speaker-0: Hello and welcome to Writing Forward, a conversation show featuring some of the best and brightest voices from across Wisconsin. I'm Jeff Aloisia, I'm a former editor at the New York Times, a Milwaukee suburbs native, and now I'm a freelance writer based in Madison. Each week I sit down with writers from and connected to my home state for candid, sometimes messy conversations about craft, identity, and what it means to build a writing life rooted at home and away from the traditional centers of the literary world. From fiction to nonfiction, poetry to journalism, we dig into what keeps Wisconsin writers moving forward, one word at a time. My guest today is Tamara Saviano. Tamara is a writer, filmmaker, and Grammy Award-winning music producer whose work lives at the intersection of storytelling, music, place, and memory. Over the past two decades, she's helped shape and preserve the world of Americana music through books, documentaries, oral histories, And deeply human portraits of artists and communities. Tamara is the author of several books, including Without Getting Killed or Caught, The Life and Music of Guy Clark, and The Most Beautiful Girl, A True Story of a Dad, A Daughter, and the Healing Power of Music. She also hosts The Traveling Kind, an Americana radio show on WVMO in Monona. Originally from St. Francis, Wisconsin, Tamara has spent years dividing her time between Nashville and the many places her work has led her. And in 2026, I'm happy to say she's returning to Wisconsin, for This Is Wisconsin, a multimedia storytelling project inspired by Robert Gard's 1969 oral history project of the same name. Tamra Saviano, welcome to Reading Forward.

speaker-1: Hi Jeff, I'm so happy to be here with you.

speaker-0: It's so nice to meet you, Tamara. You are coming to us from Nashville today, is that right?

speaker-1: I am in Nashville just for the moment, yes.

speaker-0: Well, we have a little bit of a warm spell here in Wisconsin and I just turned off my AC to improve the sound. So we can pretend that we are walking down Music Road together in Nashville. Although I have substituted mint tea for a mad dog margarita today.

speaker-1: Probably a good idea at this time of day.

speaker-0: I think so. With Tamara, we begin every episode of the show by asking our guests to share a brief passage from someone else's writing, be it a novel, poem, essay, or article for that for them, evokes Wisconsin in some memorable way. ⁓ tell us what you chose and can you read it for us, please?

speaker-1: Yes. I chose a passage from Robert Gard's nineteen sixty-nine book, This is Wisconsin, because I'm pretty much living in that book right now. ⁓ so here we go. What I have personally received out of the whole thing is the knowledge that Wisconsin does have unique flavors, a rare beauty of all the seasons, a unique geography, and most alluring of all. A regional and hard to define mysterious sensation that comes to a constant traveler and observer, a far and faint sound from sky and hills and streams and lakes, or perhaps only the echo and memory of many, many things, both ancient and new. The mystery, at least, is real to me. I get chills when I read that.

speaker-0: Tell me why. I know from your books that you are someone who deeply loves this state, even though you've spent a lot of time away from it now. Tell me why that gives you chills.

speaker-1: Well, and I think spending a lot of time away from Wisconsin has made me love it even more. You know, when I first left Wisconsin, I was thirty-four and I had lived there all my life up until then. And you're just used to it. This is just where you live. And then now I have traveled every corner of the globe and everywhere I go, I realize I hate to even say this on a podcast, but I realize that Wisconsin is paradise. And that's where I want to be is the paradise I grew up in that I didn't realize was paradise at the time. I split my time as a kid between Saint Francis, which is on the Lake Michigan shores just south of Milwaukee, and Eagle River area in the North Woods. And I just love everything about Wisconsin. I had friends in the driftless region and I'd spend time there and then I'd go to Door County and the Northwoods and you know, everywhere in between. And I I really think Wisconsin is kind of mystical.

speaker-0: I totally hear what you're saying about needing to sort of go away to to realize that I think there's some magic here as well. I'm sure we will circle back to talking about this is Wisconsin. I want to start with you as a young person growing up in Wisconsin. When you think back to that version of yourself before Nashville, before the books and the documentaries and the Grammys, what did you imagine your life becoming?

