Vision, Voice, and Stories That Shape Us

Writer and activist Amy Friedman believes stories can change how we see each other. Through All-American Story, immigrants and first- and second-generation Americans share their lived experiences through writing, music, performance, and art — raw, real, and deeply human. 

At a moment when immigration gets reduced to headlines and arguments, these voices bring us back to the only question that matters: what does it mean to belong in America?

Today's episode is brought to you by the Joan of Arc Scroll Medal, a beautiful brass alloy medal, designed by award-winning artist, Pat Benincasa. This uniquely shaped medal is ideal for holiday or as a special occasion gift!    Visit www.patbenincasa-art.com

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Chapters

• 0:00 Opening And Guest Introduction
• 2:45 A Father’s WWII Courage At Stalag 9A
• 9:20 Medal Of Honor And A Moral Dilemma
• 16:35 Writing Desperado’s Wife
• 25:47 Stigma, Loss, And Self-Discovery
• 32:17 Founding POPS And Student Voices
• 38:27 Launching All American Story
• 46:17 Why Immigrants Must Tell Their Stories

Transcript

Pat:

Fill To Capacity -where heart grit and irreverent humor collide. A podcast for people too stubborn to quit and too creative not to make a difference.

Pat:

Hi, I am Pat Benincasa, and welcome to Fill To Capacity. I'm so glad you're here. Episode #130, "Vision, Voice, and Stories That Shape Us." My guest today is Amy Friedman, writer, editor, teacher, activist, and a fierce believer in the power of people telling their own stories. Amy is the author of "Desperado's Wife: A Memoir, her story about love, incarceration, and what happens when compassion pushes past judgment. That experience led Amy and her husband, Dennis Danziger, to Co-found Pops The Club, supporting teens impacted by incarceration and helping them to put words to experiences. Many of them carry alone for more than 25 years. Amy wrote the nationally syndicated column, tell me a story. She also teaches memoir writing and through Out of the Woods Press helps bring overlooked stories into print. Now, fast forward to this moment today, Amy leads All-American Story, a platform created with and by immigrants and first and second generation Americans, sharing their stories through writing performance, music, and more at a time when immigration gets reduced to headlines and arguments. All American story brings us back to people and what it means to belong in America. Okay, well, welcome Amy. So nice to have you here.

Amy:

Thank you so much, Pat, and thank you for that gorgeous introduction.

Pat:

Well, it was well earned. Amy, I wanna start, before we go into what you're doing today. When we spoke earlier, you told me about your father. What a remarkable man he was. Will you tell listeners about him?

Amy:

I'm thrilled to tell listeners about him, and I wanna say that founding of All-American Story is absolutely all about him, and it's the founding story on the Substack. My dad, whose name was Skip Friedman, was this like honest, passionate, devoted humanist and a activist. He started out as a journalist, but we're Jewish. And he was a writer for the Cleveland newspaper where I grew up and where he had grown up. And he knew that as a Jew, he could never get beyond sort of where he was in the status of newspaper writers. And so he ended up going to law school and he became a lawyer. He became a mediator. I mean, he kind of did everything. The timeliness of the story about him and the connection to All-American story is that when my father was 19 years old, he went to war and he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge, 19 years old in this desolate place, captured marched through chest high snow, and they went to one prisoner of war camp in Germany where they separated out a lot of the Jews who ultimately were sent to their death at Berga work camp and another group of Jews.

Amy:

And I think people, they kind of figured might be Jews. So probably a lot of Italians were sent to Dresden, including Kurt Vonnegut. And that's kind of the, the home of Slaughterhouse five, if people know that book. My father and his unit of 1,275 men went on to a place called Stalag 9A. The reason this is so relevant today is that two days ago, on March 2nd, after President Trump had launched a war and disappeared, his first reappearance came giving a medal of honor to a man who was my father's commanding officer at Stalag 9A.. My father's commanding officer was a 25-year-old man from a Baptist, from Tennessee who probably had never met a Jew before he was in the war. And the German Commandant ordered Roddy, Roddy Edmonds was his name, ordered Roddy to turn over all the Jews. The next morning he would send all the Jews to fall out, and Roddy ordered his 1,275 men to all fall out together.

