Wayfinding #238

Richard Russo:

Sometimes, you know, we're out in restaurants and we'll see a couple that's roughly our age and they'll be seated across the table from each other and they're not talking and they're not talking. They just, you know, you can hear their cutlery.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine radio show number 238, Wayfinding, airing for the first time on Sunday, April 10, 2016. The Wayfinder Schools have been helping at risk Maine students for decades. In 2011, Maine's first alternative high school, the Community School, merged with century old organization Opportunity Farm to form the Wayfinder Schools. Today we speak with Wayfinder Board member Barbara Russo and her husband Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, about their work with the school, their life as a couple for the past 43 years and Richard's newest novel, Everybody's Fool. Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Today it's my great pleasure to have in the studio two individuals who are well known within Maine and probably nationally internationally. Barbara Russo is a real estate professional at Legacy Properties, Sotheby's International Realty who is Also a board member of the Wayfinder Schools, she is married to Richard Russo, also known as Rick, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist whose newest novel, Everybody's fool, is a sequel to Nobody's fool, and will be released on May 3rd. Thanks so much for coming in and talking with me today.

Richard Russo:

It's great to be here.

Barbara Russo:

Thanks for having us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Barbara, you have worked with the Wayfinder Schools for a very long time now, since your days of living in the Camden area.

Barbara Russo:

Correct.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Why is this an important organization for you?

Barbara Russo:

Well, because it saves kids lives. I mean, that's the short of it. I started working there as a volunteer in 1999. We had just moved to Camden and I was looking for something to become involved in, and through a friend in a swimming class told me that at that time it was a community school, and she said they were looking for people to help on a capital campaign. So I volunteered and fell in love with the students, the staff and the concept and what they were doing to working with young teens who had dropped out of school. And I just became very fond of everything about it and a year later joined the board. And so it's been a very, very long journey, but it saves these kids. They, for whatever reasons, are very vulnerable. They've dropped out of school for all kinds of reasons. Abuse, physical and emotional abuse, drugs, didn't fit in with other high school kids. And so the community school takes them in. It's now Wayfinders, but took them in in a residential program and they finished their high school. We were an accredited school. They actually got a high school diploma and give them the skills to move on in their lives and work with their families, their friends and become part of the community rather than beyond welfare or what other things that young kids get into when they don't have their diplomas.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So this must be an interesting contrast for you, Rick, because you spend many years teaching at Colby, and that's an educational institution of a very different sort. So you, in your family, you had the chance to experience this broad range of education and why education was important and who benefits from education and in what ways. As you were working with Barbara and Barbara was working with the Wayfinder Schools, what types of things did you notice?

Richard Russo:

Well, yeah, I mean, I've been. I've taught at Colby. I taught before Colby, at a number of state, state universities before that. So I've worked, I've really, as a teacher, I've run the entire gamut. And of course, coming from a small mill town in upstate New, I was a first generation College student, myself. And also seeing how vulnerable these kids are in the community school was personal. At the community school, the Wayfinder Schools now. Yeah. Old habits die hard.

Barbara Russo:

Yeah, they do.

Richard Russo:

But it took me back to my own experience of going to school in Gloversville, New York and I remembered how vulnerable, how vulnerable I felt at the time. And now, of course, you know, the ante is just, is just upped now. I mean, kids have all the same pressures that I had as an 8th grader, 9th grader and all of that. But on top of that, now you've got kind of cyberbullying and the kinds of. It's really hard for kids who are not fitting in to find a place to be, to just survive these years with so many more pressures now than they had when I was growing up. And when I was growing up, those pressures felt full and sufficient. I wouldn't have wanted any more. So watching these kids from the Wayfinder School simply find a place to exist, a safe place, a safe harbor where they're not just completely always under the gun, always pressured socially and in other ways and to give them a chance to heal, it's just wonderful to watch.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You also have two daughters that you have successfully raised into adulthood and they have their own experience with education. How did this play into your work with the Wayfinder Schools? Were they interested in the work you were doing? Did they find any valuable experiences out of the things that you were doing?

Barbara Russo:

Absolutely. In fact, both of our daughters and their husbands have done work for the school. Our son in law, Tom, worked at Wayfinder School, actually at the community school in Camden when they were living as a teacher. He was a teacher there. He taught art and absolutely loved it. Kate volunteered at the school, also worked with Tom on art projects with the students. And then Emily and Steve. Emily's our daughter, older daughter, when they moved to Camden after Steve graduated from college, from graduate school, they both volunteered at the school tutoring. And they, all four of them have been invaluable to Rick and I in helping, in helping with that.

