How Family Stories Shape Identity: A Literature Professor's Guide to Inherited Narratives

Elizabeth Stone [00:00:00] First of all, if you are a dearly loved son of your mother, nothing can stop you.

Vance Crowe [00:00:06] And that's when you have to. I always say like, it's the only way you can be truly authentic is if you're willing to share with other people what you're asking them to share with you. What

Elizabeth Stone [00:00:16] He found was that he could be loved by someone, Jesus. And that the experience of knowing that being capable of seeing yourself as lovable is a huge achievement that I don't know, you can get to you. Just, just howdy. I'm Hannah Newi Schwer, a production lead at a soybean seed facility in central Illinois, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:49] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today is a big day for me. We are sitting down with Dr. Elizabeth Stone, who wrote a book called Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins that I read in college. This book had a huge impact on me because I started to see the true power of family stories. And I can tell you that for many years as I traveled around the country doing different work, even abroad as a deckhand and living in Africa, I took that book with me everywhere I went because one of the things I found is that everybody has family stories to tell. And when you can get somebody to open up and talk about their family stories, you get let in, not only on their culture and on the this place that they came from, but really who they are as an individual, what their values are, what they care about, and what they hope gets passed on into the future. That's why Dr. Stone is such a great guest for me because longtime listeners of the podcast know that I do Legacy Interviews where I sit in this studio or I do them online, and I sit down with individuals and couples to record them telling their family stories so that future generations know their family history and the values they want passed down. If you're interested in having me sit down with your family, go check out our brand new website at www dot Legacy Interviews dot com. Alright, without further ado, let's head to the interview with Elizabeth Stone. Elizabeth Stone, welcome to the podcast.

Elizabeth Stone [00:02:14] I'm delighted to be here. I'm cupping down your website.

Vance Crowe [00:02:17] Well, that's great. So it is such a big day for me that I get to sit down and talk with you. I read your book, I've carried your book around for so many years, and so the first question I have outta the gate is, you know, why write a book on family stories in the way that you did?

Elizabeth Stone [00:02:34] It began with an article I did for the New York Times long ago when, when people still associated Italians with the Mafia. I think they don't anymore. And so the article was called, it's Still Hard to Grow Up Italian. And what I realized is that although my grandparents were demographically, there were certain expectations from southern Italians what they weren't going to do and what they weren't going to be. But my family was very different in my mother's generation and we're talking about the 19 teens. Then my grandparents had six children. One became a painter, one became a novelist. My mother was an an actor, and one went into business and shortened his first name. So it didn't sound Italian. And so what I realized was I didn't, I didn't know why my family was so different from the demographic, from what the demographic expectations were. And so I started thinking about the stories I'd heard, which I mean, my grandmother lived in Brooklyn, all her six children, four of them lived in Brooklyn, and two of them lived very close by in Long Island. And so there were very large family gatherings on every conceivable holiday, but not saint stays and stories, just sort of, and so what I realized was story in my family, what I was very aware of, and I should make one aside, which was that when World War II came, my grandmother was required to sign up as an enemy alien, even though she had a one son in, in the Navy and another son in the army.

Elizabeth Stone [00:04:32] And the reason for this was because Mussolini was the enemy. And so, and that was incredibly humiliating to her and to the whole family. And it became almost a symbol of the denigration of Italians during the, the first half of the 20th century. And those stories stayed with me, but what I saw were a lot of protective stories that intentionally or not diminished the power of the, of the, the negative world that was just outside the front door. My grandfather, my, my great-grandfather, had run a, he, he had been a postman or so, the story went and he fell in love with the wealthy landowner's daughter. He was a very talented postman because he could play any musical instrument he laid his hands on. And so I had this image of her running off with him in the night wearing a shift. I didn't know what a shift was, but I thought it was very romantic. And they went off and had their dozen children. And the story was that they, at night, he and his sons would gather in the town square and they would have all their musical instruments with them, and they would play, and the villagers would be frozen in their tracks with admiration.

Elizabeth Stone [00:06:10] Then there was another story about my grandmother's beautiful singing voice, and she did have a beautiful singing voice, and the story was that she would be singing and the parish priest would walk by, and the story was that my mother would say that my grandmother would say, be quiet. My great-grandmother would say, be quiet. Be quiet. The the padre will want us to send you to Rome for singing lessons. So the idea in the family was that money wasn't really important. Nobody ever talked about money, but that the arts were really remarkably important. And my mother had a brief career on Broadway, and my uncle published two novels, maybe more. And so the idea was that accomplishment was important, and it was fueled by, by the idea real or imagined of these ancestors who gave them, who weren't celebrities, who weren't famous people, but it was in their blood. And so they could go forth and they could do what they wanted to do in this country, even become artists. And those were very protective stories. So base thought on that and a few more. I I mean, one of the stories just to bring to, so to show you that there was some element of truth in it, when I, after my book on family stories came out there, there had been another music story, and it was my grand, my mother and her five brothers and sisters lived above a grocery store, and my grandmother would have to clean the stairs, or she did clean the stairs that led up to their apartment.

Elizabeth Stone [00:07:59] And, and the story was that Mr. Peterson, there goes one of my AirPods that Mr. Peterson would stop whatever he was doing and say, be quiet. Be quiet. I have to listen to the woman upstairs sing. And I sort of rolled my eyes at that. But when the book came out, I, I wrote a piece for the Times again about some of the family stories and actually got a letter from Mr. Peterson's daughter saying that was not an apocryphal story. It was a true story. Every she remembered my grandmother, she remembered her singing opera. And so the mixture, whether everybody in the town square was frozen and all the suns played different instruments, who knows. But there was enough of a germ of truth there that we all bought into, and that was inspirational.

Vance Crowe [00:08:53] Yeah. The thing you said at the beginning of that where the, you know, your, your, your grandmother was so horrified by the fact that she had to register as an illegal alien or an enemy of the state or whatever. It was like

Elizabeth Stone [00:09:07] Alien,

Vance Crowe [00:09:08] The stories were allowed to push the outside world away, and they got to define who they were. That's such a, an important concept because it allows families to be able to pass down this is who we are and, and kind of what matters to us. Did you know that going into these stories, like when did you come to these conclusions about stories?

Elizabeth Stone [00:09:28] Oh, not for a long time. I mean, nobody thinks about these stories, but I, I do wanna say one thing is that the stories, that story, the story about how my grandmother had to sign up as an enemy alien was enormously painful. I was, and, and it, and that went through the gener that went through the decades as much as all the sunnier stories. And there, so the story, she did have to register as an enemy alien in the early forties, which was long before I was born, and shoot forward to beyond the, the, into the 21st century, when she had a grown grand great-granddaughter that she'd never met. She died in 1973, and now we were in, I don't know, 2015. And at Ellis Island, there are ship manifests and all the, all the names of all the people who came on particular shifts. And so my cousin, my young cousin, spent a lot of time looking up to see if she could find my grandmother. The, the, the earlier story was that the reason my grandmother had to sign as an enemy alien is because she couldn't prove that she could come, that she had come here legally. Now, in those days, there were no green cards and there were no visas, but the proof was, were you on a ship manifest? Could you prove that you had gone through Ellis Island?

Elizabeth Stone [00:11:01] And at a certain point, my young cousin solved the mystery, a mystery that went from 1905, a full century to 2015. It turned out her last name was Bongiorno, B-O-N-G-I-O-R-N-O. Her first name was an nunziata, and I am not sure that I can spell it, but I think there are a number of Ns, a t or two, at any rate, her name had been misspelled on the ship manifest. And so even though my uncles went down to wherever you're supposed to go down to find the manifests, then on paper and prove they couldn't find her on the manifests, and of course they couldn't with her misspelled name. So a century later, my young cousin solved the mystery that had put my grandmother in a very bad light and caused her to sign up as an enemy, forced her to sign up as an enemy alien.

Vance Crowe [00:12:04] When your family was passing down that story of her being, you know, an illegal alien or that, like what was the value that they were trying to tell? What were they were trying to communicate?

