Teaching, Empathy, and Living Abroad with Alex Poppe

Writer, teacher, and humanitarian aid worker Alex Poppe joined me last year to talk about her journey from acting to teaching to writing, and how her experiences abroad influenced her journey. She returns to the show today to talk about her new memoir, Breakfast Wine, which chronicles her time teaching in Iraq. We also talk about what we each learned from living abroad at different ages and for different amounts of time, the special magic of teaching teens and young adults, and the way the arts teach us empathy and are a uniquely human way to give life meaning. Alex, who worked for USAID, also gives us a glimpse of the power of humanitarian aid around the world.

Episode breakdown:

00:00 Introduction
04:18 Teaching international students changes perceptions about other cultures.
08:16 Political divisions and cultural nuances within Iraq explained.
12:26 Americans are insulated from ongoing events in Iraq.
16:09 Motivations for living abroad differ by age and situation.
20:47 Financial reasons and curiosity drive educators to work overseas.
24:39 The emotional impact of teaching youth in conflict regions.
28:14 Teachers and students mutually influence each other’s lives deeply.
32:34 Adjusting to working with USAID and NGO environments.
36:00 Culture shock of returning to the US after years abroad.
40:26 Living abroad changes your outlook and maturity in many ways.
44:11 Encountering anti-American sentiment versus curiosity abroad.
48:09 The arts foster empathy and human connection in society.
52:28 Creative collaboration and failing exuberantly in brainstorming sessions.
56:01 The writing process of Breakfast Wine was messy and surprising.
01:03:34 Personal journey revealed through the writing process.

Show Links: Alex Poppe

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Transcript: Alex Poppe

Please note: This is an unedited transcript, provided as a courtesy, and reflects the actual conversation as closely as possible. Please forgive any typographical or grammatical errors.

Nancy Norbeck [00:00:06]:
Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity. Ordinary people, extraordinary creativity. Here’s how to get unstuck. I’m your host, creativity coach, Nancy Norbeck. Let’s go. Writer, teacher, and humanitarian aid worker Alex Poppe joined me last year to talk about her journey from acting to teaching to writing, and how her experiences abroad influenced that journey. She returns to the show today to talk about her new memoir, “Breakfast Wine,” which chronicles her time teaching in Iraq. We also talk about what we each learned from living abroad at different ages and for different amounts of time, the special magic of teaching teens and young adults, and the way the arts teach us empathy and are a uniquely human way to give life meaning.

Nancy Norbeck [00:00:52]:
Alex, who worked for USAID, also gives us a glimpse of the power of humanitarian aid around the world. Here’s my conversation with Alex Poppe. Alex Poppe, welcome back to Follow Your Curiosity.

Alex Poppe [00:01:07]:
Nancy, thanks for having me back. It’s great to see you. I really appreciate your having me on a second time.

Nancy Norbeck [00:01:13]:
Oh, you’re welcome. So folks who, haven’t heard your our first conversation, if you wanna hear all of Alex’s backstory, that’s where you should go for that. Since this is her second visit, we won’t do that again. But, we talked a a fair bit the first time about your teaching adventures abroad, and now you have a book that you have written pretty much specifically about that. And it comes out what’s the release date again? June?

Alex Poppe [00:01:42]:
June tenth. And it’s being released by Apprentice House Press, which is an independent press from, Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland. And I just wanna give a little shout out. I I feel like they’ve been very responsive and a great partner along the way. I’ve published now on five independent presses, and each one has its pluses or minuses. But I feel like this press has given me a lot of care and concern. Just for example, they gave me additional ARCs and didn’t charge me.

Nancy Norbeck [00:02:18]:
ARCs are…

Alex Poppe [00:02:19]:
Advance review copies. Sorry. And so I think that was done because I’ve been recently unemployed with the furlough for USAID. So it’s just to me, that’s like an extra kindness that wasn’t necessary. I I very much appreciate it. So and they they also had someone do social media reels for us. So that’s been great because I’m technologically just a dinosaur. I’m GenX.

Alex Poppe [00:02:47]:
I’m not good at it. I don’t like social media, and, that was great. I have, like, 12 reels, and I’m kinda spreading them out of my socials, one per week. So I’ve never had that before from, a publisher, so that was great.

Nancy Norbeck [00:03:00]:
That’s fantastic. So in about a week, you will be able to get your very own copy of Breakfast Wine, which is all about Alex’s adventures teaching in Iraq and Kurdistan. And I have to say, as I read it, I thought so often of my experience teaching international students, which is very different from your experience because I was here in New Jersey. Mhmm. And yet there were so many things that reminded me of, you know, we’re still both teaching international students. Mine mine were the ones that were away from home, where you were the one who was away from home. But, you know, those those moments of, you know, do I you know, who whose whose family member, you know, is in some high place where you think that your power their power is gonna, you know, protect you if you don’t bother to do your homework? And, you know, what influence do you think you can use here? And and, you know, who’s who’s actually here to do the work and and who isn’t? And also just who’s really, really sweet and who’s in a situation that, you know, might be less than ideal. All all of those kinds of of questions.

Nancy Norbeck [00:04:18]:
I mean, my kids were more vulnerable because they were away from home, whereas you were the one who was more vulnerable in in your situation. But but so many moments, and especially, I think, one of the things that really occurred to me was the way that, you know, I think I was thinking back to the way that a lot of people in probably in any given country, but certainly, you know, especially people that I grew up with would look at different ethnic groups as all being the same. You know? And I mostly taught Asian kids, though I also had the occasional kid from Germany or Poland or Russia or wherever. And you can’t you can’t teach kids from another place and continue to see all people from different places and different ethnic groups as the same. It’s just not possible because you are interacting with those folks individually every single day, and you realize what a phenomenal myth that is. And, I mean, it is right on its face. You know? It should be obvious that every single person is a different person and personality and comes from their own background and all of that. But I think it doesn’t hit home for most people because they’re not exposed to people from different places.

Nancy Norbeck [00:05:48]:
And I suspect, especially having read the book, that you probably had similar situations and moments and maybe even conversations with people from home.

Alex Poppe [00:06:00]:
Yes and no. You know, the kids the some of the kids were displaced. Like, I had Yazidi kids, and kids from the South during during ISIS and post ISIS, and they had been displaced. So we had, you know, kids that were being housed at the school. The school opened up extra scholarships basically to bring them to a place of safety and security where they can continue learning. But their families were living in IDP camps and tents and other places. And then during COVID, when, you know, there’s not a reliable Internet or electricity access, we had kids that were studying from refugee camps again. So, some of them were not in their own locations.

Alex Poppe [00:06:43]:
And and then kids that come up from the South are tend to be Arab, and the kids in the North Of Iraq are Kurdish. And sometimes those two groups don’t like each other given the historical animosity ginned up by Saddam. I don’t know how to say this. Saddam committed genocide against the Kurds. It’s really what I wanna say.

