Jacinda Townsend, Novelist, Mom, Professor, Political Activist

 

92-120. Jacinda Townsend

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Jacinda Townsend

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Will Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host. Will Bachman. You can visit all of 92 report.com where you can get the transcript for this show, the show notes for this show, as well as all previous shows. You can also sign up for an email, and I’ll email you each week with the show notes and some bonus material. Today, I am so pleased to welcome on the show, Jacinda. Townsend. Jacinda, welcome to the show.

 

Jacinda Townsend  00:33

Thank you will it’s a pleasure to be here. So Jacinda, tell

 

Will Bachman  00:37

me about your journey since graduating from Harvard, sure.

 

Jacinda Townsend  00:40

So it has been a weird journey. It’s, you know, it’s like, how many of us read the Odysseus for that huge class, right? It’s been kind of like that. It hasn’t, I’m not home yet, but I’ve lived in 10 different states since then. I’ve lived in two foreign countries. I’ve had four careers. I’ve been an elected official in two different states, had a couple kids, done quite a few weird things, and I think, like the thing that most informed me is that I think, you know, some people want a certain thing out of life, like some people want to be rich, some people want to be famous, some people want a family. Some people want to I just, I just wanted to live the hell out of it, no matter what I was doing. And I think I have almost died a few times. I think I’m doing a good job.

 

Will Bachman  01:43

Well, there’s a lot to unpack in that opener, so I need to, I need to ask you a few questions before you just proceed on with your thing. So to kind of get this stuff on the table. So for careers, why don’t you quit? List out what your careers have been,

 

Jacinda Townsend  01:58

sure. So when I I went straight to law school from Harvard, which I think was a big mistake for a couple of reasons. One is that when I graduated from Harvard, I was 20, so I had no idea, really what the world should be like for me. I think I had always just kind of gone along with this idea that, you know, I will, I will go to Harvard, I will go to law school, I will go back to Kentucky, and I will go into politics. And this route was sort of foreordained for me when I was like 11, you know, and then I got to law school, and I was like, no, absolutely, I did finish law school, but when I got out, I went back into television. And I had had the really great fortune of having a job while I was at Harvard, I was a news commentator for the Christian Science Monitor network. So I went back into television on the production side. That was my second career. Then I messed around a little bit. I decided that I really wanted to be a writer, and that is what stuck, and that’s what I’m doing now. I’m a novelist and a professor, but somewhere in there, I got sick of academia for a couple of years, and I was a in sales for a software company. So that’s four things, but I’m now happily writing again. I teach at Brown I teach in the MFA program, which is just a beautiful, wonderful life, really. And I feel really fortunate to have ended up here. So in some ways, I think that is career wise, I am home. I still want to go back to Kentucky, but we’re working on that. So okay,

 

Will Bachman  03:49

so how did you end up graduating from Harvard at the age of 20, when most of us were just figuring out, you know, which core course we were going to take next so

 

Jacinda Townsend  04:01

I want to say something like, you know, I’m a genius, but it’s not that. It’s that, when I was little, I started school a year early, and then I did second and third grade in one year. So I had, in some ways, always been that age, socially, you know? Because no, I was also, when I was a kid, I was taller than everybody anyway, so nobody knew, and I kept it pretty low key. You know what I mean? Where it got to be an issue is that everybody else got their driver’s license and not so.

 

Will Bachman  04:41

How did you end up being a news commentator for Christian Science Monitor in college, when some of us were, you know, comping the crimson and doing student paper things you were, you know, being a professional journalist, how did that happen? So

 

Jacinda Townsend  04:55

that was, and I it was funny. I was telling somebody the other day I was. Like, gosh, my life has been so random because someone saw me. I had a spot of campus activism that sort of landed me that 15 minutes of fame, and someone saw me on this week with David Brinkley, and they were like, Why don’t you come in for a screen test? And I did it. I wrote a pretty angry screed about whatever was going on in 1991 you know. And it was angry enough that they hired me. And so every week, once a week, I don’t know if you remember the Christian Science Complex that was in it was down Mass Ave, yeah, that

 

Will Bachman  05:39

little Reading Room thing, yes, side, side street, whatever that. Yeah,

 