Elizabeth Stone [00:12:15] They were, I don't think they, I think that they were humiliated by it. And I, what I bet goes on now is, I mean, we have, certainly immigration is an issue and I very much am curious about the kinds of storytelling that goes on in those families. And let's hope that in every family green card or not, the stories are not damaging to the younger generation. The stories are giving them tools to help them cope with the ways in which they are unwelcome.

Vance Crowe [00:12:57] Yeah, I think that I've, some of them, I've definitely heard one of the core questions I ask early on in an interview, if people know about their family history, sometimes like they don't know where their ancestors came from, but I often ask, do you know what made them come right? Do you know why they left Ireland? Or do you know why they left Italy? And when they do, there's often some kind of embedded lesson in there. Oh, they're their, all of their property had been nationalized, and so they had had a small factory and they, they had to leave and they would rather be housekeepers in the new world than people that had been stolen from in the old world. And you hear these stories and you hear them passed down. And for me, it's oftentimes, I think a lesson about, you know, watch, watch what can happen to you. You know, your family is if, if, if you have to leave better to leave with pride in, in the work you're doing. And I think that I would never have been able to decipher that without your book, which I mentioned in the beginning is called Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins. Where did that title come from?

Elizabeth Stone [00:13:56] I do mention, I saw, 'cause I was looking at it this morning, I haven't read it in a long time, but I do reference Black Sheep in the book. And one day I was talking to my editor and this, and this is true, I know it to be true. My grandfather and his two sisters were first cousins of my grandmother and her two brothers, and hence kissing cousins because all the, the, the two brothers and a sister married the two sisters and a brother, and they all came to the United States together and none of them had to change their names because the two brothers who were their parents were both Erdos.

Vance Crowe [00:14:46] And in the book you talk about black sheep stories and the, and the value of telling about, you know, different members of your family that are black sheep. Can you kind of describe what is a black sheep and why people tell these stories?

Elizabeth Stone [00:14:59] There are two kinds of, of black sheeps, the kind that, that people like and that appear in the stories tend to be the sort of bad boys that, that American culture makes heroes of people, you know, like Bonnie and Clyde or Johnny Appleseed or, so the really real, I didn't find out till, I don't know the day before yesterday that there was one family member in my family who was a mafia member, never heard about him. They never talked about him. So, so the black sheep are the ones that got away the larger than life folks, someone who could hold their liquor, someone who had six marriages, some that someone who climb. Well, there was one story about this sort of rebel grandmother who climbed Mount Everest or some large mountain when she was in her eighties. Now she wasn't a black sheep, but she was considered foolish. And one of the uses of that story by her, her granddaughter, the granddaughter was a very compliant young woman, or she had been, the story that was told about her as a baby was they didn't even have to put her in a playpen because she would just sit on the mat and who you're told you are can be to some degree who you become.

Elizabeth Stone [00:16:31] And she hated, she hated how she had always been seen as the one who didn't even need a playpen because she would just be immobile on the mat. Her grandmother was an inspiration to her. And she, when she was in her twenties and thirties, she refashioned that story so that she felt entitled to some of that bravery.

Vance Crowe [00:16:55] I love that it felt entitled to the bravery. Like, this is where you come from. And I mean, that's one of the most important parts of family stories, right? The, the kids that know where they came from. And the research is showing, even if you are, are in an adopted situation where you are an adopted child coming into a family, knowing your adopted family story oftentimes keeps you from having depression and anxiety and drug use. Because people need to be able to draw inspiration. This is who our people are and this is what we do.

Elizabeth Stone [00:17:25] Right. My, the, I don't know that I spoke to any adopted people for the book, but I have later heard, I mean, and maybe DNA makes this kind of curiosity possible is, is that, and I actually said this in the book, that not to know where you come from genetically is to have a little bit of amnesia because we have our own lives, but if we don't know our ancestral lives, yes, we know who our parents are, our adoptive parents, and we love them, and we think that they are our mothers and fathers. And there's a lot of, a little bit of guilt at the, at the curiosity that remains, but that curiosity seems now, because there's another kind of family story that your doctor reads every time you go to the doctor, and that's your medical chart, your medical chart is a kind of family story. How, what diseases did your parents have? What diseases did your great par, when did they die? What, you know? And so those kinds of family stories are now increasingly part of people's own family stories.

Vance Crowe [00:18:40] So you mentioned there were two kinds of, of black sheep, the the one that's the rebel and kind of the one to look up to. What's the other kind?

Elizabeth Stone [00:18:48] The one like my mafia relative who nobody talks about? I don't think. I mean, look, it certainly was a catchy title and I didn't have to put a little asterisk that said Good black Sheep, not bad black

Vance Crowe [00:19:02] On

Elizabeth Stone [00:19:02] The book title. But there, there really were, I mean, the real black sheep were generally people who abandoned the family. And so they, they worked them, they were alluded to at, and then there was the sound of the door slamming behind them. They were not included.

Vance Crowe [00:19:25] So as you did all of this, like research into your own life, into the stories of other people, what did you learn about family stories that you, that surprised you?

Elizabeth Stone [00:19:36] That's a very good question. I learned how profoundly, especially young children, I wanna go back to the woman who was told she was so good that she never even got off, you know, her playpen mat. I learned that if you tell a child who they are, it may be something that they later wanna overcome or that they, they're, they know that that's who they are believed to be, but it doesn't fit. And that's where, that's where the ancestors become very important because they give a way out.

Vance Crowe [00:20:19] Oh, that's, that's correct. Yeah. That's really interesting that by being able to draw on that, you can still be you. Something fundamentally like, because you can say, ah, this is who we are. And yet it allows you to escape the, the narrative that was created when you're a kid. I'm the, I'm the middle child of seven, so everybody had a narrative who you were was already decided. And whether or not that matters in the outside world isn't as important. But when you come home, like, how can I, how can I break the parts of the narrative I don't like, well, I can be like my uncle Mike or, or you know, somebody else that I can draw from that makes it seem credible or seem realistic to the rest of the family.

Elizabeth Stone [00:20:59] And people will refashion. I mean, the last chapter is called Patron Saints, and that is about people, often they are artists, but not always who refashion their family story. Just as this woman who on the playpen playpen mat did. And there was one man I interviewed, he was African American, and he was a really, really talented composer, and he was getting recognition. And I asked him about that and he went back to his family stories and he said, first of all, if you are a dearly loved son of your mother, nothing can stop you. And he felt that he had that kind of love from his mother. The second story he told was about his maternal grandfather. And it was a, it was a black sheep story. It was about his, his grandfather who was a Native American who would disappear into the woods for periods of time and then come back. The family obviously never knew if he was coming back. When he was coming back. The composer turned that into an inspirational story because his creative work involved a lot of stepping away to we'll gather in the most creative way possible. And the result was that he felt, he turned that into a story of permission that just as his grandfather had gone away, but had always come back, he could go away and would always come back.

Elizabeth Stone [00:22:44] And he sort of obliterated the part that the teller of the story did not think that this was a great story. He, it, it's sort of like, you know, the story of Little Red Riding Hood. You can tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood from the woodcutters point of view, or you can tell it from the wolf's point of view. And in one, there's a girl who needs to be saved and in the other there's lunch the girl. So

Vance Crowe [00:23:16] I remember sitting in my class, I was a sophomore in college, I had this really impactful teacher, Dr. Erica Owens, and we were reading this book and the question was brought up like, does it make your feeling stories, your family stories feel diminished when so many of them match up to what the book is saying, other people's family stories were. And I certainly did not feel that way to me so much about being able to understand that there's an archetype that we're living out was, was really important. And it, like, it helped me view my family in a different way of, of course, like, it helped me view what is the purpose that my mother has and what she's doing in telling this story. And, and then coming to the conclusion that really the stories that my mom and dad are telling, they don't even always know the lesson that's embedded in that story. It's just something they have to pass down. It feels right to pass down.