Nancy Norbeck [00:07:02]:
Right.

Alex Poppe [00:07:03]:
So sometimes that would play out. And then even the Kurds were, you know, aligned along political parties. So, PUK was a stronghold in Sulaymaniyah where the university I taught in was, and, the Kurdistan Regional Government, the Barzani party Party, the KDP stronghold was in your bill where I taught at the international school. And so sometimes you’d have, like, a few Barzonis kinda sprinkled into the Soleimaniya community, and there was certain friction between those two political parties that stems from the civil war, and it stems from, Masood Ghorezani asking Saddam Hussein to pair with him and defeat the PUK, which meant Kurd shed Kurd blood. So it’s the veneer of homogeny, but there are underlying drivers of conflict that, you know, sometimes would erupt. Like, when Masood Barsani pushed that referendum in 02/2018, he really thought the international community was going to back him up even though the international community was committed to publicly to a one Iraq policy. They didn’t wanna see the country carved up into thirds. They didn’t wanna see a Kurdish north, a Sunni, middle, and a Shia south.

Alex Poppe [00:08:16]:
And, so there was, like, a nineteen hour war because of Peshmerga, the special forces of the Kurdistan Regional Government, they’re allied on political parties, so they have different command structures depending on their political parties. They’re not, like, the US army is a homogeneous fighting force. It doesn’t work that way. So you had different Peshmerga forces in Kirkuk when that conflict kicked off that some followed one commander who said stand down and and one followed the other commander that said no fight or Kirk Cook because it’s where the oil was. And that added to the animosity intentions, you know, within a homogeneous group.

Nancy Norbeck [00:08:57]:
Yeah. That’s that’s a lot. I mean, that that definitely, you know, is a major theme in the book, you know, kind of trying to keep track of all of the political situation. It was very clear to me how, I guess, the word is insulated. We all were from everything that was going on over there in a way that, obviously, you weren’t because you were living it, you know, in that situation with all this kid. But I was like, wow. You know? I had no idea, and I suspect that most people here really didn’t much, you know, after the fall of Saddam Hussein pay much attention to what was going on in Iraq anymore because, basically, it was over as far as news coverage was concerned. Like, I think you could have found out if you had wanted to, but you probably really had to go looking for it.

Nancy Norbeck [00:09:50]:
So, you know, all of those different dynamics were really, you know, not overwhelming, but surprising to see, like, the degree of, wow. You know, all of the different the different factions. You know? Like, you you mentioned Barzani and Hoa. Calavani. No. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.

Nancy Norbeck [00:10:13]:
But there was a different name that you used.

Alex Poppe [00:10:15]:
Oh, the PUK and the KDP because they’re different political parties that have very similar initials.

Nancy Norbeck [00:10:21]:
Yeah. That’s sort of like when I lived in Northern Ireland, it was like this alphabet soup of all of the the different abbreviations for different groups and very similar kind of kind of thing. But it was like, holy cow. You know, I had no no clue that there were all of these different different pieces. And I realized at one point, I was like, the last name that I remember associating with Iraq was Hamid Karzai, and that has to have been at least twenty years ago. So, of course, there are different people over there now. Yeah. Wow.

Nancy Norbeck [00:10:47]:
It’s been a long time.

Alex Poppe [00:10:49]:
Yeah. You know, when I went, I went in 02/2011. And at that year, Kurdistan was on, like, National Geographic’s fifty two places to go in 02/2011, I think, or 02/2012. So there was relative peace and stability and security and a big push for investment because the North was just rich with resources, oil, natural gas, different minerals. And you had lots of contractors. You had lots of activity in the area. And our bill was trying to make itself as the new Dubai. You know? But, you know, people here in The States I remember I was waiting tables at Citywide in New York, and they would think Kurdistan was Kyrgyzstan or one of those stands over there, and then I, you know, then I would say it’s Northern Iraq, and then they would, like, thank me for my service.

Alex Poppe [00:11:38]:
And it’s like, I’m not military. I’m, you know, I’m not gonna be in any harms danger or harms way. And so it was, you know, different. And then ISIS, again, put shone shone the spotlight, I think, you could say, on Iraq. But even now, people don’t know any a lot of people don’t know anything about the Yazidi massacre. And, you know, it’s been, like, a ten year anniversary or anniversary is the wrong word, commemoration, remembrance of that massacre. And the enslavement of the girls, there’s still 3,000 girls estimated that are missing or have never been recovered, and there’s still ISIS is still active in Syria. We see it now post, Bashar al Assad, and yet there seems to be, like, a little awareness in the collective consciousness.

Alex Poppe [00:12:26]:
And I understand the news cycle moves on and especially under our current administration where it’s, you know, break things quickly and move on. There’s just a lot of information, and I think a lot of Americans tune out, because it’s overwhelming or they’re sick of the bad news or they’re worried about the price of eggs, and they’re also, it’s our kind of our cultural character to turn inward and say, I’m concerned about me and mine and not necessarily look out to the geopolitical even though it affects us. You know, there’s a significant amount of refugees coming up to the southern border that aren’t from Mexico or Central Or South America. That’s how bad living situations have gotten in the greater world that mobile and there’s such instability mobilizing migration. There’s so many push factors that are direct or indirect results of our foreign policy.

Nancy Norbeck [00:13:19]:
Yeah. I’m sitting here thinking again. We we were chatting before we started, and we’re like, we could have a whole conversation just about foreign policy if we’re not careful.

Alex Poppe [00:13:29]:
And I

Nancy Norbeck [00:13:29]:
feel like we we could do that again. But Yeah. I’m I’m also you know? And I think we talked about this last time too, but, you know, you you talk at the beginning of the book about, you know, wanting to live outside of your culture. And and I, you know, I resonated with this so much because that’s, you know, that’s that’s why I went to Northern Ireland. You know? I had always wanted to have an immersive experience in another country, and I hadn’t been able to do that as a semester abroad program as an undergrad. And so when I had the opportunity to go in a pretty unconventional way and just be a an unofficial nanny with a family over there, I was like, I might not ever get the chance to do this again, so I’m I’m gonna go. And and there was a line here on on page eight where you said, living abroad is more forgiving for those of us who have not found ourselves according to traditional American measures of success, spouse, children, and homeownership. And I I remember when I I went it was right after I turned 24, I guess.

Nancy Norbeck [00:14:39]:
And when I told people that I was going, my family were the ones who freaked out. You know? You’re going to Northern Ireland. You’re gonna get blown up.

Alex Poppe [00:14:48]:
And I

Nancy Norbeck [00:14:48]:
was like, no. I’m no. I’m not. Though I was there when the Docklands bombing happened, so that was a little bit of a moment of, hi. I’m still alive. Keep breathing. It’s okay. Docklands is in London.

