Doug Has Questions

Send us Fan Mail A passport application shouldn’t rewrite your life, but that’s exactly where Sandy Corbari’s adoption story starts. When she requests her records and opens a live birth certificate, she gets a name, a birthplace, and a new set of questions she can’t unsee. Years later, one spontaneous search turns up an obituary, two half-brothers, and a message that comes back fast: “You’re my sister. I’ve been looking for you for 10 years.” We talk through the full adoptee journey, from gr...

Send us Fan Mail A small town can make your life feel straightforward, right up until you zoom out and realize how many unlikely turns it contains. Kay (Haas) Dunning grew up in Haines, Alaska, with a family story that starts in the 1950s with the US Army, the Haines tank farm, and a mom who chose Southeast Alaska as home after falling hard for aviation and the north. We talk through the kind of local history you only learn by living it, how places change (and how names like “tank farm” never...

Send us Fan Mail You can hear the exact moment a life story turns into a healing practice. Susie McCartney grew up outside Philadelphia in a family shaped by Vietnam-era fallout, alcoholism, and the kind of “everything is fine” chaos that looks normal until you’re old enough to feel your own nervous system. We trace how that early wiring shows up later as the urge to flee, the need to belong, and the lifelong project of figuring out who you are beneath the roles you inherit. Susie takes us f...

Send us Fan Mail A nine-year-old gets hit by a stray bullet while playing second base. A 30-year-old nursing student hears the words “you have cancer” and still has to get dinner on the table for three boys. A seasoned Alaska RN crashes an airboat into a sweeper, wakes up pinned, and starts running a trauma checklist on herself while the boat sinks. That’s the real-life timeline Nicole Holm lays out with us, and it’s as raw, specific, and human as it sounds. We talk about growing up in Haine...

Send us Fan Mail A kid from flat Kansas farm country ends up on the open ocean, clinging to a mast in a storm and wondering if he will make it back down. That is where Matt Jones’ story gets real, and where mine as a listener shifted too. Matt walks us through the unexpected chain of choices that took him to the Coast Guard Academy, onto cutters and tall ships, and into a career shaped by responsibility, risk, and the kind of leadership you only learn when other people’s lives are tied to you...