Elizabeth Stone [00:24:11] Right, right. And, and children are the perfect audience for that because, you know, Piaget would tell you children don't abstract. They don't think in abstractions. They're very, very concrete and they model what they get. And so it really is strategically very smart if completely unconscious to tell children's stories. And many stories of course, do have a moral at the end, and that's why you shouldn't, you know, talk to foxes. But very often that it's not, there's not that much of a hammer to it, but it is the way that that families pass along archetypes, which is a definitely, and I mean there are very often stories of lost fortunes, stories of love at first sight, but there are variants on that. For example, some families have stories about how you're not allowed to get sick. Other families have stories about the only good child is the sick child. And I imagine those might be monkhouse families. There's an so that you really, there are there, there are fine points. And if you tell, I bet if you were to tell one of your family stories that you heard as a child in a room full of your siblings and an outsider or two, your siblings would absolutely know the meaning of the story. And the outsiders would say, huh,

Vance Crowe [00:25:44] Oh, I,

Elizabeth Stone [00:25:44] Because

Vance Crowe [00:25:45] I discovered this live on a stage one time I was asked to come talk about it, what happened? And I was like, well, I'm not gonna tell stories I've heard in Legacy Interviews. I'll just pull a story out that I know so well that I can just tell it. And I get all the way close to the punchline and I realize like, these people aren't going to understand the punchline. This is like deeply embedded into my family. I've since like, worked on the story and figured out what other details do people need to have or how do I explain it. But like I've, I've now said it many times, like the punchline of so many family stories are, and that's why our family always took sticks of butter out when we ate corn on the front porch. And you're like,

Elizabeth Stone [00:26:26] What

Vance Crowe [00:26:26] Could that possibly mean? But to them, the moral was right, was embedded in it. And it, it's like, yeah, almost a riddle that can only be answered by the family.

Elizabeth Stone [00:26:37] It reminds me of a story that I, that I came across just this morning that I hadn't really thought of. And it was a family with a very feisty mother and a very feisty father. And there were power struggles between them and the father felt that money had to be saved and the mother wasn't opposed to this, but there was one day where the father went out and bought a, a new set of golf clubs and the mother said to herself, oh yeah. And she went out that very day and she bought a whole set of dishes that she'd always wanted to have. And in the family those dishes, can you guess, can you see the punchline roaring at you were called the golf dishes. And it was, the way it was explained to me by the children now adults, was that there, it was a, a story of a power struggle that resulted in power equity. And that's why the, the golf dishes, the golf dishes was a reminder of the circumstances under which the dishes had been purchased. And and the point there was the mother was not gonna be subordinate to the father.

Vance Crowe [00:27:49] Yeah. And every daughter that hears that story that then later grows up to get married, that's gonna influence who she chooses as a mate that's gonna influence how she behaves in that situation because this is how we behave. Or, I mean, and it's, so once you hear these things, that's why your book was so impactful on me was that once you hear this, all of a sudden you start realizing like how important the narrative is in your life to making those decisions. The story that I told on stage, we'll see if I can do any better now, was that I had a, a great uncle that was a priest and he was, he was a tough guy. He used to challenge us on our Gaelic, you know, we'd see him once a month and he'd expect that we'd moved our Gaelic language forward, which we hadn't

Elizabeth Stone [00:28:31] Really, but

Vance Crowe [00:28:32] This was a big important part of the family was that everybody spoke Gaelic. 'cause they were Irish and they'd been in the country for many years. Well, one day he was in a, he was in a Catholic school run by Italians and they were learning Latin. And somehow the Latin teacher said something very dismissive about Gaelic, how it was just a, like a, like a dialect of English and it wasn't a real language. And, and William started pushing back and saying, no, that's not true. It's its own language. And the teacher kicked him out and the principal then sent him home. So William is sitting at home and his dad comes home from the factory and he's like, what are you doing home? And he tells him the story and his dad drags him all the way back to school. And he, he grabbed a little grammar book on the way out the door and he puts the grammar book down on the table of the principal's office and, and he says, if there is one word of English in that book, Liam here will eat the book. And this used to just make us Roar with laughter because the, yeah,

Elizabeth Stone [00:29:28] William

Vance Crowe [00:29:28] Would say, well, I knew there was one word that was similar to an English where it was a cognate and, and it wasn't the same. And so like to us, this story was about if you have truth on your side, you can stand up and the family will stand up for you. And like, I, I actually am getting even a little bit emotional about it, but that has lived out in our family so many times that I now understand there's no better way to communicate. The family will stand up to, to for truth, even in the, in the face of power. And it's been really important to us.

Elizabeth Stone [00:29:59] Right. And just to, I mean, that story is terrific for a bunch of reasons. First of all, there's a slight ethnic tension in it, right? Second of all, the historically, I, I know this from, I mean, I've taught in a Jesuit college for, you know, long time and I'm very, very aware that that Italian Catholics did not tend to go to Catholic school because there was the Irish clergy who had preceded them in immigration terms. I mean, the Irish came for the most part in the middle to late 19th century. And the Italians there, they began to come in the late 1880s, 1890, and came till about 1910. So they were, they were, they were my family. Now my family did not have a single priest in it that I ever heard of except for the Padre who was telling my, you know, one of my, but he wasn't a relative.

Vance Crowe [00:31:04] I, I can't even tell you how elated I am. I'm telling Elizabeth Stone my story about my, you know, it's great, great Uncle, father Bill was his name. And you're totally right. Like all the stories about Greatuncle father Bill were this, he was a giant of a man, but definitely like a black sheep in a way. He is just very different. And that ethnic tension that you talked about later, one of his stories that, that like showed how, how great he was was that the bishop was punishing him at one point for speaking out and he put him in an Italian parish and he had to go to an Italian town and be the Catholic priest there. And he won them over because he played soccer with the kids. And everybody could have this shared language around being Catholic and playing soccer and how they developed into the community. And so it's very insightful that you picked up on the, on the ethnic tension because when I was growing up there was there that that tension had to be explained to us. I didn't know that that existed.

Elizabeth Stone [00:32:00] Yeah. Right, right. The other thing both stories are, are have very positive responses to speaking up.

Vance Crowe [00:32:09] Yeah, that's right. And I would say that is me to a t that is, that is a hundred percent me. And I'm not sure that my sibling siblings would say these are the most important family stories. Which is another interesting concept of like, you pick up on the stories and pass them down to your children that mattered to you, and then they pick up the stories that you told which ones that'll be important to them.

Elizabeth Stone [00:32:30] Right. And are, are you, are both you and your wife's storytellers?

Vance Crowe [00:32:35] And

Elizabeth Stone [00:32:35] Do you share

Vance Crowe [00:32:36] No, my wife is absolutely not a storyteller. She's an engineer and now she's a physical therapist. But she, so like

Elizabeth Stone [00:32:44] Right,

Vance Crowe [00:32:44] I'm traditionally, I always say that I'm from Venus and she's from Mars. Yeah. Because we're so, we're so different in that way.

Elizabeth Stone [00:32:51] And that's interesting because the usual, usually the women are the storytellers usually not always. 'cause when they are from Venus, they're storytellers. You were the perfect, the interesting,

Vance Crowe [00:33:03] Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.

Elizabeth Stone [00:33:05] Let me, the, the thing that's interesting about that is you have these passionate Italians who are named O'Brien because they, they identify with their mothers and their mother's stories and they feel Italian, but their last name is not Italian. And that I came across quite often.

Vance Crowe [00:33:30] So I you're the perfect person to ask this. I started to write a blog about this one time, but I haven't formulated the idea so well in my mind. But that you're, what you're saying really matches is that when people come in as couples to do Legacy Interviews, it feels like the woman is the protector of the stories. So like oftentimes if if her husband is telling the story right, she'll be like, ah, ah, ah, don't forget this detail. And even if it's not her story, right, that's right. Even if it's his family's. And I always that's kind of felt like, you know, I I didn't wanna describe them as the PR agents, right? But they, they definitely have like a feel of making sure the story is communicating the lesson. That's important. I don't mean it disparaging in any way. I've just never understood why they're the ones that usually do it.