Nancy Norbeck [00:15:00]:
I’m over here. It’s okay. But, you know, a a lot of people who were really excited for me said, this is the time to go because you don’t have any of those things that you’re attached to keeping you from going. You know, you’ll never be in a better position than you are right now to go and do something like that. And I I I read that line, and I thought, yeah. That’s that’s so true. And I think that I think there’s also a a personality type, and this is just me going on my sample size of one, which is me, but, you know, that that is more drawn to something like that. You know, there were plenty of people that I grew up with who and and know now who have never had the desire to do anything like that.

Nancy Norbeck [00:15:42]:
And then there were those of us who are like, get me out of here. I wanna go see the world. I wanna go experience something different. And, clearly, you experienced some of that too. Do you what do you what do you think? Because you were with a whole bunch of other people who were doing the same thing, whereas I was pretty much on my own. Did you see that same kind of thing? I I don’t know if you even talked about it with other people over there, so I don’t I don’t know if you can even speak to that, but I’m curious.

Alex Poppe [00:16:09]:
Well, I went when I was 44. So that was, you know, that’s like I I do agree, like, when you’re in your twenties, that’s the time to go, and it’s become a little bit more culturally acceptable for people in their twenties to go take that time. I mean, there was just that article in the Times about people taking the mini retirements, like, in their thirties. Like, they’ll take six months off between jobs and go do something like that. But I went later, and I went I I mean, I say in the book, curiosity and desperation in equal measure. It was true. I was working the dead end marketing job. It was so badly paid.

Alex Poppe [00:16:44]:
I didn’t have insurance. I still had to wait tables two nights a week in this, like, very mediocre restaurant on the Upper West Side where everyone thought I was an ICE agent undercover because they couldn’t figure out why someone white and educated. And, you know, it’s working at this kind of under the radar restaurant at my perimenopausal age. You know? And it was I mean, I was, like, laying on this air mattress that would, like, sink to the floor every night because it had a hole in, like, two apartment two floors down from us, an apartment had its door kicked in because there had been so many drug buff. They just took the door off. And and then I got this, like, Facebook message from a friend who was really successful, and she’s living in, Hong Kong. She had been Advertising Age a Woman to Watch in 02/2004, and this was 02/2011. She’s like, how’d your light turn out? And I’m like, you know? And then, like, another woman that I had worked with at Mobile Oil when I had a corporate career in the, late eighties, early nineties, she was like her daughter had become an actor and taught her how to use Facebook, so she found me on Facebook.

Alex Poppe [00:17:52]:
Like, you know, what happened with your life? And it’s like, you know, I can do I can touch both walls at the same time if I stretch my hands out in this room. It’s I don’t know how to explain where I’ve derailed. And, so I went because I I just couldn’t I could I had started writing classes in 2010 at the Writers Studio in New York, highly recommend. It’s where I really learned how to be a writer, and I had a hard time affording them. And I you know, my friends were my friends my age were all, like, financially very successful, and I couldn’t hang I couldn’t afford to hang out with them. And so I was just really lost, and I met Jerry Van Dyke who became a mentor. He wrote, captive. He was kidnapped by the Taliban in in 2008 and wrote a book about it.

Alex Poppe [00:18:46]:
He’s written many books about it. Then he wrote a book about, the Latin the labyrinth of political kidnapping as he tried to figure out how he had been freed. And he I mean, he’s just like the Afghanistan Pakistan Guru for, like, sixty minutes and was for a long time consultant on Charlie Wilson’s war because that’s like he embedded with the Mujahideen in the eighties and then wrote about it, which launched his reporter career. And I met him at a book signing, and he really inspired me and gave me the courage to, like, go after this job that I had seen posted in Northern Iraq. And so I was really curious about The Middle East, and I said, I’m gonna go. And it was, the faculty at the international school were we were a mixed bag. You know, we’re all ages, predominantly American, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, and Lebanese because it was a a Lebanese for profit school network. Some were married, some were single.

Alex Poppe [00:19:49]:
A lot of the Americans had crushing student debt, which I think was a motivator to go because we didn’t make a ton of money. We made, like, $2,200 a month, but your housing is paid for. So you can save a majority of that money and chip away at your loans. You know? I mean, I had just paid off my undergraduate and my conservatory loans because I was an actor for a long time before I went to Iraq. So when I I saved that money and was able to pay for my graduate degree without taking a loan, which was really helpful. I didn’t wanna get into another loan situation in my affordities. And then at the at the university that I worked at from 2015 to 2021, the faculty was predominantly American and were was, again, like, millennials to Gen Xers. So I think we all had different reasons for being there.

Alex Poppe [00:20:47]:
A lot of it was financial. But for those of us who stayed, I I think it was something else. For me, it was the sweetness of the kids. They were I say kids. They’re young adults, you know, especially at the university. They were anywhere from 18 to, like, 28. They just there’s just a sweetness there. I mean, I think students are great everywhere.

Alex Poppe [00:21:10]:
It’s the institutions around them that succeed or fail, but, you know, they they tell you they love you and they don’t mean it sexually and they’re not embarrassed to say it. Men and women, you know, they blow you parade float kisses from across the campus. They, like you know, I would throw my back out and they’d wanna carry my stuff for me, and they’re not sucking up like that. They just it’s really that’s that’s, like, the sweetness there. You know? Like, when my, father was in hospital when he was dying of COVID, I got messages from kids, like, every day. And I was teaching when he passed, and I’m I had I got the phone call. I was teaching online, and he had passed. And they were just incredibly generous and empathetic.

Alex Poppe [00:21:58]:
Like, in Trump the first president Trump’s presidency, when he had the Muslim ban, we were our program was on, like, a term break, and so I had left the country to travel. And my students were afraid that I wouldn’t they didn’t understand, I think, the ban, and they were like, can you get back to The States? Are you gonna be okay? Like, their first thought was, like, my well-being. And I was meanwhile, you know, partying in Spain, doing some research for my book about Flamenco. And their, you know, their first concern is, are you gonna be able to get back in the country? Are you okay? And they weren’t even my students anymore. These are the students from the international school years prior. Just, like, so sweet. You know? Just I mean, that’s why I stayed. And I I think if COVID hadn’t, like, in my opinion, ruined teaching or ruined the teaching experience, and if my father hadn’t passed, and if I hadn’t had those books coming out, I probably would have maybe stayed a little longer because I I I I had enormous joy in the classrooms and this real sense of purpose that I segued into working in humanitarian aid organizations, but from the communication side, the storytelling side, and didn’t really get into the field very often, just a few times.

Alex Poppe [00:23:22]:
And so I would be sitting, you know, in relative comfort in The United States. You know, electricity is all the time. Water is clean. I have heat. And I didn’t quite feel that usefulness, that sense of purpose. And, like, just like last week, I had a student email me because someone had told her about the posting I did on social media to for the book. I had a carousel post of different pictures of this of the students from the international school. And she just sent me the most beautiful email about how I had made such a profound impact on her life because I saw her and I recognized how she learned and supported her artistic goals.