Richard Russo:

And I remember when they were growing up too. I mean, our daughters are in their 30s now and they have become these exceptionally wonderful, I say proudly, young women. But, you know, they were 13 at one point. They had their. Despite being smart and kind and good, they had their struggles, both of them. I still remember because I was the one who was home. Barbara was still up the hill at Colby and often I would be the one who was home when the kids came home. And I can remember Emily, I don't Think she'd mind me telling this story? You know, coming in the door, I would hear the door slam so hard the whole house would shake. And I'd hear her scream. My life sucks. And. And I can still. I mean, Kate, I could see her sometimes. I would see her walking up the street towards the house and she had on that enormous. That enormous backpack. And she was a little wisp of a kid anyway, and she had this enormous backpack on. And I could see from the look on her face that there were days when she had struggled in school when things that she was never going to explain to me, things that she was never going to tell me about. You could see it on her face. And seeing her walk up the street towards me with this despairing or sometimes fearful expression on her face that was the seed for Tick Roby in Empire Falls. A girl who I introduce in that novel looking exactly like my daughter Kate, bearing the weight of the world on her shoulders.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's interesting because in reading Everybody's fool, there's another. I wouldn't say exactly the same, but there is a similar character, a young woman who clearly has some intelligence, but she's got one eye that isn't quite right. And she is holding a lot of kind of psychic pain for her family. And as you're talking, I'm not necessarily thinking of your children, but I'm thinking of people who are carrying a lot of psychic and emotional pain for their families which might actually make it difficult for them to succeed in, quote, normal school.

Richard Russo:

Right. Right. These are the kinds of kids that get bullied and abused and made fun of. And this particular character in Everybody' fascinated me because even as I was writing about her, it wasn't clear to me whether she was slow as everybody seems to think she is, whether she's intellectually slow, compromised in some way, or whether, in fact she might be some sort of savant. Because she has a kind of stillness about her, a kind of. A kind of. She takes everything in. She misses almost. She misses almost nothing. And so it's. It's. And I think there are a lot of kids who are. Who in school, for one reason or another, may be perfectly smart and maybe they look behind, but in some ways they're ahead. And we only kind of have one metric for judging success within schools. And so these kids that sometimes they don't speak up, the teacher ignores them because they're not causing problems, they're simply ignored. And over a period of years, it seems as if they're. It seems as if they're slow. Everybody diagnoses them as being slow learners when in fact, if nobody's paying attention to them, they may be ahead of the game. We just don't know. But in large school environments, they tend to get lost. And one of the beauties, I think, of the Wayfinder schools is just that they're small, it's impossible to hide. They'll find out, we'll find out what these kids are about and if there's something holding them back, what it is that's much more likely to take place in a really small, intimate atmosphere, I think, than in a huge regional high school.

Barbara Russo:

What I love so much about the Wayfinder Schools in terms of the students is that we have fabulous staff.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But.

Barbara Russo:

But they know how to reach these students strengths. And it's all strength based. They don't come in with, you know, they come in with enough baggage anyway, having dropped out of school. There's substance abuse, all kinds of abuse, but they do have strengths. All students have something that they're good at. And the school, the staff is so good at drawing that out and making sure that that's what their focus is. And then they move on. In terms of academics, one child might love music, so they figure out a way to make that part of their everyday lives. And it's not a punitive type of program at all. And they use a lot of social justice practices to keep these kids moving. And it's fabulous.

Richard Russo:

After a regimen of failure that so many of these kids are so used to, they're so used to failure that they, I mean, that's their lives. And to realize that they do have strengths, to have somebody find something and say, you know something, you're pretty good at this. Have you ever thought about, you know, it's huge. It's huge for them. They wouldn't necessarily even find it on their own.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Barbara, I was interested to hear that you come from a large family.

Barbara Russo:

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How many people in your family?

Barbara Russo:

I'm one of 10 children and I

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

think you're the second one.

Barbara Russo:

Second oldest. Yes. And the first daughter.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yes. And you also, you come from Tucson.

Barbara Russo:

Yes, I do. I grew up there. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So that's kind of an interesting and unique combination of things. We don't see a lot of people who have relocated to Maine from Tucson.

Barbara Russo:

No, that's true.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And in this day and age, there are not even that many people who come from large families.

Barbara Russo:

That's true. Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So what do you see as the similarities and differences between where you grew up and Maine?

