Paul Kix: Welcome to another episode of Now That's a Great Story, the podcast that examines a single piece of work is a way to reveal the artist worldview in which along the way inspires you to be just as creative in your own life. I’m your host Paul Kix. Today I'm joined by Eliza Griswold the poet and best-selling author whose latest non-fiction book Amity and Prosperity tells us as much about the fracking industry as a how to pace story really well there was a slow drip of dread to this that makes just for absolutely gripping storytelling. So first off Eliza, it's great to have you on the show.

 

Eliza Griswold: Well, thank you so much for having me, Paul.

 

Paul Kix: I’d like us to set this up if we can. What part of the country are we talking about when we're talking about Amity and Prosperity?

 

Eliza Griswold: We’re talking about really the beginning of Appalachia which lies about an hour southwest of Pittsburgh, and it really marks the beginning of where Appalachia is.

 

Paul Kix: The people of this region -- this is something that I found kind of remarkable -- they felt taken advantage of financially. First by the steel barrons, then by the big coal excavators so how do they respond when natural gas firms come inquiring about land rights in what would have been roughly, what, between 2004 and 2005? Is that roughly when they start inquiring about them?

 

Eliza Griswold: That’s exactly right. Maybe a couple of years earlier, depending on the company itself. You know, they reacted they do when outsiders arrive, which is with well-founded suspicion. But fracking and these gas leases promise to do things that coal leases and previous gas leases had never done. You know, these leases guaranteed major payouts for people. You know, to the tune of a $1000 an acre and even upwards of that to $5000 an acre. And so for a lot of people, this was a means, actually, to help hold on to farms that had been in their families for at least a century, and they could afford any more to keep up barns, to buy new tractors, you know, to put bathrooms in on the first floor of their house for aging parents, And the money from fracking allowed them to do all of these things.

 

Paul Kix: It’s a very sort of, you know, make do with what you can and the reality around you mind set to this and I see this in sort of unapologetic financial terms. which I frankly counts found kind of refreshing because the majority of what my understanding of it sort of, like, as the outsiders perspective. Who are these people that would allow themselves to be subjected to what would what would follow the fracking? But once you're inside it you just such a great job of that like showing that mindset of how again they felt that previous generations -- their parents grandparents -- had been taken advantage of by the steel industry, by the coal industry, these people didn't give them... those concerns didn’t give them nearly as much as what the natural gas firms were offering. And I grew up on a farm in Iowa so I sort of understand that, well, this is the reality of things aspect to it.  I'm curious how was your first response was when would you started to talk to people about this coming in as an outsider.

 

Eliza Griswold: Well, you know, one of my early encounters I showed up on the farm of a man named Bill Hartley who is no longer with us. Just a really wonderful, smart, old curmudgeon who ran a barber shop in a trailer on what had been his grandmother’s farm. And when I showed up, he asked me, well where are you from. And I knew that New York City, which is where I live, was not going to be a great answer to that question but I thought that PHiladelphia might be a better answer because we’d be better Pensylvanians. So I said I live in New York City, but I’m from Philadelphia. And Bill said, well that’s two strikes against you. And what I came to understand was that a long history of enmity between the western part of Pennsylvania and the east coast, that’s really rooted before the Revolutionary War. But that history follows through, and that history of emnity about outsiders coming in and wagging their fingers about moral -- usually about resources -- but about moral positions that these people hold. You know, how could you possibly be leaving your farm? And people like Bill experiences hypocrisy, right? Because they see -- and sometimes quite accurately -- they see city dwellers and urban people, and that doesn’t mean that it has to be New York City or Philadelphia, that could be Pittsburgh -- but they see urban people as taking advantage at low costs of the resources that they have really paid dearly to harvest over centuries and that does have to do with fossil fuels. But it I also has to do with sweat. Sweat equity in the land and what people have paid. So I came really quickly up against a hostility and suspicion and I what I found was that it was a great lesson in slowing me down and having me begin to listen to what people were saving and learn that that were much more sophisticated world views and that the condescension that many outsiders carry, you know, about Trump country is really misplaced in lots of ways.

 

Paul Kix: Yeah, it’s a… what you just said, the sophistication, it comes through so clearly even though you would otherwise think of people who live there as part of fly-over country. And these towns, Amity and Prosperity, we’re talking about hypocrisy, suspicion, but you titled the book Amity and Prosperity for a reason. Do you care to share briefly what that reason was?

