Episode 708
Lidia Yuknavitch, Felipe Torres Medina, and Pedro the Lion
Bestselling author Lidia Yuknavitch discusses her new memoir Reading the Waves, which explores memory and how a shift in position can reshape our complicated stories; award-winning humorist and writer Felipe Torres Medina (The Late Show With Stephen Colbert) takes us on an adventure through the quagmire of the US immigration system with his book America, Let Me In: A Choose Your Immigration Story; and indie rock group Pedro the Lion performs "Spend Time" from their latest album Santa Cruz.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Bestselling Author
Lidia Yuknavitch has been inspiring readers and soul-searches for years—her TED Talk “The Beauty of Being a Misfit” has millions of views. Fans who have been waiting years for a new nonfiction from Lidia are eager to get their hands on Reading the Waves, which critically acclaimed writer Stephanie Land describes as “a master class on how to hold your body's stories with tenderness as well as how to let go… Reading the Waves is a sigh of compassion. This book bleeds empathy in the most vulnerable and profound of ways. It’s gorgeous.” This is also Lidia’s much-anticipated return to nonfiction after thirteen years. Kristen Stewart is currently directing the film adaptation of Lidia’s first work of nonfiction, the cult classic The Chronology of Water (2011).
Lidia founded the workshop series “Corporeal Writing” in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. And she is a very good swimmer.
Felipe Torres Medina
Humorist and TV Writer
Felipe Torres Medina is a Peabody and Writers Guild of America Award–winning writer from Bogotá, Colombia. His writing for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has earned him five Emmy nominations. His humor has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and others. He lives in New York City with his wife and is totally chill when you misspell his birth country’s name. (He is not.)
Pedro The Lion
Indie Rock Band
Pedro the Lion, led by David Bazan, is an indie rock project renowned for its introspective songwriting. Formed in Seattle in the late 1990s, the band gained a following for Bazan's incisive lyrics exploring faith, doubt, and personal growth. After an 11-year hiatus, Bazan revived Pedro the Lion in 2019 with Phoenix, initiating an autobiographical album series. This musical memoir continued with 2022's Havasu and 2024's Santa Cruz, each delving deeper into Bazan's formative experiences. The latest release, Santa Cruz, covers Bazan's teenage years and early adulthood. Described by Pitchfork as "densely packed and deeply sincere," it features standout tracks like "Modesto," named one of "The Best Songs of 2024 (So Far)" by NPR's All Songs Considered. Paste Magazine hails "Santa Cruz" as "the good stuff," praising Bazan for "coming into his own, figuring out who he is and shaping the musical identity that has carried him through more or less until now."
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Luke Burbank: This episode of Live Wire was originally recorded in May of 2025. We hope you enjoy it. Now let's get to the show.
Elena Passarello: From PRX, it's Live Wire! Next week, author Lidia Yuknavitch.
Lidia Yuknavitch: I think it's more an exploration of memory and our relationship to memory and where you stand in relationship to the crap that's happened to you.
Elena Passarello: Writer and humorist, Felipe Torres Medina.
Felipe Torres Medina: We all know that a lot of the things that they're doing are illogical and absurd. And lack of logic and absurdity is to me the seed of humor.
Elena Passarello: With music from Pedro the Lion and our fabulous house band. I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello, and now the host of Live Wire, Luke Burbank.
Luke Burbank: We've got an absolutely packed show for you this week. Of course, look, we live in the world that you all live in. We know that times are tough out there when it comes to the news, but we like to think on this show that if you look hard enough, you can find some bright spots in the news. Sometimes you've got to use a telescope. It might be the James Webb telescope. It might be in another galaxy where the good news is, but we search for it. We find you a couple of those stories and we present them at the top of the show in a little segment we call the best news we heard all week. Alright Elena, what is the best news that you heard all week?
Elena Passarello: Okay, Luke Burbank, have you ever read a romance novel before?
Luke Burbank: Well, yeah, of a sort, you know. Back in the day when I was in school and there was that kind of roundabout of books in the back of the classroom. [Elena: Yes, a little carousel.] Yeah, with some like Louis L'amour and some Lonesome Dove and the like on there. And I got caught up in a few of those bodice rippers.
Elena Passarello: Oh, well, this story's for you. [Luke: Oh, good, okay.] So from what I understand, the romance novel fan base is pretty devoted. And they turn out for their favorite authors. And one of their favorite authors is Abby Jimenez. She's the author of such steamy sounding novels as Just for the Summer.
Luke Burbank: Oooh.
Elena Passarello: And the Happy Ever After Playlist, both of which sound like maybe best news. Maybe I should just recount the plots of those.
Luke Burbank: That was how I was hired on Live Wire, just for the summer. [Elena: Whoops.] And I just never left.