speaker-1: ⁓ well, not what it did become, that's for sure. You know, I always wanted to be a writer. I knew that. I remember, you know, as a kid, I was very close with my grandparents and my cousins and two of my girl cousins, one that was my age, one that was a couple of years younger, we would gather in the hallway at my grandma's house and we would pretend that we were grown up. And they were both, you know, beauticians working in a salon and I was a writer. And that has just always been part of me. My grandpa gave me a diary, a little orange diary with a gold lock on it when I was about eleven. And I started writing in that diary and never stopped. So I did imagine my life as a writer, but I was not worldly at all, who is as a kid. I couldn't imagine what that really meant until I did it.

speaker-0: I can relate to maybe not not even being able to envision what that life might look like. Because you're right, we as kids we do have very small worlds. So there there are some ways I think in which growing up in a place can be limiting, but what what what do you think growing up in Wisconsin gave you that you don't think you could have gotten anywhere else?

speaker-1: Well, I think there's this expansiveness, especially growing up on Lake Michigan, you know, when you live there as you know, being from the area, you just sort of take it for granted, it's just there. You know to go east to get to the lake, right? That's how you know your directions. But you don't really understand how magical Lake Michigan is. I mean, I didn't. I didn't understand how magical it was when I just saw it every day and walked by it every day. And my high school was right on the shores and we looked out over the lake every day. And then I moved to Nashville and within the first week I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, where's the water? What I think that there's this expansiveness and, you know, relaxation and openness that the land in Wisconsin, the land and the water provides that not everywhere has. And when you live somewhere that's landlocked, it's claustrophobic. Truly is claustrophobic. At least for me it is. Cause I guess if I grew up in Tennessee I wouldn't feel that way. But there's not much water here.

speaker-0: I moved back to Wisconsin from Wilmington, North Carolina. I was ⁓ right on the on the coast there, and I told myself that if I was going to leave the ocean, I would have to trade for being between lakes. So yeah, ⁓ it worked out. I want to connect the dots just a little bit. So you're growing up in Wisconsin, you're given a journal, you become a regular journaler, and that's very apparent from reading Poets and Dreamers. I can imagine the detail that was in those journals. At a certain point, though, your life takes this turn towards music and radio. And eventually Nashville. What pulled you there?

speaker-1: So I started college late in life. ⁓ I was a mom at 20, very young mom. So when my daughter started kindergarten, I started going to college at Alverno in Milwaukee. They had a weekend college program. So every other weekend for four years. And I was studying communications and journalism. And I ended up doing an internship at WMIL and W O K Y legacy program. radio stations in Milwaukee at a time when radio was still local. This is before deregulation, which matters a lot. And the people that ran the radio station, Mike Jorgensen and Brian Onguero, let me create a magazine, two magazines, one for each station, from the ground up. The I had no experience in this. And I built two magazines that together had more than a million subscribers. And I was the writer, the editor, the photographer. I oversaw the salespeople that sold the ads in the magazine. You know, I was the publisher. I was everything to have that creative freedom to build these magazines. was better than any schooling I could have ever done, right? I learned so much. I learned about radio, of course. I learned about advertising. I learned about journalism. I learned about feature writing. I just learned everything. And Brian, who was my direct boss, just gave me the freedom to just build it. So that's how it started. You know, it's impossible to believe that that was only five years of my life. Yeah. Because it was really For me, earth shattering.

speaker-0: Yeah. I think those years in your twenties can feel that way. Did you have any trepidation about having that kind of responsibility? Like did you think that you could do it when they came to you and asked to start these magazines?