 

Eliza Griswold: Sure, so Amity and Prosperity are the names of the two towns in which most of the book takes place. They’re the towns were I spent most of the past seven years reporting. Really just where Appalachia begins. And these are towns with a long history as we’ve talked about -- a long history -- of actually first timber, then coal, oil and gas, and now gas again. A long history of dealing with extraction and farming alongside industry. Which I think is kind of… you know, we don’t see that. We’re like, oh, there’s the bucolic farm of America and then there’s industry. And in fact these realities often coexist. You know, these towns were founded hundreds of years ago on principles by settlers -- mostly Scotts-Irish, but others as well. Germans as well, arriving in the new country and trying to set up farms and to squat on land that was Native American land. And there’s a long bloody history of confrontation between the two of them, between Native Americans and these settlers. And the names Amity and Prosperity really come out of the dreams that early settlers had of what these towns would become. And obviously given some of what extractive industry and just contemporary life has wrought in these places, Amity and Prosperity are a far cry from what one can find there today.

 

Paul Kix: Yeah. It’s incredibly well done. The nuance and complexity and dynamism of the characters and The landscaping. And again just from the perspective of his former Iowa farm boy, you're capturing something that I experience it was quite real. The rest of the coast might sneer at where I grew up but I don't see where I grew up is too much different from the last sevens years were you spent... Those characters those people are visceral on the page so great job. The protagonist of stories a single mom named Stacy. She’s a nurse trying to raise her tween and teenage children. How does she feel about firms like Range Resources coming in to extract the gas beneath her land?

 

Eliza Griswold: She’s suspicious. She, like most people, is suspicious. Her family is extremely conservative and her dad is an out-of-work steelworker and a Vietnam combat vet. And both of those encounters in his life brought him up against essentially what is structural inequality although he wouldn’t call it such. You know, the shutting down of the steel mills, the ways in which he feels he really martyred his body and lost his friends to fight for a country that doesn’t fight for him. Those… that bitterness, but it’s not really bitterness because there’s a lot of hope and joy in Stacy’s dad and in their family life, but that suspicion, that long history of resilience is, I think, probably the better word, made her, like others, suspicious when a Texas-based company came to town. But Stacy had other reasons that she thought this was going to be a pretty good thing. One of them is that because her Dad’s history with the US Military, she is very much about bringing US soldiers home. And when the company respresitive showed up at her house and talked about, you know, that American energy independence would mean American body no longer had to go fight foreign entanglements over oil, she thought it was part of her patriotic duty. And also, what gas promised to do was reinvigorate industry. A new age of industry for Appalachia so that people like her dad could go back to work and her children and there would be prosperity again and this was the big promise. So based on both of those things as well as her own, you know, basic struggle to safeguard a place in the middle class and the fact that signing this lease would give her $8000 which was just about the cost of her dream barn. For all of those reasons, she signed a lease and thought she was doing a good job of being a good American to do so.

 

Paul Kix: Can you walk through, because this is sort of the beginning of the dread, can you walk through what happens when Stacy actually goes in to sign her paperwork?

 

Eliza Griswold: Yeah, you know, Stacy goes in. Okay. So Stacy has learned… She’s a nurse at the local hospital, and there’s a lot of chit-chan in the break room about these leases, and Stacy... You know, oil and gas is coming, you know, this idea of farmers of becoming Shellinaires making a lot of money off of Shell gas, and so she was pretty excited about it. And she was one of the first people she knew to have the opportunity to sign a lease because she lived pretty far outside of Amity, which is quite rural. And she knew enough to know that the more land that she could lease, the better the deal might be from the company. So she’s actually gone up and down her road and pulled together her neighbors and served them cookies and they decided to sign a lease together because they thought that would (a) protect them and also get them the most money. So she and one of her neighbors go in to sign their lease, and they, you know, I think very much with this sophisticated understanding and this skepticism, they realize pretty quickly that they were in above their head in that they had wanted to start the signing early in the morning because they’re perfectly capable of reading documents and they wanted the time to read the documents before signing them. But the meeting was called late in the day, and they only… everybody was going to go home at five, and suddenly everything was rushed. You know, either you sign now or you don’t sign. And I think that was the very beginning of her feeling that they’d been… they were in on a con job. That alongside with, she was very, very concerned about water because she’d grown up without drinking water. Which is pretty common in the part of Amity where she lived. And one of the things she loved most about her farm is that it had a great well. Great quality water and she wanted to protect that. And she had already negotiated before going into sign the lease about a special, basically, a rider, a special clause that was supposed to protect her water. And it wasn’t in the contract when she showed up. When she asked for it, the company did go find it. But the fact that here… what she cared most about wasn’t even in front of her, all of these things started to give her and her neighbor Beth Boyles serious misgivings about what they were doing.