Elizabeth Stone [00:34:13] Well, the interesting thing is that, I mean, it's, it's, I'm having think about six thoughts, but one of the reason, one of, I mean, in Lincoln's day there was, there was a magazine called God's Ladies Journal, something like that. And it was for women, and the idea was educate a woman and you educate a family. And so the women are, the women are very often the glue. I saw a, a headline in the, in the Atlantic this, this week. I didn't read it, but it said, don't, don't confuse dad parenting with parenting, something like that. And I think that there is a difference between the way fathers parent and the way mothers parent. But in Irish families, the fathers the Irish really, I, I I don't like to to operate in, in ethnic stereotypes. But the one I've consented

Vance Crowe [00:35:16] To is

Elizabeth Stone [00:35:17] The Irish really are storytellers. They really are. And they do it extraordinarily well.

Vance Crowe [00:35:22] Oh, my mother is so much more willing. We wouldn't know very, very many stories from my dad's side at all, if not for my mother. And having her be the person that listened to my dad's mom tell stories. I mean, my dad will occasionally tell a story, but it's my mother and she's indiscriminate sometimes she's telling stories about herself and sometimes about her, my dad. But definitely the, the storyteller in the family

Elizabeth Stone [00:35:46] And that, and that's, I mean, the thing is how do you make a family, you know, how do you turn water into blood and shared narratives? I mean, nation states have, I mean, we have our family story, you know, and we enlarge. I mean, Martin Luther got in, Martin Luther King got into it about 10 years ago. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are in it. The idea Santa Claus is in it. The idea is that that stories bind people together, whether in a nation or in a family. And there was one, there was one woman I interviewed and she said, she said, we don't really have a lot of stories, she said, but if they were going to make a, a family sort of symbol of us, it would be a bunch of people who were blonde haired, blue-eyed, and good looking. She said, that's our family motto that we're all blonde, blue-eyed and good looking. And that was there and, but it was something that connected them.

Vance Crowe [00:36:52] So you mentioned that you're at Fordham. So you're a professor, you're teaching students these days right now?

Elizabeth Stone [00:37:00] Yes, I am. I'm on leave this semester. What I'm doing now is I'm edging out, but I'm still, I have an agreement with them that I teach in the fall, and I don't teach in the spring. So I, I do teach the literature of immigration and I do teach memoir. So I'm

Vance Crowe [00:37:19] So you were not a genealogy teacher, you were a a writing teacher then?

Elizabeth Stone [00:37:24] Oh, yeah. I teach creative writing. That's I, that I teach memoir writing.

Vance Crowe [00:37:31] How do you teach memoir writing? How does somebody learn how to write a memoir?

Elizabeth Stone [00:37:35] Huh? What I well, what I did last semester, and I don't know whether it was a good idea or not, but I asked my students to read Tara West Overs Educated, which is a very long story of a woman from a survivalist Mormon family, very large survivalist Mormon family. And she lived in Idaho. And so we read the book and we looked at what literary techniques she, she did, we looked at does she use dialogue? When does she use dialogue? When does she use scene? When does she use flashback? When does she use Flash forward, what are the motifs she goes to again and again and again. And the title of her book is Educated. And that is, what is it about? I also in the memoir class used Trevor Noah's born a Crime and what he, he's South African, and at the time that he was born South Africa was apartheid. And he really had, he's telling his own family stories to the public. And they are all, at the beginning of, each of his stories is, is is some history, and here's what this story means because nobody very American readers do not really know in any intimate detail the history of apartheid. So students actually didn't know what they were doing.

Elizabeth Stone [00:39:12] I mean, it was sort of like a blob to begin with. They started out doing writing. I remember the earliest one that I assigned the story was, what is the story of your birth? And that was a story in all cases about them. And then the second one was, if you had to write a profile of any member of your family, who would you choose to write a profile about? And those very often, the story about the relationship between that person and the person they choose, they chose to, to write about became what was the kernel of the, of their stories. And a lot of the stories, I mean, these were 18 year olds and they were pretty close to their past. So they don't have the kind of trajectory that they, that they will have later on. But they certainly had stories and the class actually be, and this always happens in memoir classes, the class actually bonded incredibly because they knew each other's story For America. There's just something I happen to have here. One of the things that I, that I use in a, in a class, if I can open this and maybe I can't, is a just a bunch of, you know, statements.

Elizabeth Stone [00:40:43] Like, make a list of the polarities you live with, what pulls you one way and then the other. Okay, now tell me what is your strongest weakness? Go another one. What will you have to say goodbye to when you die? So, and these are from a book called Writing Down the Bones. And it is a, these are prompts which are very, you know, there's kind of like, you know, Rach tests, what do you see here? And so this is, you know, but I use it with all my classes now as a way for the first day of to tell an introduction about themselves. Even in, if I were teaching, you know, organic chemistry, I wouldn't do it, but I'm always teaching English and I'm always involved with storytelling. And so this is a way for, you know, the standard first day thing is tell a fun fact about yourself. And then you, by the end, they all tell their dog's names and don't know much more than you did.

Vance Crowe [00:41:46] But

Elizabeth Stone [00:41:46] This here I'm saying, you know, write for 10 minutes and, and people actually write things that, that reveal them.

Vance Crowe [00:41:56] I, you've said so many things that, that I wanna talk about. The first one was just the, the way that you break down, you know, good writing. And I think like that one of the hardest things about becoming a good writer is paradoxically, you have to be a good reader. You have to read a lot. And then to be able to have somebody go through and point out, you know, we, I call it pattern spotting, right? If you can spot a pattern

Elizabeth Stone [00:42:19] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:42:19] Of like, oh, this is the way that language works. Then all of a sudden, if you can name that thing, like you, you were naming a whole bunch of storytelling mechanisms that I, I don't actually know the names of those, but once you have them, and that's a stored idea, that's a meme, right? That's the compression of a really complicated thing. Yeah.

Elizabeth Stone [00:42:35] Putting

Vance Crowe [00:42:36] It down right. And then giving you that tool. I think that's really important.

Elizabeth Stone [00:42:40] And you, I mean, when you told the story of your relative who, who spoke back, you know, to the i, to the Italian priest, I mean, you, you had exposition and background, you had dialogue. You, you delineated the characters well enough, you know, and the punchline, I'll eat that book. I mean, it had, it had, you knew what the beginning was and you knew what the end was. And that is sometimes very hard because, you know, we live our lives and it, I mean, some of my students talk about themselves as the central character. I think that's a, a current meme

Vance Crowe [00:43:19] And that's probably not the right term. Yeah.

Elizabeth Stone [00:43:21] Right. But we don't really live our lives that way, even if we are imagining who's written the score for our main character. So it, and that is problematic for people when they feel the, the main character thing is a problem for them. Writing

Vance Crowe [00:43:39] About your life is,

Elizabeth Stone [00:43:40] Especially when they don't feel confident, writing

Vance Crowe [00:43:42] About your life is very, very difficult. Many, many, many people have come in with either the, the, the book product where they send you a question every day or every week and you fill it out, or people trying to sit down and write their own biographies. And I think one of the biggest challenges is like, when it's your story, you have to go back in your mind and grab what are the relevant details that I can tell someone? And if you're writing it on paper, you don't have that immediate reaction where is this person losing interest? Are they, you know, engaged? Yeah.

Elizabeth Stone [00:44:16] Are

Vance Crowe [00:44:17] They

Elizabeth Stone [00:44:17] Reacting? Yeah. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:44:18] And so, you know, the, there's, there's a much smaller number of people that can write their story, I think, than there are people that can tell their story if there's somebody just reacting to it, because it's hard to write without reaction. And so creative writing class, I'm sure by having other people's reaction probably really helps.

