Episode 670
Karen Russell, Sam Miller, and David Ramirez
Award-winning author Karen Russell takes us inside her "dust bowl epic" novel The Antidote, which employs the fantastical to comment on memory, climate change, and the nation's troubling history of land ownership; stand-up comedian Sam Miller finds sidesplitting humor in his own experiences with addiction and incarceration; and singer-songwriter David Ramirez explains how he pulled himself out of a rut and into solitude to write his latest album All The Not So Gentle Reminders, before performing the track "The Music Man."
Karen Russell
Author and Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Her most recent book is called The Antidote. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, and was selected for the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" prize and The New Yorker's "20 under 40" list (She is now decisively over 40). She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile-library for people living outdoors. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter.
Sam Miller
Unmissable Comedian
Sam Miller is a nationally touring comedian from Olympia, Washington. At 6’6” and 360 pounds, he’s hard to miss—just like his comedy. A recovering addict with 15 years of sobriety, Sam’s stand-up dives into fatherhood, addiction, and what jails are like in Yakima. His debut album Round Trip hit #1 on iTunes and was produced by Grammy-winner Dan Schlissel under Stand Up! Records. He’s been heard by millions on The Bob & Tom Show, written for Newsweek, and performed nationwide, including The Laugh Factory Chicago and NA/AA conventions. He was runner-up in the 2021 Seattle International Comedy Competition.
David Ramirez
Venerated Singer-Songwriter
David Ramirez is an Austin-based singer-songwriter with an extensive musical portfolio, including six full-length studio albums, three EPs, numerous collaborations, and an illustrious supergroup project in Glorietta. In 2020, he was awarded Songwriter of the Year by The Austin Chronicle, recognizing his significant contributions to the music scene. Praised by NPR Music as "the ever moody innovator of Americana," he returns with his most recent album, All the Not So Gentle Reminders, a wide-ranging musical tour-de-force featuring Ramirez’s remarkable voice as the constant thread spinning stories and painting poetic imagery throughout.
Show Notes
Best News
Elena’s story: “Couple Stunned After Finding Out Priest Who Married Them Is Now Pope Leo XIV”
Luke’s story: “Houston woman's cat quinceañera goes viral, unexpectedly saves local shelter”
Karen Russell
Karen’s latest book, a sweeping futuristic dust-bowl epic, is called The Antidote.
The Dust Bowl was a period of extreme dust storms that devastated the Great Plains region of the United States and Canada during the 1930s.
Live Wire Listener Question
Tell us a small memory that you’d like to preserve forever.
Sam Miller
Sam performs a stand-up set about recovery and family life.
David Ramirez
David performs "The Music Man” from his latest record, All the Not So Gentle Reminders.
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Elena Passarello: From PRX, it's... This week, author Karen Russell.
Karen Russell: This book, I think it's really exploring the way that you can have a collapse of memory that forecloses a lot of possibilities.
Elena Passarello: Comedian Sam Miller.
Sam Miller: If any of y'all are wondering if you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, just read your belly tattoo. What does yours say? Because mine says, let's dance.
Elena Passarello: With music from David Ramirez and our fabulous house band. I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello, and now, the host of Live Wire, Luke Burbank!
Luke Burbank: Welcome to Live Wire, everyone. Thanks for coming out to the Alberta Rose Theatre. We have a really fun show in store for you this week, but of course, we can't get started until we kick things off the way we always like to with a little thing we call the best news we heard all week. Here's how this works. Things are hard out there, but live wire goes harder when it comes to finding you good news that is happening. And we like to bring you those stories here at the top of the show to remind you that in fact there is good news happening out there in the world. Elena, what's the best news you heard all week?
Elena Passarello: Well, the worst news I've heard this week is that I forgot to bring my glasses. So let's just see how we do here.
Luke Burbank: It's remarkable how quickly I've gone from does not need glasses guy to needs glasses guy to where the f*** are my glasses guy. It's just like lightning fast.
Elena Passarello: Well, thank you for the loaner, I appreciate it. I'll give him back when it's your turn. I want to tell you the story, everyone, of a person named Heather Schmidt-Jaroche, who is a preschool teacher in Chicago, Illinois, and a gentleman named Dominic Jaroche. They had a lovely Chicago wedding with 75 guests, and the sort of showstopper moment was Heather's father really wanted this family friend to perform the ceremony, but he was out of the country and as a surprise at the last minute. Father Bob walks in, performs the ceremony. It was great, it was super memorable, and then he had to get on a plane and fly back to South America. Didn't even get to stay for the reception. That wedding was 10 years ago, and the happy couple are still together. A few days ago, they were camping in, even with my glasses, this looks like Point Patriarchy Lake, which I just don't think is the name of it. So anyway, Heather and Dominic are camping at a lake. Heather's phone rings, it's her sister, and like most people with sisters, she's like, whatever, it is not important. Keeps calling, keeps calling. Heather picks up the phone. Father Bob is the pope. Oh! I'm sure you've heard this, Chicago born Robert Prevost, our first American Pope. I don't know if you've seen, there have been so many fun stories of people that knew him.