Barbara Russo:

Well, first of all, the weather and Tucson. Tucson, when I grew up there wasn't that of a city. And by the time we left in 1981, it had grown tremendously astonishing. And now it's even bigger than that. It's just huge.

Richard Russo:

But, yeah, they have a great car culture out there.

Barbara Russo:

They have a very great car culture. That's true. You couldn't. You can't go anywhere without getting into a car first. You couldn't go to the grocery. You have to go to. To the grocery store, you have to get in the car. You want to go to a movie, you have to get in the car. If you want to go out to dinner, you have to get in the car. It's, you know, I mean, I grew up in a. In a. In a subdivision development thing in the 1960s.

Richard Russo:

And no sidewalks.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

No.

Barbara Russo:

No sidewalks. Yeah.

Richard Russo:

If for some absurd reason you actually did want to walk someplace, you'd either have to walk across people's yards or in the street. Or in the street. So, yeah, cars kind of ruled and still rule, I think. Arizona, living in a way that.

Barbara Russo:

I think that's very true. I think that's very true.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And that's very different from where you grew in upstate New York, at least the way that you describe it through the books that you've written.

Richard Russo:

Yeah. And I'm an only child, and that's a story. And that's a story in itself as far as Barbara and I finding each other in this world. But, yeah, I mean, my experience is mostly small towns and certainly much smaller than Tucson. Tucson struck me as very much a big city when I went there. The University of Arizona was larger than the town that I came from, and that was just. The University of Arizona was just a small part of Tucson. So that was a bit of a culture shock for me. And of course, when. When Barbara and I got married and we started having a family, we've lived almost. Until we moved to Portland three years ago. We had lived in a series of small towns or university towns. And so it was. It was much more a question of, I think, introducing Barbara into a world that was more familiar to me than vice versa. And now, of course, I mean, that's Portland's. Portland's still seems to me like kind of a small town with a lot of amenities. It's not the big city, is it?

Barbara Russo:

And I couldn't go back to living in Tucson for any length of time. I'm just too used to the east coast now. And I love. Don't necessarily get on the water, but I do Love the water. And I mean, my family's still there. I still go visit them, and they don't come visit very often, but it's not part. It's not something I envision doing, is going back to Arizona to live. I'm too much in love with this. Love being here in Maine.

Richard Russo:

I recall last winter, though, there was a time when we looked at each other. It was long enough. February of that horrible winter we had last year. And we kind of looking at each other and say, would it be so

Barbara Russo:

wrong

Richard Russo:

if we had a little pied a terre somewhere? But this winter we've been much happier.

Barbara Russo:

Much happier.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I can't really let go this. I don't know, this teaser that you put out there about you being an only child and Barbara being in a family of 10 and how that contributed to your coming together. Talk to me about that.

Richard Russo:

Well, I don't know if it contributed necessarily to us coming together, but it was. I think it was. It was really took some getting used to for. For both of us. I know going. Going into your family, just the noise level, you know, sitting around, they. They didn't have. Because there were 10 kids and. And it was a kind of. Was one of those houses, your family, always inviting other people over. So there just wasn't a table large enough, you know, to sit all these people around. And I would just. I would just have to leave the room from time to time. I'd go out and sit. I'd go out. And I was considered very antisocial. But just the volume of take some getting used to. And I think, well, I'll let you talk to the silence. But that must have been as difficult for you coming into first marriage and then, you know, and then when we're with my family, it's just a much smaller group. And the silence was problematic for you, at least in the beginning.

Barbara Russo:

It was. It was difficult for me to get used to. I mean, if he would go away for a couple days, he'd be out with friends and I'd be back at the apartment by myself. It took some getting used to, to realize I'm alone. And I mean, I could read, I mean, which. Which I always do, or watch television or something like that. But it took. It took a lot of getting used to actually learning to be by myself. And that took a long time for me to. To be comfortable with. And now I love it. I don't mind at all if he goes on away for two or three days. If I'm by myself. It's great you know, I don't have to. I don't have to. I don't have to cook. Well, he does all the cooking anyway, so that's not. That's not valid. But, yeah, I just like the quiet and the silence, and I can do what I want to do.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I can relate to this because I think that I mentioned to you that I'm the oldest of 10 children and obviously the oldest daughter. So the people coming into my life who have had to get used to the volume level, and we're not a noisy. As individuals, we are not noisy people, but collectively, we are very, very. There's a lot of energy there. And the one thing that I wonder about is, Rick, you wrote about what it was like to care for your mother in her older years and the fact that as an only child, it was you.

