Turn the Page

HANNAH HARLOW One day, a colleague comes into my office and she says, "I want to live with my heart on my sleeve."

Yes, let's promise each other that we'll do that.

RITA ZOEY CHIN: I rushed into my therapist's office with a revelation.

"I write fiction," I pointed out.

Why not write myself a mother?

RAUL THE THIRD: I would look at the artwork that my kids were drawing, and I thought, why aren't they designing characters that look like themselves?

♪ ♪ WES HAZARD: Tonight's theme is "Turn the Page."

♪ ♪ It can be difficult whenever we turn a page in our own lives and embark on a new chapter.

Whenever we do so, we inevitably bring our history with us, and it informs us in all sorts of ways that we cannot expect.

Tonight, our amazingly talented storytellers are going to share their moments of turning the page, no matter what came after that.

♪ ♪ HARLOW: I'm Hannah Harlow.

I'm from Ipswich, Massachusetts.

I own a bookstore, and I'm a writer.

You've had a very long professional and personal relationship with just books.

When did that start and when did you know that "This is what I have to do with my life"?

I got into books right out of college.

I was graduating, and I went in for an interview at Houghton Mifflin, and the movies for The Lord of the Rings were about to come out, and they published the books.

And so I was interviewing and they said, you know, "We have this big campaign coming up."

And I just launched in to my love of J.R.R.

Tolkien, and I got the job.

And that was 20 years ago.

And have you had a lot of experience with sharing stories on a stage like you will be tonight?

No, I would say my natural habitat is the page, not the stage, so this is new for me.

What would be some advice that you would have for aspiring storytellers?

Just keep going.

I think sometimes the most successful writers are the ones who persevere, and it can be really tempting to give up, because people are going to tell you no all the time, But you just have to believe in yourself and just keep going, and someday believe it'll all work out.

In the winter of 2015, my boss took me to a trade show down in Asheville, North Carolina.

Carla knew everybody at this show.

Boss had always been too inadequate a word for what Carla was to me.

She was also my mentor and my very dear friend.

Carla and I worked for a midsized book publisher, and at one of the events, we were pitching our titles to tables full of bookstore employees.

We were going back and forth pitching, and we get to the last one, I give my spiel, and all of a sudden, Carla's jumping in, and she's like, "I'm sorry, I can't help it.

I just love this book so much."

And she goes on to tell the booksellers how this book changed her life.

Within 30 seconds, she's crying.

I'm mortified.

Crying in public?

No thank you.

(audience laughs) But her tears were genuine, and she connected with every bookseller at that table, and they all wanted that book.

Two years later, Carla died very suddenly and unexpectedly.

I'm devastated, of course, but immediately the company asked me to take over Carla's responsibilities, but also to continue doing my old job, and also-- oh yeah, that job of the person we laid off last month.

Things only get worse.

It turns out that Carla had been shielding me from a lot of unpleasant changes at the company.

One day, a colleague comes into my office and we're catching up, and she says, "I want to live my life more like Carla did."

And I say, "What do you mean?"

And she says, "I want to live with my heart on my sleeve."

And I think, that's so perfect.

Carla lived loudly and passionately, and I miss this so much in my life right now.

So I say, "Yes, let's promise each other that we'll do that."

So, now I have to be honest with myself.

I am no longer happy in my career.

But, how am I going to make a change?

What else do I know how to do?

I spend the next two years figuring this out.

Two years of despair and dead-end job interviews, and every night bringing my stress home to my husband and my kids.

And every morning, I'm going into the office, and because I'm looking for opportunities wherever I can find them, I'm diligently reading this daily industry newsletter that comes into my inbox.

And one glorious September morning, that's where I see it.

The Book Shop of Beverly Farms is for sale.

Now, every book person I know dreams of owning a bookstore.

Of course I did.

But over the years, I'd also gone so far as to build a business plan.

I had done a ton of research, and every iteration of the plan led to the same conclusion: I could not afford to open a bookstore.

And yet, a few days later, I find myself sitting down with the retiring owners in this cozy little bookshop with sunlight streaming through the front windows.

And they tell me the history of the store, how John Updike was a longtime patron.

And this one time, they did a book signing with Chris Van Allsburg for The Polar Express, and the train across the street came chugging into the station just as it began to snow.

(laughter) I mean, this place is clearly magical.

Also, the rent they're offering is cheap as hell.

So this all seems too good to be true.

And yet I still don't have the money.

At this point, it's Thanksgiving, and I have 35 people in my house for dinner.

And my dad pulls me aside and he says he's gone over the numbers I've shared with him.