Luke Burbank: I was in Chicago the day the news came out, and it was a situation. It was like Ferris Bueller's day off at the end. Just Pope related. So, yeah, I mean, the stories have been kind of incredible of like the people that just knew him. He was at a White Sox game, yes, just caught by the cameras being a fan.
Elena Passarello: Yes, or did you see the TikTok? I don't know if it's true or not, but it's a zoom call of a family going Mom's situation ship from high school is the pope now
Luke Burbank: And I do not want the facts to get in the way of that story at all. Please. Yes.
Elena Passarello: Same, same, so they all freaked out and they say their only regret is that father Bob didn't get to stay for the cocktail reception because then they could have said that they had cocktails with the Pope. That is the best news that I heard.
Luke Burbank: Okay. Um, thank you for giving me back our community glasses. Thank you, yeah. That's a tough one to follow, and I don't know if I can, but I'll just tell you the story of a woman named Miranda Gonzales in Houston. About 15 years ago, she got a cat, which she named Holly Marie Gonzales, and she had a plan for 15 years when she got this little kitten, which was that one day when the seniora. And not just like a, you know, low-key event. No. A full-on, real quinceañera. She got her friends and family to serve as padrinos, which meant they donated to the event, which would happen maybe in a traditional quinceñera with like a human child. The party had a grand entrance for the cat, Holly. The cat showed up in a remote-controlled Bentley. Before the show, I was advocating for us to show a picture of the cat in the Bentley. I was reminded this is radio, and so it doesn't matter. But I'd like you to observe the look on Elena Passarello's face when I show her a picture the cat in the bentley. If you're in your car, pull over and Google Cat Quinceanera Houston. This is a really cool part though. Of course, of course this went viral. Oh, by the way, other things. There was a father daughter dance. Love makes a family, Elena, and don't you forget it. There was a cake, there was a mariachi band, a full mariachi who told the local media it was the first time they'd played a cat quinceańera.
Elena Passarello: Oh, surprising!
Luke Burbank: And, of course, this went viral when it went to the internet. And this is where things get really cool, because Miranda decided to make this a fundraiser for a local cat shelter, a place called Almost Home Cat Haven. So when it started getting all this attention with the cat in the Bentley and everything, she started soliciting donations from the people that were spreading this video around and everything. And they raised so much money. They saved the cat shelter from closing. It was gonna close that week. It's in the article. It's a miracle. I'll loan you the glasses in a minute and you can read it. This is like something out of a movie. They were on the verge of closing and the donations from the Cat Quinceanera attention saved the almost home cat haven in Houston, Texas. So there you go. There is good news happening in the world, people. That's the best news I heard all week. Our next guest is the author of six books of fiction, including the novel Swamplandia, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and announced her arrival as a major American writer. Not for nothing, she's also a MacArthur Genius Award winner. Her latest eagerly anticipated novel, The Antidote, is out now. We are so happy to have her back on Live Wire. Please welcome Karen Russell to the show. Karen, welcome to Live Wire.
Karen Russell: I'm so happy to be back.
Luke Burbank: We were talking backstage, and you said that this is sort of the end of the publicity run. You live here in the Portland area. Is it a great relief to be done not with just the writing of the book, but then the hard part, the promoting of the books?
Karen Russell: Oh my god, this is my favorite part, just the hooked on phonics part. Like, it's written, I can't mess with it. It's so great to just drive across town to Live Wire and to feel just sort of like a, yeah, midlife, I don't know, like chain-smoking Denny's Waitress kind of like, what's up? Like, I'm not, I was thinking about my first visit when I was just like trembling and overwhelmed. I was like, this the coolest speakeasy in the world, where am I?
Luke Burbank: Now you're just bringing that energy of a person who was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and has absolutely delivered on all the kind of hype around like this next novel. I wonder what that was like for you to have so much success with Swamplandia and then kind of have so many people really anticipating the next big thing you were gonna do this book.
Karen Russell: Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting. I think some of the press around the book that surprised me slightly was like, woman comes out of coma after thousands of years with new book. And I had been writing these short story collections in a novella that I put, they were genuinely just as challenging and important to me as this novel or my first novel. So I think one thing I learned is the cultural cache of story collections is not equal to a novel. And that my family is more impressed by novels because they are sold in airports. That's really it turns out like there's no higher note to hit, you know.
Luke Burbank: I want to read what Ron Charles wrote about the book in the Washington Post. Russell may be writing about a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, but the scale here is large. Into this book she's packed a whiff of Steinbeck's grandeur, a murder mystery, the legacy of genocide, a young woman's coming of age, a Dickensian story of a missing baby, a warning about climate change, and even a talking cat.
