Cspan. Org the president s, wherever books are sold. Host welcome to the Atlanta History Center virtual author talk featuring Heather Lende in conversation with jessica handler. I kate whitman Vice President of programs and Community Engagement for the History Center and im glad you are here and thanks for being with us. This will also be broadcast on cspan, so look out for that. You can purchase copies directly from our official bookseller. There is a link so you can do that and also we provided a link on the website. As jessica and heather are talking, please submit questions as jessica will entertain questions as well. There is a qanda feature at the bottom of the screen. We will get to as many of those as time allows. Heather lende has contributed to the New York Times and National Geographic traveler. Among other newspapers and magazines. Shes the author of the bestselling book take good care of the garden and the dog and if youve lived here i know your name. Tonight she will be discussing her latest book, of bears and ballots. Heather will be interviewed by jessica handler the author of the magnetic grid nominated for a prize for fiction. Named one of the books you should read in her guide breathing the fire a guide to grief and loss was praised by magazines into this. She teaches creative writing at university in atlanta. She lectures international writings and we are so delighted that she is joining us tonight. Heather and jessica, welcome and i will let you take it from here. Heather, im glad to talk with you. I feel like you are a friend even though weve only met on the internet in the past few weeks. I love this book so much, and while i personally do not have the temperament to run for office, and you do it apparent apparently, you and i share a deep belief in the importance of community and democracy and it is just a real honor to spend some time with you. I want to know if you could read for us just the beginning of of bears and ballots an alaskan adventure in smalltown politics. If you could read from the beginning through my life is an open book, the first three paragraphs. Guest sure. Election day. There are two polling places in haines, one is in the lobby of the cruise ship dock and the other is mosquito lake, [inaudible] i voted at the arts center and said hi to everyone as i walked in. I didnt say wish me luck or anything close to that. The public Radio Stations have signs on the street corners reminding residents know campaigning was allowed at or near polling places. One neighbor in an old house was asked by the clerk to remove Campaign Signs from his home because it was too close to the polling place. I did notice who was their voting, friends and foes and wondered which decides if the haines right and left divide would be victorious. Either way a little more than half of us would be happy and a little less than half would be disappointed. Haines is predictable. I assumed that it would be close. It looked to me as though more conservative voters than my supporters were at the arts center that morning. The Community Service and library board, the planning commission, volunteer hosting of the local Country Music show Coaching High School runners for 17 years, four children and five grandchildren our family my husband runs and all they obituaries that ive been writing since 1997 which gives the crossover support. Should i keep going . Host you can stop there. Guest sorry, i was a little nervous being in your presence. Host gosh. We can stop there because what i wanted to do is the voice in this book which is yours obviously is so pleasan presd warm uninvited stopped by the fact in your town you have a valley. The piece of the puck on the subject of the valley it gives the reader the sense of the charm and smallness of haines and your love and commitment to this place that could have been for a long time. Guest my first book was a map and people have always asked me so i asked my friend to draw it. Host it reminds me of a silver spoke in a way. So, you know, you write in the book you ran for local office in haines to help set an example and im curious in what ways did your experience set an example . Guest i was thinking my grandchildren would talk about their grandmother, the local government, and i was thinking how in my life by influential my mothers and grandmothers were and the things they did that i didnt even realize at the time that has become a part of the way that i live in things like respect so i thought i want to show them that they need to be involved in their community and the government and i wanted to talk about their grandma and remembered me typing my notes in meetings or it didnt work out that way. I didnt become like the local star of the assembly or anything, but what i did do is because i was thinking of that over time, i realized about halfway in what i was going to bring to it as a kind of civility, kindness i wasnt going to do anything that i wouldnt want them to be proud of me for even if i might not be winning particular battles or being revered by certain people. It was different than that. I was going to show them how to behave in the public eye when the chips are down a little. Host they were down for you for a few years. Guest and how you talk to your neighbors even the ones you disagree with especially publicly. Im not a