The Daily Stoic - Susan Straight on the Power of Story

Episode Date: January 23, 2021

Ryan speaks to professor and author Susan Straight about their first encounter at the University of California, Riverside, finding joy in the private process of writing, how specific books can change your life, and more. Susan Straight is a professor of creative writing and part of the MFA faculty at the University of California, Riverside, as well as an award-winning author. Her newest book, In the Country of Women, is a memoir based on the people of California and stories from the women in her family.This episode is brought to you by Ladder, a painless way to get the life insurance coverage you need for those you care about most. Ladder makes the process of getting life insurance quick and easy. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com/stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today.This episode is also brought to you by Manly Bands, the best damn wedding rings period. Freedom for your hand to look like you want it to look. Whether you’re looking for men’s wedding rings or engagement rings, Manly Bands has you covered. Manly Bands has an insane selection of materials: gold, wood, antler, steel, dinosaur bones, meteorite, even wood from whiskey barrels. To order your Manly Band and get 20% off, plus a free silicone ring, go to manlybands.com/stoic and enter promo code STOIC.This episode is brought to you by Blinkist, the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Susan Straight:Homepage: https://susanstraight.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susan.straight/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hey, Prime members, you can listen early and app-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Story Podcast. Today's guest is... This is a great... I'm really excited to do this episode. This is someone who was incredibly formative in my development as a writer. In fact,

now that I think about it, they were the first writer that I ever met. I'm talking about the novelist Susan Strait. When I was a freshman at UC Riverside, I was enrolled in this honors program, and they brought us out early in the summer, and they gave us a book to read beforehand, they gave us the novel High Wire Moon by Susan Strait. And then Susan, who was a professor at UCR, came and talked to us. And it was just an incredible experience to meet her, to read a great novel. And it is a good novel you should read it if you haven't. And then meet and see the human being who wrote it. And I remember I dropped it in the swimming pool over the summer.

And so my copy was all waterlogged and not super in great shape. And she was teasing me about it. And that was the first writer that I ever met. And I think that helped so the seed that allowed me to go on and become a writer, it was, and again, it's a great novel that was nominated for National Book Award.

I highly recommend it. She's written a bunch of other great novels. I've been in Saros Kitchen and looked out all the pots, blacker than the thousand midnight, take one candle in light of room. But I got reconnected with Professor Straits. She corrected me when I called her that recently. She said, Repiers now, but I feel more comfortable calling her Professor Straits.

But it just randomly popped up on Amazon that she had a new book called In the Country of Women, which is a memoir of the women who shaped her life and that sort of harrowing experience, it goes back hundreds of years and how they came to live in Riverside, California where she lives. And it's it's great memoir of American history. It's a great memoir of the kinds of characters that you don't hear enough about in books, right? Most books are about the famous men. This is about the sort of some of the unsung heroes of American and world history, the immigrants,

the mothers, the caretakers, the nurses, all these women who went on to form, to create the family that made Susan and Susan's life possible. And anyways, a great book, I really liked it, and I reached out on Instagram, and we started, we connected, and I said, could you please come on the podcast and she did. And so we talked about the power of writing. We talked about James Baldwin, who is her writing mentor. And then we talk about Riverside and just what a wonderful place it is. If you don't know much about Riverside, California, I think I think you're

going to, you're going to walk away from this interview with a little more insights. But, but here's my interview with the great Susan Strait. You can go to our website at susonstrate.com. That's st-r-a-i-g-h-t.com. You can follow her on Instagram at susan.strait. But check out one of her books. Check out Highwire Moon or in the country of women. I think you're really gonna like this interview.

And look, a little bit of this interview was just for me, but I'm very glad to do it, and I'm very glad to share it with you now. You're all in your, it's home for the holidays or home because of the pandemic. Yes and yes. So my 25 year old came home in May and she's here for the first year, both feature because she was living in West Hollywood and had roommates that weren't

social distancing at all back in May. West Hollywood was a super hotspot and my 29 year old Delphine and her husband, Kumi are here for a month. Fun. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. I miss Riverside. I haven't been in over a year, which is probably the longest since I went to college there because of the pandemic and other stuff. I miss it very much. I have to say that it was so nice to hear from you. I remember that, yeah, like Mount Rivido is it's beautiful

and the funny thing is Kumi and Alfina and I and the dog went night before last. We went down the trail that leads past Mount Rivido, the Santa Ana River Trail, and we went five miles total. So we were all the way down to Anza Crossing where where Juan Antonio Ateza, the ANZA, first crossed the river in 1774. I love going that way and thinking about the history of California, seeing all the beautiful wild grape finds climbing up the palm trees. It was really something. Well, I have so many questions about that.

I thought we would start. I think I sent you this when I reached out. But I thought of you for the first time a couple of years ago because I gave a speech at a college and it had occurred to me that I had met you giving a similar talk when I was an incoming freshman at Riverside and your book was assigned to all the incoming freshman and then we had

to read it over the summer and then maybe I forget exactly when it was and then we came during the summer or something and you talk and you don't actually know that this is a job done by real human beings that other people can also do. Yeah, I think for me, something I so enjoyed writing about for the first time in this memoir was that there were all these apocryphal stories that my mom who had immigrated here from Switzerland told me about how she taught me to read. You know, she, she had these two stories. I thought you were reading when you were three because your dad had left us. So we had no money and I had to go to work and I didn't want the babysitter to drop you on your head again.

So I wanted you to be quiet and I was like, okay, that's plausible. Number two was I taught you to read a new weekend because I thought they wouldn't let you into kindergarten unless you could read. But the thing is Ryan, I looked at those books and I didn't know where they came from. Just like you said, they just, they seemed to have descended from the heavens, right?

Like these books appeared. But I was so lucky to have a kindergarten teacher here in Riverside. At a, you know, a really poor elementary school,, who when I was four, let me sit in the corner and she brought me the books by girl writers. Not just Laura Ingalls Wilder, you know, the little house on the prairie, but she brought me Lucy Maud Montgomery and Green Gables. And I read and Green Gables and I thought,

wait a minute, this girl wants to be a writer and she is writing in a journal with a pencil. And that was it for me. I wanted to be a writer, you know, from that moment. I was five years old. Yeah, and I can't imagine like certainly none of my parents' friends were writers. I don't think any of them did anything other than have a job, right? Like not even, not even sort of be entrepreneurial or creative or like they all had jobs, I grew up in Sacramento. So most of them worked for the government

or the state in some way. You know, my mom was a school principal, my dad was a police officer. So, so even just the idea of like, oh, you could, you could work for yourself and you could work for yourself writing books. I mean, it's just, it's sort of inconceivable when you're that age. Well, it's inconceivable when you grow up like we did,

not because people don't respect something about the arts or the written word, but because it doesn't occur to them, it's so separate from their daily lives, because you're right. My dad, my real dad, who had left us at three, he had a worm farm at one point. So I would visit him on the weekends in Pomona. I had to like work in the worm farm. Then my stepdad owned three laundromats.