Jacinda Townsend  05:44

yeah. So every week, I would put on a bunch of makeup and go down there and read another angry screed. And it was fun, you know, because I got to be angry like in public. It was, it was amazing. Well,

 

Will Bachman  05:57

I mean, now this is sort of, I think it’s a little unfair to yourself. I mean, this kind of, it’s calling it an angry screed. I What, what were you, you know, what were your these were kind of, what were your pieces about? Sure

 

Jacinda Townsend  06:10

they were, they covered, international politics, national politics. I remember one that was about South Africa, you know, apartheid, um, it you’re taking me back, but a lot, a lot of them covered national politics. So I was a gov major, and I’d always been interested in politics. I thought I was going to go into politics, and, um, I was just and what I think I learned about myself too is that I had always been a news junkie, you know, like, this is back in the day when, when we didn’t have the internet, and my fingers were always, like, covered in black ink, you know. And I just got super passionate about the news. And I was kind of surprised that I was so passionate about TV news, you know, because we consider that sort of the lesser sibling, right? But it’s like the kind of, that kind of writing is so delicate and exquisite, and you’re writing for, you’re writing for the sound bite, right? You’re writing for the five second sentence and and so to me, that was like a puzzle. As someone who tends to write. I mean, as a novelist, my writing is just so flowery and, you know, but that kind of writing was like, it was like working a Sudoku, almost to write. So I really, I loved it, apart from, you know, expressing myself politically. It allowed me to really learn a lot about the English language, you know. So it was good. It’s cool.

 

Will Bachman  07:48

Okay. So we have a rule on the show if someone says that they’ve held public office in two states that we always have to ask about that. It’s one of the one of the shows to tell us, yeah, tell us about that. Yeah,

 

Jacinda Townsend  08:00

so kind of similar. I didn’t mean to do the first, the first, and I really, I mean it. I really did not intend to do it. I was, I had something to say at a school board meeting, and I wanted to be heard, and so I applied for someone left, left their school board seat, and so they had to fill it via appointment. And so I went and applied, just so I could say this on TV. And then the next day, I got the phone call that, out of all the candidates, they had chosen me, and I kind of, I actually burst into,

 

Will Bachman  08:37

I’m sorry, what town was this?

 

Jacinda Townsend  08:38

Oh, this was in Indiana. This was in Bloomington, Indiana. So had I known that I was going to be a sitting school board member during COVID, I probably would have cried harder. So I served, and then I was so well. I was angry. I was still angry and passionate. And so I, I ran for a re election, and I got elected again. It was kind of a landslide. It really was. That’s how angry I am, right? I attracted all these angry voters. They like, loved it. And what were

 

Will Bachman  09:15

you angry about? What was the well, so

 

