Like Germans, you can barely know them. And Germans don't small talk. So if you barely know a German, you will barely, barely know them. Like you might have had a one-heated argument about politics or soccer, but that's like the extent. If you off-handedly mention that you might visit the town where they live, they will demand that you stay at their house for like no less than two weeks. And so I also have this reflexive thing. As soon as I find out someone's coming to wherever I live.
SPEAKER_03Do you remember exactly when we met?
SPEAKER_02Hey there, this is Stephanie Fuccio from HereShare Productions with another episode of Geopath's Books Podcast. I could not be more thrilled to have this episode today. This is an anniversary episode of sorts. Exactly one year ago today, we published an episode talking about the book Shot and Florida, a love story, me, the Germans, and 20 years of attempted transformations, unfortunate miscommunications, and humiliating situations that only they have words for. And yes, that's the full title, and you'll hear why it is in this episode. We talked about this. Who is we? Nicole from the Expatcast, Tatsana, former guest and former guest host on the Geopets Books podcast. All three of us sat down virtually and had a discussion about this book. Today, exactly one year later, is really special to me. This is the conversation that I had with the author herself on some residual questions that all three of us had. So I'm bringing in Nicole and Tatjana via pre-recorded messages on my phone. I am so excited to have this chance to touch base with Rebecca Schumann, the author of that wonderful book, and to ask her some things that I've been thinking about for a while. I did reread the book this year. Last year, I was still in China starting to plan our move to Berlin, Germany. And for the past uh, I want to say excruciating seven months, not because it's Germany, but because of everything else that's happened in the world. I have been in Berlin, China, Berlin, China. Oh my gosh, listen to that. I have been in Berlin, Germany, and uh rereading it was an absolute joy. There was so much more I understood, so many of the jokes that she made clear, but now I've experienced them, so I had a fuller uh laugh every time I hit one of them. And some of the language I understood, and some of it I want I honestly, like I tell Rebecca, I want to come back to um in a year from now, if I'm still in Germany. More on that later. Okay, let's get to the conversation.
SPEAKER_03So exciting. I wanna write a history. I wanna take it step by step.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much, Rebecca, for joining us on the Geopaths Books Podcast.
SPEAKER_05Thank you. I'm really excited to be here.
SPEAKER_02Super excited to have you here. We did a three-way conversation with Tatana and Nicole last year about your book with the long name that I never remember the full one of. Uh Shot in Forder, a love story, me, the Germans, and 20 years of attempted transformations, unfortunate miscommunications, and humiliating situations that only they have words for. And so this is a follow-up on residual questions that we have for you. So thank you for taking the time to do this.
SPEAKER_05I have not heard the title of my own book in a really long time. So thanks for reading the whole thing. I'm not saying that that's like something I long to hear. It seems like truly ridiculous until you get about three-quarters through the book, and then I do a pretty lengthy refrain on the titles of academic papers. And so once I hope that that that when when readers, if they can make it all the way through the rest of it to that chapter, they realize that oh, that's what that title of.
SPEAKER_02Yep, the colon actually pointed me in that direction. I'm like, yep, she's got the ubiquitous colon. It's fine. Yeah, it's definitely long enough. What we do in all of the Geopaths podcasts is we kind of identify the geopatist, what places the guests have been in the world that have influenced them. So can we do a quick rundown of the places in the world you have lived?
SPEAKER_05I mean, what do you mean by lived?
SPEAKER_02Very good question. That actually really depends on you. Some people think you have to be there for a few years to consider it. Some people think if they have a daily existence when they were someplace for three months, that that counts. So it's in your hands.
SPEAKER_05I've never lived anywhere outside of the United States for more than a single year just because of circumstances. So first time I left the United States was between my first and second years of college, I spent a summer in Münster, Germany, which is like near the Dutch border and famous for its pure dialect-free language. So it's a place they sort of quasi-problematically send a lot of language students to per, you know, to perfect their accents, etc. A few years later, I went back to Germany, but I went to Berlin this time. That was in 1997. I spent a little bit over a semester, I would say like eight or nine months in Berlin. It was like a semester and a summer. And then, oh, I went back again for just a couple of weeks and then back for a couple more tourist trips to Germany again throughout the early aughts. Then when I went to grad school, I realized that I needed to learn a third language. So I decided I wanted to learn Czech. And so I spent two separate summers studying and living in Prague, Czech Republic. And then finally in graduate school, I was a Fulbright scholar and I spent a year in Vienna, Austria. And then just a few years ago, my now that I have with a family with my husband and child, I went back to Vienna, Austria for uh a summer where we did, you know, live in an apartment and have a daily life there. So that's the that's the the map for me.