Barbara Russo:

You were the guy.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And also Barbara, both of you played.

Richard Russo:

Barbara played a huge role in that over the. Especially the last decade of my mother's life when she was ill for a lot of that. And, yeah, I was, of course, envious at the time of, you know, of, you know, a lot of our friends, of course, are our age, and so it wasn't. I wasn't the only person I knew that had a parent in failing health. But many of the people that we knew were living in Camden at the time. Many of the people we knew had siblings, and there was a way of kind of, you know, trading off responsibilities in some place, a little bit of support. And as an only child, boy, it was like. It was like an enormous weight. And, you know, the weight of caring for a sick parent as you're raising children and trying to be. Trying to be a decent. A decent husband as well and write books. Yeah, the burden on the only child can be pretty stressful. But large families continue to be stressful, too, don't they?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

They do.

Richard Russo:

The larger Barbara's family now is. Many of them are still in. Are still in Tucson. But of course, you know, then everybody, you know, we all breed and we all have children and grandchildren, and the more there are of them, the more opportunities for. The more opportunities for all sorts of things. And so, you know, I don't know, maybe it all works out.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, it is interesting for me to have read the memoir that you wrote elsewhere to read about this back and forth between you and Barbara, you know, once you were married and your mother and your teaching and the book writing and Barbara's career and, you know, the raising of the children. I mean, it's a very collaborative approach that you're describing. It's something that you really wouldn't have been able to this, the life that you've created now. You wouldn't have been able to do this without being in a partnership.

Richard Russo:

No, no. Barbara bore. And I'll say this because I know she won't say it. She won't say it of herself. This simply could not have been done. And I think another woman would have been long gone. So, yeah, I will go to my grave owing this lady.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, these are strong words. How long have you been married?

Barbara Russo:

43 years.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And how did you first meet?

Richard Russo:

You are correct. I was going to let you answer that one. I was just checking to see if you knew.

Barbara Russo:

We met at the University of Arizona. We were both students there. We were both members of the Newman center, which is the Catholic youth organization on campus.

Richard Russo:

I was trolling for a good Catholic girl.

Barbara Russo:

That's where we met.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And at the time, what do you remember your aspirations being? Do you remember saying, I would like to someday do this? Did you think that you would be a novelist, Rick? Or did you think that you would someday be a real estate agent or work with the Wayfinder schools? Did you have any sense for where you were going together and separately?

Barbara Russo:

I didn't have. I mean I was a business major at the university and I had. I had a part time job. Being from a large family, there wasn't a lot of money for college so I was working part time to help pay. Of course at that time tuition was probably for full 12 credits was probably

Richard Russo:

less than like $300 or something like that. Something like that at the State University

Barbara Russo:

between 3 and 400.

Richard Russo:

Those were the days.

Barbara Russo:

So. Boy, those were the days is right.

Richard Russo:

But if you don't have the $300, then it's right. It's expensive. It's only cheap if you have the $300. But.

Barbara Russo:

So I was working part time for the company that my father and a group of gentlemen from Hughes Aircraft had left and formed this electronics firm called Iota Engineering. And I started working there during my summers and then I'd go to school in the morning, do my classes and then go in the afternoon in the office and work. And I was there for 10 years, something like that, I don't know. But I was going to finish my degree and wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with that business degree. I thought about going to library school. But we got married when you were a graduate student.

Richard Russo:

And I continued working and supporting most of the income in those years when I was a graduate student. No surprise was Barbara's income. And at that time, I don't know, you've often said that you. Because I had no idea I was going to be a writer. So I was on track to be some sort of English professor. And that's what Barbara thought our lives were going to be like. She was going to.

Barbara Russo:

I did. I had this, this image of us living in a, in a, in the, on the east coast somewhere, maybe Pennsylvania. Being a professor's wife living in an ivy covered brick house. I could see it. I read too much John o' Hara's what Happened. But yeah, that's, that's, that was my vision of where our life was going to. I was going to be professor's wife and probably still work because I always, I, I really loved working. I liked being out with people and

Richard Russo:

I had no intimation whatsoever that I was going to be a writer until probably my last year when I was working on my dissertation and I kind of caught the bug. I went across the hall to creative writing and talked to the director of creative writing and said, you know, I'm thinking maybe I'd like to be a writer. This is after like 10 years and mounting debt deciding to be a writer. But, but. And had several years of apprenticeship before any of that began to bear fruit. So, you know, most of us, I think, are mystified by where we end up in life. It's not what we planned, it's not what we were thinking. And you know, I think Barbara and I are both at an age right now where we're looking backward as much as forward. I continue to be fascinated in all of my novels by destiny. How is it, how in the world is it you just stop one day and you look at your life and you think, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to anyone. I have no idea how I got here. And if I did it all over again, it seems to me almost inevitable that I would end up in some other very, very different place than the place that we happen now to occupy on this earth.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I did notice that about your latest book is it was very sort of, I don't know, contemplative regarding one's place in the universe as one engages. And the character Sully in particular, who's, you know, he's got a bad heart and he's kind of asking himself, is it worth getting it fixed? Because what do I have going on? That's great, but any number of characters within this small town that you've gone back to after writing Nobody's full. I mean, it's really. You do ask yourself, like, what. What's the bigger purpose in all of this?

Richard Russo:

I think almost every, every character in the book is having that kind of existential. Is asking that kind of existential question of himself or herself. And the whole book takes place over Memorial Day, so. So memory is of primary importance to this novel. And two or three of the characters from Nobody's fool have died during the interim, but they remain as fully alive in this novel. Ms. Burrell in particular, Sully's old landlady, is a major character in this book, and she's been dead for 10 years, but she continues to haunt Chief of Police Ramer. She asks Sully, in real life, does it trouble you that you haven't done more with the life that God's given you? And it's a question that he's still trying to answer all those years later. And this is a guy who, like my father, was part of the Normandy invasion and was a war hero, but now at age 70, is trying to say, is asking himself, what was all, what was all of this really about?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

To know that the two of you have been together for 43 years and to know that neither one of you really said, this is what I'm going to do with my life is interesting because you have had to or you have by choice, moved and shifted with each other over time. And I'm not sure that that's something that in this day and age, people realize is going to happen when they enter into a new relationship. When you get married to somebody, there's this idea that you are who you are and the other person is who he or she is. And then if things don't work out, then that's just too bad. And then you go your separate ways. But that's not really the way life works.

Richard Russo:

No, you grow into new skin, new identity. We continue, I think, to converse. I think

Barbara Russo:

we do a lot of that.

Richard Russo:

Yes, we talk. We talk. And the conversations. I want to speak for you here, my dear, but it seems to me that the conversations that we continue to have deep into our now 40 some years of marriage have, have remained as interesting as they were in the beginning. And sometimes, you know, we're out in restaurants and we'll see a couple that's roughly our age and they'll be seated across the table from each other and they're not talking and they're not talking. They just, you know, you can hear their cutlery. But over a course of an hour and a half, Dinner in a restaurant. They're just not saying anything. And you wonder. We're always so grateful that because we hear people say all the time, people our age, they retire, and then, you know, husband and wife are, you know, they're home and they're having to navigate. They're having to navigate each other after all these years, where they've, you know, they've been out in the world in different places, and now here they are in the same house as he. I've had guys my age ask me, well, what do you talk about? I'm retiring this year. I'm not sure what to say.

Barbara Russo:

I don't know. We don't seem to have any difficulty finding things to talk about. You know, it's the. If it's not the girls and, you know, Emily and Kate and now grandchildren. And now the grandchildren. We have two beautiful grandchildren. Hell, we talk about. Excuse me. We talk about politics. We talk a lot about books.

Richard Russo:

We're voracious readers. So we're always talking.

Barbara Russo:

We're always talking about books. And our children love music. Rick loves music. We argue a lot about the kind of music he likes and the kind of music I like, so. And I never get to play my music.

Richard Russo:

Well, in the privacy of your own headphones.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

See. Well, it's. You know, you raise a really valid point, and that is that sometimes we celebrate simple longevity. You know, this couple has been married for 50 years.

Richard Russo:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But it doesn't really speak to the quality of the relationship. And there can be people who are married for 50 years and don't talk across the table, and they're perfectly happy, and that's completely fine. And then there are others who look at this lifelong or half a lifelong relationship as being some sort of endurance sport, I guess.

Richard Russo:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And it's not. I don't know that that's something that we should all strive for. It's to simply make it through. Because what is the end point of this life anyway?