Jacinda Townsend  09:18

we lived in a it was actually Bloomington is a very progressive town, actually, but like all school districts everywhere, there was a lot of there was a lot of socio economic segregation in the district, you know, and then there were a lot of sort of disciplinary disparities by race and ethnicity in the district. So I said about trying to fix that during my term, I think it has taken all this time, like it’s been three years later, and people are finally fixing it. It takes a long time to move the needle, you know, on these kind of things, but I tried to lay. Good groundwork, and then I learned so much from that that when I moved, I had to move to Michigan. I had to end my term early, and I got a job at the University of Michigan, and I had been living there a year, and I was in one of those, you know those? I know you’re a parent too, so you so you probably know these, these huge parent Facebook groups that every city has, right? So I just, I had made a comment on a post about the schools, and it got, you know, like, 5000 million likes or whatever, and, and I had said in the comment, I said, you know, as a former school board member, blah, blah, blah, and so then the next thing I know, people were like, swooping. I got these phone call and they were like, will you run for school board? And the there was a woman in the town, she’s, um, her her husband is the guy who wrote duo that app. And so she funds a lot of campaigns. So she just basically swooped in and was like, here’s all the money you need. You know, so amazing. And then I got elected and and laid some really good groundwork there on similar sort of equity issues, you know, we we made the first Equity and Inclusion committee, and I made sure that it had language that required numerical assessment on the the things we were trying to move, you know? Because I think a lot of times in school districts, people, people want to feel good. They want to say, we threw a party, we had, like a we had international night. And why? Why can’t you guys feel good, you know? And, and I was like, No, it’s about numbers. It’s about test score disparities. It’s about socio economic differences between schools in the same county. So that’s kind of that’s been my thing for a while. I did not understand you and I grew up in a time you and I grew up at peak school integration, and I don’t know if you felt that as a parent, because our kids experiences have been radically different, and I have felt that as a parent and and I think one thing I learned recently, too is so I grew up in Kentucky, and I went to the largest High School in the state of Kentucky. Wow. So we had everybody, you know, and everybody kind of hung around with everybody. There was no, there was none of what goes on today. Well, it turns out, because I’ve been wondering in my adult life, I’m like, why does this feel so awful? It turns out Kentucky is the fourth most educationally integrated state in the country, right? And that, to me, is the ideal that you go to school with everyone you learn everyone’s everything you know. It’s e pluribus unum, like we are, we are one people, and we need to know each other, right? And I have found, as a parent, that that’s it’s not happening. And so one other thing I learned, this really dispiriting, dispiriting statistic, is that we are now as segregated as we were during Brown versus Board of Education. So if I told you the numbers you would just like so a white kid is something like 80% 80% of all white children are are likely to be in a predominantly white School, and that predominantly white means over 75% right minority children are about 90% likely to be in a predominantly minority school. So we 1987 was the peak of integration. So you and I have had a whole different American experiment than our kids are having, which I find just profoundly sad, and so I still, right now my work is, you know, because I’m not on a school board, so I write a lot. I wrote, I wrote an op ed. I was really proud, not not proud of me, but proud of the effort we got. Kentucky tried to enact this thing called amendment to which was going to create a voucher system that’s a lot like Indiana’s. Overwhelmingly in a very conservative state, the voters rejected it, and that’s because we got the word out. There were a million op eds, we explained to them. You know, that means all these rural counties will lose all this money, and you’ll just be giving your money to Louisville and Lexington. So, you know, rural people in Kentucky hate Louisville, so it kind of worked. There’s

 

Will Bachman  14:52

things that you’ll only learn in the show folks. Yeah, could not learn. Could not learn in the mainstream media. Did I know that? Kentucky. Now, what has been driving this? Because it’s, I mean, forget my ignorance, but you know mostly about kind of most school districts are geographic, right? You know, you live in the school district. So what is, and I’m surprised I wasn’t aware that, yeah, integration was kind of going backwards. So what is driving that? Is it more like geo spacial, just segregation of people living in different towns? Or what’s this?

 

Jacinda Townsend  15:32

Well, that is the best question. That is the critical question, because, as it turns out, school segregation drives residential segregation, and not the other way around. So if you think about the fact that when you go to Zillow to to buy a house, exactly two clicks will take you to the school. What is that terrible? Great schools.net great schools.net one click will take you to the school demographics, right? If you call a realtor and you ask them about that school district, they will tell you, point blank, some things about the racial demographics, right? And so so they have found in places like Seattle and actually, Louisville, believe it or not, was sort of ground zero for 50 years for integration. And what they found in those two cities is that when they desegregated, the schools, residential integration followed. So what has happened is that people over these last you know, 70 or, I’m sorry, 87 to now, that’s what 3030, some years, people in these last few decades have strongly resisted efforts to desegregate schools. The most painful example of that for me is actually Louisville, because Louisville has had a number of schemes. They’ve bused that was challenged in court and knocked down. They had a scheme when my kid was going to school there. They had a scheme whereby you sort of chose diversity or not. So they give you, they gave you a choice of nine schools. You could then look up the demographic information, decide where you wanted to go, they strike that down, because that was still providing a lot of meaningful integration. And so finally, a few years ago, the Jefferson County School Board was like, we give up, you know, and and it is just gone right back to segregation. I mean, in an astonishing way. So it’s, I really, I mean, the unhappy story is, it’s our generation. These are our these are people our age, right? Their kids, our kids are in high school. They when, when I was on the board in Indiana, the number of people who use the most horrifying discourse to say they did not want these two schools merged was a pretty high number of people, and they weren’t all, I mean, yes, Indiana is red state. You know what? I mean, they weren’t. They weren’t all red state people. I’ll just put it like that. There were some surprising it came from some surprising quarters. They did not want to do that. So

 

