YouSaid · the spoken record

Beth Macy

lines on the record
68
first
2022-09-29
most recent
2022-09-29
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Yeah, and I love bringing people to life. I mean, the lead of that story I just had fun with and I was able to get my own voice in and some of the exchanges that he would call me all the time. He'd go, did you call Governor Wilder about me yet? What did he say?”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So, what material, like they didn't want me to do the story, and I'm like, dude, it's this guy, it's pure gold. Like, everybody's written about him now, but that was the first person.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The first piece I ever wrote, ironically, now that I think about it, I never thought about it like this before. It won a national award. It was a profile of a recovering alcoholic who had been a sports writer at the paper and he was this just wild larger than life person who had become a developer downtown at the time that downtown was turning from this kind of seedy place and it was reinventing itself. And, you know, he got fired when he got caught covering a sports game from the local bar or watching it on TV. And so there were all these, no one thought he was worthy in the newsroom because they knew him as this crazy guy. And I was like, I saw him as this guy with this great, you know, second chance story. His name's Dave Mudcast Saunders. He became a...”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah. Covering skulls and big growth areas and cops. And then I went down to Savannah to be a feature writer. And then I moved to Roanoke. And I was never going to stay in Roanoke because I was going to move up to a bigger and better place. And like, it just got me. First time I went to the grocery, the lady at the check-on goes, what are you going to fix with this?”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, I would have been more honest, I think. But I remember she was holding me back. And again, that's probably because of the stigma.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I did, I think I did write a little bit about it, but I remember her saying, let's not go too much into this because everybody stigmatized it, right? So I wrote about it a bit and I wrote about him getting lung cancer, the fact that we had a difficult relationship and that I never told him I loved him And I wrote about this last moment. I came to visit him. This was early days of hospice and the nurses were at our house. And I brought him, he's really, really skinny. He had this brown square from the radiation on his chest. And we had this really moving, almost like goodbye. And I gave him this bowling green dad sweatshirt. And he thanked me. And it was a sweet moment, but it was this idea of forgiveness and how I hadn't really come around to it yet. It's hard to forgive that.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, and I have this teacher, Vicki Hesterman, Huli, edited. It wasn't a contest, actually. It was just a submission for this point of view essay type thing. But she really wanted me to. Them to exect my peace. So we didn't say that much about the alcoholism, you know, she just really helped me with that. And I saw her last week. They gave me the alumni award and she came to the ceremony. It was so moving to see those people that made such an influence.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Because some teachers told me I was a really good writer and I liked reading and I really liked engaging with people one-on-one. My husband's offense post will talk to me if I talk to them long enough. I just was lucky I picked it. I never changed and it just suited me”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I just thought there were, I liked news, but I really liked the stories that took you deeper into a story. Like, I didn't really care about the breaking news, but the issues that drove the breaking news were more interesting to me. And I also like being able to write, which I don't now really get to, but being able to write about a variety of different things.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It took me a minute. I'm one of these people that's really lucky I can drink a couple of beers and stop because I was kind of wild teenager. And I'm just lucky that I'm not an alcoholic. You know, it was a party school. The classes were great. I had a couple teachers that really kind of took me under their wing. I published my first national magazine piece. Yeah, I want to ask you.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, I had really good teachers, and all my friends were going. And I was like, they're not any smarter than me. And then I had this guidance counselor that told me there was this thing called the Pell Grant, which many years later I would learn the story about how the Pell Grant came to be, which I'm still fascinated about this era when we cared about poor kids going to. It could have been, but I didn't know.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, I just felt like he wasn't taken care of us. You know, and I know there were times when he tried to get better when the little AA devotionals would appear in the house. And then one time he went away to treatment. And I didn't even remember that. But after my mom died, I found this letter that she had written them in Batesville, Indiana, where he had gone to dry up for a month or so. And that must have been like one of the times that the AA devotion rules showed up afterwards when I was just, wow, I didn't know like I don't even know how they managed that, whether my grandmom bought it or his boss bought it. Probably his boss was a good friend. He would give us money when we were really low and stuff like that.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Wasn't in a good mood, he'd invite us in, and I would get a Coke and Cashews, which I thought was really cool, but no, like by the time I was old enough to get how shitty it was and how, you know, my other friend's parents were like the freaking Brady bunch. I was pretty resentful. I was kind of a wild teen and I was very embarrassed. Like one of my boyfriend's, so I'm staggering home once from the bar. You know, I carried a lot of shame with it and I just wanted to get the hell out of there. And I did.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Not by the child I came along. They were like in their late 30s when they had me, which was quite unusual then. Everybody else's parents were much younger. You know, it wasn't home a lot. He wasn't particularly mean drunk, although I certainly have some traumatic episodes for my childhood. But they're kind of far between mostly he was just absent and I was raised by my mom, who was this gritty, feisty, funny as hell person who could like stretch a dime like you would not believe.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Oh yeah, yeah. That was my first. way to make money. Well, my grandma used to pay me to, she lived next door. She owned our house, which was like probably the only thing that kept us from being homeless. She owned our house. And she worked at this dress shop downtown. And when dressed me in these frilly clothes that I didn't like. And so I was like, I'm going to buy my own clothes. I'm going to get paper out. And I did that for years. And then I worked my way up to life grading at the city pool. And then I worked at that little newspaper when I was in college in the summers.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And I went solely on need based financial aid, a few scholarships, you know, like the Kwantas gave me a couple hundred bucks. But I had great teachers in a small town and school and the library were places where a poor kid, you know, really gets a fair shake and is judged for their merit. And, you know, in a small town, you know, all kinds of people. I had a lifeguard job in my teenage years. I was buddies with the judge who came to do his laps, you know, every day. And his wife was the librarian at the library down the street. And I had really great teachers that brought language alive for me.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Kind of the social capital with the paperwork. I then worked to pretty much just do those stories and had some really good editors. But I just want to say a minute about small towns because and also about the power of the Pell Grant. I was the first in my family to go to college.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Oh, that's a nice question. Yeah, I grew up in Urvana. It was a manufacturing town when I was growing up. I'm 58. So what, in the 60s and 70s? And my dad was kind of dysfunctional. I'm from four generations of addiction. He was an alcoholic. And my mom kept the family together. She worked at the airplane light factory called Grimes Manufacturing, which sort of dominated the whole town. And when she would get laid off because the economy would take, she would pick up under the table jobs, just like the people I wrote about in factory man did. And so I've always had an eye for the underdog and the marginalized groups. And, you know, it's probably 30 working at newspapers before I realized that those are the story sta that I wrote the best. And then, you know, by about 40, I had.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source