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Q&A: Journalist Anna Sale on How to Be ‘of Many Places at Once’ [1]
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Date: 2024-09-20
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Anna Sale is the host of Death, Sex & Money, an interview podcast that ran on WNYC for almost a decade and just recently moved over to Slate’s feed. (There are so very many great episodes, but readers of this newsletter might be particularly excited about her interview with Lucinda Williams.) She’s also a proud West Virginia native who recently exited, as she puts it, a yearslong “identity crisis about place.”
Enjoy our conversation about Anna’s long evolving relationship with her home state, panic induced by Italian-American funeral homes in Williamsburg, and the modern nonexistence of taboos, below.
Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: I would like to start our conversation with your first experience of moving away from home. So you’re from Charleston, West Virginia, which is the capital, and I’ve heard you say before that your parents are relatively educated, but still that your first experience of moving away to a big coastal city was a really intense one. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that transition and whether or how it changed your relationship and your feelings about your home state.
Anna Sale signing books in her hometown, Charleston, West Virginia, in 2021. (Photo provided by Sale.) Anna Sale: Yeah, I grew up in Charleston. My mom was a physical therapist and my dad was an orthopedic surgeon. And – anyone from an Appalachian town might know what this means – my high school was at the top of the hill. So I grew up with every privilege that one could hope for. I traveled as a kid, and I didn’t think of myself as somebody who necessarily had a particular identity around rural communities until I was a freshman at Stanford in 1999.
A few things kind of come to mind about that time in my life. I can remember that, in my family, it was always clear that I was going to leave home after high school and go to college, probably somewhere far from home. And I can remember feeling this intense, sad, almost ripping feeling when I was leaving West Virginia. And I remember thinking, “everybody’s acting like this is so normal and natural, that this is what happens when one comes of age and goes off to college.” But it felt really sad to me.
It wasn’t necessarily connected to really deep friendships in high school. I had great friends in high school but it was more this sense that I knew what it felt like to belong to that community and to row my side of the boat and then I was leaving. And so that’s one feeling I remember.
And then I remember this profound sense of dislocation when I got to Stanford. I was the only person in my class from the state of West Virginia. There was a lot of newness, as far as where my classmates were coming from, what Silicon Valley was, what technology was. We were all still kind of getting to know the internet. And I was just very overwhelmed. I felt really far away from home.
I remember meeting somebody at some party early in my freshman year, and they made some comment about what it was like to have NASCAR playing in the background when you’re home on a weekend day, and you don’t have anything to do. And I remember the feeling. It was such a small detail, but I had been feeling like nobody else understood what it was like to come from the part of the world where I came from. And so then I very much leaned into it and became all about Appalachia, and all about West Virginia, and rural places generally, and ended up being a history major. I found this wonderful history professor Richard White who studied Western American history, but let me do a guided reading about Appalachian history with him.
I remember being in the stacks at Stanford and being really touched and excited that there were as many books about West Virginia and Appalachia as there were. I did my history thesis about urban renewal and the removal of a black neighborhood in Charleston, West Virginia. So I kind of figured out how to make it work for me and to feel connected.
And then as soon as I finished college, I left California, because there was nothing tying me there. But I didn’t really know what it was going to mean to go home. You know?
DY: But you did go home.
AS: I did. My first job ended up being for the Sierra Club as an organizer. At the time, they were hiring people in different communities as field organizers. And I had done some labor organizing when I was in college. That was another way that I connected to my Appalachian background, by thinking about what labor movements looked like there in the early aughts. And so I was trained in organizing tactics, but then pretty quickly realized that job just wasn’t suited to my personality.
I didn’t feel like I was the person who had the answers about what ought to happen for the future of the economy and the environment in West Virginia. And I discovered I was much better suited to asking questions than offering certainty. So that was about a year into being back in West Virginia. West Virginia Public Radio had a job open, and I applied, and they trained me, and it was an incredible place to learn how to be a journalist.
DY: And so your view of the state suddenly becomes informed by, I assume, lots of interviews with other people who have had totally different experiences of living in West Virginia from you.