Will Bachman  18:32

now, before you were elected, before you were appointed, and then elected by landslide, you were angry now about some things. Now I’m curious, once you got into the position of power on the school board, I’m curious, if it was one or two directions, did you find out I was angry about things because there was just some obvious things they should obviously do, and they just had to have the will to do it. And then you were like, This is straightforward. Let’s do it. We made it easier than you thought, or was it harder than you thought? Like, oh, I was angry before, but now that I’m in the role, there’s all these constraints and budget and regulations and other stakeholders and certification, and find out, Oh, it’s actually a lot harder than I thought. So what was, what was your experience like, going from, you know, angry parent to be, I don’t know, to the on the board, yeah,

 

Jacinda Townsend  19:27

absolutely, absolutely, another really pivotal question, because what I’m what I most learned, and what I’m most dismayed About even now, is that it turns out parents only tend to advocate for their individual child, right? And so in Ann Arbor, especially there were, there were a number of groups that they were doing the good work. They really were the. But they weren’t like listening to they weren’t really listening to what people needed, right? You know what I mean? And and I think this is true of almost all school boards. There are a lot of people who are using it only as a springboard to higher office. And so what you tend to get are people who are not as well informed about K 12 issues. They’re not they’re also not willing to listen. Some of them aren’t willing to do the work at all. You know, you get to a school board meeting, and I’m one of these, like policy wonk people like, I’ve done all the reading, and I’m gonna bring numbers, and every there are so many people who don’t, well, there are so many people who run for school board because they just want to be an elected official, you know? And it, it, oh, it. Even before I became a parent, I always felt like our future is children, and children are the most valuable things walking this earth to me, You know what I mean, and, and they’re also so you they’re they need our protection, their children, you know what I mean, and, and So no, I mean even angrier, because I feel like so many people aren’t there for children. They’re there for themselves. They’re there for this. They’re there for the i It was astonishing to me how many people on the school board were concerned about, you know how they would look at the end of the vote, as opposed to, how will this affect 17,000 children and 4000 teachers? You know what I mean? So now I’m even angrier. I’m so angry when I got to Providence, my sister was like, I’m sure you have your campaign materials already printed.

 

Will Bachman  22:02

All right, okay, I could definitely spend more time. And you know, be I’d actually like to be more educated on this topic by you. But I also want to turn to your writing career. You are the author of, among others, mother country, which I see as the winner of the 2022, Ernest J Gaines award for literary excellence. It’s also shortlisted for the 2023 Hurston rate Legacy Award for Fiction and the finalist for the 2023 Mark Twain American voice and Literature Award. So and you have a forthcoming novel trigger warning comes out in September, so pre order now, people and and Saint monkey a novel. Tell us about if we want to get into your books, where should we start and tell me something about your about your writing?

 

Jacinda Townsend  22:52

Sure. So, hey, they’re all three, very different, but they’re all three about girls and women who are in a point of transition. I’ll say, you know, they’re all so far, all my books have been set in Kentucky, and so the first one is about a girl who she’s a pianist, she’s a brilliant pianist, and she goes to New York, and lots of things happen. The second one is about a woman who kidnaps a child, actually, but it’s not. She’s kind of the hero of the story, or not. And then trigger warning is about a woman who’s just kind of having middle aged crisis, and she absconds with her daughter, who is trans, and they go back, they give they make a road trip from Kentucky California, where she has to deal with a lot of grief. Um, so they’re all, they’re all things that I always get to the end of a first draft, and I feel like I have planned something in my psyche that I didn’t know was there, you know, and then I go back on a second draft and sort of fix it so it’s not about me, but yeah,

 

Will Bachman  24:07

now different writers have different approaches. I know some will to say, was it w Somerset mom, I forget who said, you know, I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes at 9am every morning, and Hemingway would famously, kind of write till he knew what the next sentence would be, but then he wouldn’t write it. What is your approach? Do you have, like, a set word count every day you got to hit it? Or how do you I do?

