Mara (Beverwyk) Christine, Librarian, Teacher, Lawyer

 

175. Mara Christine

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Mara Christine

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Hello, and welcome to The 92 Report, conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Mara Christine, who we knew in college as Mara Beverwyk. Mara, welcome to the show.

 

Mara Christine  00:23

Thanks. Will this is fun.

 

Will Bachman  00:25

All right, so Mara, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Mara Christine  00:31

Well, it was pretty circuitous so far. I ended up back home in New Mexico, rural New Mexico, via California, which was where I had my first post-college job. I worked with the Public Interest Research Group, CalPERG, out in Berkeley for a couple of years. Then I shifted over to Oakland, where I worked in the public library system for another couple of years, where I became inspired to become a librarian. There was only so far you could go as a library assistant without a degree, so I went to grad school. So, from California, I hopped over to Michigan for library school, and then I just missed New Mexico so much. Anybody who’s from here knows what I’m talking about, or who’s been here, that I just.. I needed the mountains, and I needed the open sky, and I needed the lack of people, so I worked my way back to New Mexico to become a librarian, which I did for eight years. I was a school librarian for in a Bureau of Indian Affairs school in one of our local pueblos for a couple of years, and then I worked as a research librarian at a laboratory of anthropology library in Santa Fe, from there I got married along the way, and then had a stepson, and had my child, my son Ulysses, and he was a challenging child, to say the least. Turns out he has various diagnoses that we didn’t know about at the time, but I would bring him to, I would bring him to work with me at the library, which was very, very sweet. Even as a newborn at three months old, I was able to bring him to work with me, and after a few years it was just very, very challenging working for the state of New Mexico, and not being able to afford childcare because of how low they pay. So, I ultimately took a position as an assistant in a Montessori elementary school, and got my Montessori certification. Began teaching tuition for my kiddo, which was amazing. I don’t know if you know anything about Montessori, amazing pedagogy for especially for neurodivergent children, and so that was a great fit. I taught for 12 years, and towards the very end had huge life shifts. I got divorced, needed something really new in my life, and went to law school. So, at 46 I went to law school, and I now am a practicing prosecutor. I’m in my second year of prosecuting, my third year of being licensed, and it’s just been amazing. I was really happy to come back home. I’m still really, really happy to be here. I’ve got my, my mom is just down the road, my sister’s just down the road, my son is just down the road. It’s all very, very nice. And I live right next to the Ro Grande, right next to the Mesa. I have hardly any neighbors. It’s perfect. I got my mountains back, and I got my blue Spy Big Sky back.

 

Will Bachman  03:38

Wow. Okay, so librarian to prosecutor, they better not steal any books from, because they’ll get

 

Mara Christine  03:47

exactly

 

Will Bachman  03:50

so what of all the possible career shifts from librarian, what drew you to the law,

 

Mara Christine  04:04

well, I will say several factors to be glib. It was my midlife crisis, and it was 2016 when I started thinking about it, was right when Trump took office, and I’m going to get a little political here, because it was one of my major factors that was all very disturbing. I was teaching fourth, fifth, and sixth grade, and admonished by our director not to talk politics with the kids, which I completely did not agree with, because I think our kiddos, especially sixth graders and older, need to be aware of what’s going on in the world to be civically engaged, so I was feeling frustrated at school, and when Trump issued that one of those first executive. Of orders, the Muslim ban, or the ban on people from quote unquote Muslim countries.

 

Will Bachman  05:06

Yeah,

 

Mara Christine  05:07

when I saw footage of ACLU attorneys and others sitting on airport floors with their laptops, helping people navigate that circumstance in real time, it just really inspired me, and I thought that’s what I want to do. I want, I want to expand who I can impact and how I can impact communities in this world, beyond this, you know, small Montessori school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I loved teaching, so it was kind of.. it was a very big deal. Plus, when you’re a teacher of elementary students, especially, it’s really hard to leave them behind, and I had a mixed-age classroom, so if I had fourth graders, if I left, I was going to be leaving the fourth graders. Sixth graders were moving on anyway, we were all saying goodbye to each other anyway, but it was just really kind of heart-rending to leave that behind. So, the whole first year of law school, I continued teaching. I thought I was going to do both the whole, the whole time, my law school had a flex program that I could continue to work, I can continue to teach if I only did 10 credits a semester, but I was commuting from my house, it was a 200 mile round trip commute a day. Oh my god, I know, and I just, you know, at some point I realized, well, the wear and tear on my truck alone is not going to let it last more than three years, so I need to, and I’m probably going to, you know, collapse and die if I don’t.