saint or anything. I might rant and rave or yell a little bit with my talks with my friend, but typically i try that adage if i couldnt say anything nice, dont say anything at all and try to find something in either my fellow assembly members, the mayor, the staff got people working at giving us such a hard time to appreciate. Host i want to ask a hard time you refer to, but then i also want to talk about at one point in the book i started circling how many times the word kindness or respect showed up and it is a theme so can you talk to us a little bit of the attempt of the recall and how kindness and respect and listening contributes to democracy . Guest as you so clearly put it there was a lot of stuff about the recall part and it was great for the town i lived in and during that time i felt like my town had cheated on me. Right after myself and my friend, the editor of the valley news were elected, basically on a fairly more progressive than the other people and tom and i werwere the top two that got the seat and we joined an assembly that was already leaning more progressive if thats the right word. In a small town it doesnt always line up if it is a nationally. But it was an issue about the harbor and expansion and we had run on the idea that the community should have a referendum to vote on the desi design. So we thought wed better get that happening and that created a lot of anger from the people who supported this particular design so right away and it didnt happen, they break the tie 3304 so there was goin there no referendum and even though similar to National Politics, they were so mad and didnt want to do that pretty muc but prette next day we are going to recall you come and that became something that hung over us so that every meeting how that works, theres always somebody unhappy with the decision. They can get their signature on the petition and it snowballed like that for pretty much the first nine months. My second election was in august and the previous october. Host and you came out the other side. Guest myself and two other family members. A local artist was also the third one and. It was a 6040 and the other nice thing is that it wasnt personal. They didnt choose which one of the three that were targeted. They pretty much just all got the same number of votes. Host this goes to the next part of the question, you emphasized the kindness and respect regardless of if they agree with you or dont. So how do you trac trace that bk and attribute it to a community . Its the only way you will have a functioning community. Its just human nature. If somebody is standing there calling your name youre not going to want to listen to them the next time they stand up and Start Talking about why they needed sewer line extension to their neighborhood. Its human nature to back up from people that are not communicating with you while and if you can at least find some way to be for lack of a better word, polite, it helps a lot and i noticed that watching people when they come to the meetings i had to listen to somebody a long time that i completely disagreed with if they spoke to me in a calm way. If you are going like this and yelling. I had a friend who was a mayor in another small town and she told me you know, think of Public Service this way. If you shove somebody, they shove you back. Its easier than a slam in the shoulder. Host that makes sense and that is a hard lesson to learn. There is a section when you go to the Community Bath in a local community, when you talk about that section i love reading that and you make it a metaphor for the common good. Guest that is the very beginning of the book. I needed a Campaign Manager. In a way it was small but it was big. And my friend teresa said i will be your Campaign Manager and she is a gogetter, retired Elementary School teacher and has a tiny town [inaudible] i always wanted to go and traveling in alaska is challenging and even southeastern alaska before i declared my candidacy. I thought that maybe the bath was sent as public as it was. [laughter] we get down there and its time to go bathe and there is one and mans hours and mens hours and was a little oldfashioned and there is a sign that says no bathing suits. New debating only. I said maybe it will be dark. But you go down into there isnt oldfashioned skylight and there you are in your birthday suit and there are other women in the town of all ages, sizes, shapes and they were beefing together. I did a talk on a book about obituary writing and it was completely different. It made me think that if we all had to bathe together we would probably be a lot nicer to each other. Host it is a metaphor for the common good. Seeing people as people. Theres a lot of stuff in this book about democracy and community and its also about your life and parenting and grandparenting interface and upbringing. Can you talk about what drives you to think this way and why you decided to run for office and why you understand something thats hard for me to do but just listening to people who disagree. Guest ive always had a lot of empathy but a lot of that tonight but back i think comes from my mother. I grew up going to a Quaker School so very much in that, quakers teach you. The fear of god in every man, but thats why theres a little spark that is holy in all of us and that runs through a lot