Elizabeth Stone [00:44:38] But what you, but what you said you did about your own story was, I don't know whether when you said you knew what the punchline meant and you tried to use it and you had to refine it, I don't know whether you wrote it down as you were refining it or whether you just thought about it and thought about it and thought about it. But the good thing about writing is that you can revise.

Vance Crowe [00:45:01] That's true.

Elizabeth Stone [00:45:02] The bad thing about not writing and just talking is you can't revise. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:45:08] That's a, that's a, it's the, it's the brilliant trade off between the two. For me, I'm, I just tell stories over and over and over and over again trying to figure out like what is the right way to do it? And this isn't something that I'm like consciously doing. I look back on it and, and, and realize I've done it right. I keep being like, I know this is a funny story. How can I tell this story? I'm gonna try with this person and this person that, you know, that was another thing that, that you had said about the way that students connect with one another when they're telling each other their stories. Talk about that the, the 18-year-old that's telling their life story and how they get connected to others by telling their life stories.

Elizabeth Stone [00:45:47] Usually it's that they all have horrible parents

Vance Crowe [00:45:51] To be that was a gimme us to be frank.

Elizabeth Stone [00:45:56] Or that they all have troubled siblings that they have to reckon with because they're, at this point, they are telling stories about a ve I think when I think about it as I sort of go it, the, the cent, the second, the, the prime character, the main character was always the writer, but it was very often what the writer was reckoning with in another person. Like one student had a, a sister that she had adored and the sister was bipolar, it turned out, and that was a struggle for her. Another one was, had some essential religious differences, political differences with her mother. And it was about how you arrive at a Deante, another one felt her brother was the golden child and she wasn't. And it was the grandparents. So that they're, a lot of them are writing, you know exactly about what Eric Erickson talks about in, in the stages, which is they're in the middle of identity formation and they are trying to find out who they are. And, and I will say that the portraits of the parents, whether they are very, very pos well, they're never subtle portraits.

Vance Crowe [00:47:25] They're

Elizabeth Stone [00:47:25] Not nuanced. They're, because they are, they're archetypes that they're really writing about.

Vance Crowe [00:47:34] Yeah. And I mean, so much goes into the child parent relationship, right? In some ways, for many years the parent is God. And then you're breaking away from that God figure and you're trying to run away and, and figure out who am I and where did they make mistakes and how culpable are they for those mistakes? And if you find out God made mistakes, right? You're like, what do you mean? You're, you're not allowed to make mistakes.

Elizabeth Stone [00:47:58] Right? Right. You, I have a, a bit of just historical truth. Do you know what the prompt is? And it's not a verbal prompt, which sets, do you know what is, what, what makes people write their, their memoirs when they do not, not the coming of age memoirs, because that's, that is a very, you know, that's great expectations, you know, that's the arc ends before he really needs to shave, you know what I mean?

Vance Crowe [00:48:30] Or just

Elizabeth Stone [00:48:31] Starts to shave. But there's another later memoir, which has more to do with a, with accomplishment and the prompt for that. You wanna guess what, when it is that, that they most write after the death of the second parent?

Vance Crowe [00:48:47] Oh,

Elizabeth Stone [00:48:49] Do you have any guess why?

Vance Crowe [00:48:52] Well, I imagine that you feel like an orphan, right? You feel like you, you're you're out in the world alone and trying to make sense of it.

Elizabeth Stone [00:49:01] I think that's part of it. There's another layer though, which is the feeling of freedom, which is you are no longer bound by your inherited stories. You now have to become the main character

Vance Crowe [00:49:16] For real. I think that that will hit very, very close with a lot of listeners. You know, a lot of the people that listen to this are, you know, living rural lives and farms and they're very close knit with their families. But oftentimes because of the way property is and ownership of that property, that, that, you know, until the parents are gone, you never really fully in control of that. You, you don't feel totally as the master of your own destiny. There was a really big Twitter thread by a guy named Clint Fisher just the other day, talking about hundreds of people responding to him when he, when he told the story of a 53-year-old man who said, I only own my truck and I've just been told I'm, I'm going to one day get this farm, but my dad's, you know, 75, he's, you know, he's getting maybe live 25 more years. And people trying to wrestle with, did that guy make a mistake by being close to his family? He shouldn't have done that.

Elizabeth Stone [00:50:07] Or

Vance Crowe [00:50:07] Oh, this is your family. But when that, you know, parent ultimately dies, that will be a huge form of liberation for him, even if it comes with massive pain.

Elizabeth Stone [00:50:17] And there's a form of psychological cannibalism that also takes place at that point where, where you then incorporate aspects of, of the dead parent, the second dead parent usually that you hadn't before and or you transformed something that was bad and then you own it yourself so that there is, so that in effect you, in, you ingest your parent to some degree, at least the, the edible parts and not the, so

Vance Crowe [00:50:53] I think that's so right. It's interesting. I think that's so deep. And you know, to go back to your, to the point you made earlier about the young people, their, their history is so close. And then you get older and you have this other, there's something really important about people telling their stories to be able to go back and look at things in their lives that have been so painful or so difficult. And then they, when they tell the story about it, now all of a sudden it's not painful. Now all of a sudden it shows Well, because that happened, that's how I met your mother. And now I'm realizing that, or because we went through that bankruptcy Yeah. We made this transformation. And I think that right. That, that being able to tell those stories is a huge part of people being able to reformulate the story of their lives.

Elizabeth Stone [00:51:39] Yeah. Right? And it, it, I mean that's, that's the gift of retrospection, you know, I mean, one of the memoirs I like to teach a lot is called This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolf. And one of the things that Wolf did, very deliberate, there's also a movie about it with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the Boy. One of the things about it that, that Wolf said in an interview that he did on purpose, very often in a memoir, someone will say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But later I realized, so that you have the young narrator, but you also have the presence of the older narrator. And they, and you, and very often people go back and forth, writers go back and forth between them. They use the older narrator for retrospection that or interpretation that the little did I know that what I was thinking really was right. And one of the things that Wolf did very deliberately in his memoir was he, it's a memoir of a, of a very unhappy boy who ha loves his mother, but has a bullying, bad stepfather played by, I forget who played him, but what he does at, but the guy is a bully. And one of the things that Wolf did on purpose was he never entered the narrative as the retrospective older person looking back.

Elizabeth Stone [00:53:10] He said he, he wanted the reader, he didn't want to give the reader the relief of knowing it would all turn out okay. And that the guy who was struggling was now teaching creative writing in Syracuse. He wanted, he wanted the, the reader to feel as uncertain as the boy felt, not being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel at all. And so he withheld from the, he withheld from the reader any presence of the adult, of the adult narrator who was the author.

Vance Crowe [00:53:51] It's so funny, as you're describing these things, it makes me think, you know, I'm, I write for myself, but not for other people, but I do a lot of talking, speaking, and one of the techniques that I picked up was I'll tell a story and I'll say, I used to think, you know, I used to think and then you say something,

Elizabeth Stone [00:54:08] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:54:08] And then the audience is willing to go along with you because one, they, they're not now like arguing with you. Do you still think that way? Yeah.

Elizabeth Stone [00:54:16] Particularly

Vance Crowe [00:54:16] If it's something that they, they don't like. And then the other thing is that, that it gives you a chance to like show the, the differentiation between those two ideas. And it, it's like, but I'm sure there must be thousands of those techniques in writing that you've picked up on over the years.

Elizabeth Stone [00:54:34] Well, the, they are the techniques of fiction. But I also think you're talking about something else, which is if your story is very different, I mean, who's your reader? What do you have to do to get your reader Now if you're, you are, you're talking and there are loads and loads of people who are not like you regionally, religiously, ethnically familially. But you want to be able to engage with all those people. So you have strategies, maybe you never said them out loud to yourself, but I imagine you have strategies for the greatest engagement possible. And of course I do as a teacher too. I mean, I will, I know my students are talking about in, in a memoir class, I know they're talking about their vulnerabilities. And so I will mention something about myself that's not too vulnerable, or I'll mention something about myself. I won't say when I was 18, but I will say when I was in college, you know, and it gets a little bit harder to do, you know, at first I was the age of their older sister

Vance Crowe [00:55:42] Than their mother and et cetera.