And he totally agrees with me.

I need 25,000 more dollars.

So I'm ready to go upstairs and grab my grandmother's heirlooms and pawn them, because I'm also out of time.

The current owners have other offers.

And then all of a sudden, my big brother is piping up, and he's like, "Oh, you were serious about that bookstore thing?

Yeah, I'll go in on that with you."

I'm shocked.

Maybe I shouldn't have been; my brother's had my back my whole life.

But what most people don't know is that for the past year, I've also been asking for his help editing a novel that I'm writing.

And we work really well together.

So we make an offer, and it's accepted.

I open the doors to the bookstore for the first time on February 3, 2020.

(audience groans) (chuckles) A few hours later, a bookseller friend down in Cincinnati calls me up, and he says, "Hannah, I want to buy a book.

And I'm like, "Michael, you work in a bookstore.

You don't have to do this."

(audience chuckles) And he says, "No, I'm doing this.

"You're going to take my credit card information "over the phone, "you're going to put the book in the mail.

Do you know how to do that?"

And I'm like, "Michael, of course I don't know how to do that.

(laughter) And then a few weeks later, COVID hits.

Now, as a company that was incorporated barely two months ago, we don't qualify for any of the money that the government's handing out.

(audience murmuring) And if people can't walk in my front door anymore, I have to figure out another way to make this work.

So... instead of staying home like I'd like to, like the rest of the world, I go into the bookstore every day, and I sit there by myself eight hours a day, day after day.

We use every tool available to us to let people know that we're still doing business.

At first, it's our family ordering.

Mostly our mother.

Our mom orders a lot of books.

(laughter) And family and friends.

And then friends of friends from around the country are ordering, and I'm putting books in the mail just like Michael taught me.

And then my parents' neighbors are calling me up, and acquaintances from high school that I haven't spoken to in 20 years.

They all want to help.

But especially the people who've been shopping at that store since it first opened in 1968.

Most people order through our brand-new website, but almost as often, people call me on the phone because they want recommendations.

They want recommendations because they suddenly have kids who are learning from home, because they're grieving, because they're anxious, or they're just bored.

I'm still in the bookstore by myself each day, but I'm starting to feel a lot less alone.

It's two years later, and our doors are open again.

And people walk in now and they ask me, "What have you loved recently?"

And that's when I pull these books off the shelf that have become like trusted friends, and I confidently put them into people's hands.

Because I know that Carla was right.

Books change lives.

And I haven't cried recommending a book yet, but give me a little more time and I'll get there.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) CHIN: My name is Rita Zoe Chin.

I live in the Boston area.

I'm a writer and a writing teacher.

And I understand that you are the writer of an acclaimed memoir, Let the Tornado Come, and I'm wondering, when did you realize that you had the ability to sort of express yourself through writing?

It was less about ability and more about just desire, I think.

As a child, I just naturally gravitated towards storytelling and writing in particular.

And, um...

I had kind of a rough upbringing, so I could escape it by writing stories that had different endings.

(chuckles) HAZARD: Mm-hmm.

What is different in your mind for what you're about to do tonight?

Getting up on stage, sharing a story in front of a crowd of people?

Well, you know, when I'm writing, I'm alone, and, um, I, you know, can sit slumped in my chair, in my yoga pants... (laughs) And nobody sees me, and nobody sees me thinking and figuring it out, um... And then, you know, if I hand somebody a book, they take the book and go off and read it.

So having the actual interaction of telling the story live to people who are receiving it at the same time is... will be a completely new experience for me.

♪ ♪ When I was ten years old, I went swimming at a friend's house.

It was a cool early summer day, and the water was freezing, so I got out and stood shivering in her shady yard.

And then an amazing thing happened.

Her mother wrapped a towel around my shoulders.

This might sound like an ordinary thing, but to me, it was as if the heavens had opened to shine a beam of warm, golden light on me.

At home, no one ever did things like that.

But suddenly, in that little squeeze she gave my shoulders, I felt what a mother could be like, and that lit up an empty space inside me.

Technically, I had parents, a mother and a father, and...

But on their best days, they ignored me, and on their worst, the police came.

So I studied my friends' parents, mainly their mothers, taking in the smallest details.

Like the way Jennifer's mom smiled when she let us steal tastes of cookie batter, or the little notes that Dawn's mom tucked into her lunch.

Or the way when Michelle's mom stroked her hair, they both got a little dreamy-eyed.

My mother stroked my hair once, when I was in the emergency room after I'd accidentally run through a glass door.