Amy:

And when the commander put a gun to his head, he said, we are all Jews here. And when the war ends, I get choked up still, I've told this story a hundred thousand times, but when the war ends, you will be tried for war crimes, you'll have to shoot us all. And the man put his gun down, and my father and several other Jews were saved by this man. Now, I didn't know this story until my father was deep in his eighties. I knew he'd been a prisoner of war. Most of the stories, this was this Mr. Optimism, he always said from the day he was freed April or 1945, that every day was a gift. He was the kind of guy that you'd eat a tuna sandwich and you'd go, oh my God, this is the best tuna sandwich I've ever eaten. He was just like light and also a fighter and a staunch democrat, a staunch humanist taught me really how to fight.

Amy:

And this story, what happened was one day when he, my dad was like deep in his eighties, and I used to check his email for him when I visited. And there was this email from this man named Chris Edmonds saying, were you a POW at Stalag 9A? Well, it turned out Roddy had passed away early in 1985, and his son was young and his son never knew this story. But basically he was looking to find out what happened to his father at this prisoner of war camp that he knew he was in, because it was in his diary. And over the course of the last 10, 15 years, Chris has been collecting the stories he wanted to get his father posthumous recognition. He has done so in many, many ways in places, but his goal was the Medal of Honor, and he needed affidavits from the men who were there.

Amy:

So I've got my father's affidavit, so has been fighting and fighting and fighting to get this Medal of Honor. Well, when you know it, March 2nd, 2026, he is awarded posthumously the Medal of Honor. Now, importantly, when we heard, when we siblings, I have three siblings, and we don't always get along. We we're friends, but we always disagree about things on this. We were all on the same page. We were thrilled that Roddy would be honored. Obviously, none of us would be here if not for him, or it's likely we, none of us would be here. We were not thrilled about who would be presenting the award. And we were invited, two of us were invited, we could pick two out of the four of us invited to attend, and we chose not to. So one of the reasons I'm, I'm really happy to tell this story to is that I am very glad that Roddy was honored, and I could not have been in that room.

Amy:

You know, my father almost gave up his life fighting fascists, and all four of us kids thought we could not be in a room where someone who we consider a fascist was presenting this award. It, it was too much. So it was a weird little day a couple days ago, because I actually tried very hard to get an op-ed published about both sides of this, and nobody took it. But my, my dad, you know, what was, what was important about him and what's important to me in this moment, in our own story, our own history right now, he was, as long as he was alive, he was gonna fight to be alive and fight for his friends to stay alive. And kind of, one of the things he taught me was the importance of, of optimism, I guess, that when the darkness starts to fall is when you, when you're in trouble, internal darkness. So I try to be like that.

Pat:

I think you live it, frankly.

Amy:

Well, thanks.

Pat:

So I wanna go to your memoir, "Desperado's Wife, "because that tells a deeply personal story about love, incarceration, and survival. How did writing that book change you?

Amy:

Well, you know, it was actually my third memoir, and I wrote it because this is what I believe about writing our own stories, or not necessarily just writing, but writing, expressing our own stories. It helped me understand what had happened. When I teach memoir writing, I always say to people, when you write, what happens is you find out what you don't know. You know, briefly, I was a newspaper columnist. This was in Canada. I moved to Canada in 1982 ish, something like that. And I became a newspaper columnist there. I lived in Kingston, Ontario, which is surrounded by prisons on both sides of the border, by the way, you know, right over the US border, Kingston's, right on Lake Ontario, right over the border, numerous prisons in upstate New York, and all around Kingston, there are all kinds of prisons. And I decided, you know, I don't really know what happens in prison.

