Exploring Art's Healing Power: Michael Claytor and Andrew Hix on Shift Change Radio Hour

In this episode of "Art Heals All Wounds," Michael Claytor and Andrew Hix, arts in medicine practitioners at the Arts in Medicine program at UF Health Shands Hospital in Gainesville, FL and co-hosts of the Shift Change Radio Hour share the story behind starting this radio show. Michael, a musician, and Andrew, a literary artist, each share their journey of using art as a tool for healing within the hospital environment. They delve into their unique roles – Michael’s involvement with music engagement for patients and Andrew’s focus on storytelling.

The episode highlights their innovative project "Shift Change Radio Hour," a radio show aimed at acknowledging and appreciating the efforts of healthcare workers, especially during the pandemic. They discuss the conception and evolution of this program which focuses on playing song requests from healthcare workers, creating feature stories, and fostering community connections.

Michael, and Andrew share how the show has impacted the community, building bridges between hospital staff, patients, and the local community. They also reflect on the personal impact of the show on their own lives, emphasizing the role of collaboration and the healing power of music and storytelling.

Key Takeaways:

·       Origins of Shift Change Radio Hour: The program was initiated to provide support and appreciation for exhausted healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is broadcasted twice weekly in collaboration with a local Gainesville radio station, WMBT 90.1 FM.

·       Patient and Staff Interactions: The show is fully request-based, allowing healthcare workers to request songs, which creates a personal and engaging platform for staff and patients alike. This fosters deeper connections and provides a unique arts-based outlet in the healthcare setting.

·       Creativity as a Healing Tool: Michael and Andrew share how integrating music and storytelling into healthcare not only benefits patients but also enriches their own lives as practitioners. They emphasize the importance of boundaries and self-care in their roles, as well as the rewarding nature of their work.

·       Community Building: The show has successfully created connections between hospital staff, patients, and the broader community, emphasizing the human aspects of healthcare environments.

·       Personal Reflections: Both guests express how the show has transformed their approach as artists and their understanding of community engagement through creative media.

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Transcript

Michael Claytor [00:00:00]:
Hello, and welcome to Shift Change Radio Hour, the show where we say thank you to our local health care workers by playing their song requests on the radio.

Andrew Hix [00:00:08]:
We've got a new episode coming in hot that does just that. I'm Andrew, four personals and one technical, Hix.

Michael Claytor [00:00:15]:
And I'm Michael Triple Dribble Claytor.

Pam Uzzell [00:00:31]:
Do you believe art can change the world? So do I! On this show, we meet artists whose work is doing just that. Welcome to Art Heals All Wounds. I'm your host, Pam Uzzell. Michael Claytor and Andrew Hix are both arts and health practitioners at the Shands Arts and Medicine program at the University of Florida Hospital in Gainesville. Michael, a musician, provides music engagement for patients, and Andrew, a literary artist, focuses on storytelling. During the pandemic, Michael and Andrew knew that not only were patients suffering, but the health care staff at the hospital were exhausted, stressed, and overwhelmed. They decided that they would team up and create a radio program that would show these health care providers, hey, we see you and we appreciate you, and that this show could foster a connection between health providers, patients, and the greater community beyond the hospital.

Pam Uzzell [00:01:40]:
This became the Shift Change Radio Hour. Last May, I attended an arts and health intensive at the Center for Arts and Medicine at the University of Florida. Artists and creatives from all over the country and a few from outside of the country joined together to discuss the ways in which we were using art to provide healing to our communities. One of the first things we did as a group was to work with Michael and Andrew to create a Shift Change radio program. They let us know what they wanted us to explore for this episode, and with a great deal of trust and good input and feedback, Michael and Andrew helped us create this work with them. For me, it was really inspiring to see how well collaboration in creating audio content can be. So today, Michael and Andrew are joining me on the show to talk about Shift Change Radio Hour and about their work as arts and health practitioners. You want to know how you can really help me keep this show going? Follow me on your favorite listening app.

Pam Uzzell [00:02:49]:
So easy. Right? And if you really wanna give the show a boost, leave me a five star rating or review. Hi, Michael and Andrew. Thank you so much for being on Art Heals All Wounds. Can you just introduce yourselves, who you are and what you do? Maybe, Michael, you go first.