And so what we did on the weekends was we cleaned the laundromats. And then my mom would take the insides of the washing machines out, and we would paint those with spray paint and plant flowers in them. My mom was a foster mom, so there were five kids. I was the oldest of five kids and I was six years old. So for me, reading was the great escape. Like, I would literally hide, you know, in a tree to read. And the thing about wanting to be a writer is you're right all my friends Either join the military when we were in high school or you know everybody worked for the city People were tree trimmers my girlfriends. We all had fast food jobs And to be a writer was not something that that you even thought could happen and it was really my getting a scholarship to go to USC

could happen. And it was really my getting a scholarship to go to USC that made me into a sports writer. And I didn't want to be a fiction writer. I wanted to be a sports writer because my mom wanted to meet Vince Gully. That was my entire purpose in life. I was to let my mom meet Vince Gully because she learned to speak English from listening to him do Dodger broadcasts. So just like you, the idea that you could write something and people would buy that and actually read it, that didn't occur to me till I was probably 20 that I could make a living at it. But I'd been writing in notebooks, had hundreds and hundreds of pages of writing.

It's just what did you do with it when you were kids like us, right? Right, well, it's heroing the things too. Like, so even though they weren't like, hey, yeah, you could be a writer and you know look at you know The the family down the street both parents are writers or something But at the very least we have the advantage of like writers look like us, right? So you can I it's difficult to imagine what it would be like

Coming from a different background and and not even being able to conceive of someone who looks like you or from where you're from doing that thing. And I also think like, yeah, you had this one teacher who decided that one day to bring you these books and you're a mind to a thing how, you know, maybe, maybe because she was going through something or someone had said something to her when she was a kid,

maybe she has the exact opposite reaction to you being interested in books and slaps it down and your entire life goes in a different direction. See, that's just, I love how you're thinking because that's exactly now that I am who I am. And I still live three blocks when I was born, and my job is to write, but also just like you, my job is to tell people, like, hey, here's what narrative does.

You know, here's what, looking at things that were written down can do for your life. I love talking to students, whose parents would be like, but I don't know, can you make a living as a writer? My mom was the one that was most resistant. She wanted me to be a secretary. Genoa, I should, she had no idea I would go off to college. And then in college, like I said,

she was like, well, you're a girl. You can't do those other things. And if that teacher had made a different choice, as teachers do, for someone who doesn't look like they should be what someone else thinks they should be. I think often about this crazy moment that I wanted to be a cheerleader and I was so little and so unattractive. I was tiny, I had failure to thrive. I was just so small, but the cheerleader said you could be a cheerleader because you could be on the top of the pyramid the ceiling you're useful for.

And then my mom is so angry that I'm going to be a cheerleader. And we've gone to get our measurements taken by Mrs. Smith who was born in Kyoto, Japan and was married to an African-American serviceman from Texas. And I grew up with her four boys. And Mrs. Smith measured me and she just tisk, tisk, tisk, tisk, and looked at me. And then

my mom ran me over with the country squire station wagon. So there I was in traction in the hospital for two months. And I was 12 years old. And you know, I thought, I'll never be anything. Now I can't even walk. And my mom felt super guilty about it, but had no idea how to say that because she grew up with no mom. So talk about, you know, just put things behind you. When I got out of traction, I said, I can't ever be a cheerleader again. And she said, well, you're so unattractive and you're so plain.

And now you can't do sports. And she said, you'll never get married. You should always use your brain to see only thing you have. So I have to say, my mom's backhanded, you know, trying to get me to understand who I was. In a way, Ryan, that's also what led me to be a writer because there I was in stuck in a hospital bed watching football, and I thought I'd rather write about football than be a cheerleader.

Yeah, I've got to imagine, like, I sort of trace back my desire to become writer, to my parents not really understanding anything about me and feeling and then ever feeling like every time I talk to them, they did not hear what I was saying. And so I feel like it created some desire to me to sort of like go in my room and figure it out. And if I got it perfectly on the page or over over instant messenger to my friends or something, then it would work.

And I don't know if you were perfectly understood and appreciated and loved as a kid, if writing is the craft that you gravitate for. But you know, you're the first person, all of the times, anyone's talking about writing that points out what you did, which is, look at how many people do what their parents do. Like, look at how many people in the film industry have parents who were in the film industry and look at how many people, because I have a lot of friends who are police officers

like your dad, and my ex-husband was a correction officer for 20 years. And just to think like he thought our daughters would go into probation. You know that he still says, well you guys have college degrees, you can always go be a probation officer. But to be a writer, writers often like look at saving Kingston. I think that's such a cool story. But for people like us who are, I think of us as aliens, sort of drop down into our landscapes. Like who gave me this brain? Neither of my parents had graduated from

high school. They had terrible lives. They could never understand anything about what I was doing, especially the obsession with reading. My mom used to say, you're reading too much, it's bad for your eyes, go wash the dishes. And she still doesn't understand what I do, which is quite fascinating. But as you said, to sort of think what we wanted was control, right? We wanted to control a narrative. And so if you write fiction, you're making this narrative that you can let someone live or die. And you can change the landscape from fire to snow if you want. And maybe we felt like that's what we wanted in our heads with stability to like write something down

and then it would be thus true. Yeah. And it's like maybe if you could call your mom and be like, hey, I was thinking of this, this I was thinking of this cool story. And if you could like tell it to her and she was like, oh, I love it, that's amazing. You probably wouldn't ever go through the painful process

of writing it. So I feel like, you know, if it's like if you were perfectly understood and supported, would you go through the insane gauntlet that it takes to write a story or a book, it almost has to be done for this naive belief that if you just get it perfectly, if you just had enough control and you just did it perfectly, then you will get a tiny bit of that relief for that being seen or something.

It's obviously a bad reason to write over a long period of time, but I think that's what plants the seed. I think you have a fascinating point there because it's a secret thing. I always say that Americans do so little in secret, but when I got older and I've driven across the country numerous times, just me and my dog, we drive all the way from Southern California to Prince Edward Island,

actually the land of Annabelle and Gables. And there is nothing I like better than driving. I'm a Cali girl, and my beloved younger brother made the first cross country trip with me. And I just, so I think of him, he died in 2002. And I think of all the secret lives, everybody leads. And the two sort of really secret lives are like, let's say you're a cowboy,

and you're out there with your thoughts like let's say you're a cowboy and you're out there with your thoughts. Let's say you're a nurse and you're in a super crowded, you know, I see you right now during COVID and you're completely shrouded in all of the protective material you're alone with your thoughts. So I think the secrecy of being a writer and writing things down is that you don't have to show it to anyone. If you're singing, someone else can hear you. If you're dancing, you usually dance in front of a mirror before you dance in front of other people. But writing is just very crazy thing. You're right. And for me, there is nothing that matches the joy of creating fiction because it is this control over a scene. Like I said, and I love imagining what the fire looks like, or what the

Santa Ana wins look like, and what someone is saying dialogue is one of my favorites. So yeah, I think you're completely right. It takes a modicum of wanting to push back against someone who thinks this isn't something, but it's the joy of I'm creating this in secret. And I still write longhand, like on a legal pad. I have a pen or 12 legal pads next to me right now, because I always still write the first draft on a legal pad. And so I often think when I write it that way, it's as if I were writing it back when I was 17 and started my first novel, you know, in a notebook, it's a secret when you begin, isn't it? I love the thing about driving across the country.