Amy:

I'm gonna go in as a columnist, and I'm gonna start asking questions and writing, like as if I were sort of coming in on a helicopter. I wanted to interview everybody. I wanted to interview the administration and the prisoners and the nurses and the guard, you know, everybody. And I started, and it happened that I met a man who was in prison. And we began talking, and this is a complicated story, but basically I got thrown out of the prison. I was told by my bosses at the paper that I couldn't go there anymore. The, the administrators had written a letter to my boss at the paper who, which had just been purchased by a syndicate. So it was in flux. We're watching that happen all over the place, right? And they wrote a bunch of lies about my behavior. I was behaving perfectly innocently.

Amy:

So anyway, I was kicked out, I was angry. So I signed on to be his personal visitor to keep hearing stories. And we fell in love. And then they transferred him farther away. He was real political, real outspoken, telling me the true stories, not the ones that, you know, I'd been kind of shepherded to particular people to talk to particular prisoners, and he started telling me things that they didn't want me to know. So we ended up getting married, and my life totally changed. Largely what happened was everybody's perception of me changed. I didn't change, but suddenly I was as stigmatized and as shamed and as pushed aside as so many people who are incarcerated, detained, deported, I mean, other people start telling your story and you can be anybody they want you to be. So we were married little over seven years. He was inside most of the time we were married.

Amy:

He got out. Our marriage did not last long after he was released. However, he had two young daughters when we got married. And I raised them. And to this day, they're old now, and I'm really old. They're my daughters and my beloveds, he and I are, we're cordial with each other. We're friendly, I would say. But many, many marriages that happen in prison, disintegrate afterwards. Those kinds, the kinds of stresses that happen to people through the incarceration process are pretty intense. So, writing the book, when we got divorced, I was pretty devastated. It was a lot of years of my life that had changed the trajectory of my life. And I lost friends, I lost family for a while. My dad, bless his heart, my dad came and visited, was not happy that I was marrying someone in prison. But he came and he visited, and my mom and dad and my siblings.

Amy:

But I did lose a lot of people. And so I, I wanted to understand, I wanted to understand what had happened between us, what happened in, in my soul and spirit that led me there initially. Uh, the first draft, you know, first drafts are just get it all out. The first draft was a full of a lot of lies because I started it thinking, I am gonna prove to people that prisoners are just like us, right? And prisoners' wives are not crazy. You know, there's this whole thing about like, oh my God, if a woman marries a man in prison, she must be crazy or desperate or whatever. And I was like, I'm gonna prove to everybody how untrue that is. And so, you know, when you're sort of taking revenge in a way, I would leave out certain things without, without subconsciously. So when I read the first draft, I went, well, you know, sometimes during those years I was pretty crazy. And sometimes during those years, I was not the most well behaved person in the world, and nor was he sometimes. And there were all kinds of corners that I had not gone into because I was trying to make an argument instead of telling a true story. So is a true story.

Pat:

And a powerful one. I might add.

Amy:

Thank you.

Pat:

But it's interesting to me that sometimes we, we have a narrative in our mind, and anytime we write our stories, the question comes up, how much can I share and do I want to share? Or the things that we can't face ourselves. And as you said in the writing, all of a sudden a sentence comes out and it stops you cold. Like, oh, I was thinking that. Or, oh, I gotta own this. So I really appreciate your candor in terms of what that process did to you and for you.

Amy:

Yeah. And it, it was really healing for me. You know, I think by the time it took me a long time, I write a lot, but I'm slow. It took me, I would say, I don't know, six or seven years to get through that whole book. And then I'll tell you one little funny story. I did a kind of dumb thing because I had a literary agent and she was sending it out. I got a, a phone call from a producer who was about to launch Katie Couric's new television show. And she said, Hey, we'd like to have you on talking about women who marry men in prison. And I said, well, you know, I've got a book that's going around to publishers right now. The show wasn't gonna launch for seven or eight months anyway. So we, she said, yep, we're gonna have you on and we'll have you on when the book comes out.

Amy:

And, then they started pressuring me. Is it, is it Out yet? I hadn't sold it yet. So I, I self-published it. So that I would have it for tv. This is what I learned. People who watch TV are not readers daytime tv, because I was on the show and they promoted the book, and I was getting, you know, reviews in Amazon. And the few reviews right in the middle of the reviews were by three people who had seen the show. And they, all three of them said she was great on tv. But tv, there's so many words in this book, <laugh>, basically. So be it, it's out in the world.