Alex Poppe [00:24:01]:
And I, you know, losing my job with USAID because of the cuts is a confidence crushing experience. Yeah. And so to get an email like that is such an affirmation. Like, I did do something in my life that I’m actually really proud of. And I think breakfast wine celebrates that because it celebrates the resilience of women and youth post conflict. Like, this book only exists because the people that I interacted with in Northern Iraq were incredibly generous and kind. I’m sorry.

Nancy Norbeck [00:24:39]:
It’s okay.

Alex Poppe [00:24:42]:
I’m really grateful for the experience. I’m really grateful for the lives I got to intersect my life with for a little while.

Nancy Norbeck [00:24:49]:
Yeah.

Alex Poppe [00:24:51]:
And it it makes me really sad to see, like, someone she was a abundant cut that’s doing things like building up civil society and female economic empowerment and gender equality because those are the things that make their lives better. They make their lives safer and they make their lives worth worth living. And we’re cutting that programming, It seems just to show that we can and to be cruel.

Nancy Norbeck [00:25:16]:
Yeah.

Alex Poppe [00:25:17]:
And we already have inflicted a lot of cruelty specifically on Iraq through our invasion. Sorry. I didn’t mean to get that emotional.

Nancy Norbeck [00:25:28]:
It’s totally okay and completely justified. It’s completely okay.

Alex Poppe [00:25:34]:
I mean, I’m really, like I said, I’m really grateful for, for those years. I’ve learned a ton from them.

Nancy Norbeck [00:25:42]:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think if if you’re teaching and you’re not learning at least as much from your kids as they are from you, you’re not doing good right. You know? I mean, there’s there’s something about that relationship that that you just I I just don’t think it’s possible not to learn from your kids, you know, whether they’re, you know, from a different culture from you or not. There’s just if you’re paying attention, your kids are gonna teach you. And that’s I I just don’t think it could possibly be any other way. And, again, I have zero studies to back me up as I say that, but but I just I think if if you’re missing out on that, something’s something’s out of out of whack. And I wanna go back to something that that you were talking about a minute ago.

Nancy Norbeck [00:26:36]:
You know, when when you talk about how much your students care, because I certainly experienced that too. I mean, I had one of them turn up at the last graduation that I was at my school for because he had heard that they had not renewed my contract and I wasn’t coming back. And he had graduated a couple years before, and it was it was not that long, but it was long enough that, you know, I wasn’t expecting to see him there. It took me a couple seconds to to place him. And when he told me that he came back because he had heard that, I mean, I just about melted into a puddle of goo all over the the lawn. You know? I was like, seriously, you came back because of me. Like, really? You know? And this was the same kid who isn’t a kid anymore, sent me a message on Facebook a couple years later to tell me that my student had just won the award for best writing at his law school and that it was all because of me. And I said, Shantaro, that’s really sweet, but you do realize that you had to do the work to get there.

Nancy Norbeck [00:27:48]:
Right? Like, yeah. I taught you, but if you hadn’t done the work, you wouldn’t be there. So it’s just as much because of you as it is because of me. And, you know, he was like, really? I said, yeah. Really? You deserve some credit too. I mean, I’ll happily take credit for my part, but you need to take credit for your part too. And he had apparently just never thought about that before. And I was like, no, really.

Nancy Norbeck [00:28:14]:
You get to take credit for the part that you did because I can’t just pour it into your brain. You know? But but when, you know, when you talk about, you know, the the kids who come back and tell you what an influence you have. I just wanna tell anybody who’s listening. If you have ever had a teacher who made a huge difference to you and you have not told them, and especially if you have not told them because you think that they won’t remember you or you think that it won’t matter, you should go tell them because they probably will remember you, and it definitely will matter. You will totally make their day. So if you’ve ever doubted, go go do it while you have the chance because I know some people that I’ve said this to haven’t been able to find that teacher and, you know, have have wished that they could have. So go find your teacher and tell them that they made a difference. You won’t regret it.

Alex Poppe [00:29:10]:
Yes. That’s Definitely second that.

Nancy Norbeck [00:29:12]:
That’s my my little plug for for going and and telling your teacher, I promise you won’t regret it. So when you came back and you went to work for I hear people say USAID and USAID, and I don’t know if it really makes a a difference, and you’re shaking your head, so I guess it doesn’t.

Alex Poppe [00:29:32]:
No. I mean, they say them both. There were a couple of other NGOs in between. I didn’t come back, and I may at least start working for USAID USAID.

Nancy Norbeck [00:29:42]:
So but was it a big adjustment?

Alex Poppe [00:29:45]:
Oh, yeah. I mean, just learning the massive apparatus that is USAID and then the relationship between the state department and aid, and that’s always been combative, I think, and there’s a lot of gatekeeping. And then my role was new. It had never been done before, so there was no scaffolding. I I felt like I was constantly throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what would stick. I was the STRATCOM’s adviser for a democracy and governance initiative that was 10 countries across four geographical locations. And so the idea is when a democratic reformer is elected, we would surge attention and resources and support so that that reformer could enact act on corruption measures and deliver on citizen priorities so people remain galvanized to support democracy until the democratic opening would concretize and democracy would take root and hold. And I think probably our best, most successful country is Moldova, which is on its way to EU at Ceschen.

Alex Poppe [00:30:53]:
Guatemala was one of our newest countries, and I just I’m such a fan of president Arevalo. He’s such a reformer that’s really looking to better the lives of people. He’s, there was an initiative before he was elected to eradicate all the dirt floors and replace them with cement floors, but it had gone nowhere under the previous administration. I think they did, like, five or seven floors. And in November, they had hit a huge milestone. They had eradicated the dirt floors in one entire municipality. The ambassador was out. He had some great, very informal, videos on social media just showing the impact on people’s lives because it has a huge effect on poverty and malnutrition.

Alex Poppe [00:31:35]:
And president Ravalos is, you know, working against a really kind of corrupt AG who who’s trying to block every one of his reforms, and he’s been a he was a very good partner, to president Biden in terms of anti narcotics and trafficking measures because Guatemala is such a transit country. And he, you know, he was really being a great partner, and I don’t know I don’t know how the country is gonna fare under the new administration. I you know, it’s a different it’s a different lens for prioritization. But I I I hope he can continue because he’s really doing a lot of good work for people, not for himself.

Nancy Norbeck [00:32:16]:
Yeah. That’s increasingly rare, I think

Alex Poppe [00:32:21]:
Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:32:21]:
To find a leader in that position.

Alex Poppe [00:32:24]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:32:28]:
Yeah. But returning to The US on its own must have been a culture shock too.