Elena Passarello: And now you're living the happily ever after playlist. So Abby Jimenez did an event recently in Toronto and 400 people showed up. Most of them were women. They were really, really ready to hear one of their favorite authors talk about the romance novel game. And then all of a sudden the fire alarm went off. Uh-oh. And everyone was like, oh no, no, oh, no. And then a door opened in the back and like six firemen came in. They were all hot! I saw the TikTok they had the gear they had like short sleeves and suspenders and one of them had his helmet in his hand
Luke Burbank: They were like right out of Central Casting.
Elena Passarello: Yes, I feel like some of them had like sexy soot. Yes, which doesn't make any sense cuz like nothing was on fire
Luke Burbank: They had come from a different fire.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, they were like, one of them was holding a kitten, you know, and then apparently the entire crowd went insane and started being like, are you single? And all this stuff. Firefighters took it in stride. There also was no fire. It was just literally a false alarm to the point where people were like is this some kind of paid promotion? Because it's something that apparently would have happened in an Abby Jimenez novel. But no, it was real. And apparently Toronto firefighters can get it.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, life imitating art.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, which for me that just makes me smile when like random perfect things happen to the perfect people to receive them.
Luke Burbank: Speaking of people getting what they deserve, and I mean this in the best way, you know, there's almost nothing worse than moving, right? Can we agree moving is a huge hassle? Actually, there is something worse than moving and it is your friend asking you if you will help them move. Hey, I've got a sales pitch for you, Elena. Could you spend, I don't know, the better part of 12 hours endangering your lower back, carrying heavy stuff up to my place for the reward of up to two slices of pizza?
Elena Passarello: Why is the reward always pizza?
Luke Burbank: It's not enough. It's not enough reward at our age.
Elena Passarello: How does anybody say yes to that? People in their 20s do just...
Luke Burbank: I think yeah, I think that's one of those things you generally age out of. Yeah Okay, so a woman named Michelle Tuplin had to move her bookstore in Chelsea, Michigan It's called Serendipity Books and it's been in this same spot since about 1989 and it's beloved in the community independent bookstore but she was going to move down the block and around the corner and She was very daunted by the project of moving this whole bookstore. She's the owner and basically one employee of this thing And so a couple weeks ago, she just put a note out on the Facebook page and just said like, could somebody come help me with this? This is a lot. And she comes out of the bookstore on the day of the move. And there is not one, but two lines of people all the way down the block and around the corner to the new location to be a book brigade to hand a book. A book starts out in the original Serendipity Books location and then goes past person to person all the way down to the new location.
Elena Passarello: That's so beautiful because then it's a community bookstore and like a lot of the community has had their hands on the entire inventory.
Luke Burbank: And you bring up a good point, Elena, because this was in the article I read out of the town paper. This is a quote, organized Type A volunteers were at each end of both lines to ensure the book stayed in order.
Elena Passarello: I did worry about that. I did worried about that!
Luke Burbank: Shout out to my Type A kings and queens. Just like, being very organized about it, but check this out. The book brigade involved volunteers from ages six to 91. It took them two hours to get over 9,000 books. [Elena: That's it? Wow.] 9,00 books moved all the way down to the new location. This is very cool because it means that Serendipity Books will now be able to open in time for National Independent Bookstore Day, which is coming up.
Elena Passarello: That's right!
Luke Burbank: I mean, any story about people and books and the books surviving these days is a huge W. People in Michigan taking care of Serendipity Books, that is the best news that I heard this week. This is Live Wire from PRX. Our next guest is a best-selling author who transforms complex personal experiences into hauntingly beautiful sentences. Her memoir, The Chronology of Water, is coming soon in film form, directed by none other than Kristen Stewart. Her latest book, Reading the Waves, is a Quicksilver expansive exploration of grief and hauntings according to Vanity Fair. We are so glad to have her back on the program. Please welcome Lidia Yuknavitch to Live Wire.
Luke Burbank: Welcome back to Live Wire.
Lidia Yuknavitch: My complete pleasure also. I love you, Portland.
Luke Burbank: Let's start kind of at the beginning of this book where you write that this is not a traditional memoir. I'm wondering what is this book to you? What were you looking to do with this book?
Lidia Yuknavitch: I think it's more an exploration of memory and our relationship to memory and where you stand in relationship to the crap that's happened to you. And we often just stand in one place and kind of lock on to the story of what happened. And that's cool. [Luke: That's one way to do it.] Don't let anybody take your story from you. However, if you hold on to it so long that the story kind of begins to be too heavy or something you can't carry anymore, it might be time to consider standing in a different position to the crap that happened to you. And I guess I mean the difficult stuff. The things that have wounded you or made things hard for you. And so I think the book is kind of a space walker, mind walker heart walk around looking at your own life to see, can I stand in a different place? Can the story shift and can I shift?