But any other time I came in with the usual childhood cuts and scrapes, she'd point at the bathroom and say, "You know where the Band-Aids are."

Eventually, the violence at home got so bad that I ran away.

And I spent years living on the streets, hoping that some kind woman would take me in like a stray dog and adopt me.

She'd bake blueberry muffins and make the bed in soft flowery sheets.

She'd tell me stories and stroke my hair.

As you can imagine, that never happened.

But it was okay.

I grew up and made a good life for myself anyway.

I went to college, I got dogs, and, um... (audience chuckles) Spent a lot of time hiking in the woods, and I was happy.

And then, in my mid-30s, I started having panic attacks.

When the first one struck, I called 911, thinking I was having a heart attack.

And when the ambulance arrived, I remembered when I was a kid and had run through that glass door.

"Am I going to die?"

I asked the EMT as he bandaged my leg.

And that's what it felt like now, like I was dying.

After that first panic attack, it was as if the world had suddenly grown teeth and I was like this small bunny darting from place to place, just trying to feel safe.

I tried a long list of therapies, ranging from traditional approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy to more esoteric things like voodoo acupuncture.

(light laughter) None of them worked.

And then, after months of panicking, I finally figured it out.

What I needed was what I'd always needed: a mother.

And once and for all, I was going to find myself one.

So I resumed my childhood search, mainly in the produce section of my local grocery store, because I think the way a woman chooses her veggies says a lot about her.

(laughter) I kept waiting for the moment when I'd ask a woman how she planned to cook her rutabagas and she'd look at me and say, "You look like the daughter I've always wanted."

Again, as you can probably guess, that didn't happen either.

But I did come home with a lot of cooking tips and more than one rutabaga.

(laughter) Still not deterred, I hired a dog sitter.

We had just moved to the Boston area, and I legitimately needed to find one.

But this woman just looked so kind in her photo.

This was online.

(laughs) It was, like, kind of like online dating.

But she looked so kind and so maternal that I was convinced that once she met me, it would be love at first sight.

I, I know this sounds weird.

(chuckles) When the dog sitter arrived, she didn't look much like her internet photo.

She looked more like someone who had just spent hours in traffic, tight-jawed and tired and already bored.

Still, I was hopeful as I invited her in and introduced her to Aramis and Starlet, my Jack Russell dachshund rescues.

And for a moment it was nice just sitting on the couch watching Full House reruns next to another person.

And then, after a few minutes, the dog sitter turned and looked at me.

This was my big moment.

This was when that spark I'd seen in her photo would light up in her eyes and she'd recognize something in me.

And then she spoke.

"Don't you have somewhere to go?"

she said.

(laughter) It was then that I realized that I was never going to find a mother.

But I did find my way out of panic, just as I'd found my way out of my parents' house.

And though my childhood wish for a mother didn't disappear, it receded enough that for long periods of time I could go on without even thinking about it.

But I did still think about it.

And then one day, I rushed into my therapist's office with a revelation.

"I write fiction," I pointed out.

Why not write myself a mother?

(laughter) She'll be even better than any real mom.

It was such a happy day.

But when I got home and started trying to envision my fictional mother...

I couldn't see her face.

I tried to conjure some small details about her, like the kinds of things I'd noticed about my friends' moms.

But every time I tried, this claustrophobic feeling would come over me and I had to stop.

And it was then that I realized that this empty space that I'd been carrying with me since childhood had grown with me and I'd been filling it all along.

And when I really let my childhood wish play out in my mind, imagining that muffin-baking, Band-Aid-applying, towel-wrapping mom in my house now?

It made me feel small.

It was time to let that wish go.

But you know how when you stop looking for something, you tend to find it?

I found a mother.

But in this life, she's never going to be a person or even one thing.

She's bigger than that.

She's the forest that envelops me.

She's the wind that strokes my hair.

She's the night sky, vast and mysterious and filled with light.

All those stars glittering like home.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) RAUL THE THIRD: My name is Raul the Third.

I was born and raised in El Paso, Texas.

But I was raised in two cities: El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico.

I have been living here in the Boston area for, I would say, about 21 years.

And I am an author and an illustrator of children's literature.

How has growing up in these, you know, sort of twin cities of El Paso and Juarez, how did that inform your upbringing, and also, how has that been brought to your work?

Honestly, when I was a kid, I had no idea that I was crossing between two countries.

I thought that I lived in one gigantic city.

I had family on both sides of the border, both in El Paso and Juarez, and we would make a almost daily commute to either city, because my mom worked in Juarez, my dad had family in Ysleta, And now, as an adult, most of my picture books are set in the town of El Paso and Juarez.