​

Paul Kix: All right, and now we’re getting at a part of the book that becomes this self-contained, gripping as I said a minute ago, story. Let’s actually start at the beginning of that story with the Yeagers. Is it the Yeagers. So who are the Yeagers?

 

Eliza Griswold: The Yeagers are Stacy’s neighbors. They’re neighbors to both Stacy and Beth Boyles. They live just next door to these two farms. They are.. Let’s see. How can I describe the Yeagers? They are… They never did speak to me over seven years of reporting, although I stopped by many, many times to ask them. They always politely declined. They did not want to be written about as private people, but, unfortunately, as a result of what happened on their farm, the Yeagers site, which was the oil and gas site where the pond leak and other major missaps happened, because a source of public concern.

 

Paul Kix: What’s in these ponds that are on the Yeagers property?

 

Eliza Griswold: Very good question. So one of the things that makes the history of fracking in Pennsylvania especially chilling, and one of the things that really bares most investigation is the use of these massive waste ponds, and, you know, there was a pond next door, a wade pond next door to Stacy’s farm which her daughter, her eleven-year-old daughter actually found this giant eight-acre black void when she was in her seventh grade computer class looking on Google Earth, and she saw next to their house this massive black pond sitting just a few hundred feet away. And what was in it became a source of basically several lawsuits that stretched over the period of the investigation that I was doing. So what in it first was fracking waste. Very short. Which is the chemicals, the sand, and the waste water that goes down into the hole on the more than a mile down under the earth, sometimes up to two, and out laterally. Under such pressure… under about the pressure of a shot-gum blast to try to fracture the shell rock to free the oil and gas and then all of that comes back to the surface, leaving some of the waste behind in the earth. But what comes up in addition these chemicals, is radioactive waste. Radioactivity that’s been down in the earth for millennia and over time that becomes more and more concentrated.

 

Paul Kix: Yeah, and what’s amazing here is you do this great job of describing the Yeagers, the ponds, and then there’s line, if I may, that says, “within months there were indications of trouble in the trouble pit of the two pits there. The Yeagers grass was dying around it.” And it’s just like, uh-oh. And the thing that captivated me as I’m reading it, Stacy, right, she’s downhill and therefore down water from the Yeagers? 

 

Eliza Griswold: She’s downhill, down water, but this is the crazy… So she is downhill and down water. Exactly right. You know, her neighbor Beth is even closer that they’re living on horse farms and, you know, they have pigs, they have goats, they have ducks, they have dogs. First of all, the dogs begin to sicken and die. And then a couple of these horses begin to sicken and die. And it’s actually only at that point that Stacy and her neighbor Beth Foyles begin to put together what could be going on. And it turns out that they are multiple what we would call pathways of exposure that could have been responsible for it… for affecting these animals and these people. The pond was no question leaking. The state department of environmental protection which was tasked with regulating the pond issued several notices of violation. So several warnings and then fines against the company, saying these ponds are leaving. It came out through the history of depositions when all of these private documents and private emails beame public through the discovery process in these lawsuits, that in fact in one email from one worker to another on the site, they wrote, we all know these ponds lead. So it isn’t just this pond, there were other ponds leaking in the county as well. So you have all the waste that we discuss, that radioactivity, those chemicals, antifreeze leaking through the bottom of these ponds that are lined with essentially black garbage bags, okay? So there;s leaking into the earth. There is something else happened, though, in the air, which is that these… the hope is to get rid of some of this waste, the pond is being aerated, okay, so there are non-permitted aerators basically flinging this mucky water up into the air so that some of it evaporates. But at one point, more than once, the power goes off, those aerators break down. And instead without that air, without that oxygen going in to that pond, the pond begins to rot.. It basically breaks out, like, it goes septic like a wound, and it has a bacterial infection in it which makes it off gas, massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide which at high levels of exposure can be lethal. And what the company does in response to that is they apply hundreds of pounds of this biocide, a carcinogen, like a cancer-causing agent to try to kill off the bacteria. And so at one point, you know, you have workers up there wearing hazmat suits, putting this highly dangerous material in the pond that’s leaking, okay? And hundreds of feet away you have Stacy and her neighbor Beth, like, in shorts and culottes, getting their animals ready for the county fair.