We did, during the pandemic, we did Austin to upland in a camper trailer and then we did more recently, we did Austin to Tucson. And you drive through these towns and I guess a lot of them are kind of like Riverside. We stayed in Van Horn, Texas and Las Cruces. You stay in these towns and you're just sort of like, who lives here? It's always curious to me to be like, yeah, this is like the center of somebody's existence. And it's not a weird way station by the side of the highway that you can't conceive of why it exists.

But there's this whole community here. And people live here on purpose. And that's always like a bewildering sort of fascinating thing I get when I drive across the United States. Oh, dude, you know everybody says that about Sacramento, too. And they say that about all of a fascinating thing I get when I drive across the United States. Oh, dude, you know everybody says that about Sacramento too. And they say that about I don't say it about Sacramento. Did you ask me? Yeah, I was, why do we live in Sacramento?

And they would always say, well, you know, it's close to Lake Tahoe and it's close to San Francisco. And so I would say, so we live here because it's closer to two better other places. You job your parents crazy. I did. My girls are so funny because yeah, everybody couldn't wait to get out of Riverside. And Duane and I couldn't wait to get out of Riverside. And then, you know, I went off to graduate school. He already had a job here as a correctional officer. I came back and how do I think this is paradise?

And yet it's exactly what you're saying. When you're driving, I have these vivid memories, Ryan, of every single trip I've taken. Like I've written down everything that happens to me. That's a book I definitely want to work on. I was in Wallcott, Iowa one night. And it's different. See, you're with your family in an RV

and that's a whole different kind of situation. If you're a tiny blonde woman like me with a large shaggy black dog and you're by yourself like in a Honda CRV, you know, I get out and I am staying at some super eight or whatever. Everybody starts timing their life story. From the desk clerk to the person, you know, at the truck stop, so walk-out aisle, it has the world's largest truck stop. It has this big restaurant. And I go in there and I'm eating by myself when I'm with all truckers and then people from around walk-out. And people sit next to me and start telling me about

their entire life that they fix tractors. And the waitress is a blonde woman and she looks at me and she says, but you're not from here. And I say, no, I'm from California. And she said, where? And I said, you're not going to know. So, I tell her Riverside and she says, but you're not from here. And I say, no, I'm from California. And she said, where? And I said, you're not going to know. So I tell her Riverside. And she said, my mom still lives in Palm Springs. And my dad left and came back here to Walcott. And he's disabled. And I live here now and take care of him.

And she works night shift at this, you know, the biggest truck stop in the world. She told me her whole life story. And we talked about this very thing, Ryan. And she said, when I came here, I thought, who would live here? And she said about my dad lives in the house that his grandparents built.

And he will always be from here and not from Palm Springs. So it's great. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. I love that. I did Sacramento to LA to New Orleans one time by myself.

And somebody gave me this book called Road Food, which is like, it's like the best restaurants in the United States in the middle of nowhere, but it has to be easily accessible like off a highway or something. And what I loved about the book was this sort of realization where it's like, oh, there's some person who's like a world class barbecue restaurant in the middle of, you know, off some obscure highway in North Carolina, or, you know, you wouldn't

think that between, you know, obviously, you know, you, if you weren't from California, you wouldn't know about Anderson's pea soup. And you're just like, oh, wow, there's this pea soup chain in the middle of California. And you just go like, oh, you can really be a master of anything. And sometimes people decided to be a master in off the five freeway in the middle of California 80 years ago.

It's a strange world that you get a glimpse into. Let's see, this is what I, this is what's so fun is I've been writing my whole life, but my main, I think my main job as an intellectual, coming from a family that, you know, my brother who died, my beloved brother, he left, you know, he gradually graduated and he was a house painter from the time he was 17 until the day he passed

away. But he was also a master marijuana grower. He grew 18 varieties of marijuana when he was 19. And he'd have a completely different life right now, wouldn't he? Marijuana people. Sure. But instead, you know, he was always in the shadows. And so I think my main job has always been to think about all these hidden stories in

America, whether they're fiction or nonfiction, and as you said, really what we're about is food and like our home landscape and and like this sort of we either leave or we stay. I said that in this memoir. I said there are two kinds of people, people who leave and people who stay, and then I was giving this talk one time in Long Beach at Rancho Los Alamedos, which is one of the original ranchos from California. And a woman came up to me and whispered in my ear, no, there's a third kind, the kind who comes home. And she said, that's you, and that's me too. And it was fascinating to hear her say that, you know, and I thought

there are three kinds of people. So who is the guy that stays right off the interstate with his world class barbecue? Maybe he left and he came home, but it's always about place, even though America seems like a highly mobile place, and it is, look, you're in Austin now. But Americans are very, very rooted in that idea. Like you said, that I live in Los Cruces and I'm from Los Cruces

and my grandfather is from Los Cruces. I think that's my other job to listen to everybody's stories. I was at a diner in Natchez, Mississippi, with my wife once, and we were going to, we were driving from New Orleans, we were going to go to Vicksburg. I wanted to see the Civil War battlefield. And so we're, you know, eating at this restaurant, it's like a little diner. And then we were talking to the waitress and we said, we're going to Vicksburg, have you ever been, how far is it, anything we should know or whatever? And she was like, I've never been.

And it was like 40 minutes. She hadn't been to the most famous sort of town in her 40 minutes away. I guess it's technically over a state border. But yeah, you realize some people are so rooted and for some people, a lack of opportunity is why they leave. And for some people, a lack of opportunity is why they stay. And so it's like two different reactions to the same thing.

And then there's the third part, the third person as you're saying, who sort of comes back and says, like, maybe I'm gonna try to do something about it. You know, that's so funny because since we're talking California here for a minute, I have tons of friends and there'll be like, I haven't been to the beach in 20 years. And you know, the beach is literally,

it's 42 miles away, but it takes two hours on the freeway, but it's more the idea of that everyone in California goes to the beach. And, you know, I think there's a ton of people who don't go more than an hour away, because as you said, life is so hard every day, you know, every day.

And now that you have young kids, you know what I'm talking about. And I just like, I wake up in the morning, you know, I had chickens, I don't have chickens now, I gave them to my friend, Inez, and she says, now they speak Spanish and they don't want to come back to me. She had to watch her when I went on book tour

and then I came home and she was like, no, the poetos don't like you anymore, they only speak Spanish. So I don't have the chickens, but you know what I mean when you have animals, when you have kids. Also my elderly parents just went into assisted living two weeks before COVID,

and they're less, they're a mile from me. So I take care of them. My mom has memory loss and my dad has Parkinson's. When you have all those chores, you know, your day is 14 hours, and sometimes you didn't even leave, you went to Ralph's or you went to Target. Like we used to joke when I taught at UCR.