The towns of El Paso and Juarez.

Tonight, after our audience has heard your story, what would you hope that they most take away from it?

Well, one thing that I would hope that they take away from it is that everybody's origin stories and personal histories are important and that we should take pride in sharing them and, and telling them to people.

♪ ♪ I was a 20-something-year-old cartoonist living in Boston.

I headed straight for the public library, portfolio under my arm, and I'm not sure what possessed me, but I decided to share my work with the head librarian.

And as she flipped through those pages, I noticed her eyes grow really big.

She invited me to teach a workshop at her branch.

I wasn't quite sure, because I had never taught before, but when she said that it paid $150?

Woo-hoo, I was in.

(audience laughter) I was nervous, but I was also very excited.

I wanted to instill in the kids that came to my workshop the same excitement I had felt years before.

When I was a kid, my mom would take me and my two brothers to the library, almost on a daily basis.

One day, one year, I was a part of a reading program, and I remember a librarian asked me, "Oye, Raul, hey, Raul, what was your favorite part of the book you just read?"

Tenia verguenza.

I was shy, so I didn't say anything.

So then she said, "Well, if you can't tell me, "why don't you instead draw for me your favorite part of the book you just read?"

And, wow, that question blew my mind.

And so from that moment on, I tried very hard to capture those images forming in my head on the ruled line paper with my Bic ballpoint pen.

And to teach myself how to draw, I started to copy illustrations from books I was reading.

The illustrations that I was copying were, I would say, an introduction to an American lifestyle that I was unfamiliar with at the time, coming from a Spanish-speaking Mexican household.

I remember drawing weird things, like snow-covered lawns in front of huge Victorian homes that look like haunted houses.

I remember drawing long tables with silverware, versus the tortillas that I used... that my mom would make me to scoop up rice and beans, right?

But I was learning how to draw.

Back in Boston, I was really enjoying teaching workshops.

Matter of fact, I was teaching them everywhere.

But, I was starting to feel really discouraged.

I would enter art galleries or museums, and I never saw myself represented in the works of art or in the artists making the work.

Then, I would look at the artwork that my kids were drawing, and I thought, "Why aren't they designing characters "that look like themselves or that represent who they are?"

And that's when I decided, if I'm going to survive here in the Boston area, I'm going to have to introduce myself, mi cultura, and my American experience to the Boston area.

And from that point on, I never struggled to come up with ideas.

Suddenly, my pictures were filled with images of the Mercado Cuauhtémoc, where my mom worked, and all of the booths, and the people that worked there.

They were filled with the roosters that my grandma raised.

They were filled with the games that I played at the apartment complex I was raised in.

And I drew all of these stories into zines that I would self-publish and send out into the world.

And out of the blue one day, I received a telephone call from an outreach librarian way out in Portland, Oregon.

She had read one of my zines.

It was called Cowboy Boy.

(laughter) As an outreach librarian, she served a Latinx community, and she had grown frustrated with the fact that she could not recommend any books to the kids that represented them in any way whatsoever.

But she had noticed that there were these boys who were in love with books about lowriders.

Those are the cars, you know, that go low and slow.

Sometimes they jump up and down.

Bajito y Suavecito.

Anyhow, she sent me the script for... the book that she had in mind.

It was titled Lowriders in Space.

(laughter) Whoa.

And after I read it, I gave her a call, and I was like, "Cathy, I wish I had had this book to read when I was a kid growing up."

Perhaps my big revelation as an artist would have come sooner if only I had seen myself and my family represented in books.

I started drawing this book, and we sent it out.

A few months later, we started getting back letters, right?

And we opened them up, we were like, "Yeah!"

But then we read responses that said, "too marginal an audience," Or "not white..." (coughs) I mean, "not right for our audience."

(laughter) And we were bummed.

I gotta say, we were super disappointed.

But she never gave up, and she kept sending out our story.

And then one month, we received a letter from an editor who wanted to publish our book.

Because, you see, when this editor was a young girl, a young Korean-American girl, she had always been on the lookout for books that represented her and her family.

And guess what?

She never found them.

So, when Ginee Seo became an editor, she decided to make it her life's mission to publish books for kids from all walks of life.

And I gotta say, we were so happy and excited.

And today, 20 books later, I am happy to spend my time writing and drawing books for kids so that they can go to the library, reach up, pick up the book, and see themselves reflected within.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) THERESA OKOKON: The Stories from the Stage podcast, with extraordinary true stories, wherever you listen to podcasts.

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