 

Will Bachman  06:30

Oh man, okay. And then tell us a little bit about the experience of, and wow, just good for you. I mean, congratulations. Going back and just saying, I’m going to.. I love that. I’m so inspired by just saying I’m going to start fresh, and okay, you know, opportunity at some cost. I’m going to just do something new. What was it like being in law school with probably most, or mostly, you know, younger, younger classmates, I would imagine, mostly right, you know, right out of college, but

 

Mara Christine  07:05

being surrounded by younger people, yeah, everyone was not everyone, but most people were like 26 right, and I remembered being 26 and being in library school and being one of those people who just griped about how hard everything was and how impossible everything was, and it was all funny, but anyway, being surrounded by kiddos, like young people, was actually really energizing. They brought amazing energy, amazing ideas, a lot of confidence, and honestly, I was pretty well respected. I had a classmate who was older than me. I was 46 I think. He started at like 4849 He’d already retired from being a high school teacher for 25 years.

 

Will Bachman  07:52

Whoa,

 

Mara Christine  07:53

so we had this one, this one guy in our class, we’re still friends to this day, his name was Joel, who would, whenever he had some, whenever he had some hiccup in his love life, would come to me for mom advice, and to my classmate for dad advice, so you know, there’s a very.. it’s a.. it’s.. it’s the only law school in New Mexico, it’s UNM in Albuquerque, and it’s this amazing law school, really, really amazing community emphasis, and super supportive of non-traditional students like me, super supportive of students and students from non-traditional or families that aren’t traditionally supported or or encouraged into law. What am I trying to say? I don’t know. It’s just it’s a really diverse program, really, really. The professors are super accessible. It’s not, it’s not what I’d always heard law school to be like, which was super cutthroat and competitive, and maybe it is in at Harvard or Yale or Stanford or something, but I didn’t have that experience at all. So we all supported each other. I was able to support the 26 year olds, they were able to support me, and professors were just equally supportive of everybody. It was really super.

 

Will Bachman  09:21

And how did you decide after law school to pursue being or to become a prosecutor?

 

Mara Christine  09:29

Well, I didn’t initially. My focus was environmental justice. That’s where I ended up getting super, super inspired to head in that direction. My, and then it actually took me two years to pass the bar, because right after I graduated, I had a stroke.

 

Will Bachman  09:47

Oh my god,

 

Mara Christine  09:48

yeah, 49 three weeks after graduation, I had a stroke, and that was, that was traumatic, as you can imagine, so. Obviously, I had to defer the bar exam that summer, and then I ended up deferring it a second time. I just, my brain wasn’t there yet, and I then I started taking it, and I failed it twice. So those two years I would rather just kind of erase from my history, but

 

Will Bachman  10:18

okay,

 

Mara Christine  10:19

yeah, those were huge struggles for me, you know. I got plunged into depression and anxiety because of all that, and I’d never experienced those mental health issues before my entire life. But it was just really, really rough, and I finally passed in the summer of 22 and then I got licensed, and I still had this very narrow focus and keen focus on environmental justice, so I, my first job after I got licensed was with a local environmental justice nonprofit that I thought was going to be my dream job. Turns out it was not, for various reasons, namely a toxic workplace, but I’m not going

 

Speaker 1  10:59

to,

 

Mara Christine  11:00

yeah, I’m not going to, you know, talk badly about them on your podcast. It just was not a good fit. Let’s just leave it at that.