I was a single mom with three kids and I'd be like, I go to UCR, I go to Target, I go to Ralph's and I pay go to my kids. That's why I wanted to ride at night, right? And that's like, to ride all those novels meant I was escaping into a completely different world

and I never wrote about myself. It took me so long to ride that memoir because I didn't want to write all those novels meant I was escaping into a completely different world, and I never wrote about myself. It took me so long to write that memoir because I didn't want to write about myself. I wanted to write about, you know, menu or firefighters. And right now, my new novel, actually, the five main male characters are CHP officers and animal control officers and all the women are nurses. And I've been working on that for four years. I always think, like you said, that when you look at that one person that changed your life, whether it's the kindergarten teacher or a cop

who gave you another chance or, you know, a great foster mom, that's that is that turning point and you decide who you're going to be. Sometimes you leave and sometimes you stay. But the people who come back, I love, I love reading about LeBron. You know, LeBron's the... I'm going to do these things for Cleveland. I'm going to do these things for Akron. I just... I love going through Ohio. And I think of my three favorite people from Ohio, which is Toni Morrison. I always sat in Lorraine, Ohio, which is what she wrote about. And I drive around, and I think of how Toni Morrison grew up in this tiny place. And she became one of the world's most famous writers

and she was still obsessed with this idea of Lorraine. I love thinking about LeBron and I love thinking when I'm in Ohio about Sherwood Anderson. Do you remember that book, Wine's for Go Hyal? No. It's crazy. I taught it once in my undergraduate class and everybody said, why are we reading this old book?

And by the time we ended, they're like, this book is about guilt and shame and repression. And I said, I'm so proud of you guys. And they said, that's right now. I have secrets from my family right now. And I said, good job. That's what Sherwood Anderson does. I grew up so right outside Sacramento, first in Farrokes.

And then we moved to this town called Granite Bay, which is right next to Roseville. And it wasn't until I was right out of college that I read John Fontey's novels for the first time, a bunch of which are set in Roseville. And there is something about seeing where you're from, fictionalized, or on the page if you're a lover of books that makes you like, like I hated where I grew up. And then as soon as I saw, you know, in a novel that I liked, I was like, I love that place, you know, and then as soon as I saw Lady Bird, I was like, oh, it's Sacramento, like I had to,

like there, I think, so I think sort of what you do for Riverside is important because, and actually Walker Percy talks about this in the movie goer, it sort of certifies the place when it becomes part of art, and it adds sort of a mystique and a significance to it that maybe you don't experience in the everydayness of life. Now, that's, that, if you sort of look at who we are and you think about what we all do, the

ineffable things people do for each other, like, you know, a policeman or an ambulance driver or a doctor or even a good neighbor. Like, that's the, that's the amorphous thing that no one can see that makes a place a home, right? But for people like us, yes, like my job somehow, like us, yes, like my job somehow, for whatever reason I was put here as this alien with a great brain and the ability to write, and I'm not good at anything else. I'm a good mom, I'm a good neighbor, I'm a good friend, but like I write, I think that's exactly what I felt when I read Little House on the Prairie, and when I read a tree grows in Brooklyn, is that these places were immortalized and no one had ever immortalized a place like Riverside. In fact, you will make fun of it all the time, don't they? And they make fun of Sacramento. And you know, two big novels that changed

my mind were Fat City, which is set in Stockton. And to really, like this sounds crazy, but John Steinbeck, of course, everything John Steinbeck, of course. Sure. Everything John Steinbeck wrote, I thought, is your places that I love and I care about, and nobody else would have known them, had he not written about them? And so, the other fascinating thing, James Baldwin,

which I mean, I know we're going to talk about James Baldwin. Of course. When he wrote, you know, go tell it on the mountain, like to read that version of Harlem, it is, it is, again, it's indelible. People can write about all kinds of different neighborhoods and all kinds of different cities, but the way a writer like Ernest J. Gaines

writes about Louisiana, or James Baldwin writes about Harlem, those were the books that always appealed to me the most because just like you said, they made it a real place. And then I have to tell you something funny. I knew we would do this. Yeah, the other night I was just bone tired and I sat down on the couch and, you know, everybody's working at home like Kumi works on one couch, Delphine's working in the kitchen, Rosette's working on the other couch.

And I, I've been working out on the porch. We trade all different places. So I'm riding this new novel, and I'm riding by hand out on the porch. And all my neighbors come by, and everybody's got a story. I was so tired that night, because one of my neighbors has COVID, and I'm really scared for him. He wanted to be a CHP officer, and he became a pest control guy. And that's who I'm writing about. So I sat down on the couch and Dase and confused came on like the vice channel and my kids were laughing. You're like, mom never watches anything intentionally.

Like she just, she does that thing. Like I listened to the radio. I listened to like Art Lebo, Killer Oldies at night. I listened to Kilo S. Classic Rock and it was in the DJ's. And so they're like, mom's hilarious, she's never intentionally like, I'm going to watch this series. And I'm like, oh my god, days and confuses on again. And they just rolled their eyes because I literally will sit there and

watch it from beginning to end because it's a love letter to Austin. It's a letter to the city where you live. And it's one of my favorite movies of all time. And it's the people in that movie graduated in 76 and I graduated in 78. And it's everything about the open freeness, the danger, yes, but also the possibility that we had, that you could go to a party in an orange grove.

And there be 200 people there. And everybody be drinking and racing cars. And it was crazy. But we had that freedom. And your generation doesn't get to have that. But it's just, it's stunning to think about what a legacy a movie like that is for a place. Well, and that's why I like Lady Bird. Because I think that's class of 2004.

And I was class of 2005. You know, so it's like, so it's actually the same thing, right? It's like a coming of age movie for your generation when it like set in the set in your town. And I mean, it's just it doesn't get better than that. And it reminds me actually of, because you know, she's like an artistic person. Parents don't understand. It reminds me of a quote from from Baldwin that I was going to ask you about that I've talked about before.

But he says, you think your pain is so unique and special and then you read. And I think that's really what books do and what great literature does is sort of make you understand. It sort of shakes you out of that egotistical state where you think you're the only one dealing with what you're dealing with. In fact, not only is everyone dealing with it,

but I remember when I was a riverside, and that's when I got introduced to the Stoics, it's like you're like, oh, the emperor of Rome was going through this 2,000 years ago. I mean, like, it doesn't get any more sort of awe-inspiring than to sort of see just how perennial the human condition has been. Yeah, when you think about a movie like Lady Bird, it's because the personal is made universal. That's absolutely what we have to do as artists, and that's why I think when writers get too self-referential and they're too cute and it's, you know,

they're not thinking sometimes about that, that's a particular kind of writing. But again, for what James Baldwin did, was elevate all these personal things to the universal. And yeah, this, that sounds crazy that you and I are doing days and confused lady bird and James Baldwin, but think about it. It all goes together because James Baldwin's experiences, the way he felt them, it was

one of the few writers of that time who could say something that was so large and yet have it resonate so personally. Like you said, his quotes were all over my computer for years and years and just like you said that you think that your pain is so large and then you read it's the way that that leaves on an open end and then you read he doesn't say and then you read and you find out all these other things he lets you be the judge of what you're going to find out and I love how he says poverty is more expensive than anyone who's not been poor will ever know. Because that's something, look it right now with all the

inequities that are sort of laid bare by COVID. When I, when you think about the tenderness it takes to make a movie like Gacy Confused or to write a book like Go Tell It On The Mountain, that's always what I'm aiming for. And it's funny because the circle's back to what we were saying. My place was not beloved to anyone but me. That's what so many writers say. Right. The way you started is, for me, being, you know, four years old and walking to kindergarten by myself. My mom was like, you know how to get there? So I'm four years old with good level, late birthday. I walk down the street, you know, and I walk past all these dangerous places and I'm for. But when I get there, there are going to be books. And in those books are recordings of places that might be dangerous too. And yet they're recorded with tenderness. And also with sort of vivid imagery and imagination,

I can't ask for anything better than that, who's thinking about why we make art. That's why we make art, who's to hand that to someone so that it'll be unforgettable and it'll be about their beloved place. Yeah, and you know, it's like on one level, I probably shouldn't relate to James Baldwin's books at all. I mean, it's about such a

radically different set of circumstances and experiences. And yet, you do connect with it. I think I somewhat made this comparison before me. I'm forgetting who it was. But like, I related to the autobiography of Malcolm X more than Ketcher in the Rye. But they were saying, biography of Malcolm X more than catcher in the rye. But they were saying, like, those are similar sort of coming of age books, depending on where you grow up. And it is like, oh, yeah, it really is. It's like somebody sort of realizing that the world doesn't make sense, and everything is fake, and that there's a different way to live.