 

Paul Kix: You just describe a lot of this stuff that’s happening. And some of that is a little bit of flash forward, right, with the department of environmental protections.

 

Eliza Griswold: Yes.

 

Paul Kix: But certainly the nurse in Stacy, in that moment, she’s seeing these animals get sick, she can start to smell this stuff, what is she thinking might be causing this?

 

Eliza Griswold: Well, she knows… at first… the first sign of trouble here is this very simple reality of truck traffic. They have two hundred diesel trucks passing their house every day and that…. They live on a dirt road and those trucks are passing 35-feet from their house,and they are kicking up major amounts of dust. Stacy’s first understanding is, well, we’re coughing because of this dust. And you know what? This is the price of progress, right? It’s the give and take. We’re getting money from this industry, they’ll be gone soon enough. The dust will settle, and we’ll be okay. The first pathway of exposure and what probably began to weaken Harley’s immune system, was the particulate matter, diesel on that dust. So that dusk most likely had pretty serious implications by the time we get to this point. What happened with Harley’s weakened immune system is that one of the things that happens when fracking occurs, arsenic is not used in the fracking process, but it’s naturally occurring in the ground already. And quite often, fracking shakes loose some of the elements that are already underground. And so Harley’s arsenic levels spiked. She, Stacy, doesn’t know what’s sickening her son but she finds out pretty quickly that it is exposure to arsenic because arsenic and heavy metal exposure is likely what sickened Jody the horse next door.

 

Paul Kix: With her own background in medicine, she has him tested, and this is the part… I thought at first, well, this is obvious what’s wrong, but it wasn’t. They had him tested for all of these various illnesses and diseases and what happens?

 

Eliza Griswold: Everything comes back negative. They don’t know. So do you want me to read that part?

 

Paul Kix: Yes, if you could.

 

Eliza Griswold: Finally, he’d missed so much of seventh grade that she enrolled in the homebound program. Once a week a teacher came to the house with his homework. Stacy tried everything she’d learned over 23 years of nursing to figure out what was wrong. They’d made trips to Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh and the ER at the Washington Hospital where she worked. Harley was tested for appendicitis, Chrone’s Disease, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Cat Scratch Fever -- after one of the Haney’s three cat Cheyenne scratched his lip -- Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Mononucleosis, Swine Flu. All came back negative.

 

Paul Kix: This is… the reader, what’s amazing here… I want to ask a craft questions because what’s amazing here, at least this reader, me, I’m thinking, well, God, this is obvious what’s causing this. But it’s not so, actually, so obvious… you know, there isn’t such a quick and easy answer, so you start to second guess yourself as your going through it. And it keeps you, at least it kept me really moving through all of these pages. Like, could this really be because of the water? Is it perhaps something else? Although it would be such a strange coincidence? The upshot is that I thought it was just thought paced so very well, Eliza, and I’m wondering, you know, are there certain writers that you admire that taught you how to structure stories?

 

Eliza Griswold: Yeah, I think, you know, yes, absolutely. Both structuring stories and also, you know, there are in this craft, this kind of immersion reporting that’s also really investigative, there’s certain principles that have to do… that I adhere to probably more strongly than I even do when I’m thinking about storytelling. And they are factually accurate. That really is… so throughout this, they cause a link between what was sickening Harley.. I mean, in retrospect you cannot believe that Stacy as a smart nurse cannot put together what is happening next door. And her kid, you know, just as you said it’s not in her interest, right? She’s making money from this. She doesn't want to, like… If it is this industry that’s sickening her kids, they’re going to have to move. And they can’t afford to. So I think what happens here is being extraordinarily conscientious. And conscious of the fact in the way the facts preceded, helps establish the narrative tension. And that this really took years of putting on a page. And when I think of the other writers I admire so much, who work in this vein, I would say, you know, of another time, I would say Martha Gelhorn. Certain George Orwell. More recently I would say George Packer, Kate Boo. You know, this immersion… Ted Connover, certainly. Because it’s a balance between… It’s not just dishy immersion, this is what people’s lives are like, it’s this very taught struggle to get across what we call both the foreground and background narrative that the inclusion of detail is in service of a larger story...

 

Paul Kix: Yes.

