Jordan Salama, STRANGER IN THE DESERT: A Family Story
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[0:33]Jordan Salama is the author of Stranger in the Desert, a family story.
[0:37]Jordan is a writer, covering culture and environment in the Americas.
[0:40]His essays and stories have appeared in National Geographic, New York Magazine, the
[0:44]New York Times, and other publications.
[0:46]An American writer of Argentine, Syrian, and Iraqi Jewish descent.
[0:50]He is the author of Every Day the River Changes, a Kirk is Review's Best Book of 2021,
[0:55]and the 2022 Princeton pre-read, and which, by the way, he was on my podcast for that,
[1:00]and now Stranger in the Desert a Family Story.
[1:02]He graduated from Princeton University in 2019, and has been based in recent years between
[1:07]New York and Buenos Aires.
[1:08]Welcome, Jordan.
[1:09]Thanks for coming back on mom's.
[1:10]Don't have time to read books.
[1:12]This time to discuss Stranger in the Desert a Family Story.
[1:15]Congrats.
[1:16]Thank you so much for having me back.
[1:17]This is great.
[1:18]It's my pleasure.
[1:20]I love this story.
[1:22]So personal, your exploration set off by the family and what it was it called.
[1:28]His story, Antiquet.
[1:29]What was it called?
[1:30]The book in the basement.
[1:31]The story Ant Iowa, the ancient history.
[1:34]You can tell I don't speak Spanish.
[1:37]That you found in your grandfather's basement.
[1:39]Tell listeners about the book and about the journey that you went on as a result of your
[1:44]discovery.
[1:45]Yeah.
[1:46]So when I was in college, one day at Thanksgiving, I went down to my grandparents'
[1:50]basement in peak school, New York, to look for some ice cream that my grandmother asked
[1:54]me to get out of the freezer.
[1:56]And next to the freezer, there's my grandfather's kind of like desk work space and a lot
[2:01]of books and old things that he has there.
[2:03]And I caught sight of this binder.
[2:04]And it was like about this thick and kind of filled with yellowing papers and photos
[2:07]falling out the sides.
[2:08]And it was just labeled in Spanish, Istore Ant Iowa, El Quinto la familia.
[2:13]So the ancient history, the story, the family.
[2:16]And I was like, what is this?
[2:17]And so I opened it up and I found 500 years of wandering history of my family, Sephardic,
[2:22]Jewish past from Spain to Syria to Argentina and beyond.
[2:27]My family's a big mix of things.
[2:29]My mom was born in Baghdad and my dad's family are Syrian Jews who ended up in Argentina.
[2:33]So there's always been kind of like a big mix of languages and stories thrown around
[2:36]in my family.
[2:38]But this was different.
[2:39]This was like an oral history for the first time my grandfather had written down over
[2:43]the course of his life.
[2:44]And he never told us about it.
[2:46]So I started reading it in secret.
[2:48]And then after a few weeks he found out that I was reading it and he started reading it
[2:50]with me, our conversation's drifted increasingly to Spanish, which had never happened
[2:54]before a boil and I, like a lot of I think families in the US that come from other places
[2:58]spoke largely in English.
[3:00]He would sometimes speak to me in Spanish, but I'll always respond to English.
[3:03]So anyway, in that binder there was a mystery.
[3:06]He said that his father, my great-grandfather, was a traveling salesman on a horse in the
[3:10]Andes Mountains.
[3:11]He moved from Damascus, Argentina, and he sold his goods in that navy just maybe.
[3:15]He had these long lost descendants that were still in the mountains of Argentina.
[3:21]And I'm a journalist.
[3:22]I'm a storyteller.
[3:23]You know me now.
[3:24]I traveled down rivers in Colombia in across America and I love a good adventure.
[3:29]So I knew that this one had to do with my family.
[3:31]I had to hit the road.
[3:32]So this book is the story of my search across Argentina looking for the long lost family
[3:38]members and traces of my great-grandparents and my grandparents and myself in a country
[3:43]that previously I wasn't able to call home, but now I kind of am.
[3:47]Yeah.
[3:48]Only kind of, though.
[3:49]No, well, I mean, I guess I was born and raised in the United States, so I'll always consider
[3:53]myself as American, but my connection to Argentina before this was only really through
[4:00]like soccer and a little bit of Spanish.