speaker-1: ⁓ no, I I totally had imposter syndrome. And I was like, wait, why me? What? I don't know anything. But they had confidence in me and told me so and said, Hey, we're here to help. You know, and Brian, one of the things I learned from Brian out of many, still the best mentor I've ever had, was to not be afraid to make a decision. You can always change it with another decision, but just make a decision and go for it. And then if that doesn't work, Turn around and make another decision and do something else. So it was really this beautiful creative environment. And the magazine made money. And in radio, if you know anything about radio, making nonspot revenue that comes from not on the air, especially back then, pre-internet days, ⁓ I was kind of the rock star there because I was bringing in more than a million dollars a year that was not taking up airtime. So that just made them give me even more freedom. It really was quite extraordinary. I've never had a job since that was that extraordinary.

speaker-0: You mentioned deregulation and radio. Timing is so important to anything, but especially a career. I think about you coming into country radio in the nineties and how big of a deal it was. But also you mentioned this deregulation piece. Can you talk about that and what you mean by that?

speaker-1: Yeah, so in nineteen ninety six, President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act. Before that, the law was that companies could only own a certain amount of media in one market, right? I think it was like two radio stations in a market. And with deregulation, that meant big companies could buy up as much as they wanted anywhere they wanted. So what happened in Milwaukee, I was already gone by then, but you know, I was working in music business by then, but in nineteen ninety-six Immediately a company called Clear Channel, which is now iHeartRadio, came in and just bought up everything. And they bought it like our radio station, they bought in multiples of like 10 times what the radio station was worth. So the people that sold the station can't be really faulted. It's like, wait a minute, you're gonna give us 10 times what this station is worth for us to just give it to you. And so that happened everywhere around the country. And we see it now with corporate television and corporate radio and that it just changed everything where media used to be very local and ⁓ it hasn't been since nineteen ninety six.

speaker-0: Yeah, that's such a hinge point. I'm glad you talked us through that. I wanna jump ahead just a little bit. You know, we could spend, I think, many hours talking about your career in Americana music. There are two moments I especially want to ask you about. The first has to do with how you met Chris Christofferson, but it also has to do with you getting fired. What happened there?

speaker-1: So after nine eleven, things were pretty heated, you know, politically, although it seems very charming now comparatively. But ⁓ things were very heated. It was like this you're with us or against us and and it stopped being about coming together to solve problems. And ⁓ I think I write in the book that everybody was up and down like teenage hormones, you know, during that time. Anyway, to make a long story short, I sort of got in a jam at my job, which at that time I was the operations manager at the Great American Country Cable Network, which was, you know, music television basically. I got in a jam with Charlie Daniels, who in one of his blogs he took the actor Sean Penn to task for taking a a trip to, I don't know, somewhere in the Middle East. I don't even remember anymore, but they called him a traitor and Anyway, I got this email from Charlie's publicist. And the first time I deleted it, and the second time I wrote back and said, please take me off your mailing list. And then the third time I was like, okay. And I just went through point by point and sort of like just said, look, dissent is an American thing, you know. From the Boston Tea Party, I mean, Americans have dissented when they don't agree with their government, and that's why we have the First Amendment. And Charlie Daniels can say whatever he wants, and so can Sean Penn. And that's the beauty of this American system, right? Well, the publicist who shall remain nameless called my boss, who was in Denver, Colorado at the time, and complained and said that I needed to be fired. So then the boss called me and said, You are no longer allowed to talk about politics with anybody in the music business. And I was like, Well, First of all, that's ridiculous because my husband's in the music business. Well, we weren't married yet, but my boyfriend is in the music business. All of my friends are in the music business. I'm an American. I can talk about politics with whoever I want to talk about politics with, you know. So I got fired. And it was a very public firing. And this is a week before the Dixie Chicks incident. They took all the heat off me. Bless those girls. Anyway. Al Benetta and John Prine, who owned ⁓ a little record label called ⁓ Boy Records. John, you know, is a Chicago boy. Of course. And they heard all this. And I, you know, I knew them because w ⁓ we had rented an office from them. ⁓ Great American Country did. So I knew them. I was with them all the time drinking wine in their office. And ⁓ so Al called me and he was like, I need you to come over to my office. And I went over there and he's always yelling in his speaker phone to Studs Turkle and you know everybody that was on his speakerphone was amazing. So I get walk in his office and he's yelling at his speakerphone, you know, she's here, Tamra's here, you know, and this gravely voice came out of the speakerphone and said, Tamara, this is Chris Christofferson and I like what you did and I want you to come work for me. And that was that. Yeah. Well, it was crazy. I mean, it was like, I'm like, wait a minute, what? And by the way, I had just gotten back from Italy and I was really jet-legged. So I was my my brain wasn't really functioning. And I'm like, wait, what? What? Okay. You know? So I just said okay. And then for the next 20 years, I was on this magical journey with Chris.