SPEAKER_02Fantastic. Okay. And now you're back in the US, right?
unknownYou're in?
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02We're gonna start out with a question from Tatiana, pulling it up on WhatsApp right now. I'm gonna play it into the mic.
SPEAKER_07Hi, Rebecca. This is Tatiana. I did the interview, the podcast together with uh Stephanie and Nicole. And I loved your book because I'm just German, but in fact, from Berlin. And your book really showed me how foreigner looks at our country, the people, the traditions, and everything. So that was really fun to read.
unknownAnd you also speak about how you realize that there's certain things that are obviously very different between the state and Germany.
SPEAKER_07Things like we're very important that the brand has certain consistency, the fact that Germans like to walk everywhere, the words obviously like shortfoil. Is there anything that you have adopted from your time in Germany and taken back to the US and either for quite a while or in fact till today are following?
SPEAKER_05Many things, but the thing that I think would be most interesting to Tatiana and also the rest of your listeners is I have this compulsive urge to let people know that they can stay with me if they come visit my town. Like Germans, you can barely know them. And Germans don't small talk. So if you barely know a German, you will barely, barely know them. Like you might have had a one-heated argument about politics or soccer, but that's like the extent. If you off-handedly mention that you might visit the town where they live, they will demand that you stay at their house for like no less than two weeks. And so I also have this reflexive thing. As soon as I find out someone's coming to wherever I live, I am like, oh, you should stay with me. Even though now I have a I have a little kid and it's extremely inhospitable at my house. But um, that's I think something that people don't really know about Germans because they they I think they assume that because Germans don't have the sort of fake, fake niceness and fake hospitality that Americans have, where Americans will be like, hi, oh my gosh, it's so good to see you. How are you? Uh-huh. Yeah. And they pretend to be so concerned about you. But then if you're, you know, coming to visit their town and you don't have very much money, they'll be like, Oh yeah, that's too bad. But they'll like you know, assume that you should be lifting yourself up off your bootstraps and staying in a in a hotel or an Airbnb.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So before you were in Germany, did you not offer that much? Well, yeah, you were pretty much a good idea.
SPEAKER_05I mean, as a child, so I didn't yeah, I didn't really have the means or non-s to do that. Yeah. So I think it was just something I sort of adopted as I grew into adulthood and started having apartments of my own. This also has something to do with the fact that I did live in New York City for the first seven years of my adulthood. So there's no, you know, no 22-year-old visiting New York is gonna afford to be able to pay to stay somewhere. So I hosted a lot of friends on the, you know, on the floor of a studio apartment.
SPEAKER_02That's very generous of you because those studio apartments are not big.
SPEAKER_05No, but it's like kind of fun to have somebody as a slumber party. It was always like a little bit of a slumber party vibe.
SPEAKER_02Oh, and by the way, she mentioned bread in there and your bread chap, the the section of the book on your love of bread made me laugh so hard both times I read the book.
SPEAKER_05Thank you. I really do miss the bread. I I mean Austria obviously has its own bread traditions, but when I lived in Vienna, I did gain like a pretty substantial amount of weight, and I was like, worth it. I don't I know exactly what it came from. They have these combination pretzel croissants that they have, and they're just deadly, but worth it.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah. I gained at least five pounds my first couple of months just on the bakeries alone, and thank goodness for COVID because it made me cook at home and then shed that off. But it was, it was, I went from why is there a bakery on every corner to oh, there's a bakery on every corner?
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So we're gonna get a little bit deeper into culture shock, shall we say, with Nicole's question.
SPEAKER_06The questions that I had once she committed to America, like what would that feel like a commitment? Like I mean the choice I'm gonna be here now. And if so, what would it be? Like, I know so many people, especially when they're starting to think about like more towards the people social support. Did you ever think about maybe what you try to like especially for all these challenges that were just specific to America? And I wonder too, like what was her relationship with that like? Like what was she thinking about? Like, how am I going to integrate the things I love about Germany to show my life here today?