Karen Russell: I think the cat is really polarizing for a lot of people. Yeah, there are people who are like, yeah, and even a cat. And there are are people like, ugh, and, even, a cat?
Luke Burbank: I mean, it is an ambitious book. I'm wondering, what was the genesis of it? Did you like read an article about the dust bowl and just become fascinated? Like when did this book start to become a thing in your mind?
Karen Russell: I was telling Elena, I mean, it's pretty humbling in this way, too, because I got the idea really early on. I was still finishing my first novel, Swamplandia, which is about a family of alligator wrestlers in the Florida Everglades. And my joke at that time, which I thought was pretty funny, was that I was writing Drylandia.
Elena Passarello: That's right.
Karen Russell: And then I just, I really struggled with it. It was, I think, I wrote a lot of stories that felt connected to this world and sort of testing grounds for the ideas, you know, or in the landscape. But it just, I would put it aside sometimes for years at a time, but much, much like a cat, it just kept coming back.
Luke Burbank: We're talking to Karen Russell. Her latest book is The Antidote. This is Live Wire Radio from PRX. We are at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland this week. We have many more questions for Karen, but not until we take this very short break. Back with more Live Wire in just a moment. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. We're at the Alberta Rose Theatre this week. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We are talking to Karen Russell about her latest novel, The Antidote. Let's talk about the setting. It's, do you say Uz, Nebraska?
Karen Russell: Well, I mispronounced it for most of its composition as ooze like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle ooze.
Luke Burbank: Uh-huh, secret of.
Karen Russell: A Hebrew scholar was like, of course you know it is us, and then I did know that.
Luke Burbank: Okay, good. Us Nebraska, this is set in the 1930s. Who's living there, what are they living through, what's sort of going on there?
Karen Russell: Yeah, so they're living through these apocalyptic clouds of dust that have swallowed the sun and are really kind of people are quite literally blowing off the map, leaving this town. It's the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought on the southern plains.
Luke Burbank: And this thing really happened, right? This Black Sunday storm, because this book is part history, part sort of fiction, part magic.
Karen Russell: You know, it's historical and fantastical in that way. And the storm, you know, kind of feels genuinely so extreme that it's taking millions of tons of dust and dumping them as far east as Congress. I think it's really resonant with some of the extreme weather we've been living through in recent times. And I, you know, I started the book again right after the wildfires. I thought that was the hardest time of our pandemic. .
Elena Passarello: The fall 2020 wildfires, yeah.
Karen Russell: Yeah, and so I think part of the book, the fantastical part, is that there's a witch who absorbs people's memories for them. She's like the town's memory bank. She calls herself a vault. And if there's something that was kind of too difficult to carry into the future, some event from your life too precious for daily reminiscence, you give it to this woman. And yeah, she just takes it into the vault of her body, and you can withdraw it at some later date. I was really interested in kind of the relationship between memory and history. And sort of what sort of futures we can imagine. So this book, I think it's really exploring the way that you can have a collapse of memory that forecloses a lot of possibilities too. So it was about a bankruptcy of memory and these witch ladies in this town. So it's a problem for the town, right? Because this woman goes bankrupt during the black Sunday dust storm and she stored whole lifetimes for people, right. And so there's gonna be a run on her like there was a run-on, you know, the other banks and she doesn't really have anything to return to people.
Luke Burbank: I mean that's such a genius idea that like there would be a run on the bank except it would be again as you just said these memories she's holding. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
Karen Russell: Yeah, so Del is this like a feral orphan. There's been a string of murders in this region and her mom is one of the victims. She's sent to live with like her dusty bachelor uncle. That's like a very bad roommate situation. And she's a basketball star. Like that's sort of what's getting her through. It's just like her, you know, that sound is just her heartbeat. It's the metronome. And there were these basketball teams. I sort of, there's a book called Dust Bowl Girls by Lydia Reader. I mean, genuinely, if you have seen the picture of this time, it's like a tsunami of dust is swallowing towns. Like, people are dying of silicosis, and still these young women were like, practice is Wednesday, Mary, I'll see you at practice, you know, and really sort of, that life wish was sort of incredible to me. So she's sort of in furious flight from her grief, and she just is alive to play basketball, and at a certain point, like any enterprising young person, you know these vaults, I imagine them as women living on the margins who sort of. You know, something happened to dynamite a space through them, that they're now renting out as storage, essentially. So she's like, she has this roaring abyss inside her, and she's, like, maybe I can be a witch too.
Luke Burbank: There are photos in this book that are real photos of the era, right, if I understand right, which probably brings us to the character of Cleo, who's a photographer. She's a black woman who is basically sent out to sort of do like publicity shots for like works progress era. Like, hey, look what we're doing with this more or less. And but a camera kind of goes haywire.