Pat:

Let's jump forward to present day and talk about All-American Story. What is it, what and what sparked the idea for this project?

Amy:

So there are three parts to this. One is when President Trump was elected in November, well, the first time. But the second time especially, I was doing a lot of activist things, activities, trying very hard do everything I could to keep democracy alive in every way I know how. And one day I realized I needed to do something that utilized. So I was marching and I was writing letters, and I was registering people to vote and all of that. And I thought, you know, I need to use my skillset. So my skillset is both writing, but also helping other people write and, or tell their stories in whatever form they can, their personal stories. So that, that was kind of part one. I started thinking, what can I do? What can I do? That was around, right after inauguration, I would say.

Amy:

And when my husband and I launched POPS The Club, which POP stands for Pain of the Prison System- Pops, has now been taken over after many years by a larger nonprofit. So it's actually called the Pathfinder Club now, but still exists. And I wanna say it was for kids, not only those affected by incarceration, but also by deportation and detention. So it's really important today in the schools where it exists, it's in schools and detention centers and so on. But we published a book every year. We still do. We're just the new ones coming out in May. And of stories, artwork, plays, essays, poetry by the young, the youth who are involved with the clubs. And in 2016, we started doing live shows where we would have actors perform with the kids and present their work on stage. And there would be dance and music.

Amy:

And, and there were amazing shows. And I worked in 2016 with a extraordinary woman named Jessica Tuck, who is an actor and a producer and a director. And she produced that show, the, the first one. And it was kick-ass. And so I thought, I'm gonna call Jessica and see if we could produce a show of stories of American immigrants. And we got talking and lots of conversations, and then lots of other people coming into the conversations. But this was actually a recommendation by a social media maven, I know who said, put it on Substack. So we started working on it in May. It launched December 10th, which is Human Rights Day on Substack. And we still are going to be doing live events across the country, but we've been amassing work and sharing that work out on Substack. Our first live event will be in Los Angeles in April 26th.

Amy:

And so we're looking for venues, we're looking at museums. This first one will be in a museum that has the theater, the Wende Museum. That's the Cold War museum. Culver City actually. And schools and bookstores and wherever, wherever we can do it. But what happened was, the minute I had the idea and I started sharing it with people I knew, you know, you always think your, your friends and your family are gonna be the first people to pick up on an idea, and it's never them. And so I just started hearing from people, former students, family of former students, friends of friends of friends who, some of whom are writers. So we publish stories, but we also publish music and poetry and photography and paintings by people like Pat Benincasa. So there's a website that has all the kind of instructions for how to get involved.

Amy:

And also the link to the Substack. The Substack is you need to subscribe to Substack. And I think that kind of stops a few people. 'cause they don't, they're not familiar with it, but it's just a platform that you subscribe to. It comes in your email. We have no paywall, so a few people have paid because they wanna support the project, but it's free. Yeah. And it's just been magical, mostly because each time there, there are writers and then there are people who just wanna tell their stories. So myself and a few other writer editors are working with people on their stories, helping them to put them to the page. And it's been transformational for the people who have done them.

Pat:

Why is it important that immigrants and first and second generation Americans tell their own stories?

Amy:

Well, the birth of this, my language in my head was, all these lies are being told. All these lies are just pouring out into the ether about who immigrants are. And the truth needs to flood the zone and drown out those lies. That's conceptually the, the idea. And I think when people begin to tell their stories, they start also making these discoveries about how hard they've worked to be here, to raise families, to keep their culture close and to cherish their Americanism, the melange of what America has always been and is meant to be and is so delicious and gorgeous and powerful and brilliant, cannot be lost. And, you know, that means stories from everyone. I'll tell you a little story. How this started to develop was, I swim every morning and I swim in a public pool, a pool at a gym that's outdoors.