SPEAKER_02Okay, let's pause there because that's a lot of questions all at once. That's a lot of questions. That's a lot of questions. So the first one was about when you returned to the US and your decision to stay there. Was that in like an instant, that's it, I'm back for good? Or did you did you think you would be going back to Germany to live longer?
SPEAKER_05Well, originally it was based on academia, and there's just simply no way a non-native speaker of German will ever be hired at a German institution of higher learning to teach Germans back their own literature. They just would never allow that to happen. I mean, on very rare occasions it does, but it's like usually a man who's become a uh a great eminence in the field. If I had wanted to live in Germany forever, I would have thought a little bit more wisely about my choice of discipline, and I would have taught um academic English composition instead. And then I could have gotten a job in any German university if I'd wanted to. The fact is, though, that it's not just about me, you know, my my daughter has grandparents, and the idea of taking her permanently into another country away from them so that she can't grow up knowing them was just too I was never an option. I still have plans. Once the American passport is no longer poisoned, the pandemic's over and I'm able to leave the United States. I still do have plans to retire uh back in in Germany or Austria once my daughter is old enough to go to college or even high school, really. I think she would probably be better off in high school there. So for me, it was more just of a family thing. I wanted to be either, you know, a short walk or a short flight away from my daughter's grandparents and not have her grow up completely away from them. That was a massive sacrifice. There's everything else about day-to-day life in Germany and Austria, as she rightly pointed out, is more supportive of parents, mothers, working mothers, and children. When we lived in Vienna, there was a playground on every block. There were so many free things for children. There were so many places that were welcome for children. You could take your child to a bar. I didn't usually, but you can. I mean, it's just assumed in most countries of Europe that children are people and that everybody acts their own. You know, they in America, there's this like constant call simultaneous fetishization of motherhood and children and total hatred of them, where you try to make their lives as difficult as possible on purpose out of some sort of punitive Puritan. I don't know what it is, but yeah. Obviously, my views about America are have not been great since 2016. And um, you know, on a personal note, I can't see myself leaving Oregon for quite some time. My father passed away about nine months ago, and so now my mother lives here alone. And so I do believe that it's my responsibility to sort of remain close to her uh for as long as I for as long as I can. So sometimes family things get in the way, and it is a kind of a sacrifice, but I find that it in the end it's worth it. Um, the other question for her that she asked that I wanted to answer about my sort of daily habits is that I do bicycle everywhere. That's sort of me trying to bring a little bit of normalcy, European normalcy into my daily life. Whereas if I have to go less than about you know 10 kilometers, I will take a bicycle. I'm not gonna get into a car for no reason, which is like anathema in the United States.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I know I know you lived in in urban. I used to live in Los Angeles, and it it perplexed me to no end that people would drive down the block.
SPEAKER_05Oh, but that was totally normal. I had a um I had a uh a flatmate in my apartment who got a parking pass so that she could drive from grad student housing to class.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah. I lived literally one block from the community college I was going to in Santa Monica, and people asked me, where'd you park today? And I'm like, no, I parked in my apartment. This is why I live so close to school, so I can walk. It just and it was, you know, perfect weather and all those things that are similar between yeah, it just it it will forever perplex me. Like cars are for long distances if you can't take it in my mind.
SPEAKER_03Every moment ago.
SPEAKER_02Hey, hey, hey, this is Steph popping in, and I just want to say that I have an obsession with audiobooks. You've heard me talk about Audible before, and now I'm happy to say that we have an affiliate relationship with them. So you can actually listen to the same exact version of Shot and Ford out that I did, the unabridged version, and you can get it for free. You can get a free month of Audible, and you can listen to this and whatever other books that you so wish. All you need to do is go to www.audibletrial.com forward slash you know what's coming, Geopats Books. Don't forget both of those S's, Geopats Books. I'll put the link down in the show notes below as well. But I just want you to know that you can listen to this as well as other books during your free trial. I think you should try it. I personally I do everything with books and podcasts in my ears. I walk, I do things around the house, I even do some of my podcasting tasks that are not sound-oriented, um, some administrative stuff. I do that while I'm listening to books and podcasts also. So if you haven't gotten into audiobooks yet, which I think you may have, I think you want to try it. And what better way to try it than for free? Hurrah. Enjoy. You're welcome.