Elizabeth Stone [00:55:45] So I'm always working on how to engage. I mean, it's something that as a, that I do. Whereas when I write, I may be writing for a more limited audience.

Vance Crowe [00:55:57] That's very,

Elizabeth Stone [00:55:58] I'm not trying to write for everybody.

Vance Crowe [00:56:01] That thing that you're describing about building a connection with people as they're sharing vulnerability, I call that the law of mutual self-disclosure. And I experience it a lot, right. In these Legacy Interviews because people will tell you, oh, this is when we lost a child, or this is when we went through and, and you realize like if you're talking with somebody and you're really getting them to share, oftentimes they will go way beyond the line of what they would've been comfortable with, right. What they would've thought they would've done. And then they wake up and that waking up is like, whoa, that person knows a lot more about me than I know about them. And so right now I feel uncomfortable. And that's when you have to, I always say like, it's the only way you can be truly authentic is if you're willing to share with other people what you're asking them to share with you. But I take, I also agree, you, you don't want it to become about you. So you don't wanna share things that are like, oh, you, you lost a child. Let me tell you this other horrifying story. But it has to be some kind of a balance there.

Elizabeth Stone [00:56:57] And, but that is what also works in a classroom. Because in a classroom, I know just 'cause I've taught since the advent of papyrus that the, that what you use, that that one of the ways you improve your own writing is by what you can suggest to someone else about their writing and the more, right? 'cause you can see something in someone else's writing that you can't necessarily see in your own, and then it's really yours. It's not like professor so-and-so, you know, with the red pencil or the, you know, the balloon next to the,

Vance Crowe [00:57:33] You know, in,

Elizabeth Stone [00:57:34] On the, on the, on the page. And that's where they really do learn and where they connect and where their own stories, where they themselves through sharing their own writing and reacting to other people's, writing their own stories became richer for it. And they revealed things that they in fact hadn't known before.

Vance Crowe [00:58:01] Yeah.

Elizabeth Stone [00:58:01] And that I think, yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:58:03] I, I think as a teacher you must, you must, it must make you a better writer to be able to articulate the things that other people are doing to watch what they do to see their mistakes, and then be like to go to your own writing and be like, Ooh, I don't wanna make that mistake that I just, you know, pointed out in, in their own writing.

Elizabeth Stone [00:58:19] Right,

Vance Crowe [00:58:20] Right. So you said you've been a, a teacher since before there was papyrus. Talk a little bit about where students are. I think that people living in the rural countryside right now hear all kinds of things about what's going on with college campuses and students, and are students today the same students they were 20, 30 years ago.

Elizabeth Stone [00:58:39] Students today are not the same students they were five years ago. And that, I think is due to a number of factors, but largely the pandemic because they missed out on, I mean, the transition from childhood to sane adolescence is a difficult one. And you have to, it's a, you know, all, we're all trained to be perfect children. Nobody really, and you could be trained to be a perfect adolescent on the way to adulthood, except by that point you don't wanna listen. You have to have the opportunity with your peers. And a lot of these people missed, I mean, kids who are sophomores now, so college sophomores now missed out on a lot of high school. They were in their rooms zooming and they missed out on a lot of learn. Oh. So if you say that to a girl, that's not gonna get you a, you know, oh, so if you dress like this, people will think you're, hmm. They didn't have the opportunities for all those hypotheses that they about growing up that they could. Correct. And so they're pretty, I would say they're, I would say three quarters of them are fine, but I would say a quarter of them are not, you can see it in, first of all, you can see it in the kinds of stories they tell, which aren't inevitable story in, you know, there are stories that didn't have to turn out that way, that you can see that after this kid has a couple of years of therapy, she'll be different.

Elizabeth Stone [01:00:29] And it's really true. A lot of kids are on medication, a lot of kids are, they're not in good. I mean, 75%, again, are resilient, or at least their academic skills are not hurt. But a lot of people are suffering.

Vance Crowe [01:00:49] I, they

Elizabeth Stone [01:00:50] Really are

Vance Crowe [01:00:50] Your point that like the, the young years are when you get to practice and the stakes are so much lower, and there's people that are around you that, I mean, that's exactly why you have a seventh grade dance and a high school homecoming and a prom. It's to give people practice to say, okay, this is, this is you getting a shot at it, but we're not totally setting you free. And like get, get your, get your your licks in. Right. And then, but if you didn't have that, it would really be hard. Right. Because you're now living in a world where your actions have way bigger consequences. And I mean, I think that's the other biggest thing about young people today. For me, like I was so fortunate that I went to college just before cell phones became a big deal. And, you know, whatever you did was going to stay as local as whatever your college campus, it was not gonna go further than that. Yeah.

Elizabeth Stone [01:01:39] And

Vance Crowe [01:01:39] The stakes are so much higher for young people today. Let they ever were for us. Let's try. Right,

Elizabeth Stone [01:01:44] Right. And my sons now, you know, they're grownups. They're in their thirties and they're best friends are the kids they met in high school or maybe before, but, and, and one son lives in Seattle and they all have gone on to do, to work for Google and Amazon and you know, Microsoft. So they all have a little too much money and they don't have children yet. And they will say, okay, let's meet in Austin next week. Or Oh, let's, let's go to, you know, Puerto Rico for the, you know, that kind of thing. And these are their, their best friends.

Vance Crowe [01:02:22] Yeah.

Elizabeth Stone [01:02:22] Still they have friends from college. Yes. They have not so many from grade grade school so much, but the friends they met when they were mo originally trying to figure out who they were and who they identified with and who was like them. That's high school. That really is high school. But in a sports, it's athletics.

Vance Crowe [01:02:49] Yeah. You can appreciate that though, because they have so much of a shared narrative. Right. Like, there's something about that. Like my closest friend, the one, you know, I, I'm, I'm an extreme extrovert, so I have, you know, a a group of probably 20 good friends, but my closest friend is the one that I've known since I was super, super young. And that's because there's so much that goes unsaid between us. You know, he knows the story of my great uncle, father Bill, and, you know, he, he was around with my parents and the transformation. So it makes, makes sense to me. And I think, but I also, that's, I I don't think that's throughout the years. I'm sure it's been different over time. When people would go away to college, they would oftentimes find their intellectual equals their, the people that found the same interest as them.

Elizabeth Stone [01:03:36] Yeah. I mean, I certainly, I mean, I was just, you know, sort of like, until you're in high school, either you don't have a fingerprint or you don't know what your fingerprint is. But, you know, and when I think about it, in middle school, I was one of the editors of my school paper and I was one of the editors of the literary magazine. And in high school, I, in high school, I sort of began to realize who I was. And because there were, I, the people I hung out with, I said, oh, that's, I'm choosing these people to hang out with. And, you know, we were all people who read TS Elliot and,

Vance Crowe [01:04:19] You know, did

Elizabeth Stone [01:04:20] Stuff like that and wrote for the newspaper and wrote for the literary magazine. And, and guess what, you know, Hawaii, who I began to think I was in high school. Sure. Have I morphed since then? Yeah. A great deal. But that kernel is still very much part of my identity. I became an English teacher and a writer. Did

Vance Crowe [01:04:44] You grow up knowing you wanted to do that?

Elizabeth Stone [01:04:49] I thought I wanted to be a psychologist.

Vance Crowe [01:04:52] I think you maybe are. I think,

Elizabeth Stone [01:04:55] Well, I, I think that actually there's not, I mean, I don't think I could be a psychologist because I think there are things people could do that I would say, oh, really? You did that? And that

Vance Crowe [01:05:07] Probably wouldn't be good for good

Elizabeth Stone [01:05:09] For my practice. But I think I do, I think I'm, I'm pretty good at reading an audience and I've learned how to, to, like, I'm much gentler than I used to be in terms of I want people to write well at, but I know that I have to give a lot of praise for what they've done right before I can suggest what might improve it. And notice I don't finish the sentence by saying by what they've done wrong.