speaker-0: A lot of people know Christofferson, I think, is this legendary songwriter and actor, you know, and a lot of people know him from his films. What fascinates me, I think, is that he was also this serious literary person before he even became a songwriter. You know, he had a he was a creative writing major, a road scholar. He had won an essay contest from the Atlantic. He was obsessed with language. ⁓ Did you recognize a a kindred spirit there?

speaker-1: Absolutely. And when I was writing my first book, which Chris wrote the foreword for, I was giving him pages. He's the only one in my life that read the book as I was writing it. And that's because he very actively wanted to. And so I was sending him pages and then he would call me and we would talk about the pages and we would and it's a family memoir, you know, it's about my relationship with my stepdad, really, which was volatile. And so then we would have these long discussions about family dynamics and his dynamic with his parents and my dynamic with my parents. And God, we really got to know each other during that time when I was writing that first book. And like I look back now and I think, ⁓ my God, how what did I think I was doing by sharing my writing with Chris Christofferson? But I, you know, as much as I knew he was this, he is this literary genius. He was my friend and my colleague, so it felt natural to share that with him.

speaker-0: How long did it take to sort of get to a point where you didn't where you weren't sort of pinching yourself that like, ⁓ this is Chris Christofferson and we're and we're having this correspondence and we're friends? Like, are you someone who gets starstruck easily?

speaker-1: I'm not really. And I think when you get to know somebody kind of behind the scenes like that, it's you know, you lose that Starstruck thing pretty quickly. However, I will say, you know, I saw Chris perform, I don't know, ⁓ I I tried to count once and I lost track at seven hundred and fifty. Wow. And then I quit counting. And and when I would stand ⁓ on the side of the stage and he would sing Sunday morning coming down. That's the moments I would pinch myself and go, ⁓ my God, I'm getting paid to stand here and watch this songwriter sing these songs. Those are the moments, you know, when I would see him in his element. I think also, you know, when you're in the day-to-day work of just working, it just feels normal. And then later. And I had this with Guy Clark too, like later when they're gone, or you know, Chris had ⁓ dementia, so he was gone before he died. That's when it really starts hitting you, like the importance of it, or at least importance to me. It may not be important to everybody, but you know, I look back and I just think those years with both of them were probably the most important years of my life just because of what I learned from them and just being in the same room with these genius songwriters.

speaker-0: There's a Christofferson quote I kept thinking about while preparing for this conversation. You write about when he entered the country music hall of fame, he said that the real joy was having the freedom to write songs without worrying about where they ended up. It feels to me like that idea connects to another turning point in your life. In 2007, I believe, you were at the Center for Creative Leadership in North Carolina. And an instructor told you a story, the parable of the Mexican fisherman. that completely changed the way you thought about success and ambition. Can you like tell that story?