[4:02]I mean, we won the World Cup like all these things.
[4:04]My whole life, like very, very feeling very proud of the Argentinian, but not really knowing
[4:08]what that meant.
[4:09]Going on this trip and looking for this family, what I actually found were traces
[4:13]of us and why we are the way that we are because of these spaces that my family passed
[4:17]through in the past.
[4:18]And that's what I want readers to take away here, that we have all of these stories.
[4:22]That means something to us, even if the place names and the exact details of our families
[4:26]can't be found, you know, there's so much that can be revealed about ourselves when we
[4:30]take that look into our families past.
[4:32]So true.
[4:33]This is, this is like the perfect instruction manual for what to do when you find like
[4:38]a buried treasure and you have maps and emails and conversations you had with so many
[4:44]people.
[4:45]You know, one of the things I was struck by is you say pretty matter, faculty early on
[4:49]that your great grandfather was horribly abusive, right?
[4:54]And he didn't even like the school teachers to, you know, enact any sort of discipline
[4:59]physically on his kids because like that was his role and all of that.
[5:05]And that was just, even though he was very protective of them, this was like the way
[5:09]he did it and, you know, full stop.
[5:12]Tell me about how you felt learning all of that or did you know that all along and how
[5:16]did you handle the writing of it and the presentation and all of that?
[5:20]Yeah.
[5:21]I mean, I didn't know it all along.
[5:22]I actually didn't even know my great grandfather's name before I found this book.
[5:25]Like this is the one.
[5:26]I didn't know.
[5:27]I'm sorry.
[5:28]No, no, no, no.
[5:29]So I definitely didn't know it all along, but it was something I learned very quickly.
[5:32]And it was partially a lot.
[5:33]I think a big part of it was just because that was like the time and what people did
[5:36]at that time, like, you know, corporal punishment to figure your kids and things like that.
[5:41]So it wasn't just him.
[5:42]But what I think was more revelatory about him was that in addition to all of that, he
[5:47]was a big embellisher.
[5:48]He was a big exaggerator.
[5:49]He was a big storyteller.
[5:51]And that meant he was actually kind of a big liar in a lot of situations.
[5:54]There's this anecdote that I love where he would sit on the corner in Buenos Aires and
[5:58]read the newspaper to all of his Arabic speaking companions because they were from Syria.
[6:02]But he was one of the only ones who could kind of read well in Spanish at the time.
[6:06]So he would read the newspaper and he loved the attention of people hearing him read
[6:09]those stories out loud so much that when he finished, he would make stories up and
[6:13]everybody would believe him.
[6:14]And so here, a lot of times, right, I would be thinking like here I am so far away from
[6:18]home looking for something based on one of these like fairy tale goose chases by this,
[6:24]you know, spinning liar of stories and tales who might not even be the best example
[6:30]to want to follow in the first place.
[6:32]And I definitely grapple with that in the book, like what does that mean and why are we
[6:35]doing that?
[6:36]But the truth is, it was just a door, it was just a portal.
[6:39]I think a lot lately about portals and what these like initial curiosities can spark.
[6:44]And at the end of the day, this is not a book about Salim Salama, my great grandfather.
[6:48]This is a book about a family that has an identity that's so complex and it tries to at least
[6:53]a little bit better understand or analyze why some of the people in our family do the things
[6:58]that they do because of those complex identities.
[7:01]I mean, we are, and a lot of these identities are identities in conflict, especially now.
[7:05]We are Arabic speaking Jews, we're Latin Americans, we're Americans, like we are this giant
[7:09]mix of things that so many people say have to be separated, but we feel like all of them
[7:13]in one.
[7:14]And it's a character study in all these different people, these different characters
[7:18]of our family and how they dealt with that over the course of centuries.
[7:23]Yeah, you do a beautiful job discussing the migration and the wandering nature of Jews
[7:30]in history and how you call them suitcase ready, which is an after description.
[7:35]There were a couple of times that you talked about how your own relationship to Judaism,
[7:40]can I read this passage?
[7:41]It's a second to read.
[7:43]You said Judaism is like this, we are a people who constantly question and adapt and
[7:47]only ever are we able to move forward if we modify our traditions and laws and customs in
[7:52]a way that is reasonable, livable for us wherever we are.