Luke Burbank: You know, this book does, you know, deal with some pretty traumatic things, and I found the book incredibly readable, and I was, but I was also reading reviews of it, and one thing I saw coming up over and over again was people talking about your ability as a writer, sort of, I don't know if it lightens things, but it makes it possible for the reader to go on this journey with you over a lot of topics that are really intense. And I'm wondering, when you're writing about something. Like, do you feel pressure to write in a very clear way so that the book doesn't just get pulled down by the top?
Lidia Yuknavitch: You know about this kind of question one mustn't kill the reader This is very important number one as the writer
Elena Passarello: Keep the reader alive.
Lidia Yuknavitch: Resuscitate them if necessary. Well, you know, think about your own life, right? And the sad stories or the sorrowful stories or the heavy stories, you know, they can weigh you down till you're underground, right. And so one thing that's beautiful about storytelling space, I think you'd agree, Elena, It's different than real life. You can move around, you can make narrative dynamics, you can make sound, you make smell, you can silence, you could make a pause, you can make up.
Lidia Yuknavitch: But in real life you just get dosed with the experience and it's overwhelming, but storytelling space lets you curate or choreograph so that we're going somewhere together and yeah it's sad or difficult but we're holding hands.
Elena Passarello: I totally relate to that. There's a power in that curation. There's the power in putting your story through those paces on the page. If you're just somebody who's telling stories as a person, like you're never going to write a book, but you're talking to people, do you think we have the same power to narrate our lives how we want to?
Lidia Yuknavitch: I would not know I'm an introvert and I'm hiding in the bathroom while other people are telling really verbal stories that are wonderful, but I have noticed when they're telling the stories that I can participate in the listening and I admire that and then I go back and hide in the bathroom.
Luke Burbank: This is a perfect time for us to take a break. Lidia will let you power down for about 60 seconds. This is Live Wire Radio. We're talking to the writer Lidia Yuknavitch about her latest book, Reading the Waves. We will take a short break, and then we'll be right back with more Live Wire in a moment. Welcome back to Live Wire Radio, coming to you this week from the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon. I'm Luke Burbank, here with Elena Pasarello, and we are also here with Lidia Yuknavitch. Could you read a little bit from this book? You talk about an ex-husband of yours named Devin who passed away, although I know you're not a fan of that term. I want to talk about that too in a bit. So I'll use the term that you probably prefer. He died in 2015 under some extreme and somewhat unclear circumstances. I was wondering if you could read a little bit from the book.
Lidia Yuknavitch: The word Devon means poet. Skydiver. People are sometimes too interested in what happened, the plod of plot and action. Sometimes the rest of the story, or perhaps the heart of the stories, is carried by image, by repetition, tiny intensities, not captured fully from plot and actions. A very intense drama played out in my relationship with Devon. You will not find it in these pages. The drama is not the story, or the story of why and how relationships dissolve or crescendo is every story. Living inside all of us to differing degrees, rising and falling in waves, when I focus on a moment on small intensities that may or may not interest anyone else. I'm reminding us how those tiny pieces of a life are sometimes carrying bigger meanings than the big, dull, thunderous calamities that befall us. If I track not just plot and action, but impressions, emotional intensities, associations, repetitions, images, can I transmogrify and reframe the story? What happened is Devon and I loved each other into the death of our marriage, which is not any kind of unique story. Oceans of women have fallen for dangerous men, for example, or angry men, or depressed men, or death-driven men. Legions of marriages fail. I don't want to write about the plot of what happened to him. I want to find the heart of this story underneath that.
Luke Burbank: That's Lidia Yuknavitch reading here on Live Wire. I guess you sort of, in that reading, answered sort of my next question, which is, I was struck by the line, people are too interested in what happened. Is that, kind of going back to the conversation about memory, I mean, do you feel like the specifics of what happened are sometimes over-prioritized and over-indexed?
Lidia Yuknavitch: I think the dramatic action is over-emphasized. When Virginia Woolf has written extensively about the periphery of your life and what's just to the side of the main action or what's underneath it or little moments that other people ignore but she thought were like, this is the whole deal. There's a moth dying on the windowsill, That literally is a story of hers. And uh...
Luke Burbank: Was it Kafka?
Elena Passarello: The moth was named.
Luke Burbank: I would love to see those stories intersect.
Lidia Yuknavitch: What an unholy love child that would be. I'm sorry, my brain just went somewhere really weird. You know what if those tiny periphery flickers and moments and small pieces are where they're holding part of the story what of the big dramatic thud action that we've been so trained to you know embrace as what happened to us is only carrying a small fraction of the story it could be that in your heart the sound that happened is more important or the smell or something you put in your mouth and ate. But that doesn't get to be the center of the story because it wasn't the dramatic action of what happened. So I'm interested in that, and I don't, I'm not right, I'm not a wizard, I'm just interested in bringing those smaller things in the side and underneath and above into the heart of the story in case they're holding something, which for me, they hold everything.