of faith traditions. And im a regular practicing episcopalian. I go to church on sunday and i hear all of those lessons. Some people call it the fillin the blank church. You are reminded every sunday you have to care for people and even the idea that god will forgive you only as much as you forgive others. That has bee been ingrained in e and its part of my value system and while again i fall short of what i know, especially when im in public i feel like thats what you have to do. Your best foot is forward. There you are in a leadership role in the community and that is when those come into my decisionmaking. Sure there is code and the constitution and other things but how you get there comes from that background i think. Host in terms of being an Assembly Person you have a section of the book about the order which i dont even understand, but i know that its [inaudible] was it hard to learn that . It was a hard job youre doing just on a daytoday basis. Guest you know there is always the you make a motion in a second. It can get very complicated and the people who were holding you to them if you are not sure what you do in this amendment or how this all happens, you can get stuck in at the beginning sometimes it felt as if people were using my lack of knowledge and wanted to make sure you couldnt have something happen. They make this notion into your bike i didnt even get to talk about it. I better learn how to do this. And there is a certain builtin the decor. In the small town that we all know by our first name, alaska is a very informal place. My children call her School Teachers by their first name outside of school and you call the doctors and the priest of church on a first name basis. Being in the assembly is on and when people speak to the assembly they have to give their full name. This is don turner, junior and by saying this, even though they know who it is, thats part of the protocol. Host and youv and you for e notorious for their family can be sure that your Hardware Store and lumberyard. Its like two aspects of the same community. Guest really. Even on the assembly, the people that are upon the dais, the mayor, i wrote the mayors husband is obituary, other members of the family. If i went around the room at any given time theres four or five people in there that ive been involved with them in a very kind of intimate time in their life. Host in the buck you have a section where you are chatting with an author visiting your house to ge and even death havia deep conversation having to do with racism and privilege and collective memory and this idea comes up later in the book when theres a Community Tragedy thats been kind of covered up over the generations. You talk about collective silence and i dont know if politics is the right word out being a member of the community are being represented of the community as you are, how does that help guide a community out of collective silence and grow in a positive way and fax so what im asking is how does talking about difficult subjects or confronting a physical passed in the Community Help the community to grow . Guest i had this conversation with my friend. And i know i speak for myself in this, you dont want to bring up these things that might be issues of race and justice, abuse thats happened unless someone brings up to you first that isnt my place. In a small town you are trying to keep privacy for different things. We have a balance where we might know what everyone is up to but we dont face up. To give them a sort of veil of privacy i guess. But like talking with ernestine and then shining a light on that in the privacy of my living room, she could talk about things that she had grown up with, this is an alaskan native woman who had an incredible stories. She had been homeless at 50 and a College Professor by 70, shed written a beautiful book. But in public it might be awkward to have a conversation like you and i are having because neither one of us would want to say the wrong thing or have it interpreted the wrong way. There is so much of that and the same with the situation in communities where the past crime was uncovered and it turned out people kind of had an idea about that but never nobody ever said anything. And now i think especially Community Leaders and this has come through loud and clear with the black lives matter and those of us that are privileged white they are supposed to say stuff and say this is not right, i dont think this is right and they are supposed to call people out on it publicly and you can do it politely. Any time she speaks, she is a wonderful, nice grandmotherly person, sparkly eyes, she writes about hard things in a way that is a likeness to and youve done it in your book the way is harder when tragedy that its challenging. She ends all of her speeches with she puts her fist up and smash the patriarchy. She does this in front of governors and you want to stand up and cheered. For me that is the same as people do go to church and hold their hands up. Im episcopalian so i dont do the waiting staff. But so moving and she does it in such a way that its coming from love, not hate. But this is what im going to do and she says that at the end of everything she speaks so that is the way that the leader, a native woman would do this and she did it every time and nobody got mad at her about