And you can see it, like, and it's just sort of going that it actually doesn't matter how specific it is if it taps into something that is true about what it means to be a human. Yeah, that's the hardest lesson that I think we learn in no matter what we do is how you take the personal, your own pain, your own hurt, your own insecurities, the things your parents made you feel, but also that, like, if you were bullied in high school, or if you were terrified in high school,

or if you were a bully in high school, because you were terrified, right? Right. You take all of that, and you think about what makes it universal, that's what takes something to a higher level. Exactly. I loved autobiography of Malcolm X When I and I read that when I was very young too because same thing like Ketcher and the ride didn't resonate with me not because I didn't like

The narrator but he seemed so far from me like and so much more privileged in that way where the things He's already dropped, you know, and I kept thinking like man. I'd get you know, I'd get plaster That's something like this like we'd get beaten, you know, you couldn't say things like that. Autobiography of Malcolm X, to me was about a man trying to find out who he was in the world. And he was called red, you know, and he, it was about his, the amount of melon in his skin. It was about how he felt about his hair. Those are very personal things. It's, you know, think about what people remember is the pain about how he felt about his hair. Those are very personal things. It's, you know, think about what people remember is the pain he went through to make his hair straight and the pain he went through to try to be somebody. All of the art that you look at, whether it's beautiful photography, Delphine and Cumi, last February, we went to San Francisco. I went to San Francisco for an event about the memoir and we went to MoMA and we saw a photography exhibit by Dawood Bay and his renderings of Brooklyn, New York,

they were from the 70s and you just can't imagine how timeless that feels. When you look at the way Brooklyn is now now like what a place like Brooklyn has become, it's so valuable. The Delphine's art history is, you know, specializes in photography and the history of photography, especially among African American women. I just, I love going to museums. I love books of photography. I have a book from Udora Welty, which is WPA photographs.

And sometimes I think, why can't we do WPA right now? Why can't we record what our life is like right now with COVID? You know, we are in a great recession, and what does it mean to be an American? And how does it look? So I love looking at books of photography. That's my biggest help when I'm writing, actually.

Sure. Yeah, what struck me about the autobiography of Malcolm X is that moment in prison where you just sort of discovers reading and it like it changes his life. And that was such a specific thing. I mean, I've never been in prison and I didn't turn to reading in my 20s or however old he was. But that experience of discovering

he and Alex Haley sort of captures so perfectly, they're just like, yep, that's it. That's the coming of age experience. Even though it's not, it's about someone who's, you know, a hardened criminal in their 20s. It's, it's, it's just beautiful when you see it done, I think. Exactly. Because he still wanted to love himself. He had to learn how to love himself when America didn't love him. And that's why Ketchon's ride feels different to us. But also to think about, again, like the hand reaching down, like if James Baldwin hadn't reached that hand for me, I wouldn't be able to do

what I'm doing right now at all. And that the oddness of sort of watching him be everywhere now. Like everyone talks about James Baldwin, and most people only talk about all the famous people that he knew Malcolm X and Martin. He was a New York Times piece about this like last week. Exactly. So I read that piece and I thought, this is a man who changed my life.

And I was not a famous person. I'm still not a famous person. I'm, but I'm the only person who can write about the people I'm writing about. Like I'm the only person who can write about, you know, these guys who want to be CHP officers and what it means to be like speaks Spanish and speak English and be caught between. And I'm the only person who can write about a guy like my brother, you know, who was so oddly ahead of his time. And we both were descended from farming people and we can grow anything. And it's like, I don't understand why you're not growing that plant.

I'm like, that's not what I'm about to grow roses and sunflowers. I think that if James Baldwin hadn't looked at me and said, what is this place that you're writing about? You know, and he befriended Dwayne and me. I mean, he was so kind to my then husband that we spent so much time together that the thing that rings in my head always is that moment that he came over to our apartment. He said, I would like to see where you live. And then he said, it looks bad here. It looks like my first apartment in my life. And we were like, yeah, it looks pretty bad. It was a buried student housing.

It was a studio. It had gray linoleum on the floor. Brian, you can't imagine how sad it was. The building was built in 1950. It's in Amherst. It's got a rot iron railing. And we had furniture we found on the street. Dwayne and I were good at that.

We still find furniture on the street. He will still come by here with a bookshelf and we'll be like, oh, I found this on the street. Do you want it? And the girls would be like, Dad, what are you doing? And I'm like, you know, I like that. James Baldwin stood there and looked out this little window and I had taped to the window. This quote from from George Clinton from Parliament, you know, George Clinton is famous, you know, too, but it was a different kind of famous back then. I was only 22.

And we all listened to Parliament of Funkadelic and it was with the rhythm it takes to dance to what we have to live through. You can dance underwater and not kept wet. And I had broken it up as if it were a poem. and I had broken it up as if it were a poem and I'd written it on a little piece of line paper and taped it above my little tiny Smith-Curro in the typewriter that my mom bought me when I graduated from high school and I was 17 and I had a card table and he said this, this is the most profound thing I think I've ever read and he turned to me and then he said to Dwayne, where does this come from? And Dwayne pushed the button on this boom box that we've had for like five years. And here came Akobugi. And James Bowen was just stunned. He was standing there while he was holding a glass of Johnny Walker Black label. That's what he drank every night. And he just said, this is astonishing. And then he said, where do you listen to this? And we were like in the car. And I said, and like, sometimes there'd be eight of us in the car, but we're too poor

to afford hydraulics. So we would just bounce up and down. And the car would appear to be bouncing up and down. And we'd be listening to this and just stared at me. And he said, is it imperative? It is imperative that you write about your place, that you write about, about what you, you know, where you come from, because no one else is writing about this. And that, that was a life-changing moment. And that's like you said, that's the hand that comes out to you that says, here you are, you can be this, you can do this. And for Malcolm X, it was the hand was in the form of a book. And that happens all the time, doesn't it?

It does. So I'm going to hand you a book. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. ["Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast,'s given this book by his mentor, Rousticus, his philosophy teacher, gives him what they think is Rousticus's personal copy of the notes of Epic Titus, who is a slave. And so you have, you know, a teacher giving, reaching out with a book, the memoirs of a slave, essentially, to the most powerful man in the world. And it changes the course of history.