Luke Burbank: Now, you are not the only person that I know who has lost loved ones, who does not really enjoy or appreciate the term passed away. What is it about? And it sounds like there's other folks here that feel the same way. What is, what is it about that? What an odd support group we're forming this week. Like the world isn't bleak enough. But when I read that in the book, it was echoed in conversations I've had with other people who've suffered loss and do not appreciate that term. Can you kind of explain why it is that you don't really have use for that term?
Lidia Yuknavitch: I mean, again, I'm not right. But what pisses me off is how passive it is. Like, something just floated off. When the lives we lead, when we're in relation to people we love, that's all there is. That's the heart of being human. And so I'm not trying to say that we should exalt death and give it over dramatic language, I'm saying we should bring death into the story of being human. And the beauty and the pain and the sorrow and the joy and the ecstasy of that. And so when someone dies, it's part of what it means to be alive, and why don't we glory in that? And the passed away language also. I was raised Catholic, and Devin's family was Baptist Christian, and so it just pisses me the hell off that this language is like, oh, fly away. You don't fly away, you're remembered in the bodies and hearts of people you were close to. And that's still there as long as I'm alive, and hopefully I can pass that to someone else. And so. That language, again, you don't have to agree with me, but you know what I mean?
Luke Burbank: Yeah, I do. We're having a very meaningful and deep conversation, as we often do with you, Lidia. I don't want to take it to Hollywood.
Lidia Yuknavitch: But you're going to.
Luke Burbank: But I feel professionally obligated to mention that your last book has well actually was Chronology of Water. How many books ago was that?
Lidia Yuknavitch: 2011, I think.
Luke Burbank: Well, that really beloved memoir has been adapted into a film. I understand it's been filmed. I was looking at production stills of a person who's portraying you in the film, a young version of you. And I'm just curious, I know that you and your husband were in on the writing of the film. What is that like for you to see the story of your life portrayed in that way?
Lidia Yuknavitch: Well, let's back up for a second and talk about who's making the film. It's Kristen Stewart.
Luke Burbank: That she said she was pausing her acting career until that she could get this movie officially made. All this being a famous Hollywood person was getting in the way of her executing a movie about your life.
Lidia Yuknavitch: She did say that. I think a feature we share is that when someone tells us no, we get feisty and pissed off. And someone was telling her no, and that was her response. But what I want to say about her being the person making this piece of art, it matters because she has a singular and, you know, different than everybody else view of what films are, of what acting is, of what stories are, of what women are, of gender is. And so she's not making a biopic. This is not that. She's very interested in being faithful to the experimental quality of the narrative. And so if I was telling you what to look for, I'm thinking art house movie, Probably Beyond Jarmusch like collage, vaguely psychedelic, interested in memory, not interested in linear narrative, interested in image sequencing and rearrangements, and that's fine by me.
Luke Burbank: That's got to be maybe a relief from this otherwise kind of constraining notion of a biopic, of a linear story, of a that's not maybe what I thought in that moment or how I wrote about that moment. But to have it be a totally different expression, that must be kind of liberating for you as the person whose life it is to some degree based on.
Lidia Yuknavitch: Completely, but also, I just have a fundamentally different view of the whole project, which is this. Kind of like in jazz musicians, I'm an artist, I made a piece of art, this other artist came along, had felt something about the piece of the art I made, and now she's making a completely different piece of art, and she riffed off of my art, whatever it is will be its own autonomous thing. And that's beautiful to me. I don't need it to have anything to do with me. It's just a riffing, an artistic riff.
Luke Burbank: We're very excited to see it, however it turns out. Lidia, thank you for coming on Live Wire. That was Lidia Yuknavitch right here on Live Wire. Her latest memoir, Reading the Waves, is available right now, and it is really, really something else. Live Wire is brought to you by Powell's Books, a Portland institution since 1971. Powell's offers a selection of new and used books in stores and online at powells.com. I'm Luke Burbank, here with Elena Passarello. Of course, each week, we like to ask the Live Wire audience a question. And we were inspired by Felipe Torres Medina, who you're gonna hear from in just a moment, whose book, America Let Me In, is about the insanely complicated U.S. Immigration process. So because of that, Elena, what did we ask the Live Wire audience?
Elena Passarello: We asked our audience to tell us about something that's way more complicated than it should be.
Luke Burbank: We actually recorded responses from a recent audience at a Live Wire taping and here's what they had to say this is something Jonathan thinks is more complicated than these to be.
Jonathan: Low-key college physics, like, in class, why do I always have to assume that gravity equals zero or like we're in a vacuum or something? Like, the equation makes no sense.