[7:56]For my family and indeed for many families, I know these kinds of modifications are as old
[8:00]as time.
[8:01]And we skip down, you say, I do not consider myself religious, you know, maintain certain
[8:05]customs that are undoubtedly rooted in faith, especially when it comes to food, which by the
[8:09]way I do all of these as well.
[8:11]And then earlier you talked about how as if being Jewish, we're not a complicated enough
[8:16]existence being an Arab Jew feels even more complex because along with the traumatic
[8:21]memories associated with being expelled from the Arab world for being Jewish, they're
[8:25]also came widespread experiences, a palpable prejudice and discrimination within the larger
[8:30]Jewish world for being Arab too, especially as the Arab is really violence, has deep
[8:35]individuals and made personal tensions more painful and pronounced.
[8:40]So talk a little bit about all that.
[8:42]Wow, that's a lot to unpack and work on.
[8:45]I'll start with the first part about being Jewish.
[8:49]Yes.
[8:50]I mean, this is a book about being Jewish is the book about the different evocations
[8:53]of Judaism in a family that has moved through different spaces, every couple of generations
[8:59]for a very, very long time in history.
[9:02]And so what does that mean?
[9:03]I mean, for me, I think that being Jewish is, it's so much more than a religious identity.
[9:07]It's an ethno religious identity, it's a cultural expression.
[9:12]I mean, for me being Jewish is drinking mate, which is like the traditional Argentine
[9:16]tea, being Jewish is speaking Arabic.
[9:18]I mean, I would speak fluent Arabic, but I use words in Arabic in my English and in my
[9:22]Spanish.
[9:23]And that to me is being Jewish.
[9:25]Being Jewish to me is, I don't know, doing henna parties for weddings and having belly
[9:29]dancers at bar mitzvahs and all of the things that are like age, old traditions of my
[9:33]Iraqi and Syrian Jewish families that to me, it's like so interwoven and not separable
[9:39]at all.
[9:40]At the same time, I've seen so much of those kind of ethnic expressions of Judaism go
[9:44]away in my 26 years of life.
[9:48]My mom's family from Baghdad came to the U.S. and when I was little growing up, I have
[9:53]these vivid memories of all these people sitting around the table, sitting around in like
[9:57]a living room at a party, just jabbing away in it.
[10:00]Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic, this like now rare Jewish language, that if you asked me today I could
[10:05]probably count on less than five fingers, the number of people who I hold close who are still alive
[10:10]to speak that language. And with the death of a language like that, obviously comes the death of
[10:14]tradition to the death of culture. So all this comes back to, okay, why do we do these things?
[10:19]It's because our ancestors tried so hard to maintain these things. They put their lives on the
[10:24]line or they escaped or whatever it was because they wanted to keep these things going.
[10:30]So in honor of them, that's why I think so many of us do these things because it's kind of like
[10:36]a way of holding on to these complexities that the world wants us to let go of. There's another
[10:43]line in the book where it says, where we are Arab Jews and the job of Arab Jews is trying to
[10:48]remember all the world wants us to forget. And I think that's true because we're fading away.
[10:53]I say we, I was born in the United States like I'm an American Jew, but I hold all of that
[10:59]history and that weight behind me and I want to carry it forward from my kids and my grandkids
[11:04]because I think it's just such a beautiful thing to have and it opens up so many stories and so
[11:09]many histories. And talk a little bit about the role of Arab Jews, the role, the identity of that
[11:17]within the context, even in America and even right now and especially in light of everything that's
[11:22]going on, having straddling so many different cultures in a way to create who you are.
[11:29]What does that feel like? Yeah. I mean, I think that the path like, I mean, I'm no expert on any
[11:35]of these things, but I think that the path to peace kind of runs through our shared histories and
[11:39]our shared identities. And the more we ignore the fact that there's so much that we have in
[11:44]common so much that there's people like me and my family who've literally feel like we have
[11:47]both identities in one being that we can start to claw back our way through all of the terrible
[11:55]violence and division and conflict over the last more than 75 years and 100 years. I think that
[12:03]that it's really important to say that there are Jews who listen to Umpalsoom and there are
[12:07]Arabs who like the Hanukkia. That's why I use the term Arab Jews in the first place. It's
[12:11]controversial sometimes in communities. I mean, you'll find even people in my own family who will
[12:15]while frying kibbe and listening to this old Iraqi music, they'll say we're not Arabs because it's
[12:21]a way of saying we are not like them. And I think that there's also people maybe in those countries
[12:26]who used to be around lots of Jews who might also kind of reject those notions that there is
[12:31]something that's called Arab Jews. But to me, it's such an irreducible fusion. And I think that the
[12:36]more that we try to tell our story and the more that we say, you know, this is a sign that there
[12:43]was this coexistence for a long time that maybe there's a way of of starting what I think could be
[12:50]very meaningful conversations about how to live together again. Interesting. You love that.