SPEAKER_03Each and every passing day is if I write no left today.
SPEAKER_02Okay, and then we have my question. Uh, and we talked about this a bit in the episode last year. The book um felt like it was kind of two books: the love story with the language and what pulled you into the language and the culture and and with um and that kind of thing, and then the kind of um slightly unhealthy but definite an attraction love story to academia, and the two together left all three of us kind of going, it feels like two books. At any point, did you feel like it was oh, I I have to do a disclaimer though, because I did reread it recently, and the connection between the two hit me over the head, but the first time it didn't. Like I got it the second time, but the first time I was a little like, huh, this feels like two different books.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I mean, it was sort of like when Faust says he has like two different souls dwelling in his breast. It was a big conflict for me about how much about academia to write about. I didn't really, uh you know, the first version that I turned into my editor had a different last chapter and actually didn't really didn't really detail my sort of flaming out of academia at all. But, you know, I tried to make it work by having the structure of the book be extremely very carefully tailored to my changing relationship with Kafka, which went from this sort of schoolgirl infatuation through to, you know, kind of a codependent misery, and then finally into peace. And so, you know, he wasn't even German, but he wrote in German, and so that sort of mirrored my own relationship where I was sort of always on the outside, never gonna be on the uh inside, but couldn't leave anyway. And I was sort of always meant to be in this liminal spot, just sort of on the outside, always trying to get in. And so I do feel like in the end, I hope that I worked hard enough to make that theme very prevalent in every chapter. The irony was that once I committed to working with German literature as a vocation, my opportunities to live and work in German-speaking world over and above the Fulbright chapter, which got cut because it wasn't traumatic enough, I guess. I was kind of boring here in Vienna. I was just cold. Like that was like this. The extent of my time in Vienna is I lived in a really little bitty apartment with no um, with no central heating. And that all it had was like an electrograde, like a like a like an electric radiator you plugged in. Oh no. Which, as you can, yes, because you can imagine how much that cost to run. So I didn't have, you know, this was a 300 euro a month apartment that had no bathroom. It had like a shower in the kitchen and uh and a toilet in the hall, much like my apartment in Berlin. And so that I couldn't make the joke because I had already done a toilet hall, shower kitchen chapter. So, you know, I was cold. I was 33 years old, worked on my dissertation a lot, and was cold, was like not that was like not a sexy chapter. So they were like, const you know, constrict that chapter into two paragraphs, and so I dutifully did. And so, you know, the primary relationship I had in the German-speaking world in like my foibles with it in my later relationship with it were more they took place in the US, and so it was a hard thing to, you know, there were some readers who felt like they had wanted a book that really took place all in Germany and that was much more about Germany and a lot less about me. And you know, there's a reason that the first word in the subtitle is me. Like everybody knew that this was not there was like really smug review. So it was just, you know, a small one. It wasn't like in a major publication or anything, but it said looking for a deep dive into all things Teutonic, keep looking.
SPEAKER_02Oh I know it's no, that you didn't even try to. I mean, it I definitely didn't even try. No, why would you why would you? I mean, the thing that brought the story to life was you, it was your sense of humor and the way that you molded the story and your experiences.
SPEAKER_05And I guess I just I wanted to make the kind of tension, the inside-outside tension be the sort of unreclotted love, like that was the story. Yeah. And so I hoped that that would bridge the sort of two bookness of it enough, but I think that maybe it still didn't work.
SPEAKER_02I think it, I think it did, like I said, the second time it hit me like a ton of bricks, and that thread was definitely there. The first time I, in full disclosure, was about two years away from walking away from a PhD program. So it could have been too fresh for me still. So personally, I could have been like, nah, can't hear about this yet. So it could have been that. Because the first part of the book, even though there were well, actually, the majority of the book is not necessarily the academic side. And that was more humorous. I mean, it wasn't always happy, happy, joy, joy, but it was definitely more humorous, exploratory. That kind of thing. And then the academic side did get more serious. And I think for me that definitely plucked on a few things I wasn't ready to deal with. But this time, having been just a year later, it was like, oh yeah, I remember that. And the culture shock into academia, that part was hilarious.
