Official Interview: Susana G Baumann

[kandscreeley]

Today's Chat with Sarah features Susana G Baumann author of Speak Up! Tell Your Story to Influence Others.

View Official 5-Star Review

View Kindle edition on Amazon

*****************************************************************************************************************************************
1. If you would, can you tell us a bit about your background?

Unlike most people, I have a real past life. I was born in Argentina and lived there until my forties, which meant I had a career as an architect, a family with two children, and lived through the worst military dictatorship in our country's history. In 1990, we moved to the US for better opportunities and a safer life with my second husband. Shortly after, we ended in a horrible divorce that marked my life and my children’s. That made me realize I had to do some soul-searching to heal from that devastating experience.

Since then, I have committed myself to building a new life, doing work of self-awareness, and learning to use these stories and others I reveal in the book with a positive outlook, even with humor sometimes. We all have stories that, with little work, can become a way to share our experiences and lessons learned from them so others can relate to their life choices and seek better outcomes. It is a fantastic healing process most people do not take advantage of because they think their stories are not interesting or their lives are plain or flat. However, with the tools I provide in Speak Up! anyone can find situations that were crossroads and that turned their lives into what they are today, for good or bad. Understanding our choices and learning to share them with others give us resilience and clarity in facing anything life throws at us and advance in our seek for happiness.

2. As an immigrant, what was the biggest culture shock when moving to the US?

As a child and teen, I attended an American school in Argentina founded by the Methodist church in the 1800s. I was proficient in English and had a good grasp of American culture. Despite all these advantages as an immigrant, the cultural shock is exhausting. I literally felt that my brain was splitting the first few months we moved here. Dealing with a new language, learning new places and locations, and understanding spoken and unspoken rules of social behavior are just some of the adjustments you need to make to integrate into the hosting society. I share several stories in the book, some funny and others not so, of discrimination, microaggressions, or just plain ignorance. Now, after more than 30 years of living in this country, I can look back and grasp the power of the survival instinct in a new environment, which gives immigrants the resilience needed to move forward and excel.

3. Let's discuss your book Speak Up! Tell Your Story to Influence Others. Can you give us a brief synopsis for those that haven't heard of the book yet?

Speak Up! is an empowering self-awareness guide that blends practical storytelling advice with personal experiences while focusing on a multicultural perspective. It uses a strong blend of motivational insight and actionable steps, with engaging storytelling throughout. It is written with a multicultural approach, which will appeal to a wide variety of readers looking for new ways to build their personal brand and excel in their professional goals.

However, there are multiple contextual levels to this book. While the intention is to provide a tool for anyone who is looking to improve their speech writing or public speaking skills, it also speaks to the increasing assaults on our multiculturalism as a people and our diversity as a country of immigrants. As diversity expands in the United States, ethnic, cultural, gender, and ability gaps widen in the workplace and the community. The tension caused between forces that resist change and those pushing for change can be addressed with stories that teach, inspire, and bring us together.

Lastly, understanding the level of political penetration of mass media into our lives, which permeates every day through the constant bombardment of TV, media, and movies, and the intensification of messages in social media, and the manipulation of algorithms. The book provides tools to understand the messages hidden in those media and choose which ones are useful for our success.

4. Without giving away everything in the book, can you give us a few ideas of how storytelling is important in our lives?

The most inspirational quote of the book was the one I placed at the very beginning, which tells the importance of storytelling in our lives. It is a quote by Gloria Steinem, a social and political activist and a women’s advocate, a personality I admire the most for her dedication to the cause of women and girls. The quote says, “We have not been sitting around campfires for over 100,000 years telling each other our stories for nothing. It is in our cellular memory that this is the way we communicate. This is the way we know what the other person is feeling and, ultimately, the way we know that we are linked and not ranked. I want that to be my legacy.” As Steinem remarks, the legacy of storytelling is powerful because it shows that, in the end, we are all connected and share the same fears, the same concerns, and the same aspirations.

5. How do you think the internet and social media have influenced our storytelling?

Social media channels have extended audience engagement. The USA has 302.35 million social media users. That means 90% of the total US population uses them actively. There are 4.9 billion social media users in the world as of 2023. With this extended reach and a vast audience, the opportunity to grab a small device and reach a large audience has become a tool and a weapon. Stories are told in a few dozen characters, only in seconds. Storytellers have a short window of opportunity to connect emotionally with their audience.