Alex Poppe [00:32:34]:
It always is. You know? And, like, you feel it I feel it the most in a supermarket and a hypermarket when there’s, like, so many types of cereal and so many brands of toothpaste. And the first couple times, it’s like it was it was literally paralyzing. You know, especially before I worked in Iraq, I worked in Ukraine, Poland, and Turkey, and made very little money, you know, less than a thousand dollars a month. And so just to, like, take that ticket home to see family once a year was a financial burden. And then you’re in you know, I would bounce between New York where I had lived and had friends or Chicago where my family’s from. They’re very expensive cities. And so to kind of be in that context, I always felt like it always made me feel like a loser.

Alex Poppe [00:33:22]:
Like, I didn’t belong because financially, it just was a different scale. So it’s like there’s something so odd about coming to your home country, a place you’ve theoretically known and should feel like you belong to, and feeling like I I’m not good enough. I don’t deserve to be here. I I just it it it didn’t feel like home, especially along, like, obviously, the economic lines with peers, but it also with perspective. I mean, when I came back from Iraq in 2021, I had so much support. Like, I already had a job online. I had an apartment waiting for me in November, so I got back in the September when we crashed at my mom’s. And I had my bank accounts, and getting a state ID was problematic because I didn’t have a utility in my name, and I, I didn’t have mail at her address.

Nancy Norbeck [00:34:28]:
Yeah.

Alex Poppe [00:34:28]:
And I was like, I have all this support. It was only, like, at the last minute at the DMV where I was getting a state a state ID. And I was like, oh, wait. I can pull up my payroll thing and you can see that I have a bank with an address. And so I thought, what do you do if you’re coming out of incarceration and you don’t have a job or you don’t have a place to stay? You don’t have any of these things that I have. How do you get started? Yeah. And I mentioned it to a friend of mine, and and that friend was like, I never think about that. And that’s what I mean if I could still it was really hard to come back to a context that I had previously, you know, had fit me like a glove.

Alex Poppe [00:35:11]:
I just I had changed a lot. My my viewpoints had changed a lot. It was it’s very hard to kind of be back in those spaces. I I definitely feel like a tourist when I’m in Chicago. When people say, where are you from? When I say Chicago, I always feel fraudulent because I spent my life my adult life trying to leave it, and I it just doesn’t fit. You know, when I hear people in Chicago call it Chiraq, I get very angry because our violence is our own making from our racism and our redlining. It’s not because the country came in and destroyed the infrastructure and bombed it. It’s a different perspective.

Nancy Norbeck [00:35:54]:
Yeah. For sure. For sure. I mean, it could be more different.

Alex Poppe [00:36:00]:
Yeah. And I’m grateful for the perspective, though. It didn’t I think it definitely, you know, I needed to grow up in ways that perhaps you grow up if you have children in those ways. And since I’ve never had children, I don’t know. So I feel like living in these contexts, developing our post conflict context, like, helped me mature in a way that I’m not sure I would have if I had stayed just my entire life in The US. I’m not saying you have to go abroad to, like, mature. I’m just saying for myself because I never had kids and, you know, I I’m born white and middle class. I have all these advantages.

Alex Poppe [00:36:37]:
I call them my birth gifts that I didn’t work hard to get. My father worked hard, so I have them. But I’m not sure I’m not sure I would have had had the viewpoints I have today if I hadn’t been abroad for so long.

Nancy Norbeck [00:36:52]:
Yeah. I I I think I think going abroad, I mean, I was only there for six months, so a world of difference time wise from what you did. But it definitely it definitely forces you to rely on yourself more. It it forces you to, you know, look at the world differently. I mean, I always find it so much more fascinating to look at a newspaper in another country to read American news than to read it here. You know, I I was amazed by how much more interested I was in American news when I was in Northern Ireland than than I was when I was here. And that’s still true. I mean, in many ways, I’d much rather read a foreign newspaper than read an American newspaper because the perspective is is just different and often more enlightening.

Nancy Norbeck [00:37:50]:
But, you know, you also get that different perspective from everyone else. I mean, you you mentioned in in the book, you know, saying to your kids a couple of times, I think it was your kids, you know, you don’t hate me because I’m American. And they were like, no. Yeah. And and, you know, there there are certainly you know, Northern Ireland didn’t really expect people to hate me. But at the same time, you know, Americans definitely have a reputation abroad. And, you know, it it you you have those moments of especially at different times. You know, when when I was in London in 02/2005, you know, during that whole conflict, you know, you you had that that moment of if somebody asked me where I’m from, do I tell them I’m from Canada? You know, which I never did, but, you know, there were definitely moments where it was kinda tempting because you didn’t really wanna have to own up to the fact that, you know, yeah, George w and Tony Blair are good pals, and I know it’s a whole big conversation.

Nancy Norbeck [00:38:57]:
Do we have to go there? You know? But, you know, it’s it’s it’s got its baggage. And and you have to contend to that with that when you’re abroad in a way that you can be completely ignorant of when you’re here because you’re not forced to confront that international perspective. So so, yeah, you’re you’re definitely you know, you’re you’re looking at that reduced selection of toothpaste. I recognize that when you said it. You know? The moment when I was standing in the grocery store just thinking, this is, you know, not not nothing, but definitely much less than there would be at Walmart, you know, or anywhere, you know, a regular drugstore here. And and just kinda going, yeah. This is this is different. It’s not necessarily better or worse.

Nancy Norbeck [00:39:49]:
It’s just different. And so, you know, adjusting to all of that. And then when you come home and you hear people talking about things that now you see differently, it’s kind of like, maybe I’ll just roll my eyes on the inside and not make a big deal out of this because it’s probably not worth the conversation. But because your perspective has changed, you you don’t quite fit the way that you did before. So so, yeah, you you grow in surprising ways when you take yourself out of the soil that you are used to and plant yourself somewhere else.

Alex Poppe [00:40:26]:
Yeah. A %. I mean, that’s the beautiful thing about curiosity. It can lead you in a direction that you would have never imagined yourself in. You know, when I was in my teens or twenties, I never thought that I would be in Iraq in my mid forties. And it I I I mean, I I worked in the West Bank, and I was down in Baghdad a few times speaking at conferences and training teachers. I I mean, I never would have thought I would have had those experiences. You know? And then I remember when when I was at the university teaching, someone from Amistansoria University came up to watch my classes, and he told me I was like, oh, so how is it? Like, how do you how do your students view Americans? He’s like, oh, they don’t like you guys.

Alex Poppe [00:41:13]:
And I was like, oh, okay. That’s fair. And then, like, a month later, I was invited down to go train teachers. And from that, like and then a lot of them had come from that same geographical region, and they were very welcoming. And then I spoke at a conference at that same university, and the director of the language department was like, some of the students wanna talk to you or your can will you give them an hour? Like, yeah. Of course. And they couldn’t have been nicer and friendlier. They were so excited that they’d never met an American before.