AS: I think the thing that leaving and then coming back made me really appreciate – and I don’t know if it’s like this in every rural state – is in West Virginia, we have this collective identity of being proud of where we come from and wanting our state to get respect and acknowledgement. Even when ESPN analysts would talk about West Virginia University, it was exciting that they talked about us because we were just ignored. And so I think I didn’t have this illusion that I was just like every other West Virginian, but I did have this sense, and still do, that there’s something fundamental that I get that other West Virginians understand, that we share. And I like having that. I like having that sense of belonging in a place. A bi-regional lunch: California tomatoes with West Virginia-made ramp salt from JQ Dickinson Salt Works. (Photo provided by Sale.)
DY: Do you still feel the ripping sensation when you visit and you leave?
AS: You know, it’s a little bit different since I last lived there full time in 2008. It’s been a long time and it’s changed a lot since I was there. The politics have really changed. I don’t understand it reflexively in the way that I used to. I still have incredibly deep affection, but I feel less connected. And I think a large part of that is time, and also raising my kids somewhere else.
DY: Do you ever struggle with or against that sense that you don’t understand it so reflexively? Like, do you ever catch yourself talking as if you do?
AS: I’m still asked to explain West Virginia to people. And so I feel both like I will do my best to do it and also I’m aware of, “Who’s this lady from California who’s explaining this place?” Anything that I have to say that’s not 100% positive, I have to add caveats that there’s a lot that I’m not in connection with. Because, with rural places in general, the place and the context and being there matters. And when you’re from a rural community, especially when you’re from a place like West Virginia, a place that has whole histories of being denigrated, if you’re not up on what it’s like to be there, you can do a lot of harm. So I just try to be self-aware about that. There’s a lot I know about West Virginia from being from there and also from studying it and continuing to read the news from there. And also, I’m more of an outsider than not now.
DY: I think it’s interesting that you mentioned that you feel like raising your kids somewhere else has been a real point of separation. I kind of nonsensically think about my own life like “I can run around and do whatever until I have kids. And then if I want to still be from Southern Illinois, so too must my kids be,” you know what I mean? I wonder what it is about that experience for you that creates that barrier.
AS: One of my kids was born in Cody, Wyoming. So, she really likes being able to say she was born in Wyoming and she tells other people from Wyoming that, and then one of my other kids was born in Oakland at the same hospital as Kamala Harris. Both are very different from growing up in West Virginia. As I was in my thirties I thought a lot about where I belonged – and I really had a long identity crisis about place. I’m only just settling into the idea that I can be of many places at once and that’s okay. I think being somebody who straddles different places actually is of enormous cultural value.
However, during my identity crisis about where I belonged, the other thing I was obsessed with when I lived in New York City was I would pass by a funeral home in the Italian American section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or something, and I would be like, “Where will my body go? Where will there be a memorial service?” Because when you’re from a community where there’s one or two or three places where memorial services happen, you know what’s going to happen when you die. And when you leave that structure, you really realize how on your own you are.
DY: Yeah, totally. And maybe even if it was obvious to you moments before you passed that you should be buried in West Virginia, would anyone else know that?
AS: Yeah.
DY: I think I’m going to do an ungraceful shift and ask you a question about your podcast. I’ve been wondering about this for a long time actually. Death, Sex & Money is supposed to be about “the things we talk about the least.” But I wonder if, since the show first started, you’ve had to reformulate in response to increased cultural openness about those topics.
Like, for example, it seems like purity culture is well and truly subcultural at this point. It obviously still affects people profoundly, but the virginity cult in America is less obsessive and less mainstream than it was in the early aughts. And then when it comes to money, both on the left and right, some form of economic populism seems to be the dominant political rhetoric, which indicates to me that people are more comfortable talking about class and money. So – if you even accept that premise – I wonder if that’s something that you’ve had to think about in continuing to create the show.