it or maybe they did it they didnt say so. She did that and i love her for it. Host in the book you are writing about community disagreements or difficult spots in a communitys history and how people at ththe people of the cu specifically because its a memoir, take a stand and speak up and encourage people to look at their community, look at themselves and make a change. Host guest a newspaper editor that came to a few characters in the book, ray came in 1955, columbia grad, to teach french, from a logging town and in 1955 really in the middle of nowhere because it was before anything, not even a Radio Station or tv. He brought to this idea of culture and then he started a Student Newspaper that became a local paper thats still in existence. They started publishing the regular news and helped found a public Radio Station. The local Conservation Group that is responsible for a lot of preserve lands around here and he also served on the assembly for seven terms as a socialist. At one point he was called red ray, the powers that be and he went right to the source of the rumor and explained the difference between socialism and communism and assured them he wasnt a communist. I see that legacy that he left in one small town and its still here. We still have to radi the radio, we still have the local Players Group and a strong Conservation Group, we still have a newspaper. And thats ray, one person in a small town isnt exactly what ty what you think of as your stereotypical alaskan, but very much so. Host he is a great character and i wish that i could meet him somehow. Something about the people in this book makes me want to reach into the pages and come have coffee with me, tell me more about this. Tell me about some of the other characters in the book. Guest one of my favorites is a former mayor and retired special ed teacher and she has a flower farm now and she grows flowers and delivers them everywhere, around town, to motel rooms, wherever people want Fresh Flowers all summer, but stephanie was a great big dog and she is a buddhist and really helped me to go out and see her and say what am i doing they are yelling at me and screaming. She gave me this book from choosing civility. A great book. Anybody thinking about running for office who is thinking about living in the world a little bit better this is a wonderful book. The cofounder of the Johns Hopkins stability project. And you know, its it just really helped me. And she had all this stuff underlined and circled from when she was mayor. Then what happened is we ended up people quit. Theres all kind of controversy anand the end we ended up appoig stephanie to a speech during a really serious illness so that one is overshadowing us but the fact that she was mayor during that time made us realize what we were doing wasnt life and death and here we have somebody that had obviously in a headscarf and cancer and a service dog with her and yet she wanted to be on the assembly and that changed for me. I could feel the room change when she came in and of course we all know that we are terminal in a way, that to have someone say im here to do this for the community and i know i might not have as much time as the rest of you, that was a game changer. Host shes setting an example in the way that you intended but also in a different way. Also set an example for you. Guest that really helped me because she put her hand out and said dont say anything. [laughter] just vote. You can vote. That was helpful. One time is that i ca i said i t anymore. Im going to quit. She said dont be silly. Just dont go to the next meeting. You can do that . She said sure you can. If you miss three then they can take you off. Knowing i had a backdoor, i never used it, but i felt like okay if it just looks like its going to be too much for me i can just not go and knowing that empowered me in a way. And then tom, of the news, fighting the man and he reported on it for years and has lots of issues about the kind of inertia of government and the slowness and all these things. There is many and im sure they are there. I just happened to adore the ones i was around and even though i disagree with. Host i have two or three more questions and then i want to go to the audience. I can see the little red numbers coming up with questions. There is a topic in the book you write what is the expectation to make everyone comfortable, what is the expectation, so what do we do about that, do you have any thoughts about that . Guest i dont know if it is generational or my family. I hate to paint a broad brush and say this is how we all are because we are all different in and of itself. But the way i was raised, if they were the person in the room that is the good hostess did everybody have enough to eat, i will put the dog out to speak to [laughter] golden retriever. By the time i got done, i felt like i had more courage to be okay if people were not comfortable with it as long as my wise and that is just an ongoing issue of how to to be public and not have your expectations, how to separate that. One of the best pieces of advice i got was a manager that said to me you have raised five children. They are pretty good. They are all contributing citizens and good people. Didnt sometimes they get mad at you and not like your rules, you bet i did. She said that your mothers brain