the story and what it meant to each character, that we were able to listen to and appreciate both of our ideas and combine them. In the end, we both felt heard, respected, and we were both incredibly pleased with the outcome. Through the years we’ve been collaborating, and particularly using our newer method of “calibration” rather than “compromising”, we’ve grown to really trust each other’s opinions, concerns, and notes.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

For sure! Honestly, we feel like we have to pivot on a daily basis in order to make art and develop our careers. It is very common for us to switch between acting, producing, writing, and directing in a single day. We actually call this “gear shifting” in our house, and it is something we are actively trying to get better at every day. But it’s not always easy. Some days we really just want to brainstorm, but we might not be in that phase of the creative process. So we have to gear-change and focus on the task at hand. We do this by re-aligning on the purpose of the project. What are we trying to say? Why are we saying it like this? Why now?

As John Steinbeck says, “The formula (to art) seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer (or artist) to convey something he feels important to the reader.” We believe the best artists are willing to step into other departments and mediums to make their vision come true. True art is nothing more than hard work.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.acornartsandentertainment.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecallofthevoidpodcast/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CalloftheVoidPodcast/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/CallOfTheVoidP
• Other: The Call of the Void – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Call_of_the_Void House of Ka – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Ka#

Image Credits
Acorn Arts & Entertainment