speaker-1: Yeah, sure. So I in two thousand seven, you're right, the that was the year. I had a very busy company, PR and and artist management. I mean, I had lots of clients and I had an employee and I was at the point where I was gonna have to hire at least one more employee, maybe two, and it was a lot. On one hand it felt really good to have this success. But I went away to this retreat All week I had classes and these lunches and dinners with all the people that were there, and most of the people that were there were from the corporate world. There were people that worked in hotels and hospitality and tech and so at the end, our last day there, it was a full week, and our last day there, one of the instructors told this story, the parable of the Mexican fisherman, which the short version is An American businessman tries to get him to start an IPO and, you know, go bigger and go bigger. And the fisherman kept saying, and then what? And then what? And it turned out that he would just go right back to what he's doing already, fishing and having a siesta with his wife and playing music with his friends, you know. It was like a light bulb, you know. I just sat there and I'm like, ⁓ my God, I'm the fisherman. I'm here. I'm living the life I want to live. I don't want to grow my business. I don't want to have more employees. I don't want time taken away from me being able to write. And so I came back to Nashville and my one employee was pregnant and she was going on maternity leave and not coming back anyway. And so it was just perfect. Annie went on her maternity leave and I basically closed down the business. And just went to anything I could handle myself, which is basically Chris and some other side projects and then my own creative projects. I started making less money, didn't matter, like at all. It's never mattered because I have had since 2007 so much freedom and everything else that I do.

speaker-0: ⁓ it's refreshing any time I hear about sort of we're so we get so used to this growth at all costs mindset. Yeah. So for someone to slow it down. And what struck me about reading about that moment is is that the lesson wasn't necessarily work less. It was more about sort of protecting space in your own life and your own creativity instead of just endless scaling into into exhaustion.

speaker-1: Yeah. 'Cause I still I mean, I love to work and I work a lot. It's just that I'm working on different things.

speaker-0: think a lot of writers wrestle with this constantly. Like, how do you build a financially sustainable life while still protecting the time and the emotional bandwidth necessary to to make your art? I think about this all the time as someone who has a day job. How have you tried to navigate that balance in your own life?

speaker-1: Well, you know, it's hard and I'll I go through periods where, you know, I watch my bank account go down and then I'm like, okay, I need to pivot and do something that makes me some money. And so I do a lot of consulting work with artists and other creative people. But I still when I do that, I keep all my mornings for me. No matter, you know, like right now I'm I have about four consulting clients, but everything we do is noon or later. my mornings are for me for writing and and thinking and just being I'm fine working later into the night on client stuff if I have to, as long as I have my mornings when I'm most fresh to write and think about my projects. Now another thing is I'm married and and my husband is a great partner and he works in the music business as well, but he has a a job job

speaker-0: Mm-hmm. ⁓

speaker-1: If I were single, it would be much harder, I think. Much, much harder. And also I don't have young kids. Like I'm old now and I don't have other things pulling at me, family obligations and things like that. My husband travels constantly. So I have a lot of time to devote to, you know, my own creative projects and then working with my consulting clients.

speaker-0: You're also the first writer of biography we've had on this podcast. You wrote a wonderful biography of Guy Clark without getting killed or caught, as well as a sort of companion documentary about Guy and Susanna and Towns Van Sant. I'm curious, what does that process look like? Like how deep is the cavity search, so to speak, when you're taking on a biography like that?

speaker-1: Well, you know, I didn't know what I was doing, which I can say about everything I've ever started is like I have no idea how to do this. And I think that that's probably a good thing because sometimes if you know, you might not do it. So I it took me eight years to write that book on Guy. And the first four years I did nothing but research and interview people. That's when things started taking shape in my mind. And now this biography is a true biography. It is Cradle to grave. It was not a, you know, as told to or anything like that. It was my book. Guy didn't get to approve anything. You know, it was a true biography, but he did participate heavily. I've learned since then with other, you know, meeting other biographers that they don't always get the kind of access that I had. I had so much access. I knew Guy for 10 years before we even started on this journey. And he was a pack rat and his family are pack rats. And I went through every paper in every house. I spent just years digging through archives, which is my favorite part of the job, by the way. You know, I could live my life in a library archive and never leave, and I'd be perfectly happy. But it was a big job. It was an overwhelming job. And even to this day, the book came out ten years ago, and I'm surprised I finished it. Because it just felt overwhelming from the beginning to the end. The day I turned in the manuscript, I was relieved on one hand, and on the other hand, I thought I haven't done enough. And I think that that's just you can't cover every minute of every day of your subject's life. I'm really glad that I did it now that it's 10 years past. But boy, at the time, part of me was like, Was it worth giving up all these years? And why did I give up all these years? And you know, this book is never gonna make money and all of that. It turned out it did make me some money, which was a relief after all that, but I didn't think it would. But again, I look at those years with Guy and what a gift they were. I mean, I was at his house three, four or five days a week. interviewing him and Susanna and going through his stuff and really getting, you know, we got to be very intimate friends. We didn't start that way. But by the end, you know, I went through his death and the the lead up to his death and and we became very close friends. Yeah, yeah. It's a it's a gift. And not not only that, now, I mean I didn't realize I was signing on for Guy Clark for the rest of my life, but I also I run the Guy Clark Family Foundation, the nonprofit that supports songwriters. And also I take care of Guy's legacy and his publishing and and creative stuff. So that's also one of my day jobs. So I still live in Guy Clark World ⁓ after all these years.