on. You can love them all and tell them you are not going to get a pair of shoes and you have to go to bed now and yes you have to get up and we are going to do the firewood today, those kind of things. But hopefully i can still like everybody but instead of the hostess i could see the mother, the boss of this place. Host the boss of the place. Guest that helped me tremendously because some of these people i didnt even like and i was worried. Host its a good way to look at it through a different lens and i dont know the word, more power or maybe a different way to navigate a challenge. Host guest and to know i can love someone and not trust them, which sometimes happens with teenagers. [laughter] i adore them, but careful. They might not tell you the truth about where they went last night. With all kinds of family members that happens so i start thinking of the family members as well as the residents. Host on the subject of love and then we will go to the questions. You have a great love for alaska and you write about the wilderness, specifically the arctic wildlife refuge and the trip you took and on the truth unit marty neary and you quote her asking him income above, the 1920s, what is the most precious thing in life, so im curious what do you think as a person that has contributed to the politics, the democracy of the community, a person that writes obituaries in the community and contribute and thinks a lot about the health of their community and wellbeing of their community, what makes a good life for you . Guest for me it is all about relationships and i think that is why it is challenging and its about, you know, do you love while, have you been loved, do you take care of the people around you. Anthony fauci says i dont understand how to tell you to take care of everybody they wearing a mask. I dont understand how to explain why you should love your neighbor. [laughter] and thats i think thats it. The place you are in you should do everything you can to leave is at least as good as when you got there and hopefully a little better. Your community and family and friends. The way those relationships evolve with all kinds of people it doesnt have to be like mine. I have another friend who never had any children and pass a whole family around her that shes created these relationships for years and years by caring for people, by being fair, generous in your community. And it doesnt mean sure, you can write checks, but its more than that. Its volunteering and being part of things. Host i feel so inspired. Should we go to questions, how do we do that, does kate do that or do i do that . I think we go to the qanda, i think i do it. We have one person who says Many Americans ar were focused on National Politics particularly the president ial election instead of the local inn. Co. Officials have a daily index of their life. How have you educated your community on those roles and participation in the process and how can we convince more women to run for local office, so it is a doubleheader. Guest i dont think i educated my community very well. They educated me. The haines is a place everybody is aware of local issues and not so much national. National, sure people argue about that, coffee shop and bar but in general they wil would ae more about what is on the assembly agenda. They tend to line up in the chance that it could match the national, the overtime i emphasize the local and we are seeing that now come issues of Public Health and justice. They come right down to decisions that are made every single meeting by small groups of people in small towns, medium towns, just issues about policy, do the women i work at the library gets paid less than the men they work for public works. Has anybody looked at that. I am ashamed to say i didnt. It never occurred to me. All the news in the last few months has brought to right front and center. Even to the idea that our Assembly Meetings in many Public Meetings in small towns require you to be present to speak and now we are all doing this. Even in haines, my kids have been attending Assembly Meetings and have never gone before because its 6 30 on a tuesday. They are not going to sit down in the Assembly Chambers and waits to speak. Now they can do it online so maybe we need to change the process to get more people participating. And that can be made at a local level. So i just think its critical. The police, local people Hire Police Department they say the policies that the budget. Now we have to run the place. But we can maybe change things and i thought of it again when i was on the assembly i thought that this is what i have to do. I have to leave before i have dinner with my husband because he doesnt get home from work. Makes a meeting later. Have it go from eight to nine instead of five to 7 30 which is about the worst time in the world for most. Frankly when men are good at this because they see the things that mattered to people. I think in general, women tend to be less the women spoke up for for families, communities, schools and parks and it seemed like it was all about business fulltime. Not that the economy isnt important and women certainly contribute to it and have a lot to say about it but why is it such a big issue, make it like normal. Why do we have to go back to work like six weeks after having a baby if you are lucky