 

Eliza Griswold: ...While really, really, really insisting that, you know, if you’re ever here reading what Stacy’s thinking, it’s because Stacy told me what she’s thinking. And we in.. you know, in writing, we talk about interiority and how do you establish what we call interiority. Well, what was she looking at? What was she thinking when she was driving? What was she feeling? And when you read that on the page sometimes, how could anybody possibly know what Stacy was feeling when she was driving down that road. And the very simple answer that I teach my students at NYU, is you ask. You know, what were you feeling, right? What were you afraid of? What did you dream about?  And the very simple answer that I teach my students at NYU, is you ask. You know, what were you feeling, right? What were you afraid of? What did you dream about? And all of those are just simple narrative questions that help establish the three-dimensionality of a human life.

​

Paul Kix: You’ve got a little bit of diverse background. For someone that does investigative work, I mean this is the best possible way, I didn’t also imagine that you’re also a poet. So I’m wondering, you know, how… what you came to first and did your first passion in any way lead you to this investigative journalism or is it the other way around? I’m not really sure. So could you just enlighten me?

 

Eliza Griswold: I sure could. It’s very, you know, it’s such a weird walk, but essentially my background of my first love was poetry and is poetry, and I have another book coming out from FSG next winter called If Men, Then, which is my second book of poems. So I still do write the poems. I write them quietly alongside the nonfiction. But what I… you know, I grew up in a household where social justice and the idea of service to the world was very, very much how my parents lived. And I think what happened is, you know, when I hit adulthood, I know this is what happened. That I was working at the Paris Review, I was George Plimpton’s assistant, and I was writing poems, and the time came for me to really… and that was fun, but that was not a living, and the time came for me to support myself. And through George’s work and actually through the work of other narrative nonfiction writers who focused on social justice issues, I was like, you know, I could do this. I can go travel around the world and write about some of the issues facing humans today and support myself in doing so, and pay close attention in the same way I do when I’m writing poems but in telling different types of stories. So that’s kind of how this all began.

 

Paul Kix: Do you think that your background in poetry and  to those are my new details helps you 

 

Eliza Griswold: Yes, without question. I think, you know, it’s a very similar skill of paying attention. I think the poet… both of them require a lot of patience, and I am not very good with patience.

 

Paul Kix: Really, I would have thought the exact opposite reading this book but go on, go on.

 

Eliza Griswold: Oh, no, this was excruciating. I mean, this is really. Thank you for thinking that… You know, this is a story of quiet horror in so many ways and that was the challenge of telling it because it’s a lot easier to tell a story that’s in the middle of a warzone with a lot of moving pieces that are going fast. It’s a lot harder to tell a story about a family living, you know, really an environmental mystery -- of disaster, quietly, and trying to figure it out. And I just, you know, I just -- after meeting Stacy and her kids, which I first met Stacy in the Spring of 2011. You know, she was talking for the first time publicly in West Virginia at the airport where a bunch of concerned farmers had gathered to hear her talk about what she feared was happening. And she knew very little about what was happening to her and her family back then, but from the time that I heard her talk, I knew that I really… that I really had hit upon a human being that deserved to be honored in the pages of a book. And that took a really, really long time for lots of reasons. So, yeah. I learned some patience but it doesn’t come by me very naturally.

 

Paul Kix: Were you… actually, we’re talking about observation, but that time frame you just set out, which you also, I believe, you include in the book, we’re you actually even observing this chapter that we’re talking about right now? Or were you going in reporting, like, saying, okay, what happened next? Were you basically, like, rereporting it all out or asking them to rely on their memories?

 

Eliza Griswold: So these first couple of chapters, are what we call reconstructed. And that is the hardest… for me that’s the hardest kind of… that’s the hardest kind of narrative, and it takes a really high bar of getting it right because you’re working with multiple sources to confirm the accuracy as you can using people’s memories. And you want to… It’s very, very difficult.

 

Paul Kix: Thinking of it only as the perspective of storytelling, it is seamless, Eliza. As I’m reading through that and moving through the part where you’re actually observing, I’m, like, woah. Wait. She wasn’t..? I remember being about half-way through the book, and I’m, like, wait. Was she actually even here for any of that stuff that just happened?