Richard Russo:

I think that there are people who should split. I've always thought that there are people who should split. You shouldn't split without trying. Without trying really hard. Because I cannot imagine a marriage that doesn't go through its share of struggles. But that said, some people really don't belong together. And the pain that they continue to inflict upon each other over year upon year upon year just seems so futile. Have a chance for happiness anyway.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, this is, as I was reading, Everybody's Fool. I mean, there is. There is one particular character who I think most people will find deeply Disturbing. And this is a person that just can't seem to help himself when it comes to beating on the women in his life. And he probably would beat on the men if he was a little bit less of a coward. But, I mean, it is interesting to read that novel and to just see that there's just this deeply ingrained pattern that just can't seem to be broken with that particular character. And I think we all know people like that. And maybe it's not as extreme as somebody is beats on other people, and that's the patterning. But I think that that's what we all see, is that there are some people who get so patterned into something that it's very difficult for them to change.

Richard Russo:

That's the character that you're referring to here. Roy Purdy is the most disturbing character that I have ever brought out of my psyche. It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing to even talk about him, and embarrassing to know that. That there was something like him. What does it mean? That I understand to a degree, this character, and I'm not sure that I agree that he would have ever, if he'd been a bigger guy, would have beaten up on men. I think this goes right back to his childhood. I think that the pleasure that this man derives from punching women, he's been blaming them for everything that's been wrong with his life since he was taught to do so by his father. And he has arrived at a place where he has almost no other pleasure than that.

Barbara Russo:

It's frightening.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, this was my question for you, Barbara, as you, I'm guessing, are the first person to read what Rick is writing.

Barbara Russo:

Yes, I am.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So as you're reading this that your husband is putting down on paper, and you're thinking, oh, my goodness, this guy's a sociopath. Like, how could this come out over its head?

Barbara Russo:

Exactly.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Like, what are you thinking?

Barbara Russo:

Well, Rick is so good at creating characters, you know, I mean, Roy is extremely disturbing in this novel. The person closest to that would be from Empire Falls and the student who shoots.

Richard Russo:

Right.

Barbara Russo:

But he's not evil. He's just. I forgot the name of the character Zach in Empire Falls.

Richard Russo:

Well, Zach was Tick's boyfriend.

Barbara Russo:

That's right.

Richard Russo:

And I've forgotten. I've forgotten the character's name as well.

Barbara Russo:

Yeah, right.

Richard Russo:

But he was younger.

Barbara Russo:

He was younger.

Richard Russo:

And you get the sense that he was bullied. He was bullied. And if he'd. Wayfinder School, maybe. Maybe because there was still time. That pattern was not so ingrained yet in this boy that his life could not have been turned around in the right circumstance.

Barbara Russo:

He was lost.

Richard Russo:

He was simply lost. This was a boy who had been put in a laundry bag and hung on the back of the door when his parents were doing drug deals. So if that's what your life is like at. And you've had nothing but, and you've had nothing but that kind of mistreatment, you are, you are a candidate for something like a school shooting. But on the other hand, unlike Roy Purdy, who's. Roy Purdy is now, there's a, there's a big difference between 17 and 37. And by the time he gets to be 37, if there's, if there's been no intervention, a good school, a good teacher, you know, an aunt or uncle, if no one, if no one has cared enough to intervene by that time, your chances of turning things around are slim and none.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And this is the thing that I love about what you each do in your lives is that you are both simultaneously reading about, writing about things that are thought provoking for the rest of us and also doing something about it. So you, so you're both. It's not just let me write about this thought provoking, provoking character who's deeply disturbing, but it's also, okay, where can this be turned around? Where can. In the Wayfinder School. What is there that can be useful so that somebody's life doesn't have to take a necessary path, it can take a right turn into a different place. So that must be very satisfying. I would think

Barbara Russo:

it has been. I mean, we've again, just getting to know these students on an individual level and knowing a little bit of their history, but what their hopes and their dreams are and having them finally finish getting their diplomas and moving on to many of them go on to college. And we had one student who last year was a recipient of a Mitchell Scholarship, which was absolutely wonderful. But they do go on to school and sometimes they, you know, they don't all want to go on to secondary education, but they'll go work. There was one little, one young man I think, who wanted, who loves to bake and he's now working for a bakery. I should have made myself a huge list of what these students are doing now, but they're becoming successful

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

citizens, citizens

Barbara Russo:

and giving back to their communities and to their families. One of the programs that within the Wayfinder Schools is called Passages, which is a program for teen parents, mostly young women, but occasionally there will be a teen, a male father who will come in and finish his schooling. But we have the teachers actually go work with these young women and their children at the residences because teen moms have problems with child care, transportation. All kinds of things are in their way in terms of finishing a high school diploma. So our teachers go to them and work on a program for them or with them. And sometimes it takes them two or three years to finish. But it's amazing, absolutely amazing. These young women who finish and have a goal, and every single one of them says, I want to do this for my child. I do not want my child to have the disadvantages that I have had. I want to make sure that our children get an education. Every single one of them is. That's their motivation, is making sure that their children are on the same path.