Karen Russell: Yeah, so I became sort of obsessed with the New Deal photographers and I bet a lot of you are familiar with them. Even if you don't know that's the origin of these images, I mean Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange.
Elena Passarello: The woman is sort of going like this, looking really worried with her chin in her hands.
Karen Russell: Yeah, and then later I think was like what like I have a lot of faces Why is that the one that I mean and then the way yeah foreshadows that we all feel when our friends post
Luke Burbank: The original photo that was not cleared with the friend group on Instagram.
Karen Russell: I mean, people did experience it as a violence sometimes, right? I mean I feel that even looking at author photos, as soon as you meet an author and their face moves, you're like, oh, I was totally wrong about you.
Luke Burbank: Right from that era there are these incredibly moving, both in the book and just generally out in the world of particularly the Dust Bowl and people at the real just margin of life with just so little to their name and there's something about how how sort of authentic they appear that for those of us not in the situation it's this kind tourism, but it was their real life.
Karen Russell: It was their real life. And there is this dust bowl exodus of half a million people who are leaving this region at that time. Cleo, she's sort of inspired by all of the correspondence of these photographers who were sent out to introduce America to Americans. And as I was sort of learning about this project, there's a sort of shadow archive of hole punched images. And so some of these photos are in the book. The hole punched negatives that were never circulated or were never published. And I just thought there was something so resonant about that whole punch. There's something so violent about it.
Elena Passarello: Why did they do it? Why did some of the images that you found have the hole punches in them that we see in the book?
Karen Russell: So Roy striker who was the kind of complex individual who helms this project I mean, it's the only one of its kind of it's a state-sponsored, you know, this government funded documentary project There's always this kind of tension between the need to create propaganda essentially for the New Deal and its aid programs It's like very controversial and and also to this documentary impulse So Roy would put a literal hole punch through the work that wasn't gonna be circulated. And his photographers, of course, hated that. I mean, the story I grew up with about the Dust Bowl was very regional, it was very white. And so it was interesting to look at the work that was rejected, sometimes for aesthetic reasons. You know, it's a duplicate. But sometimes also, you know, it's clearly a political calculation.
Luke Burbank: Right, because in the book, it's like Cleo, the feedback Cleo is getting is the powers that be are not really interested in photography that is actually depicting the diverse nature of the people that are out here living.
Karen Russell: Yeah, and I mean, and it's complex, truly. I mean there is diversity in the file. If you go, you'll see it, but there was some letters I read which would say, you know, take pictures of everyone, but please lay the emphasis on the white farmers that has a much higher likelihood of being circulated. So then as now, right? Thinking about like what we are receiving, the stories were receiving, what forces are shaping those images. You know, I think what this ultimately led me to sort of explore was the way that things that can feel so entirely individual, right? Like the things that we don't even want to think about ourselves, or the things that we have to exile from our waking consciousness, like to get through a Wednesday, the stories that don't get passed down in families, can in aggregate become like a mass denial, a mass forgetting. And I mean, you know, the gaps in my understanding of the Dust Bowl will not be everybody's. But I was thinking a lot about, you know. As a young person, for example, I never connected the exodus of these primarily white tenant farmers from this region with this other dispossession that had happened not even half a century earlier of the dozens of native nations on the Great Plains. I knew about those two events, but I didn't see them as connected. They sort of lived almost in the way internalized that I had encountered them in textbooks, right? In these separate boxes. So I think trying to kind of widen the aperture of how we hold this history. Ended up feeling really important to me. And it's a tricky thing to talk about too, because I've had people ask me like, well, why are there witches in this? It was already so extreme, so fantastical. And I just think there's a way where the scale of that kind of willful amnesia or the scale that loss, it's just hard to come at in a strictly realist book or I wouldn't know how to write that book. I really needed that conceit to sort of engage with that.
Luke Burbank: And also this idea that Dell's uncle came over from Poland. And these were people that were serfs over there, more or less, and had nothing, and then came here, and then were told by the US government to head out to Nebraska, where there's all this free land, and ask no questions about who was here before. And so they come out and are just toiling. And for there to be, in a way, pain is not a zero-sum game. Pain is not a zero- sum game. The pain of the native people that were there and displaced is horrible and should be acknowledged. And it doesn't mean there's no pain for Dell's uncle and trying to figure out how to sort of reconcile all that is complicated and it's also kind of a central theme of the book.