 

Will Bachman  11:09

All right,

 

Mara Christine  11:10

so I was there a little over a year, and from there transitioned into a, an adjacent type of field, disaster law with New Mexico Legal Aid. We have a lot of very, very small and very poor communities in New Mexico, in the northern part of the region, especially where I live, and they’ve been ravaged the past few years by wildfires and other climate change-related issues, flooding after the wildfires. So, New Mexico Legal Aid created this disaster law program, and I got hired into that. That was amazing. And then, again, the Trump election, there were such severe fears that the LSC, which is Legal Aid’s primary funder, was going to be cut by the Trump administration, that New Mexico Legal Aid acted preemptively and laid off 26 of us, and the newer people went first, of course. So that was a real drag, because that job was amazing, I got to travel most, most days of most weeks, I got to travel all around the state and meet with clients who were battling FEMA for compensation for losses and things like that, and then after that, sorry, I’m being very monolog but what happened is, after I got laid off, I obviously needed to find a new job, and it took me 10 months to find.. I have never had that kind.. I mean, probably nobody listening to this has had that kind of difficulty finding work, like I wasn’t used to being rejected, you know, I wasn’t used to not being the one with the resume that stood out, and it’s just a whole different reality, right? To try to enter the field of law after not having been in it, I was now in my 50s,

 

Will Bachman  13:16

right,

 

Mara Christine  13:17

and that was very discouraging, but I have a very, very long time friend who I reconnected with, who had been a DA in my nearest town, which is Espanola, New Mexico, and he just encouraged me. He’s like, ‘Hey, I know the DA’s office is always looking. Why don’t you just try? I had no idea of being a criminal law person at all until he just suggested it and convinced me on the grounds that it’s public interest law, which was my passion, is public interest law in general, and that was enough to convince me. So I applied and got the job, and it’s been great. I love it.

 

Will Bachman  14:00

What do you love about

 

Mara Christine  14:02

what do I love about it?

 

Will Bachman  14:03

Yeah,

 

Mara Christine  14:04

well, I love being in a position of being able to help communities that have struggled for generations with violence and addiction and domestic violence and lack of education, illiteracy rates that are sky high. I like being in a position where I can, for example, get someone who has a DWI conviction or DWI charge to take a plea that will put them put resources in their hands, including rehab, including community service, try to get people, especially the young people, get them plugged into various organizations around the county. See, I love that, and I love being able to sometimes help. I say sometimes, because domestic violence is really, really hard to prosecute anywhere, I think, but around here it’s very difficult, but to get victims the support and the help that they deserve, and to help perpetrators in those kinds of situations into programs like domestic violence offender intervention programs, that kind of thing, and people who have addiction, be they alcohol or other substances be able to divert into rehab type programs. I love that aspect, that’s like community building to me. I am not a very good trial attorney yet. I mean, I’ve been doing this for a year, so I’m going to give myself a little bit of grace, but I grew up here, right? So it just, it feels really, really important and really special to have this of being able to be in this position in the community where I grew up, and I know that that sounds all like naive and white savior, and whatever, but I’m gonna.. doesn’t strike

 

Will Bachman  16:28

me as naive. What? How is it? How is being a district attorney different than what you expected, even maybe when you were, you know, in law school or graduate of law school, and a sophisticated person familiar with the law, how was the reality of it different than what you expected?

 

Mara Christine  16:49

Well, I would have, if I had ever been told that I would be working in criminal law, I would have expected myself to be a public defender.

 

Will Bachman  16:57

That’s what I would have expected, based on just speaking with you for half an hour.

 

Mara Christine  17:01

Yeah, and in fact, when I first got offered the position, I emailed my, or texted my public defender friends, and one of my friends, who is a juvenile justice advocate in New Mexico, and I said, “Hey, can we still be friends if I take this job? And to a person, they all said, “Yes, we need compassionate people in the DA’s offices, so you know, I really, I think probably what I pictured was a disregard for constitutional rights, maybe a, an obvious and automatic alliance with law enforcement, that kind of stuff that I shied away from, just as a person, and it’s not either of those things. In fact, one of one of our mandates as prosecutors in New Mexico is to not take a case if we don’t believe that there’s, if that we believe there’s been a constitutional violation, or if there’s another enough evidence that the person has not done what they’re being charged with doing, and like that’s that’s a huge gatekeeping responsibility, right? It’s not a knee-jerk, oh, police said you did this, so therefore you did it, so we’re going to take you to court.