[12:55]Talk a little bit about your travel journalism in general. This book is another example of
[13:00]how well you do it. You include small details and yet bigger contextual histories. You talk about
[13:07]you know, a cup of coffee or not coffee. It was like a meeting or a call to a woman who's husband
[13:13]has passed away and has said that moment is. And then you paint a much wider context. Like
[13:19]talk about how you create scenes and how to create a whole narrative which is both moments and
[13:26]history. I mean, you know this about me. I love journeys. And I think the journeys have an amazing
[13:34]power to connect disparate people and cultures and identities. And for me, when I'm undertaking
[13:43]this kind of project, the context and all of that stuff that kind of surrounds those detailed
[13:50]scenes really is there to make sense of it for myself and also make sense for my readers because
[13:54]I don't want to have a scene out of context. And I also want to make sure that I'm well read and
[13:59]well educated about the place where I'm going before I get there so that I can have the most
[14:03]meaningful and respectful and sensitive encounters possible. It's a lot easier in this case
[14:08]because I was writing about a place that I have an actual connection to and that my family
[14:12]has a lot of history in. Whereas my first book which you'll remember was about a river in Colombia,
[14:16]I'm not Colombian and I'd never been to that river before. So that's a lot harder. There are
[14:20]different challenges. But I think that far too often we talk, I mean, I talk a lot about my work in
[14:26]terms of travel running for a new generation because I think that far too often you'll get the
[14:30]travel part without the journalism and the history in the context part or you'll get the kind of
[14:35]hard news slash history and context part without those vignettes of everyday life and the
[14:41]experiences of normal people. And I'm all about talking to to ordinary people and hearing
[14:46]hearing about their experiences because I think that that's the best way to understand each other.
[14:50]A lot of it. For people who maybe didn't listen to our first podcast, shame on them,
[14:55]they can go back and listen to it. But can you give a quick summary? You're so young. You started
[15:01]writing at Princeton. Give a little background on you. Yeah. All right. Well, so I, yeah, I started
[15:06]writing this way when I was in college. I graduated from college in 2019, I'm 26 and I tell stories
[15:13]about the world. I think that that's the best way to describe what I do. Mostly focusing on the
[15:17]Americas because I speak English and I speak Spanish and I work a lot in both languages. I write
[15:22]about culture and history and identity and the environment and the kind of intersection between
[15:27]those subjects. My work appears in National Geographic in the New York Times. Most recently,
[15:31]on the cover of New York magazine, a story about migration and children and family selling
[15:36]candy in the New York City subway system. And yeah, I think all of my stories connect the cultures
[15:42]and continents that make me who I am. And I think that it's especially evident those origins in
[15:47]this book, Stranger in the Desert. But yeah, I'm a non-fiction writer and I'm still going and I'm
[15:52]going to try to keep going at this for as long as I can as long as I'm reading. And what is your next
[15:57]project? You know, I don't have an textbook yet that I know that I want to write. I think that
[16:06]it's going to take some time to do more stories and essays and kind of focus on that for a while.
[16:10]I'm super interested in migration and the intersection between migration and climate. Those are
[16:14]definitely topics that I want to explore. But right now, the big project on the docket is that
[16:19]Stranger in the Desert comes out February 20th. And I'm going to be spending weeks and weeks and
[16:23]weeks taking it to as many communities and libraries and bookstores and schools as possible. So
[16:30]I will open to any invitation to come. What are you most excited about on your tour? Which part
[16:37]of the country? I'm excited to have these kinds of conversations. I think the thing about
[16:40]every day the river changes that was so special. I guess this was after we spoke. But then I took
[16:44]it to all these different places. And it's a book about a corner of Latin America that is so
[16:50]revelatory. And I think Latin America is kind of a continent. People in the United States or as a
[16:54]region. I'm sorry, people in the United States have these preconceived notions about that region.