And I just love that even then, like a book recommendation could hold that much sway. I just, and then, you know, 2000 years later, I was living at Grand Mark on Iowa, right off university and Riverside. And somebody recommended it to me and I bought Marcus Realis' Meditations. Then it came via Amazon, although I guess I could have driven to the Riverside Plaza to borders when borders was still there. But you know what I mean? Like all of this has changed. So much has changed. And yet the process of Malcolm X discovering a book,

Marx really is discovering a book, you know, whoever, you know, your teacher giving you an up green gables, it's like the fundamental act of a book and its power remains the same. It does remain the same. And I mean, I've traveled all over the world talking about this new book, the memoir. Like I've been to've traveled all over the world talking about this new book, the memoir, like I've been to Turkey, I've been to Sicily, I've been to Mexico, and you know,

what women always want to talk about is that our stories are so often oral histories. And I start with Homer and the Odyssey in the country of women because a lot of those recorded things that we are talking about, especially I like what you're doing. So I just gave daily stoic the 366 meditations to my best friend yesterday for Christmas. And she lives, she's from here and we used to shop together at the swap meet back in the day before we even knew each other. What what I started mind with was this notion that women's stories are the ones that didn't get recorded, like they didn't get written down as often, they were all told to each other in the kitchen or wherever, but what I think is the most valuable about what you just said and kindle kindle works fine, it's the narrative. Someone gives you a book, but they're giving you as a narrative. It's a structure. Here's this story that can change your

life. It's a physical object that you can hold no matter how poor you are. You can hold that book and read it. You don't have to have a device. You don't have to have a TV. And that's been something, again, I go to Turkey and women tell me these stories about, you know, their beautiful aunt who was trying to leave their uncle and she was standing on the balcony one day and he looked up and shot her or as in San Antonio, I'm in March. And I heard these amazing stories when people had grown up in San Antonio about how the city was, like way, way back in the day. And people told me secret stories about this person didn't laundry for this person. And I merely thought this person washed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of shirts for men.

Like, what did it mean to support your family doing that? So I love, like for the memoir, what I loved, my favorite thing, even though it was a sad thing, is the four women who were at the heart of the book, my mother-in-law and her sisters, the four beautiful women, Alberta, Daisy, Rosie, and Mary. Rosie died in October, and I was able to stand during her memorial service. I got to stand in the pulpit at our tiny little family church and hold up the book. They said, no, we want you to read from the book because that rose. He's in a book now and Albert is in a book and everyone's in a book and they said, we want you to hold up the book and show everybody and read the part about when the four sisters, you know, went out on a Sunday and how they looked. And so I did. I read from the book

and that was a strange moment, Ryan, where, you, to be in a church, in a place where women are not usually allowed to stand in the pulpit and be reading about the women that were the backbone of our family. And it was a book, and they were like, this book means that our family history will never be erased. You know, thank you for writing it. Well, that was, that was a tearful moment, no, no, no, no, tell. Well, I loved the book, and one of the things I thought of, and I think I've used this story in one of my books, but have you read any of Robert Carrows' biographies of Lyndon Johnson? Yes, I have. I love those.

Yeah, but in the first one, you know, he talks about sort of the women of the hill country. And he and his wife sort of move out to Johnson City and they sort of go and they meet these women, many of whom are still alive. And as his wife, because she's more, she's, I think her name is Ena, she's doing a lot of the research and the interviews. She sort of comes back to him with these like sort of stories of what it was like to be, you know, a woman at one of these remote ranches back then. And they just sort of get sicker and sicker of the sort of cowboy, you know, he says something in one of the books where he goes like, I never want to watch another John Wayne movie again. He's like, because

you hear a lot about gunfighters. He says, but you don't hear anything about a woman with a perineal tear carrying water from the well. And you're just like, holy shit. Yeah, you're right. Who's like the real sort of hero slash tough guy? Like the guy who's going to a bar and then getting into gun fights or the woman who's doing this sort of back breaking labor in the middle of nowhere without electricity, you know, carrying water from the well, fighting off, you know, you know, you know, raiders and Native Americans and all and you're just like, oh, yeah, actually, actually the, the story has, has, has excised out the people who were the toughest, most interesting and bravest. Well, I don't even know that it was excised out.

It's just that women didn't exist because they weren't allowed to have that narrative. You know, the legendary stories of the gunfighters, that's told in the bar in gunsmok, right? And the women aren't in the bar, are they? So they don't really get except for Miss Kitty, you know, talk about tough. And like, so you think about it, all of the, all of when I read Homer, when I read the Odyssey, and I think about all this, the

Penelope was left behind, right? But all of the the women who had to bury all of those dead men, like Odysseus just kept using up his soldiers, like they were all dying. And like, yes, who made the linen shrouds to wrap the dead, who washed the bodies, who then had the babies that grew up to be the soldiers that were then easily cast off into the sea. Over and over again I kept realizing that the strong women, just like you said,

in the hill country, in Harlem, in LA, all those women up in Sacramento, all these women in Riverside, were the women that told me their stories secretly over the kitchen table. You know, they would tell me the story of they had six kids, but they couldn't get out of their mind. And this is my mother-in-law, the one baby that died. And that, you know, crypt death was a big thing back then. And all these women told me there is nothing like, you know, watching a child leave you. And all of those great grandmothers who, when you think about it, like somebody dies and they have 96 great-grandchildren. What does it even mean to have that legacy?

As what I was trying to write about with the women that came just before my mom and my mother-in-law, was those women are responsible for, you know, 250, 300, 500 people being in America right now. I didn't think about that. You're totally right. 500 people might be in America because of my mother-in-law's, you know, first ancestor. 500 people. And so, when you think because she lived and she made sure her children lived and she watched their clothes and cooked

their food and hauled water from the well, that's what I often think is the the heroism of women, not that they were excised but that they were not at the table to tell the story. And now when you look at it and you think about what you know what women's parts are allowed to be or looked at now, I think it's fascinating to look back, look at teachers, look at the nurses, suddenly now everybody's noticing that nurses are heroes, right? And it's like look at teachers, look at the nurses. Suddenly now everybody's noticing that nurses are here. That's right. And it's like, look at all those years that nursing uniforms were a joke.

My great, you know, great joy in telling the story of my grandmother, who was my step-grandmother. She was the first head nurse in charge at Kaiser Permanente in Fontana where there was a steel mill. And when I was growing up, she was a meanest woman, oh my god, we never saw her smile. But she would say they bring me the man and his arm has been cut off and I have to stop the blood. And we're like, okay grandma, it's Christmas. And you know why she's saying that? Because we were holding up one of those brand new carving knives for the turkey. And that was her response. And we're like, yeah,

we're gonna just carve the turkey now grandma. We're going to think if it has a steel worker, okay? And she would just, like, that's who she was. Talk about stoic, Ryan. Right. Like the classic definition of stoic was, she was one of 10 kids. She could never inherit anything in Switzerland in this tiny little poor mountain town, like Heidi. And here she was, head nurse at Kaiser Permanente. She was the oldest living Kaiser patient when she died at that point. She was 96. I was thinking about that recently because, you know, John McCain's mother died this year

after John McCain was pretty insane. She died at like 103. Like she outlived her husband by 40 years. Like, you know, he died at 70. She died at 103. And you're like, so where, you know, John McCain's famously this was this tough guy who endured and it's like, where did he get it from?