Alex Poppe [00:41:49]:
They were obsessed with American movies, and, like, they were so excited to meet an American. And it so it wasn’t any of the, like, oh, they hate you. I I experienced none of that. And I think I think around the world, my experience has been well, if I’m a guest in someone’s country, they’re smart enough to recognize the difference between American people and American governmental policy. Mhmm. And I’m you know what? I don’t know if we always do that. I remember after nine eleven, didn’t we start calling them Freedom Prize? Like, we don’t necessarily differentiate. But I I’ve been lucky enough that when I’m abroad, I find that people do.

Alex Poppe [00:42:28]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I had students who had horrific experiences during the two thousand and three invasion when they were, like, 12 or 13 year olds directly on the receiving end of violence from coalition forces. So that they don’t hate Americans is amazing to me.

Nancy Norbeck [00:42:49]:
Mhmm.

Alex Poppe [00:42:50]:
Or, you know, they’ve seen, you know, family members shot and killed in home raid. There’s a misunderstanding of of culture and a lack of fluency in language, very senseless deaths, and they don’t hate Americans. And that to me is very generous. Yeah. I mean, when you look at the hyperpolarization in our own country of among ideas, not even about actual physical violence and we are so hyperly polarized. It’s pretty astounding to me. And I think I think we’ve lost a fundamental respect for human life

Nancy Norbeck [00:43:35]:
Yeah.

Alex Poppe [00:43:37]:
Which other contexts, because they’re challenging on any given day, have a little more respect for it because it’s so much more fragile for them.

Nancy Norbeck [00:43:48]:
Mhmm.

Alex Poppe [00:43:48]:
That’s just my opinion. I’m sure I’m offended somebody who’s listening, but I’m trying to figure out why we’re so kind of cavalier about the loss of life. Like, we just bombed a bunch of targets in Yemen, and we haven’t distinguished and publicly called if they were civilian or legitimate, air quote, military targets. But the death count over the weekend has already reached eighty and several hundred have been injured. And, again, it’s a country that’s vulnerable on any day of the week, lack of infrastructure, health care, portable water, food. So injuries will probably become fatalities, and it doesn’t register.

Nancy Norbeck [00:44:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s kind of like this is so Gen X, but the image that’s coming to mind is the the light up maps at the end of War Games, you know, the movie where where it’s just we’re just bombing places on the map, and they’re just places on the map because it isn’t real.

Alex Poppe [00:44:58]:
Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:45:00]:
Yeah. There’s there’s nothing more than just light light up dots on the map, and none of it’s real, except that it is real.

Alex Poppe [00:45:11]:
It goes back to this, like, loss of empathy. You know, we’re seeing foreign policy become very transactional and a lack of empathy. And, I mean, to me, that’s one of the most alarming things about, book bans because there’s significant research about reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. It stimulates the same parts of your brain as though you’re having the experience yourself, so it builds in that empathy for people who are different from us. And if we take away those stories, we’re cutting off yet another conduit to develop empathy, which the arts do so successfully. And, again, we treat art education as, like, an add on, not something that’s kind of necessary for societal and mental health and well-being.

Nancy Norbeck [00:46:01]:
Yeah. And then, you know, we we wonder why why we’re lacking in all of these things. And I I swear that I remember this ad from thirty years ago, and I have looked for it online, and I can’t find it. So it’s it’s possible that I just imagined it, but I would swear that I saw an ad for VH one’s save the music program in, like, one of the early iterations of that program that had a mother walking down the street with her relatively young kid, and they pass a street musician. And the mom says something about, oh, you know, let’s stop and listen to the music or isn’t that great or something like that. And the kid just doesn’t care at all because there’s no music education in schools. That’s the whole point of the ad. You know? And it’s

Alex Poppe [00:46:54]:
Oh, wow.

Nancy Norbeck [00:46:55]:
And it’s horrifying to watch this child just be like, no. That’s stupid. Why would I wanna do that? You know? And it’s and it, you know, was an ad that’s meant to be horrifying because why you know, what’s wrong with this kid? Well, what’s wrong with this kid is that this is what’ll happen if we cut arts funding. You know? And I feel like, you know, this is exactly what what you’re talking about. You know? We we lose the ability to see the beauty in things if we cut the arts funding. And, you know, there’s there’s that famous supposed Churchill quote about, you know, if we if we stop with the arts, what are we fighting for? And I think that that’s apparently not something that he said. But either way, the point applies. Right? Like, even if you didn’t say it, if somebody else said it, or if they made it up, like, what what are you doing all this for if it’s not to save those experiences? Because that’s what makes life so rich and and so exciting and vivid is to have, you know, a Vaughan Williams symphony or a Picasso painting or, you know, to go see a Stravinsky ballet.

Nancy Norbeck [00:48:09]:
It’s it’s that kind of stuff where to be in the ballet or in the symphony, you know, or to write one or any any of that. That’s that’s what makes life so exciting. It’s not to sit here and fight the war. It’s to be able to do all of those other things. Like, that’s that’s what makes us human.

Alex Poppe [00:48:33]:
A hundred percent. And it’s such a connector. Like, I I live in Tulsa, which you might not think is as multicultural as it is. But on first Fridays, when they have the gallery you know, the galleries are open on Friday, the first Fridays of the month, and it is so multiracial in those spaces.

Nancy Norbeck [00:48:56]:
And,

Alex Poppe [00:48:56]:
just a lot of identity lines crossing, and it’s lovely to see, and you wouldn’t necessarily see it. I think you’d see it in Tulsa, but you do. It’s it’s a very little blue bubble in this very red state. But I’m grateful that the arts are such a driver of this diversity, equity, and inclusion as is the Tulsa remote program, which is how I came down to Tulsa in the first place. They incentivize remote workers to drive diversity, equity, and inclusion in the city, and it’s had a huge economic impact on the city, which is, you know, Harvard Business, school has a lot of reporting on it. It’s quite successful, the program. But as a social integrator and connector, it’s been amazing because it is driving a lot of different types of people to this city that had been fundamentally red for a long time and has a very kind of racist history with Black Wall Street and the massacre.

Nancy Norbeck [00:49:51]:
Yeah.

Alex Poppe [00:49:52]:
So it’s it’s nice to see that at the local level, there are these pockets of hope. I feel like Tulsa is this place that is quite hopeful to be in, and a lot of that is on the strength of the Tulsa remote program, driving diversity, equity, inclusion, and on the strength of George Kaiser Family Foundation, funding so much financial support to arts. There’s so many artist grants, and he’s so generous. And the city itself, I mean, it’s half a million people. There’s so many churches around, and there are a 50 nonprofits because people recognize there’s need, and they’re willing to step up and fill that need. There’s a real kindness in that city. I’m really happy that I’ve had a chance to experience it. And it’s so inextricably inextricably linked in my experience to art programming and this this idea of of curiosity leading to the next thing.