SPEAKER_05But like, who's gonna read this book twice? I don't even know if I've read it twice. I bless you for reading it twice. Like I'm so excited that you did. But if it takes like two readings for people to understand that, and you know, I will let you know that I worked one of the earliest Goodreads reviews had a similar they didn't put it as nicely as you did. They were mean about it. And, you know, I was definitely hurt about it because I had worked so hard to make the structure of the book exactly mirror. I just I'd worked very, very hard to structure the book so that every chapter seemingly effortlessly illustrated exactly the word that was the chapter, and that they all fit one after the other in ways that they couldn't have otherwise. It was really important for me to make the structure seem inevitable. And so it was hard for me when it when it didn't work out a hundred percent the way that I wanted it to, because I did, I worked very, very hard on the craft of that book. You know, if I had to do it again, I might have just left it in the nineties. I might have tried to make it longer and just kept it in the nineties. But, you know, the world was different when I wrote it than when it was published. I finished it in 2015, and so you know, obviously the 2019 or 2017 even version, like the version that I would have written. It came out in a world that it didn't go into. I'll put it that way. Like when it was when it was conceived, it was much, much different world than the world that it was birthed into. And there is a lot of sort of you know, I'd like to think that I'm very aware of my own privilege and that I'm very tongue-in-cheek about how non-problematic my problems are. But it definitely didn't hit, you know, a world in which Trump had just been inaugurated as president in the way that I would have hoped it would hit in a world where that wasn't, you know, when when he won the election, my publishers all got to like a week off uh for like bereavement. Like it hit the world, it hit the elite New York publishing world very hard. So and they just kind of lost their desire to wanna, you know, I get it too. I don't know if I would ever write like a privileged girl memoir again. But I you know, I do stand by it. I like to think that because I tried to make it as self-deprecating as possible. Well, that's just the way I am, it's not like I do it on purpose, but you know, because it is so self-deprecating, I am hoping that it has a sort of timeless quality to it that people can pick it up and get pretty much the same thing they got out of it now, maybe in 10 years.
SPEAKER_02I think they would. I think, yeah, I mean the fact that you look back on on yourself so much and and commented on you know how you were and all those things. I think that comes across. And the humor is strong. To be fair, I was listening to it on unabridged audiobook and I was walking down the street, and a lot of times I would laugh out loud really loudly, and yeah, anywhere that would get attention, but in Berlin it was like, what's what's wrong with you? What's happening right now? kind of thing. So it just yeah, no, I I think it I think it I think it was I'm going against what I said before. I don't mean to be critical.
SPEAKER_05Oh no, I thought that was like a extremely that's like you hit on the one thing that I am the most insecure about about the book. So I think no, I'm really it gave like I got a so much out of it to talk about it. And so, you know, I still am glad that everything turned out the way it did. And I do think that I did work pretty hard to structure the book in a way that works. And you know, lots of books are two books, and lots of books have two souls dwelling in their breasts, so it's not like it even would be bad.
SPEAKER_02And if I'm completely honest with you, I'm just at the beginning of learning German language, the German language. Why is that so hard to say? Meh. Um so I was actually putting it in into my um, I was actually thinking about coming back to it even next year and to listen to it again because there's there's more that I understood this year than last year when I wasn't even in the country yet, wasn't studying German. And this year I was like, oh, okay, I get some of it, and some of it I'm still like, wow, that might be useful language for me to actually use next time. So I was actually thinking of returning yet again.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, the one thing I regret is not adding like over-the-top humorous phonetic pronunciations to all of the German that I put in because I later started doing that in my work. I wrote a column for the magazine, the All R I P before it folded for an entire year, where all I did was they just let me read the German news and then like translate the most, either the most relevant or ridiculous German news item of that week to an English speaking audience. It was really like probably the most rewarding remaining job I ever did. The least read and most rewarding writing job I ever did. But so whenever I talked about German in that, I always included like a ridiculous phonetic pronunciation in parentheses after everything that and I so now I very, very badly regret not including that in trying to find out because I think for most people who don't know German, you know, most of the German in there is only it's a sentence at most, but I understand that people are gonna be like space city, space, space, space out, space out, most of them.