Michael Claytor [00:03:10]:
Sure. Yeah. I'm Michael Claytor. I'm a musician and a songwriter and a performer, and I work for a program called UF Health Shands Arts in Medicine here in Gainesville at the UF Health Hospital. And I'm a I'm a what we used to call a musician in residence. Now we call arts and health practitioner. And I'm, basically, a musician in the hospital who provides music engagements for patients. And I, along with Andrew, am a coproducer of our hospital based staff targeted radio show called Shift Change Radio Hour.

Pam Uzzell [00:03:45]:
Wow. Okay. Andrew, would you like to introduce yourself a little bit?

Andrew Hix [00:03:49]:
Yes. I'm Andrew Hix. I work in a lot of the same programs and positions as Michael. I'm a co producer of Shift Change Radio Hour at UF Health Shands Arts and Medicine. One thing that's a little different is that I'm a literary artist here. So in my role as arts and medicine practitioner, I actually focus more on storytelling and that's how I came into the radio show.

Pam Uzzell [00:04:13]:
Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that. I think I just assumed you were both musicians.

Andrew Hix [00:04:20]:
I'm not a professional musician, but I am an amateur musician and enjoy playing multiple instruments. I do a lot of songwriting and I don't focus much on my skills with the instruments.

Pam Uzzell [00:04:32]:
Oh, wow. So I would love to know more about each of you. So maybe Andrew, we'll start with you. You probably didn't start as a small kid saying I want to be an arts and health practitioner. So tell me about your background and your journey to finding yourself in your current role.

Andrew Hix [00:04:54]:
Sure. When I was really little, I wanted to do what my dad did, which was, environmental specialist for the power company. A lot of his job was, trying to keep manatees safe and studying the local ecosystem in the swamp where I grew up, which was in South Florida. And then later, I decided I had more interest in my mother's job. I don't know why I considered money outside of my parents. But unlike a lot of kids, I was interested in what my parents did, and I decided I wanted to be a teacher. But I was very interested specifically in in literature and stories and games and all of that potential in that space. So I, started teaching through the English degree at UF that I acquired, University of Florida.

Andrew Hix [00:05:38]:
That didn't work out. I worked at a charter school in Brooklyn for a very short amount of time in New York and then, came back and ended up going to massage school because friends recommended it.

Pam Uzzell [00:05:50]:
Wow. Okay. That is a really interesting journey. I totally would wanna be what your dad did as well. It sounds amazing and maybe a little bit ahead of his time in terms of really working with a power company to protect wildlife. But maybe not. Maybe I just don't know enough about it. But I think it's so interesting because you took on massage is also a form of care.

Andrew Hix [00:06:18]:
Yeah. That was when I really came into the idea of wanting to help people heal. As a teacher, I cared about others, but it was more about interfacing with students and young people. It was a lot of fun. But as a massage therapist, I got used to the idea of being specifically related to health. And from there, as I was doing, Qigong and Tai Chi at a local studio and later Dojo here in Gainesville, I started working as a martial artist in residence at Arts and Medicine. And from there, started doing massage and later came in through my educational background to replace an outgoing literary artist.

Pam Uzzell [00:06:54]:
Okay. Well, that's an amazing background and it kind of, it makes a lot of sense. It's a very circuitous journey, but it makes sense how you wound up here with the different things you're trying. Michael, what about you? What is, what how did you wind up doing what you're doing?

Michael Claytor [00:07:12]:
My journey is a lot simpler than Andrew's. I've, I've been a musician since I was a kid. I started playing drums in middle school and, you know, learned guitar through the years, and I always wanted to be a musician. And I didn't know that this was a thing that I could do. I didn't know anything about arts and health, growing up or when I was learning music. And I went to college here in Gainesville at University of Florida, and I played in a lot of bands around town and stayed after college for a couple years. And, eventually, I had heard about arts and medicine as a student, but still never even it didn't it wasn't really on my radar as something I could do until I had a friend, who was working here as a musician in residence, and she asked me to come in and shadow her one day and see what the job was all about. Little did I know that she was moving away, and they were looking for musicians to take her spot and that I was one of the candidates to do that.

Michael Claytor [00:08:05]:
So, so as soon as I found out that there was an opportunity to be here, I I jumped at the chance to join the team, and I've been here now since 02/2013. And, yeah, it's obviously a different kind of thing than than being a performing musician and recording musician as, like, outside of a health care setting, but it's rewarding in different ways as well. So I've I've loved it ever since I started.