Vance Crowe [01:05:40] So,

Elizabeth Stone [01:05:42] But yes, I think I always, I, I think I, I really always knew a lot. I, I certainly know retrospectively there were things I knew as a child that I could, didn't have the language to say, but I knew, you know, I knew things about people. I knew who was trustworthy. I knew what some foibles were. I knew when someone hurt my feelings, but I couldn't, I, even if I couldn't say it.

Vance Crowe [01:06:12] Yeah. I think that, you know, you're in an interesting position as somebody that's asking people to write their memoirs or to do creative writing because it's a certain biopsy into the mind that, that you, that I, I think when somebody goes to a therapist, the relationship is about like, Hey, help me fix this problem. And so the nature of the relationship changes then if you're saying, Hey, I'm just interested in hearing your story, just tell me your story. And I know there are therapies where that's supposed to be what all it is, is just talk therapy where the person just talks and the other person just listens. But there's something really important about, and I think the original, you know, therapists were the people that listened to your stories, right? That listened to you talk about what was going on. It seems to me that those are tightly interconnected and maybe maybe your way might be more effective in many circumstances than even therapy would be. Except

Elizabeth Stone [01:07:06] I'm not just listening. I mean, there are things I I can sometimes see more in someone's story than they see themselves, and so can their peers that they're, and, but I, there's it, it's not useful to, to encourage someone to go in a direction where they're not comfortable. And I do think that for many people, writing is about discovery. You know, who we have to thank for memoir the Catholic church because the first memoirist was Saint Augustine. The church invented the concept of sin. And in inventing the concept of sin, they invented, or they, they gave people access to interiority, not just your actions, but the what, governs and informs those actions. What happened, that was good, but it wasn't so good. 'cause people wound up feeling awful, although they could go to confession and then feel renewed. But the real split in the road comes when, when, not with Freud, but with William James, who suffered terribly from depression, who wrote the varieties of the religious experience and had a chapter about the sixth soul. And what happened with psychology was psychology was exploration, but without, without judgment and with also without a certain kind of rescue.

Elizabeth Stone [01:08:51] I mean, it's one thing to say, go to confession and boom, you know, you're pure as the driven snow, again, change is much slower. I mean, I bet people, I'm not Catholic, but I imagine that people who, who do things that they wish they didn't do and don't understand why they do them, do them repeatedly, and they get the sort of lift from confession, and then they go out and, and do them again. I mean, one, one of the things that struck me recently was I was listening to someone, a prisoner talk about how he found Jesus in, in prison. And there was certainly no priest who was saying, oh, you shouldn't, you know, that was bad. But now say these prayers, what he, what he found was that he could be loved by someone, Jesus. And that the experience of knowing that, that of being capable, of seeing yourself as lovable is a huge achievement that I don't know you can get to with just contrition and repetition of sin. I mean, this is maybe not where you wanna go.

Vance Crowe [01:10:08] No, this is a hundred. Yeah. This is great. I, I am, I'm a a believer that in a couple of things that you said, one of which was that it's not enough just to confess. You're like, Hey, this is what's wrong with me and getting it out, but having some feeling that I am still worthy of love allows you to become something different. Because if you're not worthy of love Yes. Then you just are dirt and you will never rise above being dirt. Right. And so redemption requires some sort of relationship with the outside world. It's not just yourself.

Elizabeth Stone [01:10:42] Yeah. And to the feeling of someone that is recognizing you and loving and loving you. I will say that God always does that, but priests have a pretty spotty record.

Vance Crowe [01:10:57] Yeah, I would agree with that. So when you said that the Catholic church invented sin, is this a little bit like the discussion we were having before where they spotted something that was going on and by naming it and giving it a name, then other people could see it and understand it? Or do you mean like,

Elizabeth Stone [01:11:13] I think it was Saint Augustine? Saint Augustine is considered, he, he wrote his memoirs, Saint Augustine's memoirs are about the, his transformation from a sinner who was, you know, a he was very active with people other than his wife. Yeah. And into someone who became sanctified, but who did it through the discoveries he himself made with I imagine the God he imagined as supportive to him. And he did make that, that transformation. And it's like, and going to therapy is, you know, you don't call it sin, but something that you're very uncomfortable with and unhappy with, but it doesn't carry the judgment. But there is someone there who, if they don't love you, they at least help you. And they're reg you are, they're there to help you.

Vance Crowe [01:12:21] When you know this much about writing and about the, you've read so many great writers, you teach it. Do you find that makes you self-conscious about your own writing in a way that's, you know, unhelpful

Elizabeth Stone [01:12:39] N no, for one reason, what you see when you read a page is not what was on the page originally. I mean, the, the way I think of writing is scribble, scribble, scribble, scribble, scribble, you know, and then, but what the reader sees is a straight neat line from here to there. One of the things that, that really I discovered, and I discovered it through my own writing, is that the narrator at, in the beginning, when you start writing a memoir, the narrator and what I'll call the author are one and the same. But by the end of the first draft, the writer has realized something has come to some insight, some discovery. Because memoirs like novels are either about internal change or external change. And the best ones are about, I think, internal change. So what happens is, when you go back to revise, you now have the narrator, you have, you have the narrator who's as dumb as they always were on page one. But you have an author who's as smart as they got to be by page two 50. And then you have the author's capacity to act as a stage manager to make, to make the narrator even a little bit dumber than the, or at least to put in dumb things at the nar that the, the writer thought, but didn't say.

Elizabeth Stone [01:14:18] So that what you have is, is the narrator arriving finally at where the writer has arrived at the end of the first draft, but it's much more elegantly done. But really it's been a mess getting there. It's not smooth sailing. So, no, I'm involved. I hate writing because it's always a mess.

Vance Crowe [01:14:42] That is brilliant. And it actually explains so much of the internal turmoil that I have on, on, like, when you're trying to create something new and you're like, I, I've done it a hundred times. And it's easy to remember that the a hundred times they came easy, but they didn't, each one was exactly as you're describing scribbles and telling stories that, you know, people look at you quizzically and then you get it out. But the part that's really brilliant about what you said is that you, the author has hindsight and the narrator doesn't. And that's like, that's brilliant. That's exactly right.

Elizabeth Stone [01:15:18] And the, but I think of them in a memoir as Bo as the, the author and the narrator are one at the on page one. But they, but when Tobias Wolf said he wasn't going to interfere in this boy's life by showing himself, that doesn't mean that he wasn't there managing the boy behind the scenes to make him ever more desperate. Right. So that, I mean the, the the, the story starts with him being a sort of young punk who loves his mother and at the end going off to private school, but still not redeemed. He's still gonna mess up. But you don't see the author managing the boy, the boy and the author were one and the same at the beginning, but they aren't at the end. And you don't always know where the beginning is at the beginning. Maybe it actually, you have to go a little further back, or maybe you have to start a little later because a story, I mean a story. What is a story? You know, we, our lives are not stories. We have episodes that, you know, the night that I got my appendix out. Right. And those are pretty clear, but larger trajectories are not clear.

Vance Crowe [01:16:45] Yeah. And they never are. Right. And the only time they become clear is with hindsight, when you're, it's just like a map. A map is more about what you're not showing than what you are showing because it's, you gotta shed everything out of it to make it make sense, but like, it's not really what's there. Yeah. That

Elizabeth Stone [01:17:01] It, it's what it's, yes. It's the, you know, I mean, we are helped a little by the fact that we, we live in a culture where birth is important. The first words are important, school is important, sports are important, graduation is important. So we do have some milestones that will, you know, whereas your first hangnail doesn't matter. And you know, if you learn to darn socks well that's nice, but you know, unless you turn out to be, you know, a designer who cares. So you don't, you have some help, but not you, your own story emerges. I don't think people know it. I don't think people, they, they get to the point where they say it. There's also something else. I suspect you are like me, which is much better on your feet than on the page.

Vance Crowe [01:17:57] Yes.

