Guest Editorial. Crafting Meaning, Cultivating Understanding: A Prologue to the “Emerging Horizons” Series

First, a Story about the Importance of StoriesI clearly remember the moment I began to realize that the healthcare system as a whole, the people that work in it, as well as the patients and their families, needed more stories.In April 2010, I did a showing of my first documentary film, Wrong Way to Hope: A Story of Young Adults and Cancer, to a packed theatre of 250 oncology professionals and support staff at the Saskatoon Cancer Centre.I was told it was the first time anyone had proposed showing a film at Grand Rounds 1 , and people were intrigued.After the presentation had concluded and the crowd had cleared, a lone doctor in a white lab coat stood up from his seat at the back of the auditorium and began walking down the aisle toward me.He seemed deep in thought, walking slowly with his head bowed.I stopped packing up my computer and stood waiting for him.When he was a few feet away, he slowly looked up and said: You know, I have been an oncologist for over 20 years and I thought I understood my patients...But until watching your film, I never realized what is truly at stake for them; it is not just their health, it is their entire identity.We continued to talk for a few minutes about some of the other major themes highlighted in the Lang Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2022 Editorial 2 2 film and audience discussion that followed, but it was the four words from his opening line, "until watching your film," that lingered in my mind as I drove to the next stop on the cross-Canada tour.I had met only eight young adult cancer survivors in my entire life and knew almost nothing about cancer apart from my own experience of it over the previous two years.How could a 20-year oncology veteran who had treated thousands of patients glean practice-changing insight from my film?Over the next 30 days, that same scenario repeated itself many times as cancer care professionals continued to discuss with me the lessons they had learned from the film.When I screened the film for patients and families at community-based cancer support organizations the response was the same.I witnessed rich discussion and flashes of insight at every single screening, no matter the audience.On that tour, I learned that many healthcare professionals, patients, and their families had never been given the opportunity to stop and reflect on the experience of cancer through a patient-created film, despite films and video being a dominant form of communication in our culture.It became clear that cancer care systems had not yet explored the possibilities of video-based storytelling on a broad scale.In this setting, simply sharing young adult cancer experiences in a candid, compelling, and aesthetic way on screen, had offered healthcare professionals, and the patients they cared for, access to a deeper level of understanding of the cancer experience, and sometimes, life in general.Twelve years, five feature length documentaries, three web series, and over 800 digital stories later, I am thrilled to continue exploring video-based storytelling in healthcare settings through the serialization of the interpretive chapters of my PhD thesis in the Journal of Applied Hermeneutics (JAH).The "Emerging Horizons" series and the editorials that accompany it, are all based on a film of the same name which acted as the primary data source for my thesis.The film explores the Digital Storytelling (DST) workshop experiences of a group of six Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) cancer survivors 2 .It is a 53-minute film crafted from almost 30 hours of footage, and in the same way that numerous salient moments from the workshop were necessarily left on the "cutting room floor," many possible interpretations were culled from the interpretive papers of this series.Indeed, aletheia reminds us that covering, and uncovering are always concurrent events (Caputo, 1987) and together, the film and the interpretations offered provide only one possible path to understanding what could occur as people create digital stories about their healthcare experiences.The primary goal of the film was to maintain the incommensurability between what an artwork says and what it is capable of saying so that the viewer can have the experience of something emerging (Davey, 2013); the interpretive writing serialized in JAH is meant to keep that conversation going.The remainder of this introductory editorial will set the stage for the series by briefly reviewing the topics of AYA oncology and DST, exploring the fit of applied hermeneutic research with documentary filmmaking, and finally, "dimming the lights" to promote an intellectual shift in engagement with both the film and the interpretive writing that follows. Adolescent and Young Adult Cancer and Digital Storytelling:A Developmentally Appropriate Psychosocial ToolOver the past 50 years, in parallel with increased survival, there has been mounting evidence of the late effects and long-term impact of cancer treatment on psychosocial outcomes in addition to

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