Pam Uzzell [00:08:30]:
Okay. So we're gonna follow on that thread. And, Michael, if you'll just continue why it's rewarding, and then, Andrew, I would love for you both as you're talking about why it's rewarding to talk about what you actually do there at the hospital. So, Michael, continue on that thread. What do you do, and why is it rewarding for you?

Michael Claytor [00:08:52]:
Yeah. So most of my job is providing music engagements with patients in the hospital at their bedside, typically. I do a lot of performing at the bedside. I do songwriting at the bedside. We have a mobile recording studio where we can record songs with patients at the bedside, and it's rewarding for all the reasons you think it might be. You know? You're working with people who are sick in the hospital, and it's it's like patient facing work that you feel like you're, offering something to someone who is in a tough spot. And you build relationships over time with long term patients, and those can be really deep and meaningful. And, you know, just in the same ways that it's meaningful, it can also be really challenging.

Michael Claytor [00:09:36]:
To lose people or to watch people get sicker can be really difficult, but just the idea of being able to offer something that people enjoy, that people can find some relief in, that people can express themselves through, it's rewarding just like you think it would be.

Pam Uzzell [00:09:52]:
Do patients, if they can, often sing with you when you're performing?

Michael Claytor [00:09:58]:
Yeah. You know, not everybody wants to do that, but but when they do, it can be really fun. And, you know, we have people who are musicians that are admitted in the hospital and we do jam sessions together. We do song polls or we trade off who plays songs. We I've given guitar lessons. We've done lots of sing alongs and things like that. It's, you know, it's we we say it's it's patient led work. You know, we're not, arts therapists or expressive arts therapists.

Michael Claytor [00:10:25]:
We're we are musicians and artists in residence. So we kinda leave it up to the patient. We don't have any clinical goals. We go in and say, what do you wanna do today? And and kinda follow that thread. So we do all kinds of stuff. And and, and that's another thing that I love about it is it's never the same it's never the same thing every day. It's never the same thing every room. It's you're you're constantly doing new types of projects and being challenged to expand your boundaries.

Michael Claytor [00:10:50]:
And, and I love that about it.

Pam Uzzell [00:10:53]:
Yeah. I think that's one of the most mind blowing revolutionary things that I have learned is that the lack of clinical goals and the patient led experience can be healing in and of itself. Yeah. Well, Andrew, I would love to hear what you do as a literary practitioner because I I did not know that about you. So I would love to hear more about that.

Andrew Hix [00:11:21]:
So one of the things that's the most interesting to me about being a literary artist in the hospital is that it's very rare that sessions are alike. So the things that people tend to want when it's patient led and they're doing literary experiences, they often have something very specific in mind that I may not have that much practice facilitating in the hospital, when I first encounter it. But then once it becomes a pattern, then I know, okay. This is something that I do. This is something that I offer. I have some things that I'll offer like blackout poetry or various forms of short poetry that I can simply present prompts for short stories and poems to patients, and they can work on them with me or on their own time. But often, it's a special project that someone has an interest in. And through storytelling and conversation, I'll find out about that project.

Andrew Hix [00:12:07]:
Like, I want to make a children's book, with pictures, and then it becomes a collaboration between visual artists. Perhaps I have the role of an editor and then the patient as writer. Or they wanna journal and then they talk to me about what they're writing. Or they're working on a story at home like a novel and they wanna tell me all about it. So I ask questions and I, speak to the literary merit of some of their choices and really engage them on that level that they may not even have much engagement outside of the hospital in that way. So it's really diverse, the kind of work that I do when I wear the literary hat. And, a lot of it is legacy work, especially lately. I've been working with patients who they want to bring letters or, be recorded speaking to their children and telling stories and offering advice when they know that they are likely to experience death soon.

Andrew Hix [00:12:58]:
So they will they and their family will work together to create recordings and offer special projects that will show their loved ones how much they care. And that's really powerful also for the staff too.

Pam Uzzell [00:13:11]:
Yeah. I was just wondering about that. And when you were saying that is how do those types of projects and working with patients who are terminal in that way, how does that affect you as an arts practitioner?