 

Will Bachman  18:16

Yeah,

 

Mara Christine  18:16

you really look at every aspect, and another role that is really, really fun, I think. Probably coming from having been a teacher, it’s especially fun. Is we teach the police often, right? If, if somebody submits, if a police officer submits a criminal complaint or a saying or probable cause that is too difficult to determine who did what, because they, they don’t use names well enough, they use too many pronouns, or something, or let’s say they forgot to read the Miranda rights, or they didn’t read the Implied Consent Advisory Act, which is what you read to someone before you ask them if they’ll submit to, we get to, you know, we can call them, email them, have them in our office, and say, “Hey, dude, do better, right? If you, if you care about this case enough to arrest this person, I can’t prosecute this the way you have filed it. So, and that’s that’s a teaching role, and so many of the law enforcement officers are really, really young. I mean, granted, as we get older, everybody else looks younger, right? But they are, they are so crazy.

 

Will Bachman  19:31

I’m curious, you haven’t necessarily

 

Mara Christine  19:33

had the, the training for how to write a good narrative or how to read something well enough that a person on the side of the road should understand what they’re saying and understand their rights, so it’s

 

Will Bachman  19:50

here. I’m curious to hear, how has your schooling and work as a librarian shaped. To you, I imagine librarians as being super organized at home and having their whole kitchen, everything filed in the Dewey Decimals. I am

 

Mara Christine  20:11

not that, because I offer an ADHD, so I look at my kitchen right now as we speak, and there are a lot of dishes waiting, but my bookshelves are very organized, all right. You know what? The best

 

Will Bachman  20:38

Mara, it seems like your phone went to sleep again. I can’t hear you.

 

Mara Christine  20:40

Oh, shoot. Sorry about that. Will, so I think the best part about being a librarian is the information seeking and the information disseminating aspect. I love that. I love connecting people with resources. I love connecting people with the information they’re looking for, and I do that. I did that as a teacher all the time, and and I still do that to this day, and I think that’s part of what drives me, and probably got me into that librarian position profession to begin with.

 

Will Bachman  21:12

Fantastic, I have to say

 

Mara Christine  21:14

that the thing that has that has given me the most confidence to be an attorney to get up in court to present, to be on panels, that kind of thing was teaching sixth grade, because you know, you do a lesson and you’re facing 12 year olds, they are going to let you have it if you don’t know your stuff, or if you’re not confident, and this, the coolest thing, will is I have one of my former students right now as an intern. He was, he was a sixth grader in 2011

 

Will Bachman  21:48

Okay,

 

Mara Christine  21:48

and now he’s one of my interns.

 

Will Bachman  21:51

All right, now is the segment where I ask a couple fun questions. What is something that you think everyone should try

 

Mara Christine  22:04

knocking on doors for a cause.

 

Will Bachman  22:06

Oh, tell me more about that.

 

Mara Christine  22:10

There’s nothing like having a door slammed in your face because someone won’t talk to you about something you’re passionate about. It’s humbling. It’s. it’s a view into people’s a slice, whether they’re interested, whether they don’t have time, whether they don’t care, all of that. It’s just, it’s a very humbling thing to do, and I think that even, even just knocking on doors, campaigning for a candidate, that maybe it’s a cause, it’s, it’s a really interesting way to kind of get to know neighborhoods and communities, and to put yourself out there as somebody who cares about something.

 

Will Bachman  22:55

I will second that. I think that even if you’re not going to spend the whole election season doing it, going out and spending an afternoon or two volunteering for a candidate you support. It’s certainly more educational than spending that equivalent amount of time reading news articles about the election when you’re actually trying to, yeah,

 

Mara Christine  23:18

no, I agree. And then not just candidates, but also causes, right. So, let’s say you’re a well, I’ll just use my experience with CalPERG, that was an environmental and consumer advocacy group, right. So, if I was going to a door to talk to somebody about the Clean Water Act, I would learn right away how much this particular community knew, didn’t know, cared, didn’t care, how much their jobs were going to be impacted, that kind of thing, right? People tell you things when you go to their door, and it’s just there’s no other way to really get to know a community,

 

Will Bachman  23:52

right. And what is a compliment that you have never forgotten, I

 

Mara Christine  24:04

Huh, probably when I passed the bar exam, and my law school mentor told me he was proud of me.

 

Will Bachman  24:15

That’s nice.