Alex Poppe [00:50:48]:
And there’s also a huge entrepreneur kind of start up culture here. And so I went to, intro to entrepreneurship, like, a boot camp a three hour boot camp last week. It was so fun. It was three hours of collaborative creative problem solving. Like, the exercise was think of the worst idea in the world, write it on a piece of paper, pass it to the next table. Okay. You guys have to make a pitch for it, a founder’s pitch. And they were ideas like clothing for fish, designer air, and we got an electric carpet, electric carpet mower.

Alex Poppe [00:51:29]:
Wow. And so and you took it seriously. It was such a creative like, my writer brain was berserking, but it was problem solving and creativity at its best. And it it it was it was from, you know, embracing the curiosity around, okay, what are you gonna do with an electric carpet mower? We created something that could actually be a product and was certainly fun to just problem solve on. And I I I love that kind of, almost project based learning that some education systems incorporate very well and then some, unfortunately, they don’t. Mhmm. But I really think that that’s a key to experiential learning and and strengthening, the habit of encouraging people to be curious and not shutting down those brainstorm. It’s being like, okay.

Alex Poppe [00:52:28]:
Well, let’s explore this even though we think it’s gonna not work. Let’s go full in on it.

Nancy Norbeck [00:52:34]:
Yeah. It it’s a great it’s a great exercise to really stretch how you how you see things. You know, to force you to entertain that thing. It it reminds me of, you know, we’ve we’ve all probably sat in those brainstorming meetings in a work environment where the person in charge says, you know, all ideas are welcome. There are no bad ideas. Throw out your ideas. And somebody throws out an idea and somebody shoots it down even though it’s, you know, all ideas are supposed to be welcome. You know, something like that exercise forces you to take that idea that somebody shot down and find the value in it anyway, which proves that there really aren’t any bad ideas even though the person who said that may be the one who just shot your idea down.

Nancy Norbeck [00:53:21]:
I think that’s fantastic.

Alex Poppe [00:53:23]:
Yeah. We had a really good work environment with the preemptive love, and then later when Search for Common Ground, acquired us, the creative director and director of marketing and myself, we would get in these brainstorming sessions online, and it was, we agree we’re gonna have a lot of really bad ideas before we find anything good. And so it was such a safe place to just to fail exuberantly. Yeah. We did. I did. I mean, I’m kind of known for, like I’m gonna give you a lot of ideas, and they’re almost all gonna be bad, but this is how it this is the process.

Nancy Norbeck [00:54:01]:
Yeah. You have to let the bad ones out so that the good ones can come out with it.

Alex Poppe [00:54:06]:
Yeah. Yeah. We used to have a lot of fun doing those. I will I will say that at USAID, there wasn’t, that wasn’t so much the way it went. You know what I mean? It was a little bit more, subdued in in a brainstorming, but I think in smaller groups, we were able to kind of have that creative safe space.

Nancy Norbeck [00:54:32]:
Yeah. Smaller groups, I think, are probably safer in general. But but yeah. I I have one other thing that I’m I’m curious about. I mean, when you when you sat down to write this book, I mean, you you lived all of this. So you’ve had to have had a pretty decent idea of what you wanted to talk about and how this was gonna go, and yet you all can’t see Alex, but she’s shaking her head pretty pretty seriously here. What what surprised you? I mean, as you revisited all of these memories, there there must have been surprises along the way.

Alex Poppe [00:55:10]:
Well, you know, I I started the book. I was lucky enough to, be an artist in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in February of twenty twenty one. So my father passed in November, and I was on a contractual term break because I’d worked, like, five terms in a row. And I was supposed to have the term prior off, but then they needed a teacher last minute, so I was teaching remotely, which ended up being a godson because when he passed, then I could I had been living in New Orleans to try it out. I was kind of like, where do I wanna live when I return to The States? And so I came back to Chicago and, you know, my mom needed some support. It was obviously her partner of sixty years. So I was able to, like, have that time off, but it was also really hard. And it and it was still, you know, pandemic, and Chicago is freezing cold.

Alex Poppe [00:56:11]:
And, Atlantic Center for the Arts is in Florida. And because they were very COVID conscious whereas the town they were in were not, we were strongly encouraged not to leave the grounds, which were on these beautiful green, like, wooded areas, and it was so restorative to my grieving state. So that was just such a godsend. And then I brought down some fiction, which was rightfully eviscerated by the company of writers. And and then, you know, we were sitting at dinner one night, and I was telling some dumb story. And Randall Silver Silvis, the master artist, was like, why aren’t you writing these stories? And I said, I you know, I tried in grad school, and I just failed. And he’s like, try again. I want you to bring in something, for the next workshop.

Alex Poppe [00:57:03]:
And so I the first piece I wrote was, like, section eight, chapter eight, but don’t say a word of stuff about Luke. And that was the first thing I wrote, and I didn’t I didn’t know what an essay was. So then I spent I know I had to go back to Iraq and finish my contract, and we were intermittently locked down and then not locked down. And so there was, like, a lot of and things were shut. So there’s a lot of time to read, and I started to read craft books on how to write essays and then read a bunch of essays, and I still was unconvinced it was going to be a book. And so I kind of I was like, I don’t have anything to write about. And my poor writing partner, Karen, she’s a saint. I don’t I’m wondering how many times I asked her, is this even interesting to anyone? Like, I was so, trepidatious about writing it, and I I know I didn’t understand in the beginning, especially how to go from the personal to, like, not always a geopolitical, but something that’s gonna resonate on a larger thematic scale.

Nancy Norbeck [00:58:10]:
Mhmm.

Alex Poppe [00:58:13]:
Also, at Atlantic Center for the Arts, I had a really interesting conversation with Charlie Haley who was there. He’s a beautiful writer. He’s an architect in Florida. But he had a book called campsites, and he was talking about that book. And I asked him, like, had he looked at refugee camps? Because he has this idea of campsites as space between impermeability, that we’re always, like, rebuilding our homes and we’re always kind of, in essence, camping. And that conversation really informs, like, part chapter two and all those subsections. That without that conversation with him, I that part of the book would have not been as, I think, good. Mhmm.

Alex Poppe [00:58:53]:
So it was kind of, like, all over the place. I would think about an experience that I wanted to write about and then just try to write about it, and there wasn’t any structure. And then so I wrote, I think, chapter eight first, the one about Luke, and then I think I wrote altogether now penis, that one about teaching Margaret Atwood.

Nancy Norbeck [00:59:18]:
Oh, I can’t even that one just, like oh my god. Trying to teach the handmaid’s tale. I oh lord.