Amy:

I'm in beautiful Los Angeles where it's always sunny. I go to this pool and one day I'm swimming along and it's where I kind of think, and all of a sudden I go, okay, the guy swimming on my right is from Slovenia. The guy on my left is from Mexico. The woman next to him is from Norway. The woman next to hers from Korea, the guy next to her is her is from Mexico. And it was eight lanes, eight home countries. I mean, it was wild. One pool, one hour, eight nationalities. And then I started thinking one restaurant, one classroom, one neighborhood, my block for heaven's sake. And how fabulous it all is that there's so many different worlds that I get to learn about because of who I'm around. My grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe coming here for, for possibility for new life.

Amy:

Now, every time I talk to somebody whose story is happy, they always say to me, oh, I don't really have a story. And then we start working and then they go, oh my God, I have a story. Wow, I forgot about this. And this, like, one example of one of the guys I swim with is from Spain. And he came to the US, 40 years ago for work. And work turned into like, he, he was doing really well. He was a journalist. And then he got married and then he had a child, and then he went, oh my goodness, my, I forgot. My son just reminded me. 'cause his son's now, I don't know, I think 40, when he was a little boy, his mother was from like way back, I guess they came over on, I don't know, bef you know, early, early, early days. And his grandmother had applied for him to be somebody who could ring the Liberty Bell on July 4th. You have to be an early descendant to be able to do that. He was chosen. And so Miguel said to me, here was my son ringing the Liberty Bell, the son of an immigrant. Wow. Wow. Yeah. So the stories run the gamut. I mean, one story that's coming out soon is a woman who came with coyotes from El Salvador on her own when she was 20 years old speaking no English.

Pat:

Wait a minute, I wanna explain. Coyotes are people who smuggle countrymen into the states.

Amy:

Correct. And a harrowing journey. Yeah. Scary, lonely, harrowing. She is fabulous. Has these two fabulous daughters who, this is another reason these stories are important. So I had finished putting the story together with her photographs, and she and I worked together on the story. One of her daughters was with us when she was telling the story and had, and knew the story pretty much. But I sent them the, the published version to, for like a sneak peek before it's published. And the daughters called and said, you know, I had just been filling out my law school applications and feeling so ugh, I'm just gonna give up. And then I read my mom's story and I remembered and I went, I'm not giving up. Look what she had to do! So it's doing that kind of thing.

Pat:

This, what you are doing is setting up the possibility for people to maybe recognize themselves in a story they thought was about somebody else.

Amy:

That's brilliant, brilliant insight. And I think, yes, people are seeing themselves, people are also seeing people they love people, they admire people. They've depended on this. The woman from El Salvador is a nurse. I mean, there's a million people. She's helped live. And also we decided early on that we would offer the opportunity for people to present their work anonymously because there are people right now who must be protected. So there are anonymous stories. I struggle sometimes with people who don't want to be anonymous, who I think maybe they should, but it's the right, the, the creator's call.

Pat:

It's deeply moving because there's so much, gosh, I wanna say flame throwing rhetoric. And I'd like to maybe choose a few nicer adjectives, but I can't because we're, we're living in really a polarized time. And when you think about it, how many opportunities do we get to see something that we can say, Hey, I see myself in that. It seems like those opportunities are shrinking. But by the same token, there are the wild cards. All-American Story is a wild card. It's the thing that you didn't see coming down the pike, but it's doing all this good. In Minnesota, It's neighborhoods helping Somali families stay safe. They're watching their home and Somali neighbors coming, out and sharing Somali food with their neighbors. Yeah, I mean, for God's sake, that's Minnesota. You know, we're the people that say pass the hot dish. There's nothing, there's nothing extraordinary about any of us, honest to Pete. But when it comes to an opportunity to see ourselves and others, I don't think we even realized what was inside of us that we were encoded to say, Hey, that's my neighbor. They live down the street. If they're in trouble, I'm gonna go there and help. So coming full circle, the more opportunities we have to see art, to listen to a story, a performance, whatever, that maybe in somebody else's pain or story or joy, we see reflections of ourselves in our own lives.

Amy:

Correct.

Pat:

I'm gonna put the soapbox away and come back.