[16:58]And they maybe have one dimensional ideas of what it is. And all of my work tries to push back
[17:03]on those stereotypes and those preconceived notions. So bringing every day the river changes to
[17:07]places in Pennsylvania and Idaho and Zoom calls all around the United States. And having these
[17:12]super meaningful conversations, people for whom Latin America is not as ever present in their minds
[17:16]as for somebody like me was really cool. I want to do the same thing with Stranger in the Desert.
[17:21]But I especially think that there's a world in which I could bring it to my generation and even
[17:25]younger kids in high school, kids in college to say you're lucky enough to have your grandparents
[17:29]still around. Here's the kind of adventures and the ways that these stories that these living
[17:33]histories can change your life. Don't wait until you're, you know, 30s and in your 40s and all
[17:39]you have left or documents. Now you have the chance to interview people and here's how. And I
[17:44]hope this book can be kind of a guidebook of sorts about it for how, you know, young people,
[17:48]especially Jewish young people in this case, I think a lot of Jewish families have similar libraries
[17:51]to the library and the book that my grandfather had, specials, I think it might be in my case.
[17:56]I want people to be able to kind of grab that and hold onto it and let it change their lives
[17:59]the way it changed mine. That's beautiful. I don't know if everybody else's grandfather would
[18:04]detail any sort of romantic escapades. You never know. You'd be surprised at talking the very
[18:10]little that I've spoken about this book so far. It seems like almost everybody has a similar
[18:15]similar kind of project and when they get older. Really? I don't know. I don't, I'm going to have
[18:20]to ask, I mean, my grandparents have passed away sadly, but I don't know. Maybe I need to
[18:24]don't worry about my parents. Yeah, I mean, you're parents too worried about that to be your grandparents.
[18:29]Yeah, I don't know. It's definitely surprising to me. And what books have inspired you lately
[18:38]that have come out, travel or any kinds of stories, things that are keeping you up at night or
[18:45]things like that? I'm reading a book now called Kantika by Elizabeth Graver and it's a kind of,
[18:51]I'm just starting it now and it's a Sephardic journey, a novel actually. It's very similar to my
[18:55]family, but it's in fiction form. And I'm really enjoying it. There's these one liners and these
[19:00]details in there that are just so evocative and so special. And I actually am lucky enough to be
[19:04]doing an event with her. I'm more sure we get the Jewish Museum. We're going to be in conversation
[19:08]together. So that's super, super exciting. And I'm loving our book. Do you think it's more
[19:14]important than ever to have Jewish stories out there, Jewish characters, all of that. I mean,
[19:19]this is a crazy time for books to be coming at. It's a crazy time. And I can't, I wouldn't be
[19:25]I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't nervous to see what it would be like to market the Jewish
[19:28]book in, you know, in the coming months. But I think that where I'm going to kind of hold
[19:34]tight and hold firm is that I have this really unique story and this unique background that is
[19:40]not just a Jewish, but I mean, it is a fully Jewish background, but it involves so much else.
[19:45]Again, it involves, you know, being Middle Eastern, being, you know, an Arabic speaking family,
[19:50]which I think is rare again to have that kind of so tightly integral of being a Jewish family,
[19:55]and also it involves being a Latin American family, which talked about migration between the US and Latin
[20:00]So there's two hot pun issues that this book kind of tackles head on.
[20:04]I do think that it's important to tell these stories though, because if we stop telling
[20:10]them, these stories will be forgotten and they will be lost and the real threat is that
[20:14]kind of loss and assimilation and that forgetting that fear of forgetting is what drives
[20:19]so much of my family storytelling and my biggest fear is that it's going to be me who
[20:24]forgets.
[20:25]So I want to make sure that that's not the case.
[20:28]You said it in the book that you even went through a time in college where you were
[20:32]writing down everything you read and every song that you were playing and everything.
[20:36]Yeah.
[20:37]Do you look back on those lists often?
[20:39]I mean, I feel like all of us are trying so hard just to, whether it's through photography
[20:43]or writing or whatever, just to try to capture and like pin to the bullets in board of
[20:48]life.
[20:49]Some of these fleeting moments and like how do we do it best?
[20:53]Is it what we're consuming that reminds us of what we were feeling?