At best, social media storytelling aims to inspire, engage, motivate, or compliment someone or something. At worst, stories are used to moralize, try to coax us, cause fear, nauseate us, and make us feel guilty, frightened, or uncertain. All accounts are crafted to compel us to take action: buy, go, vote, love, or hate. The rich emotional content of these stories, proliferated by technology, has increasingly made us numb -like children playing violent video games- or extremely reactive -not being able to have a civil conversation or listen to what others say. Audiences need more incentive to spot “viral” stories because their attention span is shorter than ever.

On the other hand, digital content globalization has crossed cultural and national boundaries, forcing storytellers to submerge themselves in new cultural perspectives to adequate the message to a massive multicultural audience. We have traveled a new frontier in communication and found new ways for dominant societies to expand their influence even more on distant corners of the world. (Excerpt from pages 32/33)

6. How difficult was the writing and publishing process? What did you find most rewarding?

Writing is a very healing process for me, and I take it as a challenge for soul-searching. I started the book at the beginning of the pandemic, and it took me one more year after the pandemic was over to finish editing and translating the book into Spanish, which I also did. It was work but I enjoyed it. The hard part was finding good editors who would stick to the schedule and produce quality results. When you are self-publishing, you have to be aware of scams that are rampant in this new industry. I did not know that and paid for my naivety. It can become a costly experience if you are not extremely careful.

Notwithstanding, the most rewarding experience was the response from people I know and others who shared their reviews, the good reception from professional reviewers alike, and the encouragement to continue writing. I am in the process of writing my first novel. I didn’t think I had it in me to write fiction, and yet that’s what I’m tackling now. In the words of a dear friend, I am applying my advice from Speak Up! to my own writing!

7. What's next for you? Are there more books in the works?

As I said, I'm working on my first novel. It is the story of a reunion between two friends from childhood who had a fallout, not talking to each other for 20 years. The setting is the year 1999, the end of the century, but it takes back the stories to the military dictatorship era in Argentina in the 70s. I'm finding it hard to write because it brings back emotions and situations I thought I had healed, but I realize now that moving to another country disrupted my former life, putting it on hold. As I said in the beginning, it is a look at my past life, hoping to find closure.

I like to end with lighter questions.

8. Who is your hero?

HAHAHA! I don't belong to a generation who had heroes. We had leaders we wanted to emulate, in any case, learn from them, and follow in their steps. The leaders I admire the most have always to do with strong women, who fought for their rights and the rights of others, such as Gloria Steinem, the American women's rights advocate, Rigoberta Menchu, Peace Nobel Prize from Guatemala, and Tarana Burke, the founder of the #Metoo movement.

9. What do you like to do in your free time?

I love to watch movies, of course, because they are the inspiration for my stories and my writing, but also, I love to cook. I have a special diet for gluten intolerance, so I'm constantly trying new recipes for healthy but delicious eating. I also like crafting toys. During the pandemic, I crochet a collection of stuffed animals for my granddaughters!

10. Other than yours, what's your favorite book or books?

Favorite books have to do with the stage in your life you are going through, so lately, I've been searching for books about racism and discrimination of women's rights. I am re-reading some of Angela Davis's work. It has incredible validity after so many years because we have gone backward so many years. As for a non-fiction author, I think Isabel Allende is one of the best authors who represents my generation, who lived similar experiences in Chile, where she's from.

11. What's your ideal food?

My favorite food is eggs—very simple and so versatile at the same time. The egg is the one element in the kitchen you cannot replace. You can make it in hundreds of ways, and you always get incredible taste. It is indispensable in most recipes because it binds ingredients together. As a writer, I think of eggs as words. They are irreplaceable, and they bind our stories together.

[Liz-Monique els]

I really appreciate books like this!!

[Dustin Erikson]

This is kind of book our children should be reading very interesting

[Dustin Erikson]

Love this

[Kelly Munjoh]

Love theses

[aghil bardideh]

the story was really interesting

[NEERAJ KUMAR SINGH]

Good I like

[Nomfundo k]

we really need books like to inspire our people , I love it

[Carole Kendall]

Thank you for an interesting interview and good luck on your book of fiction. Using movies to illustrate concepts in your nonfiction book sounds like a great way to hold interest. I appreciate your comments on the difficulty of adjusting to America. I lived in Guadalajara, Mexico for three months when I was younger and experienced my own culture shock.

[Blessed Hope]

Nice title and your story as an immigrant can be very nice particularly you as an Argentine in the US. Now, there is a wave of nativism and antimigrant feeling all over the world particularly in Europe and the US. Immigrants just look for better opportunities. I hope people will learn they are just human beings.
Speak Up!!