Amy:

I like this soapbox though. It's a good one. It's an important one.

Pat:

You're a clearinghouse now for so many stories. Amy, what kind of stories tend to stay with you long after you've encountered them?

Amy:

Well, I have a really good memory. I guess I would say the things that stay with me are not so much individual stories. I've had thousands of students and clients also. 'cause I, I work with people individually and I remember a lot. I can kind of run into somebody and not remember their name, but remember a scene that they wrote, I heard from someone recently who took my class maybe 10 years ago, and I did not remember her name, but I remember vividly the scene she'd written about her and her brother being lost together. So I would say what sticks with me are those really vivid moments that people describe. I'll give you one example because it's really recent from All American Story. And this is a man who, it was published a week ago and he spent 30 years undocumented. And it, it's called, his story's called "My Undocumented Journey."

Amy:

And he wrote this scene, it's maybe five lines, but it was about when he was a little boy, his family had come from Mexico together. He, his older brother and his parents and his father worked in a hospital as a janitor. And every day after school, his big brother and he would walk this long journey to the hospital and they were always afraid because they were always afraid they'd lose their parents. And they got to the hospital one day and they sit down and they're waiting for dad to come through these double doors. He always comes through and the double doors open and it's another man. And the man says to them in Spanish, immigrations come, ... come and taken your father. And then he laughs it was a joke. And then he has a line about how that's how I learned that even jokes can just slay you.

Amy:

I'll never forget that scene. I will never forget that scene. You know, and when I'm teaching memoir writing, I, I teach people how important that it is to paint a picture with your language of whatever is most specific. Like when you think, oh my God, I can't write this. This is like so personal and who cares? The big question people always have internally is, well, who cares about my story? But this is the truth that the more personal, the more intimate, the more specific, the more it, this is just Pat's story or you know, Oliver's story. The more the reader is pulled in. And it's because you're allowing the reader to trust you and to be feel safe enough to go to their own story. Like that story Oliver told makes me think about things that happened that weren't funny. When I was little, and ways people hurt me when they thought they were just being like, such haha, grownups takes me right to my own life.

Pat:

No, I'm curious, has working on All-American story changed your own understanding of what it means to be American?

Amy:

Yes, because it, what it's changed is actually, I shouldn't say to be American, but to be the American that I am. Because what it's made me realize is how little attention I have given to the way that our family came to be here, what led my grandparents here, what kind of struggles they had. What I mean, there's so much, I don't know. I mean that's part of all American story too, I think, you know, it's just whatever happens to it in the present time, I just want it to be an archive. It's helped me understand the struggles people have. Now, I moved to Canada and I ended up becoming, I'm a dual citizen and I know what my struggles were, you know, like you'd think, but it's just right over there and you know, it's just right up there and we all speak English and, but it was different. You know, it was a different place. And, and I remember for a lot of years feeling like an outsider so that it's given me a sense of what Outsiderness feels like and what it takes to not feel like an outsider.

Pat:

What do immigrants and first and second generation Americans, American understand about this country? Other people sometimes miss.

Amy:

Yeah, it's so layered. I think maybe, well, right now what too many people are missing is how gorgeous the tapestry of who we are is because of all the immigrants that have flowed through our country that have poured their knowledge and their experience and their music and their language and their rhythms and their food and their dance and their everything culture into ours that, you know, the idea that America could just be this white Christian nation is insane. And that is not to diminish, right? White Christians, white Christians are part of the mosaic, but it is to say that the country is a mosaic and has been for centuries. And that trying to erase that part of, of what this country is, is tragic.

Pat:

Yes, it is.

Amy:

What's been really interesting is a number of the people who have submitted stories have told me how much now trying to write about their grandparents who came or you know, whoever it was that came, how much they wish they had more information, how much they wish they had learned more.