speaker-0: Well, you're a steward, I guess. The other thing that struck me about this, you know, especially in watching the documentary, is that as you're doing this, you are watching your friends go through some really d hard times. You know, I did not know the full story of that trio of friends. These are people who live in our imagination now as being sort of larger than life. It's like here's Guy Clark, he wrote Dublin Blues, you know. But th this is a A beautiful story, but one without a happy ending. What was it like to have to bear witness to that?

speaker-1: Well, again, I think now I look at it as as a gift. I'm glad that I was present. But at the time, yeah, it was a little overwhelming and it was emotional. And the movie especially, you know, Susanna's tapes. She just would set down the tape recorder and record things. And the the part toward the end before Towns died when Susanna is just recording herself saying, I've got to get used to the idea that Towns is gonna die. Yeah. I didn't listen to that tape until after my book. Was finished because after Susanna died, Guy gave me all her diaries and and tapes. And I was trying to finish my book, and there was just this box full of tapes. And I'm like, I I went through her written diaries, but I can't possibly go through all these tapes. And so then when Paul, my husband, and I decided to make the documentary, every night after supper, we would listen to Susanna's tapes, and there was a lot of her in towns, just drunk stuff, you know. There was a lot to go through that was not usable. But then we would find these gems. And so making that movie it was kind of heartbreaking 'cause we knew it did not have a happy ending. In the film world, you know, either's comedy or tragedy when you're writing and it's like, Well, we are writing a tragedy.

speaker-0: One of the the sort of thematic through lines that I see in your work across radio, biography, memoir, documentary, music, they all seem to be rooted in listening very carefully to people. But do you do you think of listening as part of your writing practice?

speaker-1: Absolutely. I've always been enthralled with other people's stories. I grew up with grandparents and great grandparents in my neighborhood. I didn't realize how unusual that was. You know, I was listening to family stories when I was just a little kid. ⁓ my great grandparents just weave these tales, you know, my great grandma came over from Norway as a little girl and they farmed in Minnesota and, you know, it's just like Little House on the Prairie, you know, and and sh yeah, I mean, I just had storytellers in my family and and I I really think we all need to leave our stories behind. I think everybody should be writing their stories or recording their stories or telling their stories. Th there is a real ⁓ for me, a real pleasure in listening to other people's stories.

speaker-0: Yeah. It's a great skill to have, right? As a human being, but especially as a writer. Well, one thing that I loved about poets and dreamers, and something that I hope that people might take away from this conversation, is this idea that creative lives rarely move in straight lines. Even now, after everything you've done, I understand you're stretching into new forms. Did I hear that you're working on a historical fiction project set in in Wisconsin? Is that still the case?

speaker-1: Yes. It it's funny because that project is really fun right now. I love just dreaming up this stuff and I'm in love with these characters in this place, but it has absolutely zero form at this moment in time. I have a situation ship, not a plot. But it's so much fun and I will continue to do that.

speaker-0: Is there anything you can tell us about the circumstances? I know that, you know, writers we we like to hold things close to our chest.