Karen Russell: Yeah, I think that's really essential work, right? I found myself thinking about that a lot. Like, definitely not wanting to minimize the suffering of people who are losing their homes during the Great Depression. Like, to lose one's home is a devastating thing. But also maybe wanting to look at the way this contract gets set up and the way that it is truly poisoned from the start, right. And that is part of our nation's story. I mean, it's- you know, a place where like these ideals, these beautiful ideals that we all hold, I think we can see today, right? We do not live up to those ideals. And freedom has always meant freedom for some here. So that the resonances between these stories, I didn't know kind of going into this. And it came to feel like the real heart of this project in some ways. You know, I'll tell you my own grandparents where, you know my grandma came from Sicily. And my grandpa was a Slav debated like was he Polish was Ukrainian we debated They talk about like what people sacrificed to come here to give their children this new life I don't know that we always look at these federal land policies for example Which are really designed to as land grabs as ways to remove Native nations who held land in common, you know, or had different ownership
Luke Burbank: and fundamentally change the nature of the land so that you then are very vulnerable to something like the Dust Bowl.
Karen Russell: Yeah, absolutely. I read the way that that agriculture is happening there, you know with cash crop agriculture with a market system That really pushes people towards monoculture. I mean, it's we it's the system that we still have today So I think you know, also I'm gonna say there's some jokes in this book. It sounds really really dire There's joy in the book too because that's like what we are But I thought that ended up feeling really like the conscience of the book to me in a way and it felt powerful It's gonna sound so reductive outside the context of this story. But this settler and I really related to him. He just keeps saying, what choice do I have? Like, I'm just one guy. I'm destitute. This is what's on offer. I can prove up on this land. Yeah, now I'm a colonizer in this new place. What choice do have? And I was thinking, what a lonely question and one that's very familiar to me as someone who everyday likes scrolling through and accepting the terms and conditions, right? Every day. And so I don't, you know, but I was thinking about shifting out of that kind of rhetoric of resignation and into something powerful. And I felt like that sort of happened to me outside of the book in a funny way while I was researching it. Like I met the most generous, the most brilliant, these incredible people, all of whom are working for a more just world and like different ways. And I was like, Oh, what choices do we have is the question. Like, it's a great question when it's intoned as a real question.
Luke Burbank: All of the sort of rapturous reviews and appreciation you've been getting over this book, Karen, is totally deserved. I'm curious, though, if you never have to come up with another way to describe large amounts of dust.
Karen Russell: Thank you very much.
Luke Burbank: For like the rest of your life, will that be fine?
Karen Russell: Yeah, I think that's my goal. My new goal is like for the jokes to dust ratio to shift in the direction of jokes.
Luke Burbank: Well, when you do that, we'll be reading that as well. The book is the antidote. Karen Russell, thank you so much for coming on Live Wire. That was award-winning author Karen Russell right here on Live Wire. Her latest book, The Antidote, is available for you to read right now. Live Wire is brought to you by Powell's Books, a Portland institution since 1971. Powells offers a selection of new and used books in stores and online at powells.com. You're tuned into Live Wire. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. Of course, each week we like to ask the Live Wire audience a question. This week we were inspired by Karen Russell's fascination with memory related to her new book, which is called The Antidote. Elena, what did we ask the Live Wire audience?
Elena Passarello: We asked them to tell us a small memory that they'd like to preserve forever.
Luke Burbank: So here's what we actually did. We went out into the audience at a recent taping of the show to collect those answers. Let's hear what people were saying. This is Jean.
Jean: Swimming with turtles in Kauai. I felt like I was in the flow of the universe and I was where I needed to be.
Luke Burbank: Swimming with turtles in Kauai. Have you ever done that?
Elena Passarello: Oh, I've never swum with any turtles except for like nasty box snapping turtles and like some kind of South Carolina crick
Luke Burbank: A moment that you did not feel like you were in the flow of life.
Elena Passarello: No, no, I felt like I wanted to get out of the flow of the river because those things are scary.
Luke Burbank: Was always afraid to go in the water in Hawaii because of sharks. This is a true thing until like three years ago. And then I got over my fear and I did that thing that Jean was talking about. I went swimming with turtles and it was in fact. Uh, here's something that Michelle wanted to remember forever.
Michelle: Building a jump in the snow and daring each other in our toboggans to go over the jump and I actually did it going backwards. So that was the success of my youth.
Elena Passarello: Nice!
Luke Burbank: You never know when you're going to be experiencing the high point of your youth right
Elena Passarello: No, yeah, that sounds like a literal high point, a high point while traveling backwards, too. Go Jill.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, absolutely. That's got powerful, it's a wonderful life vibrations, like the beginning of the movie when they're sliding down on the ice and George gets his bad ear saving his brother. Okay, here's something that Paige wants to never forget.
Paige: There's a small memory I have of hiking in the Hoh Rainforest in the Olympic National Park and it was a beautiful spring day in March. No rain that day miraculously and my partner and I took a nap on a bed of moss and it's brilliant.
Luke Burbank: Oh, my gosh. Did you also drink water out of a leaf? Were you fern gully? What was going on with this?
Elena Passarello: With this. That was the most Pacific Northwest. Have you noticed that all of our audience cards have been taking place outside? People's big memories happen outside the house, which is a good directive, I guess, for all of us to get out.
