little nuggets like that.

The best.

And yeah, we all look at her and then she said, especially the Australians.

And it was just like so specific and odd.

And so we were like, tell us what drama is happening in the quilting world.

And my mom's been in this quilting group called Common Threads for like 40 years.

They get together every week.

They really, truly believe that it's for the betterment of society or whatever it might be.

And then talk about your deconstruction as its own process to the extent that you're comfortable.

Yeah.

Uh, okay.

You know- I, I, I would describe myself at my peak as quite mainstream Latter-day Saint.

Um, never, uh, orthodox, but, uh, very practicing.

You know, I was, uh, uh, my, my peak of this probably would have been as a missionary.

You know, and I, I believed that, you know, Joseph Smith was a prophet, Brigham Young, all of the rest of them that came, uh, through that line, all prophets.

And then how you've experienced that cultural shift, if you've experienced it as I have.

I can't hear Eli, so hopefully everybody else can

canYou can hear me.

Okay, great.

Um, I had the pleasure of being able to write a blurb for Carolyn's latest, um, book, her third volume, and it is unbelievably interesting.

It, uh, covers the period in the early 2000s when she was really, um, writing about and talking about what was happening with, uh, in a, in a post 9/11 world, in the war in Iraq, and Proposition 8, and so forth.

And as a gay man, uh, who grew up, you know, closeted in the church, uh, her work has been really inspiring and really important to me.

And so, uh, and, and has been really informative of a lot of what I write.

You made it deeper.

So what has made it like just explode? Yeah.

It has been, Elizabeth, this has been such a fascinating story and it's been so fun and gratifying.

So what happened was I got this idea a few years ago.

It was actually my husband's idea to write a book about older quilters preparing for a competition against their bitter rivals, which is another group of older quilters.

And we got this idea because my mom is a quilter.

She's been in this quilting group that she's had for over 40 years.

It's called Common Threads.

So can you share a little bit of the real life drama that you've heard is happening in the quilting community?

Yeah.

It was really helpful to, to have her eyes on it.

And so that, uh, the initial pass of that was a few months of me kind of going and rewriting big sections of the book to, to, um, deal with some inconsistencies that she had spotted and so forth.

And then we started pitching it to publishers.

And my literary agent had told me this, and this really surprised me, and I didn't believe it was true until I saw that it was true.

She said, um, "Just so you know, we are going to have an uphill battle with this book because it, this is a sexist, ageist industry, and we will have publishers that will be worried about trying to pu- uh, publishing a book that's about older women."

... necessarily.

Yeah.

Well, tell me a little bit about yourself as a student.

Uh, you know, it's, I, I never thought of myself as a very good student growing up.

You know, I g- I got fine grades.

Uh, I never really thought that I was very good in school.

Usually at parent, parent-teacher conferences, teachers would frequently tell my parents that I got very distracted in class, and I would just sort of sit there and, and write in a notebook, and I was always writing stories in my notebooks, like, no matter what the class was.

Be in math class writing down stories in my, in my little notebooks.

Um, and I, I got through, uh, high school and ended up going to college on a track and field scholarship.

So tell me about the video about your teacher, and maybe you could begin by just setting the scene for us of this spectacular teacher and the classroom in which she worked.