 

Jacinda Townsend  24:35

I’m very routinized, in part because I’ve always been a single mom, so I had to get up before my kids got up. I had I would get up at five o’clock in the morning and rate until they woke up. And I do give myself, I give myself a 500 word word count. And what’s kind of cool about that is, like, I often hear people say, like, when I teach, like, adult. You know, there’s, like, there’s no way I could write a novel. I’m like, for 500 words a day. You got a novel in 10 months, you know what I mean? And then it’s so much easier to to say to oneself, like, I have a novel. I finished a novel this year. It’s a rough draft, but I have it, you know? And so that’s how I I work. I don’t even believe in writer’s block, because I feel like if I did, I’d never get anything done. So I just do it. And I was telling a student today, actually, I had a student who came to my office hours, and she said, I don’t, you know, I feel so I feel so much so little confidence about my writing. I feel like I don’t belong here. And I told her, you know, in some ways, every writer and every artist is creating a story about themselves, and that’s how we get through the day. Because I think working in the arts is kind of a weird, strange, horrifying life in the sense that there are so many external factors that you have no control over, you know, you have no control over the way your book will be received, or whether your kid’s gonna wake up at six instead of eight, you know. And so I feel like the way I have gotten through is to just keep telling myself this story that I am going to finish, and it’s going to be good, and I think it’s worked out okay.

 

Will Bachman  26:33

Do you have some kind of like virtual scrapbook where you hear a phrase, a sentence, a word or an image, and you kind of scrapbook it away, saying, I’m going to hold on to this and use this somewhere, somehow or or is it more just at the moment coming up with it. I’m curious. You know, how you approach them. I

 

Jacinda Townsend  26:55

1. I live. So what’s kind of weird about me? And I don’t know if most writers do this. I hope for their sake, they don’t, but I kind of live as those people in my head. You know what I mean. So I’ll be in the store thinking like, Avery Rother Avery Rothermel is the guy I’m writing now. And I’ll be in the store thinking like, Oh, look. Because I know what Avery Rothermel would look at that lady and think about her. And then I just text myself, so I have all these random texts that make no sense to anyone but me, and I’m like, what, you know, if I die one day and someone goes through this, like, What’s wrong with her? But that’s how I keep up with it.

 

Will Bachman  27:36

Can you I’m going to this if I don’t have permission to do this, tell me. But can you go to your phone now and just read off one or two of those texts we podcast. Very Tay, right here. This is a real thing. This is the future. This is the novel number four. It’ll be number four.

 

Jacinda Townsend  27:55

This is so, yeah, so just, and just to give you a little background. So this novel, Avery Rothermel is this sort of lothario who he has a year left to live. And he’s he’s surrounded by a cast of characters that includes, and I’m going to read you what I wrote to this guy. This guy’s name is Giuseppe, and Giuseppe has actually murdered someone, and so just wrote. He went and Stop and Shop, you know, and he, he’s, he’s, he’s describing this lady, and he’s like her, her hair was so gray that it did turn yellow and was curled under her chin. So it’s, it’s a way of remembering what was going through that character’s head, because I’ll lose it if I get home. I turn into me again, you know. So I just keep up with them. And what’s, what’s interesting is I get to the end of a first draft, and I actually like, I’ll cry for a few days, and I used to wonder, like, Why am I crying? And it’s because I’ve lost these people. Like they I was they were here with me. I was in there, you know, and and then they’ve suddenly vanished. And it’s like losing your your imaginary friends or something.

 

Will Bachman  29:22

Wow. Okay. I mean, time for a sequel, I guess. Yeah. So, so interesting. So you are going around kind of imbibing and imagining yourself in the role of one of your characters, trying to experience the world through their eyes. Yeah, how they would react to things, even if it’s not necessarily tied to the plot, just being that person exactly

 

Jacinda Townsend  29:46

and and I it, it’s so helpful to be It’s one reason. When I’m in it, I just stay in it. I don’t I do take breaks, but not while I’m. Writing a novel, I just won’t take a break, because I feel like the imagination sort of begets the imagination. And if I don’t live with them every day, it’s like a muscle memory. You know what I mean? I’ll forget what, what Giuseppe is, is like, I like sometimes like I haven’t written him in a while, and I have forgotten why he murdered the woman, kind of almost, you know what I mean, but when I go back, I’ll remember every bit of why. So, yeah,

 

Will Bachman  30:29

you said that you’ve lived in two foreign countries. Tell us about that

 