and have that kind of insurance. Every other country in the world they give you some time and tell you the most important thing is to be with your kids. How are you supposed to do that if you cant take off work. Those children are our children and they are going to be the leaders next and we need to get this right. Do you think alaska might become more progressive . Guest writenow interesting things are happening because we have a serious challenge to the republican incumbent who operates on a lot of peoples needs and fixing stuff. Alaska is a small state and hes also a commercial fisherman. He isnt super liberal but hes a democrat. Sso he is neck and neck with don young so it is possible. Alaskans tend to support her pretty well so it could happen. Host we have a question here what did writing obituaries teach you about treading on sensitive terrain my focus but i did all the time was to find the good, to look at here we all know the first thing you when they start doing that, the personality comes through. So in things like difficult topics say somebody died of alcohol or take their own life, you know, these things happen. I ask them how would you like them ttohandle this, they wanteo mention it, is it important for the family to see something in the obituary or not. If thereve been several marriages if they dont want to necessarily acknowledge them, how can we do that. Maybe youve got children from them so we will put their last names and a. Trying to find something that the other one is when you are writing an obituary, you want to think about what needs to be said and what doesnt need to be said. You also want to capture their personalities of her instance if there is somebody that was in a running feud with their neighbor, you dont quote the neighbor. Instead, you quote her best friend saying she did it to you should have seen her. Then its a complement. That is true of politics, to back. When a basketball coach stands up and speaks up for clean water, the environmentalists in the room or, everybody has been hearing from them through the Everybody Knows hes got to keep your water clean, then people will listen to him because it is a different voice and someone they trust. So its how you deliver the message. Sometimes it comes down to who is saying it is if someone they trust or someone they dont. Host what havent i asked you that they want us to know . Guest . People who want to go back to some kind of good old days and people who want to go forward and really they are the same thing. I mean everybody wants the same thing. Food, health, stability, to have a good job, go out in the park, and i think finding that somehow and trying to govern ourselves with us moving forward, that might help especially as things rolling to the full and the election and the winter. You always want people of change. Everybody went to dances every friday night and brought food to potlucks. I said dont you miss that. I could listen to my opera on the radio, look at the well appointed homes. If you dont like change, you die. Its like cs lewis said you cant go on being a good egg forever. We can keep going. And i went as a grandmother on the assembly that i changed a lot. Im better at it now and i got a lot of courage from it. Host talk about how we are living in the past cant present and the future at the same time. Guest thats fromfriend of a fine alaskan writer wrote a book ordinary wolves and he writes rates above for orion. Anyway, terrific writer. He observed that in rural alaska here in the past, present and future all at once because of Climate Change and the scope of development into the world is coming in so fast in the places that were so remote that no wonder we are stretched. That is how the whole country is right now. Everything is moving faster and faster as we realize we dont have any control. Even on the local level, statelevel, national, saying what is it we want and how can we get there and thats what the government does. All the government is as a sort of collective agreement on the rules to live by. Its to live together in the communities and states and these are the things that they collectively agree are of value. Guest im sure that i will write another book. I dont know. Right now, i am kind of treading water as we all are. I have a granddaughter that i last saw when i cut the umbilical cord and then the state went into lockdown and the next day i somehow figured [inaudible] i got to see, the head of the pandemic i was there in january. But im worried about him living home alone, my sisters, my dad, so these are pretty much taking it day by day and im sure that i will write about it as i get it sorted out. Host i will look at the chat. Somebody says the good old days were not so good. I want to thank you. This has been wonderful and your voice is an important voice and it is a pleasure to talk with you. The length of purchasing, and the books can be found in the chat. I cant recommend this book enough especially now and i just want to thank you so much. This has been a delight. Guest im going to pass your book onto my local hospice. I think that it will really help people. I was getting all this book stuff that i want to do one for next weeks paper. Thank you all so much. I appreciate it. Guest thank you and to the atlantic History Center. Its nice to be in georgia. The