Luke Burbank: I don't want to sound anti-science or anti-math, but I really salute this as a non-math person. I mean, we've just, we're taking it as a given that physics should be complicated and that we should be trying to learn it and for some of us. It just might not be in the cards. [Elena: What does it mean when someone starts a sentence with low-key?] It means high-key, Elena. That's the whole thing. Well, I think it's sort of morphed into, like, low-key, I just am not really that big on putting guacamole on my tacos, right? But now I feel like when we say low key we kind of mean it's a big deal. It's kind of high-key.
Elena Passarello: So like when someone says, no offense, but you're a total jerk.
Luke Burbank: It's just like that. In my reading of the lexicon.
Elena Passarello: That makes it even better that it's as low-key as it's physics take.
Luke Burbank: Low-key physics is a little more complicated than it needs to be. All right, here's Brandon's response to the question.
Brandon: I think roundabouts are more complicated than they should be, so all you have to do is turn into it and go in a circle and exit, and people just keep going. I don't know why.
Luke Burbank: Um, I high-key totally agree with this. There is a roundabout down the hill from my house. And so it means that I go use this roundabout very frequently. And I'd say at least 60% of the time, there's somebody who is very confused by the process, by the yield signs and who has right of way. They're not as simple as we were told they would be.
Elena Passarello: If we don't learn it in driving school, which at least not when I learned how to drive in the South, I didn't see a roundabout, I think, until I moved out of Georgia. I don't think they're allowed down there.
Luke Burbank: Let's do one more before we get out of here. This is from Amitai, something that's extra complicated that maybe doesn't need to be.
Amitai: I'll go with printers. Well, printing should just be really easy and it feels like it hasn't gotten any better since the 90s. That's a good answer.
Luke Burbank: I think this was intentionally inserted by our executive producer, Laura Hadden, who is unbelievably qualified for her job, but spends a good hour each show trying to get the printer to work.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, because we have to have a printer that can travel to the several places where we do a live show. And it does seem to be about 80% of her job description once we're on site.
Luke Burbank: Okay. So where I'm talking to you from right now, Elena, I have a printer that for whatever reason it works. It's on the network. My computer can talk to it. I can never move because I have, it's in work. When I hit print, it prints. And I know if I were to move to another location, these things would never talk to each other.
Elena Passarello: Don't even move the computer I say keep it all exactly where it is right now because you're in some kind of sweet spot
Luke Burbank: Exactly. All right. Well, thank you so much to those brave Live Wire audience members who weighed in on the topic. Appreciate you. All right. Speaking of Felipe Torres Medina, he's actually our next guest. He moved to the U.S. At the age of 21 and then spent the next 10 years of his life navigating the chaos and the confusion of the U. S. Immigration system. And now he's spending this phase of his life trying to explain that craziness to those of us who have not had to go through. And when he's not doing that, he writes for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and he's earned five Emmy nominations. He's got a book out, it's titled America, Let Me In, A Choose Your Immigration Story. Here is Felipe, who joined us on stage at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Check it out. Felipe, welcome to the show.
Felipe Torres Medina: Thank you, thank you for having me!
Luke Burbank: Okay, I feel like I learned a lot about the immigration process in this book and also a lot about you. You grew up in Columbia, had a pretty good childhood, a good life going there, but then you wanted to come to the U.S. For sitcoms?
Felipe Torres Medina: Yeah, I love sitcoms. I love writing. I love television. And I was like, wait a minute. Someone writes these.
Luke Burbank: Did you have some favorites, like were there some sitcoms that really spoke to you?
Felipe Torres Medina: At the time, definitely 30 Rock, which was on the air.
Luke Burbank: I mean, your lived experience as a 20-year-old in Colombia, Timothy Busfield and the crew, 30-something.
Felipe Torres Medina: No, 30 Rock..
Luke Burbank: 30 Rock. Wow, that makes a lot more sense.
Felipe Torres Medina:I have no idea who Timothy Busfield is.
Elena Passarello: If 30 Rock was on when you were in college, you do not know 30 something.
Luke Burbank: When you said 30 Rock, I heard the moody, 1990s, long-running, emo kind of dramedy, 30-something, which would be insane. If that was the show.
Felipe Torres Medina: Never heard of it, must binge now.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, it would be a hell of a mashup.
Felipe Torres Medina: You gotta call it 30-30, though. Yeah, that's right.
Luke Burbank: Okay, so I'm sorry. 30 Rock really spoke to you.
Felipe Torres Medina: 30 Rock and Arrested Development. I obviously grew up on The Simpsons, on a very weird Simpson's diet, because my mother didn't let me watch it until I was like 12, because boy, Bart is rude to his parents.
Luke Burbank: So you decide to come to the US and I'm wondering what you expected the process of navigating the immigration system, how you thought it would be and then what you found it to actually be.