SPEAKER_02Maybe I don't know. I'm I'm I'm weird with languages. I tend to linger on them to play with them, even if I can't understand them. But I think most people do do the just skipping over stuff. So I don't know. But what I do know is you've got a lot of stuff online that our listeners can read. I I wouldn't even know where to start, except I did I did go from your website to or on your website, I did watch a video at University of Texas, I believe.
SPEAKER_05It's an indie bookstore near University of Texas.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, where you talked about that missing Austrian chapter and so much more. So I'm gonna have that in the show notes for the folks, but where would you like people to go look at what you're currently doing?
SPEAKER_05Oh gosh. I mean, you know it's really up to them. They can do whatever they want. Um, I would recommend um for the last couple of years, I've primarily been writing about like really weird different beats that often have nothing to do with each other. Uh for Slate now, I am their gymnastics writer because I was a gymnast when I was a teenager, so I primarily write about gymnastics for them, but because sports is canceled, I'm not really doing any of that right now. I've also written a little bit about online instruction and you know, that's kind of wonky education stuff that isn't particularly, I don't know. People aren't gonna if they're coming for this, they're not gonna be like, oh yes, this article about online college in the US is just what I wanted to read. I would recommend, I guess if I had to, I mean, you know, all writers are like, no, my work is garbage, don't touch it, don't be American. I mean, that's my that's my immediate thing, is be like, what? Why? No. Why is that why why is that happened? Because the only way that you can write anything that isn't absolutely terrible is to look at it with the most critical eye possible. And unfortunately, when you inter when you internalize that, it makes you feel like you're just very bad all the time. Like that you can't turn it off once something is published. Like that doesn't make you be like, okay, yes, finally it's good. A while ago, there was, I'll answer your question in a second, but this is a side. A while ago, there was the Twitter thread from some writer who was like, Does anybody actually like their own writing? And most of the people who answered, including me, were like, no, God, what? I'm not a monster. But there were some people who did, and they were like, Yes, I love it so much. And even now, I will sometimes go back over a turn of phrase that I that was just exactly right, and it will give me so much joy. And I'll be like, oh, nine out of ten, you are the worst writer in the world. Like, I bet your stuff is so bad. If you're in love with your own writing, I bet it is terrible. I don't know, it's just how it works, it's just how it works. Like you can't you can't be in love with your own writing and have it not. Because then you can't, there's reasons for it. If you can't see that you need to improve, then you're never gonna get any better. And if you can't respond to editorial criticism with just a thank you and and incorporating it, and you know, if you don't think the editorial criticism is right, then instead you just get to the kernel of what they actually meant and do a better version of what they told you to do. Like if you can't see that your work can always improve and you really do think, like, no, this is my masterpiece, it's great, then your work will never get any better. And so it will never. Nobody's first draft is ever good. And so for people who think that, you know, they've happened upon the most terrific turn of phrase ever, chances are that turn of phrase is gonna sound very precious, very trite, trying too hard, overwork. Like, I don't know. Even that guy's tweets, I was like, no, those tweets are bad. But you know, maybe that's just me trying to that could be me just trying to trying to justify my own self-loathing. All of that said, I would say, as far as my non-print, like my book is probably what I'm still most proud of. That book, my academic book, I'm still very proud of, but it's pretty dense. I wouldn't think that a lot of people would go read it for fun. For the last couple of years, I've been a columnist for long reads, and so, which is, you know, true to its name, specializes in longer form work. And as a rule, my work for them takes me a lot longer to do because I actually tried really hard with it and don't just try to spit out a hot, like you know, for about three years I wrote a lot of hot takes for Slate and it got me a lot of attention, but it was not my best work, and so I think that my work for long reads probably has been my best work because I started writing for them after the book, I think. And so, like the book for me represented an incredible metamorphosis, if you will, in my ability to try to not be so bad because I really had the chance to revise it over and over and over again, and so I did. And so I really feel like every single sentence of that book. I still now would change everything because that's the way people are, but at the time I was like, this is as work too as I can, I've left it all out on the page. And so I think with long reads, I also really tried to avoid any sort of hot take, hot take prose. Not that there's anything wrong with like if you make your living writing hot takes, like bless you, I can I admire you and I do not have the fortitude to do it. But yeah, so I wrote another, I wrote several things about Germans for long reads. I wrote a column about the 90s, I wrote the story of giving birth to my daughter, but I wrote it as a philosophy textbook. You know, they just let me do a lot of really interesting sort of they let me play with form a lot. So I guess if I had to direct somebody to that work, I would direct them there. Right now I'm working on something that probably won't see the light of day for a very, very, very long time, but I'm working on it very hard. So who knows? I won't say much about it, but um there's no way for people to see it because it's still in process and oh that's a lot of mystery.