Alex Poppe [00:59:26]:
And and the world’s way. And this stuff I got away with in that classroom, I would never been able to get away with and I think in a US classroom. But, that had already been a version of that had already been published and bust, I think, so I reworked that. And then I think I wrote about, working alongside of Sweden’s most notorious sex offender because the International School employed him, and then how that came together. And then I think I wrote this thing about the refugee camps and my experiences doing that. And then it was like, well, what other things that were remarkable that happened, the earthquakes and the fires? That was just like a two and a half month of intense crisis. We were constantly in a state of tension, and then COVID was another. I had written about the usefulness, utility of WhatsApp, and this mediums, the startup had picked it up.

Alex Poppe [01:00:25]:
And so then I flushed that part out, and and part the last chapter I did write last. And then so the book was finished at the end of twenty twenty two, and I shopped it. And I would get very effusive rejections, and they were all kind of circling around the same thing. So I called my friend, Ellen Kaplan. I love her. She was the director of theater at Smith.

Nancy Norbeck [01:00:53]:
And she’s been on this show.

Alex Poppe [01:00:55]:
She’s amazing. I know. She’s the best storyteller ever. I love her. She’s so funny. She’s just so alive.

Nancy Norbeck [01:01:04]:
Mhmm.

Alex Poppe [01:01:07]:
She has, like, Ellen, translate this feedback. And so she’s like, I think they mean this. So then I took the book and I rewrote it. I made it I made the chapter shorter and and section them up, and I took out, more of the cerebral stuff and put in more of the personal stuff. I had never done a rewrite like that because I start over every day, so when I’m done, I’m pretty much done. Jerry Brennan, who runs Tortoise Press in Chicago, he published Moxie. He’s a great editor. I really enjoyed working with him.

Alex Poppe [01:01:43]:
Moxie didn’t need all that much editing until the last section, and he was his comments were really made the that last section much stronger. I I loved working with him. He was a great editor. So for me to have to do this amount of rewrites was really useful because I hadn’t stretched like that as a writer. And then I finished, and I shopped the book again and found a publisher, you know, kinda quickly. Yeah. So that’s where we are.

Nancy Norbeck [01:02:17]:
Wow. That’s that’s quite an experience, but it sounds like a really, really powerful one.

Alex Poppe [01:02:27]:
Thank you. I I’ve asked late back and forth on how I feel about this book. Oh, you know what? The chapter I wrote where I talk about my dad passing that starts with being violently mugged in Italy, I think that was what I wrote after the Luke chapter. And the book is really I didn’t realize what a significant influence my father has been on my life because I was a shitty teenager and we didn’t have a great relationship. But somewhere in my thirties, I recognized that I didn’t know him very well, and I wanted to change that. And I had written in this long letter, and, my mom said when he died, she’s like, he saved this. You know? Do you remember writing this? He saved it all these years. And so I really worked on that relationship with him, and, I can see the influence he’s had on my life and the choices, you know, they make sense, which I I talk about in the post piece.

Alex Poppe [01:03:34]:
But, I don’t think I recognized it until writing the book helped me recognize it. So in in a lot of ways, it’s just way more personal. It’s also me. It’s not a constructed eye. You know, you can people always confuse to, you know, the eye narrator for the writer, and you’re like, that’s a construct. You know, people like, people thought Jack’s the narrator of Moxie is me, and I’m like, she’s a profane alcoholic who’s missing half of her face. Not me. I’m just profane.

Alex Poppe [01:04:11]:
And and but in this, in the memoir, it is me. Mhmm. And so, you know, that judgment’s gonna sting when it’s negative because that is me.

Nancy Norbeck [01:04:24]:
Yeah. But it sounds like the experience of going back through it again was was definitely a worthwhile one on multiple fronts.

Alex Poppe [01:04:36]:
Oh, yeah. I I mean, I was combing through this is so bad. When I was, when I was getting farther along in the interview process with USAID, because it took, like, four months, and then there was, like, a three two and a half, three month security clearance thing. It took a long time to get that job. I was like, I better comb through my social media and make sure I remove anything that’s, you know, critical of certain people. And so I was combing through, like, years of Facebook. And I found these posts from the students from the international school where they were like they’re like, you should come out with this sometime. I was like, they’re sick dates.

Alex Poppe [01:05:20]:
And, like, we jabbed all these memories that, like, then kind of filtered into the beginning parts of the book. So that was fun or to recover the details going through the you know, seeing the pictures that they would post, and then finding a button and, like, find like, resurrecting an old, like, portable drive and going through photos on it. And I was like, god. I took a lot of photos of them. I was obsessed with them. I was that teacher that would be on holiday and talk about my students the whole time. It was weird.

Nancy Norbeck [01:05:52]:
Yeah. Well, it’s also understandable.

Alex Poppe [01:05:55]:
They were just fascinating to me. You know?

Nancy Norbeck [01:05:57]:
Yeah. And you spend a lot of time with them.

Alex Poppe [01:06:01]:
Oh, yeah. The 10 s p class, fourteen hours a week, sometimes four hours a day, every other class. Yeah. No matter how much you start out liking each other at eight, by the time it’s 03:30, you know, my head is on my desk, and I’ve had the the my own limits. You know?

Nancy Norbeck [01:06:20]:
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. But they are really your own kids for a while. You know? Yeah. They are. They really are. Well, I really enjoyed reading this book and getting to experience your adventures vicariously through it.

Nancy Norbeck [01:06:38]:
And and I think that other folks will too, so I hope that they will go out on the tenth and avail themselves of a copy and and give it a read.

Alex Poppe [01:06:47]:
Well, thank you so much for having me on and for supporting “Breakfast Wine,” Nancy. I really appreciate it.

Nancy Norbeck [01:06:51]:
Oh, it’s a pleasure to have you back.

Alex Poppe [01:06:54]:
Thanks. My hope is that reading this book will engender some empathy for folks that are being othered in our current political discourse.

Nancy Norbeck [01:07:02]:
Yeah. Me too. That’s this week’s episode. Thanks so much to Alex Poppe and to you. Alex’s links are in the show notes, and her new book, Breakfast Wine, is out on June 10. I hope you’ll leave a review for this episode. There is a link right in your podcast app, and it is super easy, and it really, really makes a difference. If you enjoyed our conversation, please do share it with a friend.

Nancy Norbeck [01:07:26]:
Thanks so much. If this episode resonated with you, or if you’re feeling a little bit less than confident in your creative process right now, join me at the spark on Substack as we form a community that supports and celebrates each other’s creative courage. It’s free, and it’s also where I’ll be adding programs for subscribers and listeners. The link is in your podcast app, so sign up today. See you there, and see you next week. Follow Your Curiosity is produced by me, Nancy Norbeck, with music by Joseph McDade. If you like Follow Your Curiosity, please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to tell your friends.

Nancy Norbeck [01:08:06]:
It really helps me reach new listeners.