Elizabeth Stone [01:17:58] Or it's easier. I don't mean much better. I, to me, what I think of how I talk, I don't know where I get it from, but it's like rope, a tangled rope coming out. But it comes out in a linear way. Maybe there's not a story there. And I think there isn't, but I don't even write as in as orderly way as I talk. Well, and I know that

Vance Crowe [01:18:24] I, I have to wonder, I mean, like, I think that oftentimes teachers, particularly good ones, are getting so many reps at communicating ideas and watching how people react. 'cause you're so close to them, right. An audience of 15 or 20 people in your classroom, and you can look in their eyes and you can watch what's going on. You know, I've been told many, many times, like, we hired you for your speech, but what we, the value we got was when you went to q and a. Right. And like the q and a is totally unscripted. It could go in any direction. Yeah. But that's when I've taken everything I've learned about the audience while we were, while I was giving the talk.

Elizabeth Stone [01:19:01] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:19:02] And now I'm able to plug that into my answers. And I, I think teacher, I think really most people are probably better at talking than writing because you put in so many more reps.

Elizabeth Stone [01:19:14] I don't know. I mean, what do you get from an audience that is useful to you in the q and a part?

Vance Crowe [01:19:20] Oh, the, so the whole time I'm speaking, there's like the energy and, and you can feel like, does this crowd want to laugh? Are they, you know, like laughter is such a big thing. I always talk about like,

Elizabeth Stone [01:19:30] Yes.

Vance Crowe [01:19:30] For me, you know, if you're on stage for more than a minute and a half and you haven't gotten a laugh at the beginning, my, my talks are not funny.

Elizabeth Stone [01:19:37] Yep.

Vance Crowe [01:19:38] But laughter signifies, do we all agree? Right. We all it's connection. Yeah.

Elizabeth Stone [01:19:41] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:19:42] And, and so I can figure out like, who is there and kind of they, in, in every room, there's almost a few like lead, lead cows, right? They're the ones that are out kind

Elizabeth Stone [01:19:52] Of

Vance Crowe [01:19:53] Determining who's going on in

Elizabeth Stone [01:19:54] Classroom too.

Vance Crowe [01:19:55] And so you've got, like, you've gotta find out who they are and they could be anywhere in the room. And then you've gotta figure out, can I connect with them? And then you've gotta figure out pacing. Like, you know, should I be going fast? You know, because this crowd likes the electricity of that, or should it be going slower because they're, you know, whatever was in front of them or their speed. So for me, all of that figures out this timing that if you ask me to write it down, I probably couldn't do. Yeah.

Elizabeth Stone [01:20:20] But

Vance Crowe [01:20:20] In the moment. Right. But when you get to q and a, I know what joke's gonna play. I know what like story that I have loaded up is, is gonna do well. And then it's also the place where, yeah, I, I've talked with comedians about this, where this is where you try out new material, but you don't even, it's not like you planned it. It's just like, I have a new idea. This audience and I are getting along. I'm gonna try it. So that's Yeah.

Elizabeth Stone [01:20:42] For me,

Vance Crowe [01:20:42] What I get out of it.

Elizabeth Stone [01:20:43] Yeah. Yeah. Right. That, that sounds absolutely right. I am very attentive to knee jiggles.

Vance Crowe [01:20:52] Oh,

Elizabeth Stone [01:20:52] Right. You know, when

Vance Crowe [01:20:53] That board,

Elizabeth Stone [01:20:54] I'm not doing well, but I have, there's one problem and it's, it's really a 21st century problem, which is they take notes on their computer.

Vance Crowe [01:21:03] Oh.

Elizabeth Stone [01:21:04] And I actually said, I actually said there was a student who was smiling at the screen and I said, could you not text during class? And I, she was embarrassed and I apologized to her and I said, and I know who you were texting to too.

Vance Crowe [01:21:25] And she said, there was a boy on the other end of that text message,

Elizabeth Stone [01:21:31] Actually it was her new best friend.

Vance Crowe [01:21:32] Oh, okay.

Elizabeth Stone [01:21:33] 'cause they didn't know each other. She was texting to the girl who sat right next to her. I mean, it

Vance Crowe [01:21:38] Was insane.

Elizabeth Stone [01:21:39] But she was, so when they're smiling at their screen, nobody has notebooks anymore. So they are always on screen. And when they're going like this, they look like they're taking notes. But, you know, who knows? Possibly, probably. You don't know. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:21:56] Some,

Elizabeth Stone [01:21:56] Some teachers don't allow computers in the class.

Vance Crowe [01:22:00] My signal is very clearly, if people are looking at their phone, then I am not, I am not grabbing attention. But if people are pulling out their phone and taking photographs, so I have slides and I, so I used to work for a corporation, right. And I figured out very quickly that the more words you put on a slide, the more that legal has to review your slides. So my, I I pioneered this way of doing presentations where there's like two words on my slides, so people take photographs of it. And I'm like, there's nothing up there. It's two words. Right? It is like,

Elizabeth Stone [01:22:27] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:22:28] Right.

Elizabeth Stone [01:22:29] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:22:29] So,

Elizabeth Stone [01:22:29] Yeah. So I mean, you polished, but for you, that's a, and I guess for me, what goes on, what I really wanna do in a classroom is actually get them talking to each other. I don't wanna lecture at all. And I don't, and, and I don't wanna do, like, you need to, you need to do a presentation. I, what I do is I give them, they have to write, you know, 10 reader responses during the course of the semester. I have to get up at a god awful hour in the morning to read them.

Vance Crowe [01:23:04] And

Elizabeth Stone [01:23:04] That's how I, that's what I build the class around the questions or observations. And that's how I best generate conversation. And that works. But I mean, we're really after the same thing that some kind of connection with the audience and in some way you know how to do it. So

Vance Crowe [01:23:26] That's, well this has been an absolutely wonderful conversation. What are you working on now? What, what are you focused on?

Elizabeth Stone [01:23:34] Well, I just did, I just did a piece on a man who is, who came from Haiti enslaved when Tucson OvaTure was in the throes of freeing the slaves in Haiti, settled in New York. Both the owners died quickly and went broke. He was trained to be a hairdresser because they thought that they would be eventually going back to Haiti. And, and so he, he was born in 1781, died in 1853. Cardinal O'Connor discovered him in 1990 something. So I, I wrote this obituary that, and he was, he's on his way to sainthood. He was made of venerable in 1997 by Pope John Paul ii, but there is no North American saint of color yet. And so this guy, but, but it was, it was a lifespan. I had to cover his life and his death from 1781 to 1997. So that's what I was working on. And then I've also just finished a screen treatment because I've been doing a lot of work on someone you never heard of named Georgina Skyler, who is the great-granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton and was responsible for putting Emma Lazarus's poem, give Me Your Tired, your Poor, your Huddled Masses in The Statue of Liberty.

Elizabeth Stone [01:25:16] And there's a whole backstory to that. So you can see that that's not as enthralling as family stories, except for the fact that sh she really learned the progressivism that started with Alexander Hamilton and that her whole family did. But the movie is, if the movie goes, that will be interesting.

Vance Crowe [01:25:39] Well, I would have you on to talk about

Elizabeth Stone [01:25:41] The movie Terrible note to end on,

Vance Crowe [01:25:42] But, or, or anything else. Right. This has been a wonderful conversation. If people wanted to,

Elizabeth Stone [01:25:46] I've enjoyed it. If

Vance Crowe [01:25:47] People wanted to read your stuff, is there anywhere you would send them to go or just Google search your name?

Elizabeth Stone [01:25:52] Sure. If you look, if you go to Elizabeth stone.website, you will find far more than you're interested in reading.

Vance Crowe [01:26:05] Well, they always warn you double

Elizabeth Stone [01:26:06] Scandal

Vance Crowe [01:26:06] Not to meet your heroes. But I did it today and this has been a great experience. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Elizabeth Stone [01:26:14] I've enjoyed advance and go forward and get more stories. Ah.