[20:56]Is it journaling like how do we, how do we capture it?
[21:01]Yeah.
[21:02]I don't have the right answer.
[21:03]I wonder what it is for you.
[21:04]Actually, I do have a way.
[21:06]Honestly, sometimes I feel like Instagram is my diary and actually I was like, I should
[21:12]just download all this because even times like COVID and like, I'm like, what happened?
[21:17]I remember, but what was it like in the day to day because I was writing about it every
[21:21]single day?
[21:22]So I don't know.
[21:24]For some people, maybe it's Instagram, for other people, maybe it's writing down songs
[21:27]and for other people, maybe it's, I mean, I have a relative like one of my grandmother's
[21:30]older brothers painted his memories.
[21:33]I think that better and better as he went along, he's became really talented when he
[21:37]was older.
[21:38]But he painted like those people who keep these kind of old collections as people who collect
[21:42]like stones, as people who collect records, it could take so many different forms.
[21:47]And that's one of the questions I have for so many people is how does your family preserve
[21:50]these or how do you observe these memories?
[21:52]Just from my family, it might be the books behind me, but for my notebooks, but for somebody
[21:58]else, it could be something totally different.
[22:00]I look back on my lists, of course, like my notebooks and my lists are the most important
[22:04]thing that I have and I hold them so close.
[22:07]Before my grandmother passed away, I started doing like video interviews there and then
[22:12]on the anniversary of her death, some years, I'll like play them back for my cousins
[22:17]and I'm so to have the footage, he doesn't take that long during the day, right?
[22:25]Just to take a minute out and do a quick video with somebody you love.
[22:30]And yet it doesn't always occur to us to do that until it's too late.
[22:32]I feel like if this conversation sparks some takeaways, it's the search for family history
[22:39]and the need to get down the details while you can.
[22:44]It's so great that you did that and I think that it takes, like you said, it does take
[22:47]very little time.
[22:48]You'd be amazed at how much you can get out of an hour of sitting down and recording
[22:52]somebody and asking them questions.
[22:54]And one of the things that I'm going to start doing these talks and I'm actually leading
[22:56]a class about this starting tomorrow, four-week class, about how to rediscover and reimagine
[23:01]your family history.
[23:02]Like a journalist, what are the ways to ask questions that are open-ended and not closed?
[23:07]Like how do you prevent the yes or no answers because there's a lot of people who might
[23:10]just be like, yes, I lived in Spain and that's it, and like no more information.
[23:16]But there's a part of the little, do you like the little prints?
[23:18]I love the little prints.
[23:19]It's been a minute, but yes, one of my favorite books.
[23:23]And there's a part of the little prints where he says something like, when I meet a friend,
[23:27]like so many people, when you meet a new friend, so many people will ask like, how old
[23:30]is he or where is what's the name of the town that he's from?
[23:33]But what I want to know is what's his favorite color and what does he think about when he's
[23:37]walking down the street and what flowers make him smile?
[23:40]And obviously it's a different situation.
[23:41]But like what I want to know when I'm asking these questions of older people in my family
[23:45]is not necessarily what exact day and year were you born because sometimes that, it's
[23:50]like not even known fully, you'll never be able to get the right answer.
[23:55]What I want to know is what was it like for you when you went to school?
[23:58]What was it like for you when you got home from school?
[24:00]What did your pet, when did your family cook for you when you came home?
[24:03]What did you eat?
[24:04]What were those sounds and smells and sights?
[24:06]The same scenes that drive my travel writing for a new generation, like you just have
[24:10]to look, it's a different kind of journey, it's just a journey back into your own past.
[24:14]And that to me is so exciting because to hear of Willow, my grandfather and Anna Boyle too,
[24:21]like she then also came forward with her secret book collection, which is in the book
[24:25]too, which was amazing, like you get all these amazing anecdotes.
[24:29]Fabulous.
[24:30]Well, what advice do you have for aspiring authors or even people trying to capture their
[24:36]family story that you're going to teach in this fabulous class?
[24:38]Well, people trying to capture your family stories is definitely to write everything down
[24:43]and to record everything because you don't know when the time will come where you're
[24:45]not going to be able to get those kind of information again when you're doing the family
[24:49]history.
[24:50]Family history thing also, I'm going to talk a lot about social media and the power of
[24:53]Facebook groups.
