The Story Collider

In honour of National Coming Out Day on October 11, we're sharing two stories about queer journeys, self-discovery, and what it means to finally become your authentic self.
Part 1: Every time Billie Sainwood is intimate with a partner, she loses consciousness—a medical mystery that makes dating difficult.
Part 2: Kelsea Best is sleepwalking through graduate school until an unexpected encounter with a postdoc at a brewery forces her to confront feelings she's spent a lifetime trying to ignore.
Billie Sainwood is a poet, performer, and trans menace living in Atlanta. Her work has been featured in Had Magazine, the Atlanta Fringe Festival, and she was recently one of Bloodletter Magazine's 2025 Trans Voices in Horror. Her poetry collections WHAT WAS EATEN WAS GIVEN and 36 VIEWS OF MY BREASTS are available from Kith Books.
Kelsea Best is an Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University where she researches topics related to climate justice and equitable climate adaptation. She is a native of Nashville, TN and has been in Columbus for almost three years. She lives with her spouse, Ash, dog, Henry, and cat, Dany. When she isn't teaching and conducting research, Kelsea enjoys horseback riding, exercising, gardening, and reading everything from murder mysteries to fairy romance novels. She is a proud queer woman and nature lover.
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Every family has secrets. But some secrets have the power to completely reshape who you think you are. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers uncover revelations that change everything they thought they knew about themselves.
Part 1: When Ryan Jones receives a DNA test from his mom for Christmas, he expects to learn a little more about his family history and heritage.
Part 2: After years of unexplained headaches, Alicia Silver is finally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
Ryan Jones is an award-winning spoken word artist, an environmental engineer, lawyer, and a lemon pepper wing connoisseur. In October 2025, Ryan founded the non-profit organization, Black Empowerment for Environmental Sustainability (BEES), that seeks to create culture and conversation around the pursuit of social and environmental justice by using the performing arts. Ryan was a participant in the Round 11 Reiser Atlanta Artists Lab with the Alliance Theater, where he began development of his debut stage play, "in spite of years of silence," a choreopoem about love, forgiveness, and healing in Black parent-child relationships. Ryan was born and raised in the Metro Atlanta area, where he currently resides. You can find out more about Ryan and his work at gohomeryan.com.
Alicia Silver is the Founder and Chief Experience Officer (CXO) of The Silver Lining Experience, a wellness and personal‑development platform rooted in Rest, Clarity, and Alignment. Her work spans restorative hospitality, storytelling, and community experiences designed to help people regulate, reflect, and reconnect with themselves. She spent 30 years in global financial services, building a career defined by precision, pressure, and performance — all while her body was quietly signaling that something was changing. That disconnect between what she projected and what she was actually experiencing became the turning point of her story. Alicia is now writing her debut memoir, drawing from her lived experience navigating invisible illness while rising through global financial services to the role of Director in 2019. She uses storytelling and health‑literacy advocacy to help people recognize the early clues their bodies offer, communicate more clearly with their providers, and move through major transitions without shame. Alicia lives in New Jersey and is a partial empty nester who believes in the power of pausing long enough to hear yourself again. Her mission is to make conversations about health and identity easier, earlier, and more human — one story at a time.
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This week we present two classic stories of people struggling with what the “right” thing to do is.
Part 1: Catherine Macdonald always wanted to study sharks, but her first time tagging them in the field doesn't go as planned.
Part 2: When Michelle Tong visits home after her first semester of medical school, a stranger presents an ethical dilemma.
Dr. Catherine Macdonald is co-founder and Director of Field School (www.getintothefield.com), a marine science training and education company dedicated to improving field research practices while teaching students to perform hands-on research with sharks. She is also the Director of the University of Miami's Shark Research and Conservation Program and an Associate Professor at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science.
Michelle Tong is a second-year medical student from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She has been published in the Margins and Glass, among other literary journals, and reads for the Bellevue Literary Review. This past summer, she won first prize in the Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Awards and received a fellowship from Brooklyn Poets. She teaches poetry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and lives in East Harlem.
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This week’s episode — produced in partnership with Boise State University’s “AWESOME” Center — features two stories from The AWESOME Center’s research team.
Part 1: Physicist Leslie Atkins has spent her life trusting evidence over intuition.
Part 2: Eric Jankowski is determined to beat his math-genius dad at the game Go.
Leslie Atkins is a professor at Boise State University whose work moves across physics, science studies, and education. Trained as a physicist, she studies how scientific concepts—light, time, energy, information—take shape, how those concepts are made legible to nonscientists, and how they transform how people notice, interpret, and inhabit their everyday lives. Her work has included collaboration with the Dalai Lama's Emory-Tibet Science Initiative, the North Carolina Governor's School, and the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life. She lives in Boise with her daughter and her dogs, Newton and Emmy Noether.
Eric's first Story Collider show was in the basement of the Ann Arbor District Library in 2011. Since then, he's published over 40 papers on molecular simulations and engineering education and he now leads the Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering at Boise State University. His collaborations with The Story Collider have led to three NSF-funded projects and been recognized by the American Society for Engineering Education and the Anthem Awards. He still likes bicycles and playing a board game called go, and still thinks sharing stories is the best way to improve big, complex systems.
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While many believe striving for perfection is a fool's errand, in this week's episode both of our storytellers chase it anyway.
Part 1: Weiji Ma grapples with the pressure of living up to his child prodigy reputation as he grows older.
Part 2: Chia Lin's meticulously structured life is upended by a chance encounter with a swarm of bees outside her lab.
Weiji Ma received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, but ended up strongly disliking working in Physics. He did postdocs in computational neuroscience at Caltech and the University of Rochester, but then realized he cared much more about measuring human behavior. He became faculty in 2008 (in Houston, TX) and moved to New York University in 2013, where he is now professor of neuroscience and psychology. His research has covered many areas, including visual decision-making, multisensory perception, visual working memory, metacognition, multi-step planning, problem-solving, mindsets, and procrastination. Nevertheless, it hasn't helped him make better decisions or reduce his own procrastination.
Dr. Chia Lin is a Research Scientist at the Rothenbuhler Honey Bee Research Lab in Columbus, Ohio. Originally from Taiwan, she moved to the United States in 2003 to study pollination ecology. Her beekeeping journey began in 2013 when she joined the Department of Entomology at The Ohio State University as a postdoctoral researcher. Her current research focuses on developing farm management strategies to enhance pollinator health and improve crop productivity. During the summer months, she manages over 100 honey bee colonies to support various research projects across Ohio. In addition to her scientific work, Chia is a kindergarten teacher at the Columbus Chinese Academy. Outside of her professional life, she enjoys crocheting, building with Legos, and spending time with her family and two cats.
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