Luke Burbank: That is a really good thing to remember. Also, I don't know how I would go about discussing with my partner, it's time to nap on this moss.
Elena Passarello: Maybe in their dating profile it was like turn-ons, moss naps.
Luke Burbank: Well, they met the right people. One more of these from Steve, a memory Steve wants to hold on to.
Steve: When my parents made me ride to Canada in the back of a pickup truck from Texas.
Elena Passarello: Whoa!
Luke Burbank: Oh, we forgot to mention Steve is a golden retriever.
Elena Passarello: That's a very like Gen X memory. You know, there's a certain cut off where that stops being a memory and starts being like a traumatic.
Luke Burbank: Well, yeah, certainly a traffic violation in this day and age. I mean, the sheer number of miles I covered in my childhood in the back of pick up trucks. That was a big part of growing up in the 80s. Nice. Anyway, thank you so much to everyone who took a trip down memory lane with us. We really do appreciate you. All right. Let's get to our next guest, a nationally touring comedian from here in the Pacific Northwest. His comedy often mines his incredible life story, which includes addiction recovery a dating while sober, and of course, what the jails are really like in Yakima, Washington. His debut album, Round Trip, hit number one on iTunes and was the runner-up in the 2021 Seattle International Comedy Competition. Sam Miller joined us at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Take a listen to this.
Sam Miller: Portland How we doing man, it's good to be here. I'll introduce myself. My name is Sam Miller. I'm from Olympia, Washington Six foot six and 360 pounds. I got two kids. I've been married 13 years and come June I've all been clean and sober for 17 years Sometimes people ask me, they're like, Sam, what was it like when you were drinking and doing drugs? And I just show them this tattoo. For those of you that can't see, that tattoo says, let's dance. It's, uh, if any of y'all are wondering if you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, just read your belly tattoo. What does yours say? Because mine says, let's dance, which is wild, because I don't enjoy dancing at all. Yeah, it was bad. I used to get in a lot of trouble. I'm not proud of this. I used fight the cops a lot. Pro tip, don't do it. Uhhh... Yeah, they cheat. Yeah. Yeah, you think you're fighting one cop by the time you get your shirt off, there's eight of them, you know? It's not cool at all. I used to go to jail a lot. Yeah, jail sucks, man. Yeah, the won't even let you leave. Wouldn't be so bad if you could go home every day. That'd be like a job. That's my thinking job. Yeah, man, we used to watch a lot of TV in jail. Anyone want to guess what our favorite TV show was? Cops, yeah! Man, this crowd is cooler than I thought, yeah. Yeah, a lot you got that. You didn't use your guessing voice. You guys were like, cops, move on. Yeah, you're right though, man. I love cops, man we used watch that in jail, the guards, they'd make fun of us, you know, they'd be like, huh huh, huh, ain't you guys tired of seeing cops? I'd be, like, dude. That's TV. They can't arrest me anymore. Actually, as you see me right now, I am maximum arrested. And then I'd get that for real, like that righteous anger, you know, I'd be like, in fact, I can't get any more in jail, so why do you get out of my face? Yo, you can get more in jail. Yeah, there's a jail within the jail. It's even jailier, man. Yeah, if I'd have known they had a basement, I would have been running my mouth, man. That was awful. That's another sign you might have a drug problem if you've been arrested in jail. That's not good at all. Yeah, I was confused, man, I'm in jail, I'm being handcuffed. I'm jail, I am being handcuff. I was like, where are you taking me? Ma'am, I' m here, you know? You're gonna walk me in a circle and cut me. Look at this, this is that, man! You're doing good now though, man, I got two kids, one of them's on purpose, yeah! You guys thought of some loser ex con, I got on purpose, kid. Love my kids, the accent one, the other one. They're cool. They got big heads though. I got big headed kids, they look like Lego people. Yeah, I know my kids got fat heads because it rains and their shoulders don't get wet. I told that joke in case the jail jokes made some of you upset, so I was like, I'm a good guy now. You're welcome. Yeah. I met my wife when I was four months sober. I was still homeless, but I didn't tell her that, you know. If you wanna know, man, it's hard datin'. Young folks think it's harder datin' on the apps. Try datin when you're homeless. That's hard. You ever try to get a middle class lady under a tarp with you? Yeah, they won't do it. Yeah, I try everything land a middle class lady, man. I love middle class ladies. I used to spray paint live, laugh, love on my tarp. It's your motto! Me and my wife, though, we