 

Mara Christine  24:16

Yeah.

 

Will Bachman  24:19

Okay. Next segment. Yeah, the next segment, let’s go back to Harvard. Tell us about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way.

 

Mara Christine  24:34

Okay, so I’m not going to remember my professors’ names, and that’s horrible.

 

Will Bachman  24:37

I’m sorry, I’m so far

 

Mara Christine  24:39

detached from all of that,

 

Will Bachman  24:41

all right,

 

Mara Christine  24:42

that I don’t remember names, but my freshman English literature survey course, I still have my anthologies on my organized shelves,

 

Will Bachman  24:52

all right.

 

Mara Christine  24:53

My, oh my gosh, she has since passed away, but she was. I can’t remember her name, but she was amazing. She really was. She was energetic, she was knowledgeable, she was frank, and I.. I.. so I ended up becoming an English major after a pretty devastating transcript from my freshman year. I switched from biology to English, and found my.. found my.. she was great. There was one moment, and probably anybody listening to this might have even been in that class, where she hadn’t arrived to class yet. She was late, and the Dins and Tonics came running in to do their, their spiel, right? And they had a bottle of gin and a little shot glass, or no, they didn’t have a shot glass, they had a bottle of gin. But on her podium, she always had a water glass, so they poured into the water glass, and then they did their little, their little advertisement for their show, and they ran off. And then she walked in.

 

Will Bachman  26:12

Oh, okay. Mara, you just went on mute again to start off. When, and she walked in, so she walked

 

Mara Christine  26:20

in, and then I remembered her name. Her name was Helen Vendler. Okay, yeah. And she walked in, she got herself settled at her podium, and she picked up her glass, and we all just did a big intake of our breath, and she took a big swig, and she just spluttered, you know. We all were laughing, and then she just started laughing and laughing and laughing. She knew she knew exactly what had happened, I think. And then she went on with the show. So I just really, I really appreciated her grace in that moment, you know. She didn’t grasp her throat and fall over or start screaming and yelling and blaming people or anything. I mean, it was a huge risk for them to take, obviously. You know, if somebody’s recovering alcoholic or something, but

 

Will Bachman  27:06

right, right,

 

Mara Christine  27:07

none of us even thought about that, I’m sure, or I didn’t anyway. I’ll just speak for myself,

 

Will Bachman  27:13

Mara, but

 

Mara Christine  27:15

that was, you know, I mean, I’ve. I think just reading literature, analyzing literature, I is so important for what I do now, because it’s all reading and analysis all the time, and when I was a teacher, I could call on that in teaching my, my kiddos, my young, young kiddos ways to look at what they were enjoying reading, so I was teaching during the era of the Hunger Games that came out while I was teaching, and Maximum Ride, like some of those young adult books that were best sellers, I read all of them, and then I would read classics to the kids, but yeah, I think I would say Helen Vendler’s English and American Literature class, I loved it, and then my other professor that I loved, his name I also won’t remember, he taught a course on genocide, and I still have that book from that class, it’s called.. I’m trying to read it from my seat here, it’s on my shelf, the.. oh, shoot, it’s like the history, the history, and something. history and psychology, maybe, of genocide. he was super impactful. He told the story of having grown up in Poland and the Nazis having invaded his village, and he was the only survivor, and that always stuck with me. And the book was amazing, and I think all through the years since then, when we’ve heard of various genocides around the world. I always reflect on that class, and I reflect on

 

Will Bachman  29:11

Mara.

 

Mara Christine  29:12

Yes,

 

Will Bachman  29:13

thank you so much for joining today. For listeners who want to follow up with you, where is the best place for them to find you online? Do I’m

 

Mara Christine  29:23

on LinkedIn, and then I have my email. Can I give you my email?

 

Will Bachman  29:30

I don’t think that’s necessary, but if listeners, you know, we don’t necessarily want to publish people’s contact info, but if listeners want to follow up with you, they can reach out, and we’ll, we’ll send you their message.

 

Mara Christine  29:49

Perfect, that sounds good.

 

Will Bachman  29:51

All right, great. Thanks, Will. Appreciate it. Thank you for joining today.

 

Mara Christine  29:56

Thank you. Have a good one.