Jacinda Townsend  30:32

there were. So I did a Fulbright in Cote d’Ivoire, and it was, it was mind blowing in in part because I ended up traveling a lot to other countries. I went to my favorite of all was Mali. And while I was in Mali, that’s when I first encountered modern day slavery. Someone just said in passing, oh, you know, that guy is that guy’s slave. And I was like, what? Tell me more. And they were like, no, no, never mind. I didn’t say anything. So when I got back to COVID from that trip, and I started researching it, and I found out that, yes, the Sahel and the Sahara are full of slaves, right? So I went to Morocco. This was sort of back in the day when you could, you know, you could just extend your layover. And so I did. I was traveling between Abidjan and New York City, and I extend that layover for four days in Marrakech. And I was like, this, this is it. This is the party. And so I just kept going back and back and back. One of those, one of those times I went to Morocco, I took a side trip to Mauritania. Mauritania, 20% of the Mauritanian population is enslaved, brutally enslaved. It’s such a remote country like it was hard for me to even get the visa, you know. And they only have one television station, and it stayed down. Everything has stayed down. It’s an Islamic Republic. So, you know, it’s hard. I mean, when you go there, it’s almost like stepping back in time, 500 years. You know, the the roads are dirt. It’s it’s just, I can’t, it’s so remote. It’s just so it’s just desert, and so it’s very hard to escape slavery. When you do employment is case based. So if you escape slavery, you have nothing to do because, you know, so I went there, and that’s the that’s what turned into mother country is sort of I met, I met an escape slave in her family, and it was the most power, one of the most powerful moments of my life, because she let me hold the baby, and it was the the last of the eight kids, and this baby had been born free. It had been born on her way out of the desert, escaping slavery. And I just thought, this is what it is felt like through the years, whenever anybody had that first family member Born Free, you know? And it was so powerful. And I asked her, I said, What can I do for you? And she was like, just tell my story. Tell my story. And so that’s what I tried to do with mother country, but the other country that I’ve lived in is Morocco. So Morocco turned into this, like love affair. And I’ve taken my kids, and we’ve stayed there for, like, you know, whole entire summers, and we need to go back. It’s Morocco, oddly enough, it reminds me a lot of Kentucky, just the culture of like hospitality and the way people are, you know, family is so central to that way everything functions. So we let we love to go, and we love the food that’s, let’s be real. That’s why you go to a country, right?

 

Will Bachman  34:06

I did not know this about Mauritania, yeah, and it’s not something that I’ve heard about in the news, or people you know, protesting and saying, like, you know, in slavery and Mauritania, what? How do people become slaves there? And what you know, like, how does that system perpetuate? I’m kind of surprised.

 

Jacinda Townsend  34:34

Yeah, so one reason you’ve not heard about it is that that country is so remote, you know, it’s hard to even get there. In a lot of ways. It’s definitely hard to be there. Not a lot of Western people ever visit it. But also the fact that the media is so state run. So there was an article in CNN many years ago about it, and that’s kind. Of the last I saw of it. They finally outlawed it in 2008 but as of 2015 they had prosecuted only, I want to say three cases, or something like that. A huge part of the problem will is, is the and again, it’s something I found per family sad. You will meet people who think that this is divine will, that you know they themselves should be slaves. There’s a lot like American slavery was right. It’s brutally enforced, like brutally enforced and and also, because a lot of it is happening in the desert, people can’t escape. People don’t know that it’s going on there, because, I mean, they had the this woman who I met, who had escaped slavery. Her like, six and seven year old children were hurting camels in the desert. I mean, just brutally hard work, you know what I mean? But like, who’s who’s watching them? Nobody, you know they’re, they’re in the Sahara. So, yeah, it’s a hard situation, you know?

 

Will Bachman  36:18

Oh, I had no idea that that was still happening. I mean, heard of you’ve heard like, sexual trafficking and that, but like 20% of a country being slaves, my God, you told us about your four careers, two foreign countries you visited. You know I wanted to return and ask you about something you’ve demonstrated it here a bit on the show it, but tell us a little bit more, expand on the phrase that you said earlier, where you want to live the hell out of it, meaning life, yeah. What? What does that look like for you, in terms of what you know? How do you know if you’re living the hell out of it, what does that? What does that look like?