Was it his dad? It's probably his mom. I mean, like you don't live to be 103 if you're not tough as nails. Plus, I loved hearing his mom talk. mean, like you don't live to be 103 if you're not tough as nails. Plus, I loved hearing his mom talk. She was amazing. Yeah. Oh, she died at 108. Sorry, 108. Yeah. No, she was amazing. You know, when when John McCain died, I was driving across the country and it took seven days that year for me to drive. And so he had died just when I was leaving and I was going through Pennsylvania the day of his funeral. I was going through Ohio and Pennsylvania. And I spent the

night in Eerie at a tiny little weird micro hotel and there was a place people could smoke outside. And I always have to go outside with the dog. So I walk all around like Eerie or Carnie Nebraska. And that's when people tell me these stories stories and they were sitting out there and we were listening to the coverage of his funeral. And there was one family that came by that was African American and they had come up from North Carolina to Eerie to a family reunion and the dad was in the Navy. And there was another guy sitting next to me and he was from a different part of Ohio and he'd been in the Marines and he was a white guy.

And then another guy came by and he was Filipino and all of them had been in the service. We sat there for hours talking about what John McCain meant to them. It was astonishing. And it was just me, the dog is patient. He was just sitting there and everybody was, you know, they were smoking and gathering

around the table and then someone else would show up. And what it meant to hear people talk about John McCain was it reminded you that someone at the funeral said what John McCain would have wanted was for everyone to go join an organization, like go back to the idea of what service meant. And I just never forgot that. Like, all those people talking to me about what it meant for them to be in the military and that John McCain was such a hero to them. Because he was, I mean, I'm not trying to be cute here, but talk about Stowe.

That's right. So, you know, his body was completely punished and disabled in so many ways. I think he got it from his mom, the idea that I'm not going to complete. Yeah, there's something worse than death or failure, and that would be sort of dishonor or betrayal of the ideals that you believe in. Yeah, the idea that you would give up and you would betray your country wouldn't have entered this mind. And I think you get that from all the things you've been talking about, the hand that

reaches down from your parents, but you also get that from this sort of internal well spring that you have inside you genetically, where you're like, I am not the person who's going to give up. If he was really something, I think what I liked the most about him, I kids that I were talking about him the other night when we were walking was his capacity for change. Sure. Because people always say, oh, he, but he was this guy back in the day. Everybody was this person, this guy or this woman back in the day, but the

capacity to change is the overlooking. Don't you think? I think so. And, and also a lover of books. I mean, he was this huge Hemingway fan. And he would, he would press for whom the bell tells it to everybody's hands. Yeah, I love that. I love that. That's what I mean, I think about the books that I've given the most often to people and the books like when I talked to you all as a as a group, like the books that changed me. And really, I mean, go tell on the mountain by James Baldwin, Anne of Green Gables was huge to me because my stepdad was from that area.

And it's so poor. And they were so poor, but her idea of imagination could save you. You know, I've given that book away. I've given tons of, um, under the feet of Jesus by Helena Maria Vira Montes, which is about migrant farm worker family in button willow. Talk about just being right off the mountain. Yeah, Button Willow is great. I go to Button Willow to, you know, to think about Helena Maria Vera Montes and how she talks about her mom raising 11 kids and having them eat in obales and tortillas and meet tortillas. And she would say, how could my mom have fed us all

on so little? And Elena's a distinguished professor at Cornell. I've given her book away a lot because, as you know, from being at UCR, we are a Latino majority institution. That book changes people's lives because they're like, I never knew that somebody could write down like the life of a migrant farm worker. And for me, High War Moon was a big deal back in the day because I went all over California. That's the book that you gave out. I did. The publisher gave us copies of High

War Moon. I have that those years when I knew you your class. What it was 2004. It was sort of in 2005. 2005. Right. Highway mode had come out in 2001. And I had driven all over the state, right? Like I went Sacramento and talked. I went to like places like Greenfield. Did you know Greenfield is the lettuce capital of America, right? I talked to farm workers who spoke Mischek. They didn't speak Spanish, so I had an interpreter and they held the book and they cried. They were like, no one's ever written about someone who's a Mischek woman who works in the fields before. And they would ask me to sign the book. And I'd have to sign it to like five different people because they'd be like, this is this will be the first book in our house. And you sign it to my aunt and my uncle and my parents and to me those, you know, those were moments

that I'll treasure forever going to Coachella out to Mecca where the vineyards are. Yeah, it was really something. Well, I want to nerd out about Riverside for a minute and then I'll let you go, but one of the things I loved about the book that I had no idea about why that there were wild pigs in Riverside when you were growing up. They're still our man. That's terrifying. Because I mean in Texas we have them, but you can hunt them and you sort of know what to expect.

I would have them in the country. Yes, I live out of the country. So you know, you sort of, you sort of. I speak in the ones. So you're gonna crack up. One of my favorite shows to watch when I'm really, really can't think is I watch this show about a guy who who traps and kills wild pigs. It's on the rural farm to the delivery Channel I watch real farm delivery

I watch RFD TV. There's this guy that has a whole system for trapping on feral pigs in the South But he hasn't come out to California which I find fascinating. So my father-in-law general his friend Floyd used to have a giant pig farm across the river in Rubido but for since way back in the 1800s pigs would escape and they were feral in the center and in the river bottom. So when we were growing up that was a legend like they would not people off horses. And they were, well, they were like 300 pounds. So yeah, the other night, I walked that way. I was telling you, I walked all the way to Anne's

of Crossing. And Anne's of Crossing, my brother, no Derek, he's six, six, six weighs 380 pounds. He was working security for a state Department of Transportation project. People were trying to steal the cranes at night. So my brother and I would sit in his truck all night and make sure no one stole the cranes. And I went to visit him and take him cake sometimes. And he would tell me stories about the wild pigs coming up. So the other night I'm there with my dog and I look

and the whole part is torn up. and you can tell that's where the wild takes them. They've been rooting. They've been rooting under, you know what their favorite is, and oak tree because they like acorns just as you know from Austin. So I saw that and I was like, oh angel, I told the dog, I was like, angel, we gotta get going, we gotta walk home fast. And then we heard one coyote call, so we left a little too late. I like watching sunset, but that was done. So we heard a coyote, we heard another coyote. I wasn't scared of them. I was scared of that Russell that would mean there was a thorough pig. So we jogged. I got a lot of exercise. That was two miles of quick jogging. Angel was quite happy.

No, I love that. And it's weird because when I went to college, it reversed. So I dropped out at the end of my sophomore year because I got a job as a research assistant for writer. And so that was sort of what I'd gone for. So I sort of took it. But it was weird. I actually only went to Rubit Mount Rubido after I left. I would come back and I would write because I had some, it's funny, I don't think I went in the library the entire two years I was at Riverside, but I've since written a good chunk of three of my books at the library because there's some, I don't know, some place that I get to nostalgicly

that helps me write when I go, but Rubito is so far from campus and I didn't have a car in my freshman year. I honestly didn't even know that it existed until I came back and I saw that cross up on top of the mountain. And now I love it. It's like my favorite, my favorite thing to do. It's such a weird... If you told me that was like a feature of Disneyland, I would believe you more than a mountain with a giant cross on the end that people walked at the top of and then down

in the middle of Riverside. I know, it's just crazy because again, with this and confused, there's like the Moon Tower, right? They're like, that's their iconic place. And they go at the top of the Moon Tower and they think about what everybody's doing in Austin, like in the middle of the night. And for us, when we were growing up, you could drive up Mount Rubido back then.