got a good thing going, man. She let me move in way too early, you know? She had bad boundaries, thank God. I was pumped. Yeah, moving in, it was my idea, you now? I was like, we should move in. She's like, it's kinda early. I'm like, not really, you no? Storm's coming, you. Thank you. Cool, man, I love my life today. I'm on the road a lot, I go all over the country now, I'm very grateful. I'll be honest, I don't have a lot of cravings for drugs and alcohol anymore, I work hard on my recovery. But there are other things out there that a man could fall into, you know? But I'll tell you this, I would never cheat on my wife, okay, because she's also kind of my landlord. Yeah, I would never cheat on my wife, especially in the winter. That accident kid really screwed it up though, man. That was wild. I don't know if you guys know this, but I was not necessarily father material 10 years ago. You know what I mean? It was bad. I was driving a 2003 Kia Spectra. I'm 360 pounds. That car was way too small. Yeah, I used to fart and my ears would pop. That's a science joke. I was like, all right, man, let's go live wire. I'll do my smart ones tonight. But yeah, man, I didn't want to be a dad. I was scared, you know? My wife got pregnant. I don't know why I said it like that. I was there when she got pregnant, but yeah, she was pregnant. This is my first kid. He was born at the nice hospital on the east side. Our second kid was born at the crappy one on the west side because we didn't pay her a bill. But anyway, even up to that point, I'm still terrified of being a dad, like I'm so scared, You know, we're at the hospital. She's on this bed or like, feed her in the air. I'm watching this. And I've had some loud, I used to eat LSD and jump off of waterfalls, all right? Childbirth is crazier than that. Childbirth was insane because even up to the point of actual delivery, I still did not wanna be a dad. But the most amazing thing happened in my life, the minute I saw the top of that kid's head, I loved him. It broke me wide open. I've never loved anything that much in my life and it happened all of a sudden and I already loved her. Childbirth is crazy. I saw a thing that I love come out of a thing that I loved. It's incredible. It's like if a cheeseburger pooped a hot dog. By the way, just so you know, all the jokes you've heard tonight, that's the one my wife don't like. She don't that one. Yeah, she's like, why do I gotta be a cheeseburger? I'm like, it's gotta be bigger than a hot dog. Yeah, yeah. Or else it doesn't make any sense. Hey, thank you so much, man. I'm on Live Wire, bye!
Luke Burbank: Sam Miller, everybody! That was comedian Sam Miller recorded live at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon. All right, here we go again. It's time for a little station location identification examination. Now, if this is your first time listening to Live Wire, first of all, where have you been? Second of all, here's how this works. I will ask our esteemed announcer, Elena Passarello, a series of questions about a place in the United States where Live Wire is on the radio and Elena's gonna try to guess where that place is. Are you ready?
Elena Passarello: I am ready.
Luke Burbank: Now you have an unbelievable facility with these things, Elena, but I think even you might be slightly thwarted by the first clue. Oh, no. The population of this place, Elena, was 107 at the 2020 census. That was up from 28 people the previous time. Whoa. So that's a population explosion.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, that's like 75 percent. Yes. So places with towns that small thinking west.
Luke Burbank: How about so far northwest that it was once thought of as Seward's Folly?
Elena Passarello: Okay, yeah, so we're going to Alaska. Nice, thank you. Okay, cool.
Luke Burbank: I don't know
Elena Passarello: I think that might be it for me.
Luke Burbank: How about this? This is actually an interesting place to take the hinting, not so much into Alaska, but into us history involving a name that is also the name of this town. It shares its name with a Wisconsin Senator who is linked to very controversial political practices. Um, something ism.
Elena Passarello: McCarthy, Alaska.
Luke Burbank: McCarthy, Alaska, home of KXKM radio. And I have this in the notes from our executive producer, Laura Hadden. If someone is hearing us in McCarthy, Alaska right now, email us and we will send you a tote bag.
Elena Passarello: Yeah! Each and every one of you!
Luke Burbank: That's right. We have about 107 extra tote bags that we're looking to send out there.
Elena Passarello: We should do an audience card where we just ask the citizens of McCarthy, Alaska to answer the audience card. We should.
Luke Burbank: A live taping of Live Wire in McCarthy, Alaska. Now that would be fun.
Elena Passarello: I wonder how you get there. I bet the transpo involves planes, trains, and automobiles.