AS: Yeah, I definitely think that that’s true. You know, people have been talking about death, sex, and money in different forms since time immemorial. And certainly since 2014 when we started the show. Taboo things are not really taboo anymore.
And so the way I’ve conceived of Death, Sex & Money is that the title is a signal to listeners that we’re going to dive in and we’re not going to skip the questions that you truly wonder about, because it’s not what fits in a usual journalistic profile interview. We’re not going to skip those.
I guess the other thing that I’ve really come to like about making the show is there is something about saying, “All of us are dealing with death and sex and money in our lives in different ways at all times.” So it’s about having a place where the spirit is that we’re figuring this out alongside one another, in real time. As opposed to what dominates a lot in the podcast space, which is conversations that are saying, “if you do this one thing, you’re going to be a smarter, more effective, better human.” There’s so much self-help slash life-hack kind of content out there. I like making a show that’s more about figuring it out.
And the one other thing I’d say about the show that I think that I’ve come to really like is that it’s a show where we treat with equal curiosity and dignity people who are public figures and celebrities and people who aren’t.
DY: So Death, Sex & Money aired on WNYC for a long time, like 10-ish years. Is that right? And then it just recently switched over to Slate. I’m curious about what you learned about yourself and your desires in that intense transition moment.
AS: I’ve been a journalist since 2005. So almost 20 years. And I’ve seen a lot of really talented people have to leave the industry because of the loss of jobs and opportunity. And I’ve seen a lot of really important stories go untold because people weren’t there to notice and tell people about them. So in my experience at WNYC, like a lot of public radio stations, there was not enough money to do everything that we promised to listeners.
So it was time to ask myself, “do I want to keep doing this kind of work? What kind of journalist am I?” I’m a weird sort of journalist because I came up in traditional newsrooms and covered politics and now do a lot more personal sharing and storytelling. So I reflected on all that stuff and I became clear about two things. First, if there’s a way I can keep building my career around being interested in people and amplifying stories that I think ought to be heard, I want to keep doing that. And then the other thing I became clear on is that, if I could, I wanted to work within a company.
I didn’t really want to worry about payroll. I didn’t really want to worry about being able to employ the people that I work with on the team. I wanted to worry about creative challenges and editorial questions with them. I didn’t want to worry about the business model. A lot of other people, journalists have made different choices, but that’s not really my interest. And the other thing was that I really like being a part of institutions. That feels a little bit counter-cultural right now, but I like having coworkers. I like having people around who are further along in their careers. I like being around people who are earlier in their careers. I like pulling my weight for the greater good. So when Slate wanted to pick up the show and bring on most of the team from WNYC, it was amazing.
DY: I think those are all the questions I wanted to make sure and get to. Do you have anything you wanna make sure we talk about?
AS: Can I have one thing? Because I’m curious how you think about this. As part of finally settling on moving out of my identity crisis and being more confident in my worldview as somebody who cares about rural places and also doesn’t live in rural places most of the time, it’s hard to find fellow travelers.
You know, I read the Daily Yonder, I pay attention to rural thinkers and outlets that are about living in smaller communities, but it’s hard to stumble across people who live in major metropolitan areas who also really understand the interdependence of urban and rural places. So I wonder if there are places where it’s easier to find those people, or ways to find them, because I wish that there was more of a network.
DY: I mean, I also wish there were more of a network of those people. I do think the Daily Yonder generates an exciting network of people.
I’ll also say I think it’s interesting to watch the national narrative about rural places change. I mean, we started this year with White Rural Rage and now we’re at Tim Walz. So I think that, in a great way, it’s maybe more difficult to tell who doesn’t hold very derogatory views about rural America, because the baseline tone has shifted so much. That’s not an answer to your question, but I think it’s kind of interesting to observe.
Editor’s Note: The Center for Rural Strategies, which publishes the Daily Yonder, runs a partner program called the Rural Assembly that creates a community for rural-minded folks everywhere. If you’re looking for a place to network with other people interested in rural issues, it’s a good place to start.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. Join my email list By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time. Processing… Success! You're on the list. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.
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