An Interview with Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Farah Stockman

Abstract

An Interview with Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Farah Stockman Jon K. Lauck and Farah Stockman Tell us about your roots in the American Midwest. I was raised in East Lansing, Michigan. Both of my parents taught at Michigan State University, and they still live in Okemos, Michigan. My dad is a big outdoorsman, so I grew up around rivers, particularly the Au Sable. Watching the canoe marathon in Grayling, Michigan, is a big family affair. My sister and her husband attended the University of Michigan. I also have a lot of cousins in Detroit. A whole branch of my mother's family moved up from Mississippi to Detroit during the Jim Crow era to work in the auto plants, and they still live there now. Many of my cousins work two or even three jobs to get by. My husband spent some time working at Albion College, so we spent time on a dairy farm nearby. Albion had some sizable factories that closed down, and the town has never really recovered. It brought home the themes of the book. What was your sense of the Midwest as a region when you were growing up? In many ways I had an idyllic childhood, growing up in a college town that had poetry readings and plenty of international flavor, in the form of graduate students at MSU and restaurants. But I didn't really appreciate it when I was a kid. I wanted to see the world and get out from under my parents. I went away to college at age eighteen and eventually went to live on the other side of the world, in Kenya and Tanzania, which felt very exciting. It was only years later, when organizing my high school reunions, that I realized how many of my friends were moving back because Michigan is affordable, with a high quality of life. Through the [End Page 109] pandemic, my parents helped take care of my daughter when we lost our childcare, so I spent an extended time in Michigan. And now I'm finding myself spending more and more time there and appreciating it in a way that I never did as a child. What did your parents teach at MSU and how did they get into those fields? My parents taught at Michigan State for much of their professional careers. My dad taught in the computer science department, and my mom taught in the communicative sciences and disorders department. My dad descended from Italian and German immigrant grandparents. His mom was a dressmaker for a time. His father directed the Henry George School in Philadelphia. My dad grew up in Trevose, Pennsylvania, where his math brain and general charisma took him to college despite the fact that his family had little money. My mother, an African American descendent of slaves in the U.S., grew up in Winona, Mississippi, during the Jim Crow era. Her parents taught at schools for Black children. Her father was also a preacher who tutored Black veterans at night. At the time, career choices for Black women were severely constrained. Had my mother gone to college today, she might have been an opera singer or an architect. But back then it was questionable whether a Black female architect would find employment. Speech pathology was one of the few professional fields open to Black women. She left Mississippi for graduate school and never looked back. Afterwards, she did a teaching stint at Jackson State University and later at Howard University, where some of her research focused on infant speech acquisition, using her own child (me) as one of her subjects. How did you decide to focus on a plant in Indianapolis to tell the story in American Made? On election night in 2016, I was stunned to see so many of my fellow Americans cast their ballots for a man who had never served even one day in government. How could that be? I asked around: Why Donald Trump? If I asked people from my home state of Michigan, I often heard one refrain: "He's going to bring back our jobs. He's going to bring the factories back." Trump had a routine at...