speaker-1: ⁓ so it it all started with are you familiar with Bjork London and the chapel there? Okay. So ⁓ this woman built this chapel during the war years, during the World War II years. It's still there. And then she willed her property to Lawrence University. It's called Bjork London. I was really enthralled with her story, and then I've always been enthralled with this Milwaukee artist, Mary Knowle. I don't know if you ever knew this when you were a teenager, but they called her house the Witch's House and it was in Fox Point right on the lake and it was kind of a teenage tradition. As soon as you got your driver's license, you had to drive up to the witch's house. Well, I've always been enthralled by her art.

speaker-0: And my mom and my aunts have have driven me by the witch's house many times.

speaker-1: Yes. So you know. So anyway, her name is Mary Knoll. She was not a witch. And all of her art, the house is still there, and all of her art is in the care of the John Michael Kohler Art Center. Anyway, so I was enthralled by these two women. So I'm like, I'm going to fictionalize this story around them. And then I started pulling in all these other Jens Jensen who started the clearing in Door County. And the lunts who had ten chimneys and I'm like, Okay, you know, I'm just gonna have all these Wisconsin characters and and yeah, it's a mess right now, but it is so much fun. I never thought I would write fiction. And of course my agent is like, When are you gonna have this? I'm like, maybe before I die, but not any time soon.

speaker-0: I think there are probably a lot of people out there like you who who are thinking about stepping into a new form. I heard you say that at one point you had to submit, I think, ten pages for a a program application. I I'd love to hear just a little bit about that experience specifically, like with the fear, the excitement, the sort of vulnerability of becoming a beginner again.

speaker-1: Do you know the songwriter Mary Gaucher? Are you familiar with her? Okay, well, she's she's a great songwriter, and ⁓ she lives in Nashville. This all started because I wanted to write a biography of the director Richard Linklater, who lives in Austin, Texas. And I have a lot of people in Austin. I've spent a lot of time there. I did this creative leadership program there, and so I had my heart set on writing a biography of Richard Linklater.

speaker-0: I'm not.

speaker-1: Well, I couldn't get Rick to commit to it, to say yes to it. He, you know, he's still making films constantly, and that's what he wants to do. And I don't blame him. But I was complaining to my friend Terry Allen, who's also an artist, a writer and a sculptor and a painter. And I was complaining that I couldn't get this project off the ground. And he said to me, Tamar, I think you should write fiction. And I'm like, Fiction? Are you crazy? You know, no, I can't do fiction. But of course he planted this seed. So then I was ⁓ talking to Mary Gaucher about it, and she's like, ⁓ you need to know Suzanne Kingsbury. She's the book whisperer. So through Mary, I met this woman, Suzanne Kingsbury, who has a an organization called the Gateless Academy. And I had to write 10 pages of fiction to get in to send, you know, I had to send to her and everything. So I just started writing about my historical characters. And I got in. And it is ju it just broke me wide open. It just broke broke me wide open creatively. I don't know how else to explain it. And the beauty of it is it's not goal-oriented. It's about writing. It's not about finishing. It's not about now you have to do this and now you have to do this. It's about the act and the art of writing. And I've never been in a program like that. I've done a lot of different workshops, but they're always kind of goal-oriented, you know, and they've helped me. But this one is about the art.

speaker-0: It sounds dreamy. It is. Maybe this'll be a good time away into us talking about this is Wisconsin. At this point in your life and career, why did it feel important to return to Wisconsin?