SPEAKER_02Can I ask if it's a book?
SPEAKER_05Well, someday maybe it will be a book.
SPEAKER_02Okay, we'll leave it on that mysterious.
SPEAKER_05But it is not, it is not a non-fiction.
SPEAKER_02Wait, so it is fiction. Yes, okay.
SPEAKER_05So yeah, I'm working on a novel. It's a like an American campus satire. Oh yes. You know, it's not a good time to try to put that out of the world right now. American college doesn't exist. And you know, it's definitely for uh it's definitely for the aftertimes. And so I'm just trying to finish up some revisions on the manuscript now, and then I may try to start sending it out into the world in uh let's say early 2022. So if nobody sees a word from me in public from now until then, that's why.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Well, speaking of which, I'm sure you already know PhD comics, but I have to ask anyway. Do you know PhD comics?
SPEAKER_05I don't know him personally.
SPEAKER_02No, for him, but the the comics itself, of course. Movies and yeah, okay. Yeah. I was I was thinking of that and the what is it? The doctor is in.
SPEAKER_05I think that's the professor is in.
SPEAKER_02The professor is in, that's right. Yeah, I was thinking.
SPEAKER_05Her, I do know. I know Karen Kelski, she actually lives literally down the street from me. It's a small world. I don't see her that much right now because nobody sees anybody, but even before, like, she's definitely in the like my kids are out of my house stage of life. And I, because her kids are finally both in college, and my kid is like barely like not even in kindergarten. So we have we're in much different places in our lives, but we're friends.
SPEAKER_03Do you remember exactly when we met?
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much to our guest, Rebecca Schumann, for joining us for this anniversary episode of our original conversation about her book. It was unbelievably wonderful for us to join us and answer these lingering questions that we had. And thank you to Tachana and Nicole for having those lingering questions with me. I think that made it quite a one-year anniversary bookish episode, if I may say so myself. And finally, thank you to Damon Castillo, who is gracious enough to have given us permission to play his music on all of our Geopats podcasts. And you'll hear the full song that you've been hearing snippets of as soon as I'm done here. Final thing, we this is a product of Here Share Productions, where we not only create a lot of global content in the Geopath series, as well as some other things coming up that are not Geopats related, but we also have podcast-related services for you. If there's anything that you've seen or heard me do, I can do it for you too. Just contact me at stefffuccio.com s t ph f u cio.com. As promised, here is I Will Remain, a song on the mess of me album from Damon Castillo. Enjoy you wonderful bookish people. See you next time.
SPEAKER_03Exactly when winning me. I wanna ride a hit. I wanna take the step back to the win, but I am the one win about it. I can start that mid. I can make that all the time. And if I don't have the means, the green that we're not green. All the time, it may not be a lot of people.
SPEAKER_01Progressive snapshot can save you money based on how you drive and how much you drive. So the safer you drive, the more money you could save. Now, if you didn't hear that because you were yelling at another car while driving, let me say it again. You need to calm down. Yelling is just making everyone as stressed out as you are and letting them all know that you definitely aren't trying to save with progressive snapshot. And if you did hear it the first time because you weren't yelling at another car, nice work. You'd love Snapshot from Progressive because it rewards safe drivers. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliate, Snapchat not available in California and North Carolina or from all agents.
SPEAKER_00Membership fees apply after free trial. Cancel anytime. You know what's wrong with health and fitness? You weaponize it against yourself. Why didn't you go to the gym today? You're so lazy. Ah, why did you eat that? You have no self control. Stop it. At Beachbody, we think training and caring for your body in a way that works best for you should be about loving yourself. Let us help you without all the judgment. Here's how. Go to BeachBody.com to claim your free membership and start feeling great.