Andrew Hix [00:13:27]:
It's rough. If I often I've grown to recognize some of the stages of grieving that I'll go through in inpatient care. It usually takes me a couple of weeks where I'll just know that I feel a little different after a patient has passed, that I've gotten to know. I'll know that I'll be sadder and I might have unexplained sighing noises that come out of me as I just don't really reflect always consciously on patient work at home, but I will reflect in other ways. I find that with massage therapy, actually, I get much closer to people sometimes, in a way that I spend so much time in physical proximity with them and touching directly into their illness. Whereas in the the work, the literary artwork is often very creative or it all happens in one go. Like, I come and I record with them and we spend an hour together and then I put it down. And that in that way, I sometimes become less attached to the people, though I still feel something certainly when they when they pass, especially for their family as well.

Andrew Hix [00:14:30]:
But I find that the different kinds of connections actually feel different when when someone's approaching or has experienced end of life.

Pam Uzzell [00:14:38]:
I met you both doing the arts and health intensive. During the online virtual part that we did before, there's a lot of talk about self care. And as you both speak, I am wondering about that for both of you. So Andrew, you were just talking about noticing different stages of grieving and behaviors after someone has passed, what do you do for yourself for self care?

Andrew Hix [00:15:08]:
So I have a few different categories of self care that I try to do regularly. One is my personal practice of practicing, Qigong, which is a kind of relax for those who aren't familiar, it's similar to tai chi. It's a relaxation exercise and works on various parts of the body to help bring about a kind of mind body approach to relaxation, meditation, things like that. That helps me a good bit because it helps me get in touch with my feelings. It helps them move through at the same time. So that's very nice. I have recently, in the past year or so, especially in the past few months, I started seeing a therapist, which is very helpful. Through UF, I was able to get insurance that actually includes free therapy unlimited.

Andrew Hix [00:15:56]:
That's not all of us have that, but I do, and I'm I very much cherish it. Free and unlimited are amazing words to go before the word therapy. So I'm very, grateful for that in helping me process when I when there are work related issues, including patient loss. And then other than that, we have our established routines at with among our coworkers. So we have our artist rounds on Wednesdays where we get to talk about patient, patients, including talking about them when they die. And that can be a good way. If I write a story about a patient and my experience with them, I can speak it out at rounds and know that I've memorialized them for people who really care and understand and know what it's like to have that kind of relationship professionally.

Pam Uzzell [00:16:38]:
Right. Right. And Michael, I'm assuming that you experience similar grief when someone that you have worked with passes. And I'm wondering what you do. And even I imagine that there are needs for self care, even if someone hasn't passed. So what do you do?

Michael Claytor [00:16:57]:
Yeah. Andrew covered a lot of great ways that that a lot of us do. Reflective writing before our our weekly meeting can be really helpful. You know, like a lot of artists, I I use music as a as a way to process emotions and feelings and grief and all that kind of stuff too. And we have a really good team, and a lot of our team or at least a handful of members of our arts and medicine program here are longtime friends of mine that I knew even before joining this program. So I feel like I have really good connections with other people that can be sources of strength for me and and people to lean on in those hard times for sure. Yeah. But it's, it can be challenging.

Michael Claytor [00:17:34]:
I I also think there's a little bit of preventative self care that that I I try to practice myself, which is maintaining really clear boundaries for myself with patients, with the work versus my personal life, and it doesn't always work. It's you know, people can break that bubble. And, and, you know, you do become close to people who you work with here all the time. But in general, I I I really try to maintain those boundaries, and that can help and that can help with longevity, with the ability to show up and do the work, and just with my own mental health for sure.

Pam Uzzell [00:18:08]:
Yeah. Well, I just was reflecting. My dad passed in the hospital in fall of twenty twenty two. And as not necessarily the patient, but the family of the patient, it is true that I had, you know, there were no arts practitioners, which I would have loved that. But among the nursing staff, I had my favorites. And it is true that I think boundaries are really important in giving care because as a person who is in that grief and vulnerable position, I could totally imagine sort of like grabbing on to that health care practitioner in a way that would not be good for them. And so I think the discussion about boundaries is really interesting and important. The other thing that strikes me as both of you are talking is that where, you know, your particular, you know, your your staff, your jobs, it's also geared to keep you healthy.