Luke Burbank: I think that's just a start to getting to McCarthy Alaska. That'll get you to Juneau or something, the jumping off point. Anyway, shout out to all 107 people listening to us in McCarthy Alaska on KXKM. This is Live Wire, we have to take a very quick break, but do not go anywhere. When we return, singer-songwriter David Ramirez will play us some incredible music. So stay with us, this is Live Wire. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. All right, before we get to David Ramirez's music, a little preview of what we're going to be doing on the show next week. We're going talk to the writer and poet Saeed Jones, who will chat with us about his 2022 collection of poems called Alive at the End of the World. It's a book wherein he explores grief and life and being a black queer person in a world that I don't think I need to even say this on the show kind of feels like it's going to end. Of the time. Then we're going to be talking to the best-selling novelist Silvia Moreno-Garcia about her book The Daughter of Dr. Moreau. We're going to find out what happened to Silvia after she was freely allowed to watch horror movies at the age of five. Then, we're gonna hear some music from the indie folk duo The Lowest Pair, so that is coming up next week on Live Wire. In the meantime, our musical guest this week was awarded Songwriter of the Year by the Austin Chronicle, recognizing his contributions to the scene in you may have guessed it. Austin, Texas, where he lives. NPR calls him the ever moody innovator of Americana, which I tend to trust NPR's opinion on all things moody. His latest album is called All the Not-So-Gentle Reminders, which he describes as a much needed love letter to his younger self, a sentiment that actually made the entire theater go off when he said this. David Ramirez joined us at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Take a listen. Your latest album comes out in, like... [David: At midnight.] Three hours? Is it Midnight Austin or Midnight West Coast?
David Ramirez: I think it's out in London, but it's just like the New Year's, I suppose.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, right? What was the process of recording the new album? Did you do it in Austin?
David Ramirez: I did it in Austin, yeah. This one was an interesting one. I, for a minute there was, last record I released was 2020. And after, you know, the shutdown and the world slowly coming back and I was going through a pretty decent heartbreak and I pretty dead set on throwing in the towel and not wanting to do it anymore and not really identifying as a creator or a writer. And you know the new world and who am I gonna be and who do I want to be and. Thankfully, I was around some really, really close friends who pulled me out of that rut, and then I just went out to this really sweet cabin out in Waverly, Alabama, and I have some friends that own this really beautiful venue out there called Standard Deluxe, and they had a cabin that was empty, and just brought all my gear, and it was the first time for me to ride in that capacity, but there was just a lot of fear going into it, and do I still have the curiosity that it takes to make something that I'm really proud of? To isolate myself, in the past, it's been a very dangerous thing. Sure. But this was necessary for me and it was a lot of fun and you know, you hit that 10 day mark knowing that you'll be out there for four weeks in the middle of nowhere and you start going a little crazy and then.
Elena Passarello: Were you all alone, all alone?
David Ramirez: All alone, all alone, alone.
Elena Passarello: Nobody in the other cabins well
David Ramirez: Well, the couple who live and own the property, I would, you know, text them and shoot the messages like, y'all are welcome to come by, like, have a glass of wine. But I think they were really trying to respect my space and yeah, after about, I don't know, 10, 12, 14 days, I started kind of, you know, feeling normal again and really enjoying the space and then came back home and we I did it a year ago in Austin.
Luke Burbank: So that was a healing process for you because I could see that really going either way, that amount of solitude for real.
David Ramirez: Yeah, no it was, it was healing. It was just nice to fall in love with the kid who fell in love with music again and I had missed that little guy and I'm gonna cry. Yeah, but I think my
Luke Burbank: I think my therapist calls that attending to yourself. Yes, I agree.
David Ramirez: Yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah, no, it is very very sweet and nice and but that was it was very healing and very necessary And I'm glad that there were people in my life who were not just pushing me to you know Make something but pushing me. To be myself. Yeah What song are we gonna hear? I've written a lot of songs for my mother and my great-grandmother and my siblings But I have yet to really get one out about my father and when I look back at my love for music all of it came from him giving me a walkman when I was 10 years old and And sharing all his favorite cassettes with me and yeah, I feel like this song's been kind of waiting in the wings for a very long time This is called The Music Man.
Luke Burbank: This is David Ramirez here on Live Wire.
David Ramirez: [David Ramirez performs "The Music Man"]
David Ramirez: Thank you. Thanks, sir. Thank you, Portland. I appreciate it. Thanks for being here.
Luke Burbank: That was David Ramirez right here on Live Wire performing his song, Music Man, that's off his latest album, All the Not So Gentle Reminders. All right, that is gonna do it for this week's episode of Live Wire, a huge thanks to our guests, Karen Russell, Sam Miller, and David Ramirez.
Elena Passarello: Laura Hadden is our executive producer. Heather de Michele is our Executive Director and our Producer and Editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Our Technical Director is Eben Hoffer. Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid is our Assistant Editor and our house sound is by D. Neil Blake. Ashley Park is our Production Fellow.
Luke Burbank: Valentine Keck is our operations manager, Andrea Castro-Martinez is our marketing associate, and Ezra Veenstra runs our front of house. Our house band is Sam Pinkerton, Ethan Fox Tucker, Ayal Alves, and A Walker Spring, who also composes our music. This episode was mixed by Eben Hoffer and Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid.
Elena Passarello: Additional funding provided by The Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation. Live Wire was created by Robyn Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff, and this week we'd like to thank member Mitch Stanley of Portland, Oregon.
Luke Burbank: For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, head on over to LiveWireRadio.org. I'm Luke Burbank, for Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire team. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.
PRX.