​

Eliza Griswold: Yeah. Yeah, no! I mean and this took… and it’s not as if I understood when I arrived what I needed to do, you know? Like, it isn’t… I had a sense over… before I started writing, I had a sense that.. I kept asking Stacy and her neighbor, well, when did you really… when did the story really begin for you and both of them independently were, like, it really begins at the fair. That’s the first conversation we had where we understood what, like, that we understood there might be a problem. And they have different memories of what happened at the fair, and so again, like, you want to be… I never use quotation marks in these reconstructed portions of the manuscript unless I have a testimony, unless I have deposition, sworn testimony from a deposition or unless I was there and since I wasn’t there for that, you’re never going to get quotations because I cannot be sure exactly what one said to the other, even if they both recall exactly the same thing. 

 

Paul Kix: Yeah. All right, so let’s go back to the story here. We were talking about how Harley was sick but then, could you describe for us what actually happens one night? Because Harley, it gets really bad.

 

Eliza Griswold: Yeah. “Then one night, he woke and called for his mom. She struggled awake and felt by the bed for the bed for her crutches. She was recovering from routine surgery for a cut on the bottom of her foot. She jumped off of Harley’s top bunk and sliced a tendon on a glass jar. Hobbling to the bathroom, she found him crumpled on the floor. Sweat had darkened his chestnut hair, and in quarter light near dawn, his pupils were so large, his eyes looked black. She crouched on the floor and tried to comfort him and called Chris for help. She didn’t need to tell him what had happened. Harley had been sick so many times. Within 20 minutes Chris, who was her boyfriend, had arrived. And he scooped Harley into his arms, and slid him into the Potiacs’s back seat.” So they drive to the hospital and Harley is admitted to the ICU on a morphine drip, and so begins one of the many trips to the hospital. This one is probably the most serious. This is one of the few that he was hospitalized over a series of days. But they do not know, and they… even when he’s let go, when he’s, you know, leaves the hospital, they do not know by returning home he’s going to get sick again, which is what happens.

 

Paul Kix: Yeah. Exactly. You describe a moment ago the dirt that was so thick, they can... it comes into their house. It’s just completely surrounding them. She actually has to, Stacy has to make sure the kids don’t… She asks trucks to quit moving just so the kids can have their birthday parties, their birthdays are close to each other. And then the stench gets worse and worse and what exactly does that stench represents.

 

Eliza Griswold: That stench which one worker likens to rotting beef jerky. That stench is the hydrogen sulfide that I describe. That is the septic, rotting pond. The bacterial infection in the pond itself.

 

Paul Kix: Yeah. And the chapter ends with this, ugh, the horrific couple of paragraphs. Do you mind just reading that?

 

Eliza Griswold: No, of course, hold on. “According to Beth, the DP told her only that the hydrogen sulfide was naturally occurring. But naturally occurring didn’t mean harmless as she and Stacy would soon learn. Low levels of exposure to hydrogen exposure inflamed the eyes and could cause depression. High levels could be lethal, especially in children. She and Beth weren’t the only ones to complain about smells. Later, a neighbor over the valley on Hedley road called that her young child was throwing up from one. Stacy went back inside and kept clipping boots in preparation for the coming fair. Later, she and Beth would learn that they were being exposed to more than Hydroper Sulfide. Up at the waste pond, workers in hazmat suits and respirators were applying 819 pounds of liquid carcinogens and biocides to the sludge in an effort to control the outbreak while just hundreds of feet away the women worked outside in t-shirts. At much higher concentrations, the biocide named Acrolyne was used to make chemical weapons.

 

Paul Kix: That is your chapter send-off right there, and it was at that point that I was, like, oh God. I mean, we can… we should admire the craft here, but this terrifying for Stacy and her family. 

 

Eliza Griswold: Yes. This is terrifying and it is like changing. It is life altering in a way that continues to affect them today. So, yeah, and I mean, you know, obviously one is trying to be authentic to a bunch of different things but the book is dedicated to the two kids. To Harley and his sister Paige because they lived this and they continue to live this. And this did.. This does… this is how they see the world. They see the world as against them. And they see companies as out to harm them and that’s probably something they will never grow out of.

 

Paul Kix: Yeah, it’s an amazing book. I was so glad that a friend of mine recommended it and you’re done great work, here, Eliza. Kudos.

 

Eliza Griswold: Well, Paul, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

 

Paul Kix: All right. The music for Now That’s a Great Story comes from Jeff Willet with production help from his as well. If you’d like to know anything more about anything we discussed today, head over to Paulkix.com, where I posted notes from this episode. Also on Paulkix.com is an overview of my latest book, The Saboteur, which is available wherever books are sold. If you like this podcast, please don’t forget to rate and review it wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. Until next week, have a good one, everyone.