Pam Uzzell [00:19:14]:
It sounds like like the reflective writing sounds really like an amazing practice. So it's not what we might often think of in terms of a health care setting where it's just, you know, you sacrifice everything of yourself in order to give care for others, because obviously the burnout there and the, effect on mental health would be very, very damaging. So that's super interesting to hear you even just describe your working conditions. So I met you both because you did this amazing session with our group, recording an episode of the Shift Change Radio Hour. Can you talk about what that is? Love to know everything. When it got started, why it got started, how it got started. Either one of you wanna jump into this first?

Michael Claytor [00:20:10]:
Sure. I'll I'll kick it off, and, Andrew, you can pick it up. So, yeah, we have a a radio program through our jobs at UF Health Shands Arts in Medicine, and we partner with a local radio station, WMBT ninety point one FM, the Wombat here in Gainesville. It's a nonprofit station, and they reached out to us just at the same time we were looking for ways to sort of give back to nursing staff and care for the caregiver here a little bit during the COVID pandemic when there was a lot of health care worker burnout and nurses, especially were having a very difficult time. There was short staffing, all kinds of issues, just making it really hard on them to show up and and do their jobs. And so we decided that we would partner with this station and start a radio program to give back to them, and we take requests from health care workers here in Gainesville and play them on the air. We DJ song requests. We do feature pieces, where we do interviews or little journalism spots about some some intersection between arts and health that we notice around the hospital or in our community or or beyond.

Michael Claytor [00:21:22]:
Just anything that we find is is, related to what we do. And we have guest DJ's. We do all kinds of fun stuff, and it runs twice a week, Wednesday morning and Wednesday evening, and we time it for drive time for most health care workers. Like, a lot of our nurses are here at 7AM or 7PM. So our show runs from six to seven, both AM and PM, on Wednesdays, and we've been doing it for about two years now. Two and a half years. Close to three years, Andrew. Can you believe that? Amazing.

Pam Uzzell [00:21:51]:
Wow. Well, what would you add to that, Andrew?

Andrew Hix [00:21:54]:
I wanna add a couple of details. One is that I actually came on to the show slightly later than Michael. Michael was more of a founder, and I came in because I had extreme interest. I very much wanted to collaborate with Michael because we had been doing, songwriting together, and I have been a fan of his music and presence since my college days. So it was something of a dream come true to work right alongside him in a project because although all the artists sometimes work together, in various ways, Working on a long term project like this that's now going on three years, I knew that it had a lot of potential to become a big kind of a game changer for staff relations and largely a bridge between the hospital and all of the communities established in the hospital and the world at large, the local community of Gainesville actually physically out on the airwaves. There's so much opportunity for storytelling and humanizing the not only this health care environment, but really all of the the people involved from patients who then their staff learn about them in new ways because they hear about them on the radio to patients and people at home learning about the the staff's music preferences and seeing them more as people like them who have, controversial music preferences they might enjoy or not. So I think radio has a really big underrated sense of what it can do now that since I was young, I I was very excited about the prospect of, like, radio dramas. This is before podcasts and all that.

Andrew Hix [00:23:27]:
Now it's just it seems like it's ripe for the picking for us to be able to engage in this medium, and not that many people are doing it. So I'm very excited to be pioneering in that way.

Pam Uzzell [00:23:37]:
One thing that I noticed when we recorded our episode during the arts and health intensive is that it was not what I was expecting it to be. When you think of an arts and health radio show, all kinds of things that might seem a little bit clinical, a little bit, you know, a little bit narrow might pop into your mind. And your show was just so wide open. I was really surprised by you just let our cohort take it over. Whatever music they wanted to request, their stories they wanted to share. And I'm wondering, was it always that way or did it kind of did you start with a more sort of tightly controlled idea and then it opened up? Or how did this evolve from the beginning?

Michael Claytor [00:24:29]:
That's a good question. I think it was always pretty open. And I think part of the reason for that is unlike a lot of radio shows, ours is completely, request based. So even if we're DJing, we're not selecting the music all the time. So we we kinda have to be open to a lot of different styles of music and different types of requests. And, also, we always kinda had the idea that for our feature pieces especially that we would always just look for some connection between art and health, and that's a really wide net to cast. Like, for any sort of health care story, you can find an art angle and vice versa. You know, you can talk to any artist about any sort of health or mental health or well-being, related topic that they might be thinking about or dealing with.