I read your piece about that. That's the craziest thing I've ever heard. Crazyest thing. Like people would drive up there and get completely drunk and drive back down to no one ever died. I just, I never could believe that. But walking up there for my three daughters was one of my favorite memories of raising those, those three girls is, you would get to the top and you'd sit there and they would say like mom you could see your whole life right and that's I can see my whole life from here I can see Rubido which I mean I was born over there on that side and gosh think about how poor we were and my mom spent her last quarter at the state of brothers

on Mission Boulevard to buy me a little golden book and change me to read. And I can see that street from Mount Rubido. And then I turn the other way and I can see the house where I grew up. I can see UCR where I still work. And then you turn a quarter of it turn more. And you can see this house I'm sitting in right now, which is 110 years old this year. And it's an old orange-go-farm house. And it was one of the first houses here. and and it's an old orange grow farmhouse and it was one of the first houses here and so it's still visible like when you look at old maps of Riverside this was one of the first houses that you could see in this little subdivision and you can see it from the top of Mount Rubido and that really helped

me having my girls be so observant because they would say like is it feel weird that you never got anywhere and And I would be like, I didn't get anywhere, but yet I got everywhere. You know, so how lucky was I? And Mount Rainer, all your minds being that? No, I go, I park at my, I park in front of my girlfriend's apartment. And then I, I walked to campus and I write in the library and then I eat at Santana's. And then I, I, on your birthday and then I walk back and I put on my running stuff and I go for the same run that I would do every every, every night when I live there and I mean we're now married, we're now have kids. So it's this

weird, it's like going back and time soon as I'll walk through Pettland and there's, there's just something, I don't know, it takes me back to a place that sort of emotionally is very conducive to writing that I don't really get anywhere else, which is weird too, because I had such a brief experience there. I mean, it was only, you know, two years, and then you're really only in school, like, you know, several months, and then you go home for the summer. It was, it's weird that it's so imprinted itself on me, but for whatever reason it has.

And I just, I just love it there. I'm glad to say that because when you live in a place like this, or Sacramento, or even Austin, or places that someone thinks, oh, why would anyone live there? There's something about the quality of light along the river bottom for me. That makes Santa and a river like my place that I go when I'm stuck trying to think about what my characters are going to do. And it was the place where I realized for that memoir that how lucky I was that everyone would say, oh, you know, I meet writers from New York and LA and Chicago constantly and they're like, I can't believe you never left there. Like, how would you even live in a place like that? And what I think is, because I don't ever talk to writers,

this is a big treat for me to talk to you because for the rest of the day, I'm gonna talk to my neighbor Jose and he works at the Cisco warehouse all day. He comes home and then at night, he works at the pet co-ware house. And he can barely lift his arms. And so I like talking to Jose and hearing about

what he's up to. And my next round of tomorrow, Bill's cell phone towers, like out in the desert. So he works like 14, 15 hours a day, and he'll tell me what he's seeing out in the desert. That's what I love is that when I think about it, it's the quality of light and the quality of the people around me. And then being able to take that lock. That's what you like, Ryan. You like the solitude of being able to quiet your mind and think, here's what I want to do. But it takes a beautiful place to walk in or run in to do that. Well, it's also a wonderful cure for professional jealousy. Like I found, you know, when I lived in New York, there was a lot of sort of what what are other people doing? Am I doing it enough? Am I selling enough?

Why is this person getting this or that? One of the benefits of living out in the middle of nowhere in Texas is like, yeah, not only am I the only writer, but nobody gives a shit either. Nobody ever asked me what I'm doing. I wrote about that in the memoir that my neighbor Ron, they used to say, why is your line on till three in the morning? Because when my husband was working night shift at the correctional of facility,

and the girls would be sleeping and my light would be on. And my neighbors were like, what's your light doing on so late? And I told them I was writing and they were like, why? And then I said, and then sometimes I'm just folding longer and they're like, well, okay. Because what does writing mean? And so I love the fact that what you just said, no one cares what we do, that allows us the immense freedom

of trying to do it well for ourselves and for our readers and not to think about what the end product is, which is what you think about when you're in your... First, true. Last last question, as I figured you of all people would know, and I think I've Googled this before, I've never gotten the answer.

The first time I'm going to Riverside, we landed on Terry O. We drive in, and you pass that elephant on the 60, coming into Riverside, what the hell is that giant metal elephant and why isn't there? Do you know the story behind it? So there was a lady that had this heroope of alley her name was Ruth something and that's over by PiRite It's it used to be like a string-follow acid pits super fun site and it's literally right across from that

Willie mammoth is where I was born in like one of the poorest places you can imagine that was also a toxic waste dump. And so she on the other side of the 60, she made this really great like nature center, the group in nature center because those granite mountains are famous, that granite that was taken from the quarries and those mountains built like the Pirate Long Beach and the Pirate San Pedro and was used for most a lot of the buildings in LA that is some of the toughest granite in the world and you know who I learned that from Mike Davis the famous writer born in Montana he's the one who told me that I didn't know so anyway there's a great artist metal sculptor artist and she hired him to create a sculpture,

and that's actually a woolly mammoth. So Ryan, I can't believe I get to say this. So for my kids' whole lives, when we go to LA and back, you know, if we go to Staples Center and see like the Sparks player, we'd go visit Seminole on the way back, my youngest daughter, the one who's 25 now, and so's post-mart, she'd say, are we to the woolly mammoth yet? And then she wouldn't say it that way, she'd say, are we to the holy mammoth yet? So we'd always say, we're almost to the holy mammoth.

And she said, good, we're almost to the holy mammoth, and we're almost home. And she'd look up, and she'd look up, and there it would be. Why the heck it was there? We didn't know, but it was a comfort to have. So when we pass it, we still call it the holy mammoth. That's what it is for us. It's very resting. I'm so glad I asked. I was always curious about that. And then I remember a couple years ago, I read Susan Arlene's book on Rinton Tin, and that was the other sort of interesting Riverside connection that I hadn't known about. Yeah, I walked by there the other night too. I went the other way along the San Ana, a past Mount Rivadot, and I walked to the place that Susan Orlean writes about where Rinton 10 was

trained. I have friends that used to live right over there. There's an old American Legion post built in 1920 and I had to go to a funeral at that recently, at that American Legion post. So I walked all around that same neighborhood thinking about the American Legion guys and like what it meant that people were dying of COVID. And I walked all the way to where Rintintin was trained. It's a great, that's a very cool place. I'm glad you brought it up.

Well, this is so amazing for me, and I'm glad it came full circle, and I can't wait for the new book. So please tell me when it comes out and we'll do this again. Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews make a difference and of course every nice review from a nice person helps balance out. The crazy people who get triggered and angry anytime we say something they disagree with. So if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much

to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music App today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.