 

Jacinda Townsend  37:05

So, you know, what will I didn’t know, and I’m gonna get a little personal here. I don’t think of this as TMI at all. But a few years ago, because I really didn’t know, I had had this idea that I was gonna be, you know, you know the phrase, it’s like a cat, you just piss where you want, right? And this idea that that’s what was what I was doing. And then a few years ago, I got really, really sick. I still don’t understand what was wrong with me. I suspected maybe it was long COVID, but then there was some indication that I just had some serious GI issues that kind of fix themselves. But I was in so much pain for such a long time that I said to myself, if I’m in this much pain a year from now, I would just prefer to be dead. I mean, it was all over pain, you know, because I think I also had some nerve, pinched nerve in my back, and the pain just radiated like everywhere, you know. And I kept thinking, I didn’t cry much. I didn’t cry much. I thought maybe I was dying. I thought I have done everything I wanted to do, and then more. And there has been gravy even on top of what I meant to do. And the only thing I was sad to think about was that I wouldn’t see my kids anymore and and my best friend in Minnesota. And I thought, gosh, like I really have done what I set out to do, you know, because I’m 50 and I feel like, okay, well, if I go, it’s not that I haven’t done what I wanted to do. It’s just that I would like to do more parenting. But yeah, and I guess, like, my guiding principle on that has always been, I think I’m really fortunate, because I until very, very, very recently, I didn’t know fear. You know, I think until I was very sick, I would tell you I really wasn’t afraid of anything. I mean, now that I’ve been there, I’m a little bit afraid of dying suddenly. But aside from that, nothing really scares me, and so I just really have done what I wanted to do, you know. And I think I’m also really fortunate in that my idea of what I wanted out of life didn’t really revolve around one thing and one area. It was more kind of like I just wanted to be big. I felt like I grew up in this little, tiny town, and it was, you know, nobody ever leaves Kentucky. So, like my whole everybody had been there for all the generations. Everybody. Grandmother, knew everybody and and I felt like I wanted to be way bigger than that. And so I felt really fortunate. And, I mean, going to Harvard was such a big part of that. Because, I think, had I not, I mean, I know I probably I would have gone to Vanderbilt and gone back to Kentucky, and just probably, you know, but Harvard really, it allowed me to tell my my because my parents, they wouldn’t have let me go that far anywhere else. But it was Harvard, right? They were like, okay, okay, bye. I guess, how Harvard does that for people?

 

Will Bachman  40:41

That’s one way to get your parents pay out of state tuition, right? So that that does lead us to the segue of tell us about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you.

 

Jacinda Townsend  40:57

So here is the person I most remember is Martin Kilson. And what was your concentration? I was physics, physics. Okay, so you probably didn’t know Martin Kilson. Martin Kilson, I found so intimidating for so many reasons. I mean, he was a brilliant, you know, political scholar, but also he had, I had a little bit of a family history with him that he didn’t even know I had, and I never mentioned it, because he his think his daughter had dated my dad’s cousin, and it didn’t go well. And so I brought this up. I was like, you know, and, and I and also back then, I don’t know if you remember that, you know, government majors were called gov jocks, and there weren’t a lot of women in my classes. And I just kind of tried not to say anything. I tried to fade into the background, you know. And especially in his class, I didn’t say much of anything. And then after I, the day after my, my campus activism started, and kind of went a little viral in public, he grabbed me in class and he hugged me and he said, You’re brilliant. And I, and it was one of the first times at Harvard where I felt like I actually belonged in these classes. You know what? I mean, it’s and it’s not that like I never doubted, I never doubted my intelligence or anything, but I felt, I felt like this kid from Kentucky who had gone to Harvard, and half the people didn’t even understand what I was saying, because I had a really thick exit, you know, and I felt like, well, one of the people, one of the most brilliant people I know, just saw me, and it was, it was amazing. So I’ll never forget that he has passed away, like probably a lot of our professors, but I appreciate the gift of that, and now that I’m a professor, I try to, I try to do that for my students. You know, when if I see somebody who’s like, just quiet and nervous, I make them feel seen, because I know how important that is.