Michael Claytor [00:25:12]:
So we've been able to really cast a really wide net for all kinds of different stories that we like to tell. And, and so it kinda has always been that way. And the longer we go, the more the deeper we can dig and the more stories we find because of the, the broad scope of our show.

Pam Uzzell [00:25:30]:
How do you feel about the evolution? Andrew, would you agree with that?

Andrew Hix [00:25:34]:
Yeah. Absolutely. I've agreed with everything Michael said so far. And I would say that we we iterate a lot. We meet problems and have conversations all the time. Especially if we haven't had one in a minute, we will set aside time to say, it's been a couple of weeks. What are we noticing? What are we gonna do about this whole new craze? Everybody wants to hear this one song. Sometimes those sessions actually result in full new segments that become staples of the show.

Andrew Hix [00:26:04]:
And that's because we're open to it and trying to spend a little extra time digging a little deeper and brainstorming and getting to somewhere that's not just, well, we have to cut that part or we have to stop asking people this. We wanna meet people where we're at, and that's a very complicated problem. So sometimes we solve it by letting the show evolve and seeing what that does to it.

Pam Uzzell [00:26:26]:
Well, I want to go back to something you said, Andrew, and ask you both if you feel like this has happened. You were talking a lot about community and connections between different groups, both within the hospital, within the healthcare workers, and then with the larger community. And I'm wondering if you've seen that happening.

Andrew Hix [00:26:48]:
Absolutely. So I have a few central maxims that I keep in mind when I think about what the show is really for. And the metaphor of the bridge is the one I come back to the most. We literally bring people across distances because, for example, we might take them into the patient room. That includes people who are listening on the Internet because my mom told her sister who lives in Michigan to listen to the show, and now she can find out what's going on in a hospital room in Gainesville. But it also includes the clinical leader who is a few feet from that patient. They might be, you know, a hundred feet away. But they don't know what's going on inside that patient's heart and mind that what what they're experiencing.

Andrew Hix [00:27:32]:
And there's there's no way to find out that same information that you'd get when someone decides they're gonna go on the radio show and share their story. That is not the same information they would get even if they did know what questions to ask and where to go. In addition, we bridge people who are artists in the community back to staff at the hospital and patients at the hospital to help them have more fun, interfacing with the people around them. I often say that, hospital is public health. People often talk about public health as being things that happen outside of the hospital, but everyone in the hospital comes from the community and returns to the community one way or another after they leave. And I think about that, how we are really facilitators, translators, where we're working sometimes in metaphorical spaces, but largely we do bring people to places and give them access to stories they, they couldn't physically get to. Even those who are local to this environment who listen on the radio.

Pam Uzzell [00:28:32]:
Michael, what would you, what have you noticed since starting the show in terms of the community building, these sorts of connections that Andrew was talking about?

Michael Claytor [00:28:43]:
Well, something that's a little bit challenging about the radio format for us is the, is how hard it is to get, quantitative data on our listenership. You know, we're just blasting out a signal and hoping that people grab it and and listen in their cars or some or something. But what is nice is that is how much we can rely on anecdotal feedback and and people reaching out to us and telling us about a story that was meaningful for them or a song that they loved and they got to hear or the fact that we played their request. Those sorts of things are great, and we do get that kind of stuff a lot. But it's also nice to be able to engage the arts community here with our health care arts in health show. And so we have feature segments like one called songs in practice where we interview songwriters about music that they've written that deals in some way with health or well-being, whether that's the topic of the song or whether the the writing of the song itself was helpful for them in some sort of, you know, mental health or emotional health way. So it's nice to be able to offer an outlet for local artists, and it's nice to be able to offer an outlet for people who are artists but don't share their art so much. Like like, certain health care workers have shared their art for the first time on our radio show, and that's really cool.

Michael Claytor [00:30:02]:
And it's a great way to, you know, like Andrew said, to to kind of teach people about the people that you're around every day in ways that maybe you don't get to see them normally.

Pam Uzzell [00:30:13]:
Well, what I'm also curious about is what the impact of doing this show has been on each of you. I don't know who wants to take that one first, but

Andrew Hix [00:30:25]:
I'd like to take it. I actually, I think the show has helped me a lot in connecting with my own local community. I feel more confident now that I know that I'm in the habit of putting myself out there on the, again, literal airwaves. I've grown into my role as a DJ and a a facilitator of content, a producer. I really like writing for the show. And when I put it together, I know I'm learning and I'm I'm growing as I'm doing it. And I take that into the world, and I want to hear from people about how they interacted with the show. So I I wanna talk to them.