Pat:

I can identify with that as being a first generation Italian American and growing up <laugh> surrounded by broken English and exquisite food and just a whole way of being. I was lucky to hear those stories. Yeah. And I've written my own, uh, little eBooks about, you know, uh, growing up with this dual identity and for those of you listening who had a grandparent that didn't speak English or a different language, there's so many folks out there that have had that kind rich upbringing. But when I wrote about them, I couldn't help but think. The question is, how much of myself do I give up to blend in and how do I cherish and preserve my ancestral roots? Yeah. Now, people who have never had to move to a new country, they don't have to weigh and measure pieces of their identity to fit in and nor do they have to silence their DNA that says otherwise.

Pat:

So coming full circle there and you talk about this fabric of America, those experiences, what they were willing to leave everything, they know all the people, they love their home for generations to come to a place that really maybe wasn't crazy to see them. Really didn't want them, but they wanted their labor. And so what do they give up to fit in? What do they do to survive? And the beauty of all American story is that you allow folks to share that, to talk about that because it's who we are. That's profoundly moving, especially in the context of today. . That we hear those stories.

Amy:

Yeah. I was listening a couple of days ago to, uh, the Daily, and there was a story of, um, a Chinese dissident named Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong dissident and a big activist for years who's been in prison for many years in China. It was an interview with his son, and it was a beautiful, beautiful interview. And weirdly, I'm working with a woman right now as a client who it grew up in Hong Kong. So I sent her the link to the interview and she went, oh yes, my mother was in prison with Jimmy Lai. I was like, whoa. Our DNA of this country is so braided and complicated and gorgeous, and we should celebrate it.

Pat:

As we get to the end of our, towards the end of our conversation, Amy, when we talk about All American story, we're really talking about identity, dignity, urgency and purpose. What feels most important about this work right now? And where do you hope to take it next?

Amy:

I have to remember that identity, purpose, dignity. And what was

Pat:

Urgency?

Amy:

And urgency. What feels most important? All four. Well, actually in a certain way, I don't feel urgent in my life. I've developed a lot of different projects and I've often felt I need everybody to know about this right now. And I, and I wanna have to make it known, and it's got, and I have to have it all over social media and whatever. I don't feel that with this, it feels organic and it feels like it's going to grow in its own way. And I feel like it will reach and find people. It's supposed to reach and find you. I mean, yes. So I have an advisor, so I have a couple of organizations that are sort of, wed to the project that AILA, which is American American Immigration Lawyers Association and AIC, which is American Immigration Council. Somebody who was a writing student of mine in a, in a workshop who's a retired immigration lawyer, is an advisor to the project and he knows you.

Pat:

We are talking about my dear friend Angelo Paparelli, who connected us.

Amy:

It's just been kind of organic that way, and I feel like we found each other, you and I at a time that was important for both of us. So it feels organic and it feels like it will grow as it's supposed to grow. And I don't know what it's gonna be. So I don't, I don't think urgency is the thing. I, I think identity is definitely the thing. I, if I can help people in any way with the elements of their own identity that they would like to celebrate and honor and share, that feels important.

Pat:

I'm gonna disagree with you on your statement, if I could.

Amy:

Sure.

Pat:

The word urgency. Okay. I see urgency to my listeners. If you have older relatives that have stories, write them down. If you don't write very well and you have a smartphone, just click record and ask grandma and grandpa or aunts or uncles, Hey, that story about tell me about it. Now is the time to do that. Record them, because as Amy says, down the road, you're gonna wish, oh, I wish I had a chance to ask that when they were alive. So there's no better time than the present, the moment to make sure you write down and document that beautiful, beautiful history. That's yours. That's your family's.

Amy:

I agree with you. I I don't think they need to necessarily be shared, you know? With others.

Pat:

No, no, you're right. You're right. Oh yeah. I don't mean you folks you gotta broadcast it or share it just for your own family. Just jot it down. Such a wonderful way to honor them and yourself. Wow. What a conversation. Thank you for coming on. Fill To Capacity, just giving us an inside view of this immigrant experience, this first and second generation experience. Thank you so much,

Amy:

Pat. Thank you for doing what you do, and thank you for being such a gorgeous host and, and artist and creator.

Pat:

Thank you. Thank you listeners, for joining us today and take care of each other. Bye.