Felipe Torres Medina: I have a friend who also writes for Colbert who came up with the term to describe the Trump presidency, but it's exactly what you thought, but even worse than you imagined. And that's kind of how the immigration system feels. It's very difficult. And I knew that because it's difficult even if you're trying to get a tourist visa. So I assumed that everything else would be hard. Perhaps I didn't know how hard it would be.
Luke Burbank: The book is a choose your own adventure, essentially. Did you grow up reading those kinds of books as a kid in Columbia? I did not have the attention span.
Elena Passarello: You didn't.
Luke Burbank: I would just be like, I don't know, back of the book. I would skip right to the end.
Felipe Torres Medina: We had one or two in my school library. And I remember that people really wanted them. And once I finally got it, I remember reading it. And I died pretty early. It was like a medieval one. And I was like. This sucks. What do you mean, I'm dead? I hate this. And I returned it. So, yes, I was familiar with the genre, but it wasn't like, oh my god, I love it.
Luke Burbank: Did you start out with the plan to write this book in that format, or were you working on a more traditional book and you thought, oh no, this is a better way to do it?
Felipe Torres Medina: It's a weird one because I very much wanted to tell a bunch of stories and to talk about a bunch of visas, so I think at one point I was listing the kinds of visas and I had gotten something called an O1, which is an alien of extraordinary ability visa, which was a ridiculous name. And so when I started doing that and listing the kinds of visas and realizing that I wanted to tell a bunch of stories about immigrants, I was like, there must be a way to do this. And I landed on this playful format. And then that just helped me create a book that put you in the shoes of the immigrants. And I think was very important because I was tired of explaining the immigration process to very well-meaning liberal and progressive Americans.
Elena Passarello: But it also seems like such a technical marvel to actually pull off, not just a choose-your own adventure, but a choose-your-own-adventure about one of the most complicated systems I have ever encountered in my life. I mean, did you just have like a serial killer wall with like all of the...
Felipe Torres Medina: Yeah, it wasn't a wall, but I think I have like seven, like maps, like tree branch maps, with all the stories in different formats until I found the one that worked for me to be able to track the stories. Also, like, obviously the children's adventure books are very popular here in America, but that was not my like only inspiration. Like there, when I was in high school, I read this Latin American author named Julio Cortázar, who's, he has a book called Hopscotch. You can find it at translation here. And that book is like that. That book is a novel that's told that at the end of every chapter tells you go to this chapter, but also the writer's like, this is a game of hopscotch, so if you want to read it, start to end, you can do that, or you can read it in this kind of style. So it was also a little bit of like, I'm inserting myself in the literary tradition of Latin America.
Luke Burbank: We're talking to Felipe Torres Medina about his book, America, Let Me In: A Choose Your Immigration Story. Now, I'm reading this book. I am finding it informative, I'm enjoying the humor, but it's all under this cloud of the intense seriousness of the topic of what is happening in this country. And you have a kind of a disclaimer in the book that just says like, yes, this is a very fraught topic, this is something that's very hard for a lot of people, I'm choosing to address it with humor. I'm wondering, but you probably wrote that. A while ago before what we're now actually seeing, and the, I mean, it's impossible to even really describe accurately what's going on for people in this country who are either trying to become citizens or are citizens and are being disappeared. Like, does that kind of make it harder to approach it with humor, or is humor still the only option for you?
Felipe Torres Medina: For me, it's the way to stay sane, right? Not to sound trite, but you know, joy is a form of resistance. And, you know we all know that a lot of the things that they're doing are illogical and absurd. And lack of logic and absurdity is to me the seat of humor. Right? Yeah. So for me, It's like, well, if I don't make a joke about this, I'm gonna cry. Yeah. Yeah, and so for me, it's the only way to address it. And it's also a way to, especially with this book, inform people about something that I say in the book, everyone has an opinion on immigration. Everyone. Every American has an opinions on immigration, but no one knows how the system actually works, including, clearly, the people doing the arrests and disappearances. Because they just take people like, they took a person who has citizenship. Yes. So they don't really know the system. They're just trying to either fill a quote or whatever. So for me, it was like, humor is a really, I think, fun way and non-preachy way to address things that you don't know.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, at the beginning of the book, you allow the readers to select a difficulty level of their immigration process, easy, medium, hard, or very hard. What would be the things, realistically, that would lead a relatively easy process of immigrating or becoming a US citizen versus a very hard one? What do those situations look like?