Andrew Hix [00:31:02]:
I wanna enjoy collaborating with artists in the community. And then I get to know them, then I get to write with them and have fun. And it's really opened up a lot of avenues just to, develop as a person in a community, here where I might have not known what to what to ask people about or or felt confident approaching them.

Pam Uzzell [00:31:22]:
Mhmm.

Andrew Hix [00:31:22]:
I would also add to myself that the work that we do, Michael and I and the other practitioners and artists in residence, it's hard to explain to people in a way that doesn't feel really sad sometimes. And the show doesn't have that same vibe. It doesn't have the same quality to it. If we talk about how we're sharing stories or getting song requests, people kind of assume that it's fun. Whereas if we talk about how, we're helping we're playing like, if Michael's, playing for someone's family as their their family member is passing or if I'm recording the, you know, the words of advice someone won't be able to give to their daughter, that that doesn't really people disengage sometimes because it's so heavy and it's so intense. Or they might be curious, but now they're curious about this very heavy and intense thing. Whereas the show lightens it and without filtering out that content.

Pam Uzzell [00:32:19]:
That is really interesting. It's a it's kind of a lovely balance for you as a practitioner. Michael, what would you add to that? How has this show changed you?

Michael Claytor [00:32:31]:
Yeah. I feel all of the things that Andrew just said for sure myself. One thing that I would add is that the simple fact of having a deadline every week, has sort of changed my mindset as an artist and a creator. And knowing that we gotta get a radio show out the door by Monday for Wednesday's airtime every week, regardless of how ready we are to ship it out, is a really good healthy exercise for me. And, you know, as artists, I think a lot of times we wait to put out the most meticulously crafted and curated pieces, but I don't think it matters as much as we think it does. And and this show has kind of helped me to learn that about myself and my art.

Pam Uzzell [00:33:16]:
Yeah. That's an amazing, excellent point for a lot of creatives. Well, I'm so glad you came on the show. I learned so much watching you put together this episode in a very short amount of time and with such an appearance at least of complete faith that you could turn it over, just give us a little bit of guidance of what we should do, what you were looking for, and then just sort of sit back knowing that this was gonna pull together. It was a really amazing experience, really one of the highlights for me of that three days there. So thank you for being on the show and talking more about it. Anything else you wanna say before we close this episode?

Michael Claytor [00:34:04]:
I'll just say thank you for having us. And it was, and that session that you're talking about during the intensive was, I'm glad it came across the way it did for you because that was the first time we'd ever done it that way. And we weren't sure it was gonna work until we got about halfway through. Like, I think we're gonna actually make it to the finish line here and have a whole episode. But that was really fun for us too, and I'm I'm glad you got to be there for it.

Pam Uzzell [00:34:26]:
Yeah. Yeah. What about you, Andrew?

Andrew Hix [00:34:28]:
Same. Definitely. Thank you. This is a really fun experience. I didn't know what it would be like because this is actually our first podcast that we've been on aside from our own, in this capacity. So, it was really fun. The the questions were so insightful, and I really felt like I had a chance to even today develop some of my concepts that'll help me go forward and work on the show in the future and do these kinds of, translational experiences. So

Pam Uzzell [00:34:56]:
Oh, that's great. Well, you're both naturals. You were born with headphones and a microphone in front of you. So I am so happy that you were on the show and I now have a great radio show to listen to coming out from Gainesville. You're listening to Art Heals All Wounds. Thank you so much to Michael Claytor and Andrew Hix for sharing the story behind Shift Change Radio Hour. They've really inspired me on the beauty of collaboration and the way that community centered arts programs can create connection and healing. I'll put more about the Shift Change Radio Hour in the show notes.

Pam Uzzell [00:36:03]:
If you'd like to get in touch with me, please reach out to me at my website, arthealsallwoundspodcast.com. You can sign up for the newsletter or just send me any kind of note that you feel like sending. Thanks for listening. The music you've heard in this podcast is by Ketsa and Lobo Loco. This podcast was edited by Iva Hristova.