speaker-1: Well, I wanted to come home for years, honestly. I never meant to stay away this long. And ⁓ life just kept happening. From two thousand five to twenty ten, we had a house in Cuttahay next to my hometown that I always intended on spending more time at, but then I was spending too much time in Texas and it just I wasn't getting home enough. And so we sold that house, which I'm still kicking myself. But it always was my plan to come home. And now I'm at that age where I'm like I have to go home now. It's time to go home. So during the pandemic, my husband and I talked about it a lot. I was like, I want to be home by the time I'm 65. Well, I'm 65 now. I just turned 65 in February. I'm like, okay, this is the year. So I'm going home. I'm coming home. Period. ⁓ last year I was in Wisconsin for the summer. I mo I'm mostly am there for the summer, however, I can be. And ⁓ I found this ⁓ this used bookstore in Doer County that has a huge Wisconsin section. Huge. And I I spent way too much money in that store at loaded up my van with just all these books about Wisconsin. And one of those books is called This Is Wisconsin by Robert Guard. And I when I started looking through the collection, there were several books by him. And they were all really cool. So anyway, I read I read this book cover to cover and Because I'm a journalist and I love Wisconsin and I love to travel around Wisconsin, I was like, ⁓ I am going to go back. And he wrote this book in 1969. I'm gonna go back to every place that Robert Guard went and see how it's changed in almost 60 years and write about it. So that was my plan, still my plan. But then I started thinking, well, you know, it's 2026. And there should really be a video component to this. So then I thought, okay, well, it's going to need a YouTube channel to go with it. So here I am. I haven't started this journey yet. That is ⁓ my plan for this summer is to move home and get started on this. At first, I thought I was going to try to go to every county this year. And then I stepped back and went, no, don't put that pressure on yourself. Just start this year and see where we go. But I'm very excited about it. And this is a project I know how to do because I know how to be a journalist. The YouTube thing, ⁓ my husband is a video guy, he can help me with that, but I can collect the content and tell the stories. And that's what I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna start shooting and writing and interviewing and researching. And I'm gonna start that this summer and I'm really super excited about it.

speaker-0: It's a really exciting project. and I I can't wait to see ⁓ when when things start coming out. We began this conversation talking about who you were as a young person. When you think about yourself at, you know, sixteen years old, what do you think she would make of your life now?

speaker-1: She'd she'd think she was high. ⁓ yeah, no, that 16 year old never could have imagined any of it. I've lived it and it's hard for me to wrap my mind around. I feel very blessed that I have been able to do it, you know, that I have had these opportunities and that I've been able to just make it work.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: The good news is I'm not motivated by money and I'm not motivated by fame and I'm not motivated by any of those things that some people give up their lives for. I'm really motivated by story and people. So that's what keeps me going. Do you still

speaker-0: feel you know responsible to that younger version of yourself when you're making decisions about your work and your life?

speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, she's part of me, you know, and I I didn't always nurture that younger part of me. I never, you know, I w when I was younger, I didn't take good care of myself and I I didn't have a very healthy sense of self or confidence when I was young. So I do feel like my the life I've built as an adult is sort of taking care of that younger me, showing her like This is the way. But yeah, I'm I still identify with her a lot. I still identify with the younger me in so many ways, especially, you know, as we started this conversation with my love of place in Wisconsin. And I just, you know, like I told my husband not long ago, I'm like, look, I cannot die anywhere else. I have to die in Wisconsin. I have to I just have to be there, you know. So I gotta get home. I mean, I'm fine, but I need to get home now, you know. Yeah. So it it feels right to have started my life there and go back for whatever years I have left and be in that place ⁓ that I love so much.

speaker-0: Well we're we're very lucky to have you coming back to us. Thank you for doing this, I really appreciate it.

speaker-1: Well thank you, I can't wait. ⁓ thank you, Jeff. It's been my pleasure.

speaker-0: That wraps things up. Another big thanks to my guest, Tamra Saviano, and thank you for tuning in. You can find Tamara online at Tamrasaviano.com, and we'll put links to both her website and her radio program in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating or share with a friend. It really helps. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss new episodes. They come out every Wednesday. You can reach me anytime at Jeffaloisia.com/slash writing forward. That's J-E-F-F-O-L-O-I-F-O-S-O-L- I-Z-I-A.com slash writing forward. I'd love to hear from you. Writing Forward is recorded with support from Dane Arts. It's produced, edited, and mixed by Anya Van Wagtenonk. The theme music is by the Lolo Ombre. Logos and episode art are by Tim Burton. Thanks again for listening. And the words of Quick Trip employees everywhere. We'll see you next time.