[24:54]Groups are amazing underutilized tool for people looking into these history products because
[25:01]maybe they might not be able to tell you about your own ancestors, but they will, there
[25:05]are these groups that we will give you rich descriptions of places and neighborhoods,
[25:09]like you've never heard before.
[25:10]That to me is really cool.
[25:12]But for aspiring writers and aspiring authors, I don't know, I feel like I'm still in
[25:15]the same boat as when we talk last time's a visa.
[25:17]You're not, though.
[25:18]You have another book already.
[25:19]I don't know.
[25:20]I feel like I'm trying to figure all this out, but I think now I talk with a lot of students
[25:25]and what I always say is just to show you writing to everybody as many people.
[25:30]I think people are so kind of guarded with like, oh, this is not ready yet, it's not perfect.
[25:34]I can't show it, but I think you just show it to as many people as possible and talk
[25:37]about what you're working on and be excited about it because one person will come along,
[25:41]I'll be able to help you bring it into the world and that's what happened to me.
[25:45]And that's what I hope will could happen to others too.
[25:47]Well, one thing that I think you do well that I love when I see authors doing this and
[25:53]it doesn't happen that often is thinking of themselves and what they write about as a brand
[25:57]and what that brand stands for.
[25:58]And like when you're like, I write about this, this and this, you know, it's like, okay,
[26:03]so the next book that comes out, like I basically know what I'm going to get, it could
[26:06]be fiction, it doesn't matter, but it's going to be around these sort of general topics
[26:10]and I feel like that's good.
[26:12]So people like reinforces what they get and that's what people want the most, right?
[26:21]They have allegiance to brands when they have consistency in them.
[26:24]So I think that that's a really great thing to have honed early.
[26:28]Yeah.
[26:29]Thank you.
[26:30]I think I'm going to be able to hone it and to figure it out because I think that in the past,
[26:33]when a lot of the writers I really admire were kind of coming up, those brands were the
[26:37]publications.
[26:38]And now it's a lot harder because it's a really sad state of kind of the journalism world
[26:43]is that there's just not like these, a lot of these places are struggling and a lot of us
[26:49]writers who are independent are forced to kind of forge our own paths while still working
[26:54]really closely with these publications, but no longer is it that you can be a staff writer
[26:58]in many places at all.
[27:00]So it's less now that you can say like, I write for this and then everybody knows what
[27:04]you write.
[27:05]And now it's I think more I do this kind of storytelling.
[27:10]If you want to read everything I write, you're going to come away with a kind of warmer,
[27:15]more meaningful sense of how the world works and why we are the way that we are and why
[27:19]we should respect the place where we live and the people who live in it.
[27:22]And I think that that's kind of what I do.
[27:24]I love that.
[27:25]Like what kind of storytelling do you do?
[27:27]I mean, it's a good thing for every author to ask themselves because there's usually
[27:31]something.
[27:32]I mean, I think of Danny Shapiro who's like, actually, I've always been writing about
[27:35]the search for my identity and now that she realized her dad wasn't her dad, it all
[27:40]like made sense.
[27:41]She's like, but every single thing was like inquiry into that in one way or another.
[27:45]And you don't always know why.
[27:47]Like she got a very clear cut answer, but yeah, I mean, this is a clear cut answer too.
[27:53]This is you're a citizen of the world, you know, it's anyway, it's a start.
[27:59]It's a start.
[28:00]I think like all these projects, like I write it actually at the beginning, the book
[28:04]starts with a letter to my grandfather and it says, well, oh, like this book, here's
[28:07]the book, but it's not finished and I don't think it ever will be because these projects
[28:10]never are.
[28:11]These are the identity projects and even these storytelling brand project, like that's
[28:16]a lifetime's work and I'm just going to, at the beginning, I just feel like I'm scratching
[28:22]the surface.
[28:23]So I'm excited to see what's coming next.
[28:24]Me too.
[28:25]Well, good luck with lunch and very excited for you.
[28:28]Thank you so much.
[28:29]I really appreciate it.
[28:30]Okay.
[28:31]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[28:35]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zibbowens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read
[28:39]Books.
[28:40]Also sign up for my newsletter at zibbowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and
[28:44]meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[28:47]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the Sound Editing and thank you
[28:51]to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.