Felipe Torres Medina: Well, I say this in the book, but if you pick the easy, it turns you to a page that says, incorrect. There is no easy way to move to the United States. Start again. Obviously, medium and hard, which are the categories where most of the stories in the book live. Are very much dependent on privilege, be it like racial or mostly economic privilege, right? I was able to move here. I came on a student visa and then I got my alien or extraordinary ability visa. Now I'm on a green card because I was born, you know, upper middle class in Columbia. So that obviously makes things easier for me. And I think that that's the biggest factor, but when you get to the very hard section and you get the people who come here the very hard way, I try to make a disclaimer that This is a humor book and I don't want to deal with the very hard stuff with jokes because I don't want to make fun of these people. I didn't want disrespect the, I think very courageous people who come here the very hard way. So what I use this section for is to maybe posit the question, why do you think people still want to move here despite all the difficulties, despite the high costs, both emotional and monetary.
Luke Burbank: I won't belabor it, but there's just L1 Visa, EB5, Investor Visa, OPT, H1B Work Visa, F1 Student Visa, 01 Visa, 01A Visa, EB1 Visa Green Card.
Felipe Torres Medina: It's actually 01A. It's very funny that I had correct you on that. O1, and O1A, and 01B.
Luke Burbank: And I'm, that's like, I'm like two thirds of the way through the list. The point is that these are just, there are so many different classifications and things that are confusing even to public radio hosts. About this process.
Luke Burbank: Towards the end of the book, Felipe, you have a chapter that is titled, Why Even Move to America? A Sort of Conclusion. And I'm wondering about your conclusion these days, because I feel, as an American who can see how enriched we are by people who come here from other places and knowing how close Canada is, I really wonder why people would still choose to want to come to this place with all of the barriers that are being thrown up.
Felipe Torres Medina: It certainly keeps changing by the day, but I do think the idea of America is why people come here, regardless of government and who's in power and all that kind of stuff, which is why I think we have to protect the idea. And so that's why people wanna move here and that is the motivation. And I think, as you said, immigrants make this country better because they believe in the idea, Like, we are so America-pilled. Like, for real, we like America so much more than Americans.
Luke Burbank: Absolutely nothing to be here other than be born somewhere
Felipe Torres Medina: Exactly, so I think that that is kind of like the motivation is to defend this idea and protect it so that it continues to be a country that people want to move to because... Thank you. Because also like I think Americans think America is the greatest country in the world. And I think that's a good thing. I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing. Um, and so I think we should always have that sense of superiority. So if we continue to make America a country that people want to move here, that's a branding thing like that's good branding. So many people want like every other country can be like, oh well We have a free health care. It's like yeah, how many people wanna move to Finland?
Luke Burbank: The book is America Let Me In: A Choose Your Immigration Story. Felipe Torres Medina. Thank you so much for coming on LiveWise. Was Felipe Torres Medina, recorded live at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland. We have to take a very quick break, but stick around because when we come back, indie rock artist and personal friend of mine, Pedro the Lion, will perform some music for us here on Live Wire. Stick around. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. All right, here we go again, Elena. It's the part of the show where we play Station Location Identification Examination. If you are new to the show, first of all, where have you been? You've been here for 20 years doing this. And you may not know, this is where I quiz our esteemed announcer Elena about a place in the United States where Live Wire is on the radio, she's trying to guess. Of where that place is. All right, one of this city's nicknames is the City of Clustered Spires. Because of its skyline of historic downtown churches, the city of clustered spires. So it sort of like rules out Phoenix.
Elena Passarello: Yes, yeah, I'm trying. It's probably an older city.
Luke Burbank: Probably older. Let me give you this other hint and see if this zeros you in on it a little bit. This place has a baseball team. The baseball team's nickname is the Keys. This is a summer league team. They are named for Francis Scott Key who of course composed the Star Spangled Banner.
Elena Passarello: Hmm.
Luke Burbank: And was a resident of this city.
Elena Passarello: It's not St. Paul, Minnesota, is it? [Luke: Wow, that's a great guess.] I know F. Scott Fitzgerald, he was named after Francis Garkean, I think he was from St.Paul, and it seems like that's the town that would have a lot of spires.