Richard Russo:

I would only add to that that Barbara has. One of the ways in which I think our marriage of 43 years has worked is that I spend an awful lot of time in my head. I'm bringing these characters to life. I love to tell stories. And I disappear one minute. My eyes are looking out at the world, but almost. But daily, for many, many hours, they kind of turn around and they look inward. And so I am, in a way, less of the world, of the real world than Barbara is. And Barbara has always been the one who has, through her extraordinary kindness and generosity, is the one who has tugged me out of my imagination and into the world. I wouldn't have found the Wayfinder schools. Barbara found the Wayfinder Schools. And Barbara has found, throughout our lives together, always has found a way of not allowing me to disappear completely from the real world and to get me involved in things that not just things that she finds rewarding, that I find rewarding that I wouldn't find but for her. And that just comes from kindness, I think, a desire to engage, which comes so naturally to her and so unnaturally to me that I have to be. I have to be taken by the hand and moved into that sphere. And the older I get, the more convinced I am that nothing really matters as much as kindness. And it's Barbara that has tugged me along sometimes kicking and screaming when I was happily inventing things into the world where real people need real help.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think that's a very good point. And as you're talking about people who have so many barriers to education, you know, I can't get a ride. I can't get childcare. Those of us who don't have that type of barrier, for whom education is really a joy, is really like a place that we want to be. I Mean, I love being inside my head. It's fun in there most of the time. Some of the time it's not so fun. But, you know, it's something that if you don't even. If you can't even get to the place where you can, I don't know, have some small sense of enjoyment about the education you're receiving because you can't get to the education itself, that just makes it seem so much more difficult.

Barbara Russo:

It's a huge problem. It's a huge problem with some of these young moms. And, I mean, we have. Martha is the director of the Passages Program, and she's amazing at being able to pull people together to make sure that these moms get the resources that they need. We'll find ways to drive them to where they need to go if they have to get a child to the doctor if they have to, you know, go to the grocery store. I mean, we're very resourceful. We find ways to make sure that they have all the support that they need and still be able to, you know, attend classes and we'll have them. Sometimes the mothers get together at one location for a big workshop or something, and that's a wonderful opportunity for them to meet each other and support each other

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

and also become interested in things that they like to do.

Barbara Russo:

Absolutely.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Decide that they like to cook, or decide that they like to write, or decide that they like to do something that is more than simply what other people have always told them that they can or can't do.

Richard Russo:

It's amazing how in so many spheres, transportation, just moving, moving parts becomes so much the issue. Barbara and I have both been involved for years, too, with an organization called Share Our Strength, which is basically a hunger. A hunger organization. And people often think that the problem is that there isn't enough food. Very often the food is there, the food is there. You know, it's getting that. It's getting. Getting the food to the hungry mouths and getting the hungry mouths to the food and depending on. And depending on where. Where you live, you may have the money for the food from one source or other, but you're half an hour away from the nearest store that has fresh fruit and vegetables. So finding it always seems just astonishing that we live at a time in which we can buy something with one click and it magically arrives on our doorstep the next day. Those of us who can afford to buy those kinds of things, and yet something as basic as food, as learning, as education, we seem to get so hung up on the transportation, the delivery aspect of this. Something as fundamental, something as fundamental as food. And it just. And it's. Sometimes it seems like we haven't even really identified the problem. If we think it's food and the food is there, then there's some failure of imagination or something going on there.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have an upcoming event that is going to be in honor of and raising money for the Wayfinder School.

Barbara Russo:

Yes, we do.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I wanted to start the conversation just because we're. It's going to be the first reading of your book that will be out May 3rd.

Richard Russo:

May 3rd, right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And this is everybody's fool. And this is why I am not reading from that book. And that's going to happen at this event, which is April 28. I am going to just read a little paragraph that I liked from elsewhere, which is your memoir. I won't make you read it. It's kind of a surprise that you probably don't know which one I would even pick. But it was from my mother that I learned reading was not a duty, but a reward. And from her that I intuited a vital truth. Most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt. You can't make a writer without first making a reader, and that's what my mother made me. Moreover, though I had outgrown her books, they had a hand in shaping the kind of writer I'd eventually become. One who, unlike many university trained writers, didn't consider plot a dirty word and who paid attention to audience and pacing, who had little tolerance for literary pretension. I love this because it just, it reminds us all to value all different types of art, including the book and including the novel, which is something that you've spent most of your life really working on, is crafting the novel. So lest some of us believe that works of fiction are any less important than perhaps fabulous memoir or some sort of nonfiction, it's important to remember that these things can be equally inspiring. That we can get as much from reading a novel, perhaps, as from, I don't know, looking at a great work of art.