 

Will Bachman  43:19

Take a minute and tell us about your campus activism. I think I recall your name in the crimson and I I’m not, I’m not remembering the the thing. But tell us about the campus activism that you sure

 

Jacinda Townsend  43:31

and and without context, it’s, it’s Whoo, without but the context is that someone had hung a confederate flag in Kirkland House. Oh, right, right, yeah, so, and she would sing very loudly and frequently that this wasn’t a racist symbol. So I spray painted a swastika on a bed sheet, and I put racism comma no question mark, like, isn’t this? Because it’s the same thing. And I hanging out my window and oh, well, I had no idea. I hadn’t no idea what that would explode into. But I remember my answering machine was. Just remember, back in the day, there was tape all day, click, click, click, click. I got letters. I got letters from people in prison. This lady from Boston, like came to Cabot house and brought me flowers. I mean, it was mostly a positive, some negative, you know, but it, it was a lot. And one of the most enduring lessons I learned is that, because I think some people did misunderstand it. You know what I mean? Some people accused me of of terrible things, but I learned that, um, when you do that, your people will have your back. You know what I mean? Because a lot of people did not misunderstand it, and a lot of people understand. Said exactly what I was saying. And yeah, I and I learned about there was a night when the Boston Police came to my room and someone reminded me that. So at the Boston Police came to my room, and I guess they were going to try to make me take it down. And I was there by myself, if I had a single and Cabot. And before I knew it, one girl showed up, two girls showed up, three girls. There were seven girls in that room, and a policeman left. And I will never forget it. Somebody said one of them was joy Reid. Actually, I don’t remember that, but I remember that four of them were girls I didn’t even know they had come to, like, support, you know, and, and I think that’s something I’ve always carried with me too, like on school board and in various places that, yeah, there are people who don’t even like you, but if you’re trying to say something important and worthwhile, that’s Who you’re there for, right? So it was a big lesson in a lot of ways, and I learned to speak on television. So there was that.

 

Will Bachman  46:16

How do you reflect on that whole episode? Now, looking back,

 

Jacinda Townsend  46:26

it was, it was a different time. Yeah, I think in the eight I think unfortunately we have become more mass media has become even more well in in fact. So back then, the average sound bite was something like 30 seconds, and now it’s 10 right back at this point, I think that would have been taken differently. I think nobody would have tried to understand what I was really saying. I think the headline would have just been, girl, hang swastika, right? Girl, girl is trying to get you to understand this racism with a symbol that you all recognize. You know what I mean, right? And and I think, and that’s why I get so nervous when, when someone asked me, someone who wasn’t there, someone who doesn’t understand the context, asked me about that, and I’m like, Well, I hung this flag, but I’m not like, I’m not ashamed of it or anything, because I didn’t, you know what I mean. I What I meant is what so many people had communicated to them. Because I think a lot of people at that point had never thought of it that way, and never did not understand the history of the Confederate flag and and just how murderous it is, and how people like me, who are from Kentucky, when we see that, having grown up with the Ku Klux Klan, that’s I’m Like, okay, they’re in their trucks. They’re coming, you know what I mean. And I’m glad you have communicated it, you know. And I know you probably don’t remember, but the reason I took it down is that, yes, it was causing a lot of sort of tension between the black community and the Jewish community, you know. And that had never been my intent, but I made my point, and I’m kind of glad. So, yeah, yeah.

 

Will Bachman  48:30

Well, you have lived a lot of lives, school boards, 10 states, two countries, like novels and teaching and mentoring folks. What I feel there? I I feel that this conversation could go I want to keep going about

 

Jacinda Townsend  48:53

you. I haven’t heard about you because I know that’s not the point of the podcast, but I wish I had, oh, there’s so

 

Will Bachman  48:59

many more questions I want to ask, but I’m at the place where I have to ask for listeners who want to find you and follow and find out, you know, kind of keep track of what you’re doing. Where is the best place? Where do you point them online?

 

Jacinda Townsend  49:11

Sure. So I have a website justinda townsend.com and it’s got all my books on it and all my all my appearances and stuff.

 

Will Bachman  49:22

Fantastic. Jacinda, thank you so much for joining us. You are so full of stories. And my goodness, it’s been just wonderful to speak with you.

 

Jacinda Townsend  49:36

Thank you will and thanks so much for doing this podcast, for our clash. You’re awesome. Thank you. Bye.