Luke Burbank: You got to go, you gotta keep going East. You're going to have to get into Maryland now. This is actually the second largest incorporated city in the state of Maryland. [Elena: Is that Frederick?] It's Frederick, Maryland, Frederick, Maryland, where we are on the radio on WYPF-FM 88.1. Shout out to everybody tuning in from Frederick, Maryland. All right, before we get a little music from Pedro the Lion, how about a little preview of what we are doing on the show. Next week, we are gonna be talking to the poet and MacArthur Genius Award winner, Reginald Dwayne Betts. Now he has spent years working to put books in prisons across America. Reginald also has a collection of poetry out. It's called Doggerel. Which isn't just a funny name for a collection of poetry, but it's very accurate because it actually involves poems about his experience with dogs. Then actor and New York Times bestselling writer Annabelle Gurwitch will join us to talk about her new book, The End of My Life is Killing Me. Annabelle is a longtime friend of mine and the book is about her journey after being diagnosed with stage four metastatic lung cancer as a non-smoker. And amazingly, through scientific breakthroughs, she's still here years later. She's doing very well, but she certainly has a new perspective on things that she talks about in the book. Then after that, we're gonna hear some music from New Mexican singer-songwriter Max Gomez. This guy's incredible. He blends folk and blues and Americana. He's gonna play us a tune from his latest album, which I've been listening to on repeat. It's called Memory Mountain is the album. So make sure you tune in for that. That is next week. On Live Wire, we'll see you here. All right. In the meantime, our musical guest this week hails, like me, from Seattle, Washington, Elena. And unlike me, is about to celebrate his 30th anniversary, playing music with his band. His latest release is Santa Cruz, and it covers Dave Bazan's teenage years and early adulthood, which is particularly notable to me because I was there for some of it. I grew up going to church youth group with Dave. We're gonna get into this. Pitchfork calls the album densely packed and deeply sincere, and I couldn't agree more. Pedro the Lion joined us at Benaroya Hall in our hometown of Seattle, Washington. Take a listen to this. I don't mean to keep going over this territory every time we have you on the show, Dave, but I just have to go back to our early days of meeting, because I came to this church youth group that you were in attendance at already, and you were the worship leader for the youth group, and would play the song into your arms by the lemon heads, which make it about Jesus. And you were putting out these DIY tapes that were legitimately good. And I was just like, this guy is the freaking coolest. And you are, but I've been listening to this latest record of yours, which covers, you know, periods of that time. And it seems like you were feeling very differently inside at that time when I was perceiving you as this guy who just had it totally made.
Dave Bazan: I'm sorry I didn't mention you on the record.
Luke Burbank: No, no, that's okay. You know what? There's always the follow-up. That's right.
Dave Bazan: Yeah, what was happening was called masking, I've learned recently.
Luke Burbank: You know, what was sort of happening for you emotionally and mentally in your teenage years that you wanted to revisit with this record?
Dave Bazan: Since I was a kid, we each have these bad bumps, bad bounces as children and adolescents and things and depending on how we deal with them, if we shove them down for later or have somebody to talk to about them, it turns out kind of differently. And so I shoved all of it down, waiting, thinking, this won't be forever, but right now I have to suck it up. And that was 45 years in, I was like, oh, it's time.
Luke Burbank: A lot of your music over the years has been you sort of publicly grappling with your relationship with God and sort of where you might be on that on any given year or week. And I know that's why a lot of people who grew up the way I did really sort of were drawn to your music because we've also experienced that journey. I'm wondering what that's like for you to have that part of your life really public and then to have a lot people be like, oh yeah, I know what he's talking about.
Dave Bazan: I mean, it's a huge honor. Like it's, it is a really delicate thing to experience. And it, in my experience, was pretty lonely. And so even writing about it, I thought no one's gonna connect with this. This is just my own trip. And then when you put out the song or the record and you have people come up and say, oh man, I felt lonely too in my transition from beliefs to, you know, belief to belief and so that's huge. Like I said, it's an honor. I can't think of it as too big of a responsibility, you just have to be yourself.
Luke Burbank: Have you considered integrating the Lemonhead song into your arms, into the Page of the Lion set? I mean, it kind of slaps.
Dave Bazan: Yeah, it does. Just don't tell Evan that I sang it to God. What song are we going to hear? This is Spend Time from Santa Cruz.
Luke Burbank: All right, this is Pedro of the Lion on Live Wire.
Pedro the Lion: [Pedro the Lion perform “Spend Time”]
Luke Burbank: That was Pedro the Lion right here on Live Wire performing the song Spend Time off of his new album, Santa Cruz. All right, that's going to do it for this week's episode of Live Wire. A huge thanks to our guests, Lidia Yuknavitch, Felipe Torres Medina, and Pedro the Lion.
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, Mike Gamble, Pony Dahmer, 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 City of Portland's Office of Arts and Culture. Live Wire was created by Robyn Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff, and this week we would like to thank member David Hardman of Beaverton, 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 crew. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next week.
PRX.
Staff Credits
Laura Hadden is our Executive Producer, Heather de Michele is our Executive Director, and our Producer and Editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Eben Hoffer is our Technical Director, and Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid is our Assistant Editor. Ashley Park is our Production Fellow. Valentine Keck is our Operations Manager, Andrea Castro-Martinez is our Marketing Associate, and Ezra Veenstra runs our front of house. Our house sound is by D. Neil Blake. Our house band is Sam Pinkerton, Ethan Fox Tucker, Ayal Alves, Mike Gamble, Zach "Pony" Domer, and A. Walker Spring, who also composes our music. This episode was mixed by Eben Hoffer and Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid. Special thanks this episode to the kind folks at Benaroya Hall. Additional funding provided by the City of Portland's Office of Arts and Culture. Live Wire was created by Robyn Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week, we'd like to thank member David Hardman of Beaverton, OR.