Richard Russo:

I spend, as you said, I've spent most of my career imagining things, telling stories. And I think that for most of us, if we do it, we do it seriously. If we care about our craft as I do, it's based on the belief that making up these lies, through making up these lies, we will ultimately arrive at a truth that transcends the mere facts of the case. And I think that I always hear People say, oh, I don't read fiction. I like to read books that are true. And I never punch people, but I can feel my fist clenching when somebody says that. Because. Because it seems to me that stories work on a different mode of truth. Each individual sentence is a lie in the sense that you're telling somebody that it happened and you know full well that it didn't. And so do they. Right. But each sentence has a kind of truth to it. And the best books are the books that have a true moment followed by another true moment, followed by another true moment. And at the end, you have a sense of life truly lived. And that's what we go to fiction for. We're always. What we want to know is, what did it feel like in Empire Falls? There is a school shooting. But the truth in that book is not about school shootings in general. It's about this particular event with these particular people. And what it does is that it allows readers to know what something in real life feels like. It's not information. It's the opportunity to live truly someone else's life.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And obviously what you have done has been so important that people are excited to get to hear you read for the first time. Everybody's full on April 28th for the Wayfinder Schools. So I'd like to just learn a little bit more about this and how people can themselves go to hear your reading. So, Barbara, tell people. Just give us a little bit of information, a little bit of a tease and so people can go and learn on their own how to become part of this.

Barbara Russo:

Okay. Well, it is April 28th at Wayne Fleet School on Spring street here in Portland. Thank you to Wayne Fleet for letting us use their space. And there will be. It starts at 6 with A. With an author reception. Rick will be there and you can go to the Wayfinder School's website. Tickets go on sale March 10, I believe. Tickets for the reception and the reading. Actually, it's a conversation with Rick and Josh Bodwell, who is the director of Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Two of them are going to be in conversation. The tickets for both the reception and the conversation are $100. And with that you get a signed first edition copy of Everybody's fool

Richard Russo:

several days before it goes on sale.

Barbara Russo:

Exactly, exactly. And general admission, if you just want to listen to Rick and Josh talk is $35.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I for one, you would never have to punch me because fiction. Fiction is.

Richard Russo:

That was the wrong metaphor, wasn't it?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think people understand. Fiction is one of. I think that when I think of the most delicious treatment that someone could possibly offer me. It's probably a work of fiction. I love to read all books, but fiction is where my heart is, I believe. And everybody's full. Really wonderful book. I mean, the crafting of it. But not.

Richard Russo:

Thank you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But not crafting like in a. In your face crafting way, but very. And the ideas that you've brought out. And it was absolutely worth the time for me to read it before we sat down. And I feel so lucky because I don't think that many people have had this opportunity. So you're one of a handful. And I encourage people who are listening to go to the Wayfinder School benefit to find out more about the Wayfinder School. But to also read Everybody's Full, probably they should go back and read all of your other books. I know you have a project coming up with the artist Linden Frederick, which is about a year. We're about a year in advance of that.

Richard Russo:

I think so. But it's a fascinating project.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So can you come back on and tell us about that at some point?

Richard Russo:

Of course, of course.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Bring a little teaser.

Richard Russo:

Yeah, we'll get. Get Lyndon and maybe Heather and Barbara if you want to come back on too. We're neighbors. We're just a couple doors apart here in Portland. So it would be lovely to come in and talk about that project because I think it's rare and interesting and I think people will be fascinated to learn about it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So we're giving just enough information, just enough preview, so people will be waiting with bated breath to hear what's going to happen in the next year. But for now, they'll go listen to you on April 28th for the Wayfinder School Benefit to hear you read Everybody's fool and also talk with Josh Bodwell. It's really been a pleasure talking with the two of you today and to have you in and thank you so much.

Barbara Russo:

Thank you.

Richard Russo:

Thank you so much for your interest. We appreciate it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have been listening to Love Maine radio show number 238, Wayfinding. Our guests have included Barbara and Richard Russo. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Bellio. I hope that you have enjoyed our wayfinding show. Thank you for allowing me to be part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.

Richard Russo:

Com.