Oct 2, 2018 8 min read

Jeanne Marie Laskas loves her garden. So much. It’s her source of pride, in fact. But this year, well … “It’s an off year!” she apologizes – but not in a woe-is-me kind of way. No. Instead, she’s mostly telling it like it is as she leads the way to her back patio, a shady space covered by an arbor of winding wisteria.

“If you were here last year … !” she says, taking in her beautiful tangle of a hillside.

We’re at Laskas’ home in Scenery Hill to talk about her new book, “To Obama.”

It tells the story of 44th President Barack Obama’s practice of reading 10 letters a day from his constituents. The book also profiles the citizens who penned some of those heartfelt missives – often in their moments of deepest anguish and despair, but also gratitude and pride.

Laskas is perhaps best known for “Concussion,” The New York Times’ best-selling novel-turned-movie starring Will Smith. Similar to “Concussion,” “To Obama” originated as a feature-length magazine article, not a book.

It started in late 2016, at a time when everyone was trying to score “the big Obama interview,” and writing lengthy retrospectives. Laskas was attempting to approach the final days of Obama’s presidency from a different angle. One, because “I don’t do that kind of story, and I was not interested in that type of story,” preferring to “focus in tight on individual people” and “write about characters.”

And two, once she was introduced to the mailroom staff in the Office of Presidential Correspondence – the people sorting, reading, managing and archiving the 10,000 letters and messages received each day – Laskas was hooked. “When I saw how that operation worked, I was like, ‘What?!'” she says, incredulous. “I was just dazzled by the people and their level of commitment. [They were] these unsung heroes.”

Published in The New York Times magazine on Inauguration Day 2017, the article captured Obama’s legacy in a never-before-seen way. It was one of the magazine’s most read and emailed stories of that year.

Laskas wants to make a point about that, though. “It never was intended – the story and the book after it – as a political story, at all. In fact, one of the things I liked about that mailroom is that it was an apolitical shop. It really was. In the White House, it was considered the most apolitical shop because it was about the letter writers. It was about connecting the voices, the unfiltered voices of America, of the nation, and bringing them to the president, because he wanted them.”

In the months following the election, Laskas returned to her original concept: “To meet the letter writers and figure out why they were doing this.”

Writing letters to the president, she means.

Back at her home on Sweetwater Farm, Laskas wove the equal parts heartbreaking and hopeful book together. (Full disclosure: There is a very high probability that you will cry, more than once, while reading it.)

Laskas resides there, with her husband, Alex, her daughters, Sasha and Anna, and her pets. Oh, her pets.

Currently skirting around her feet in all manners of cuteness are: Pug, (Butterball, officially); Scooter, short for Scooter Pie, a rescue dog from the Washington Area Humane Society, and Omar, rescue pit bull and resident “gentle soul.” Matt the cat (or was it his sister Millie?) also scoots past.

Dory, the lime-green, very loud, Conure parrot, is squawking inside. The fluffiest chickens you’ve ever seen are puttering around the front yard (they’re Silkies).

In and around the barn, she tallies four horses, two goats, one mule and a miniature donkey. Somewhere wandering the property is Luna, the livestock garden dog. Though the Great Pyrenees Maremma Sheepdog is technically retired, she still keeps watch over the farm. “We have no coyotes here because of that Luna,” Laskas muses.

Wondering how a Philadelphia suburbanite ended up on a horse farm in Washington County? In “‘Fifty Acres and a Poodle,’ you can read all about it,” she says, with a nod to her first of three memoirs.

A professor and founding director of The Center for Creativity at the University of Pittsburgh, Laskas has authored nine books and her byline has appeared in GQ, Esquire, The New Yorker and Allure magazine, to name a few.

Her character-driven stories run the gamut of the human experience, from the account of one man’s miraculous face transplant, to an in-the-locker-room look at the Cincinnati Ben-Gals cheerleaders – it’s an article that her University of Pittsburgh colleague Peter Trachtenberg calls “stunning. It really is about gender inequality on a deep level, but those two words never appear together [in the article].”

Trachtenberg, director of The Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh, considers Laskas’ interviewing style to be nothing short of brilliant. “She is a very keen listener, and you sense no judgment from her when she listens. She’s thinking very intently. She’s somebody whose intelligence is always on. The kind of deep receptivity she projects, I would compare it to Studs Terkel,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such works as “The Good War” and “Working.”

“She also brings an ethos of really rigorous journalism that also is literary journalism,” he says. “It’s not just about the daily story, but about stories that people will read 10 or 20 or 50 years from now.”

A while later, we’ve moved inside to sit on a cozy sectional in the living room. Sweet Omar is attempting to nose his way into the photographs, as Jeanne Marie chats about a few of her favorite things: Running her loop around the farm property, caring for her animals, as “you may have guessed,” and “weeding, weeding, weeding” her garden while listening to podcasts.

NPR’s narrative series, “S Town” is her “absolute favorite.” She continues, “To me, that’s the standard. I want to really do that kind of work. I really do.”

In fact, a podcast is what’s up next for Laskas, a series based on “To Obama,” and the interviews recorded with letter writers featured in the book.

“Writing the book – that was the best part of it. An audio producer traveled to interview a lot of these characters and would stick with them for like, 10 hours, and I would just listen to the audio. And weed. That’s why I had such a good garden last year! Weeding and listening to this audio. I would become engrossed in their stories.”

Boom. Lightbulb.

Researcher Rachel Wilkinson helped capture those countless hours of reporting, from which Laskas would craft the 3,000- to 5,000-word chapters. “I’m surely not the first person to say Jeanne Marie is an incredible listener. A listener maybe, above all else,” says Wilkinson. “She has this laser focus on seeing people and trying to suss out that sacred story.”

The pair met at the University of Pittsburgh, where Wilkinson was a “green grad student” and Laskas became a mentor. “Jeanne Marie is the person that instilled in me the beauty of long-form journalism. Everybody has a story if you are listening and present and empathetic.”

Like so much of her writing, “To Obama” sings with the author’s ability to truly tune in to her characters.

“I believe listening, like actually listening,” Laskas says with emphasis, “is transformative. For both parties. It gets at the core of this book, but I also really respond to it so much because it gets at the core of my work. It’s like being heard. It’s so simple, but it’s so rare,” she says.

While Laskas says she would never personally write a letter to the president, her answer to one of my final questions reveals the parallels between her lifelong passion for writing and her cherished letter writers, whom she speaks about with great affection.

I prompt her: “Writing is …?”

“Writing is …” she pauses, then lets out an enormous, giggle-inducing groan.

“I went two places immediately. Hell was the first thing,” she laughs. “And the second was, a privilege. I do believe both. It is a privilege to be able to say what it is you need to say and get it out. It’s a privilege. It’s sustaining. You get to communicate. You get to untangle what’s going on in your mind and figure it out. A lot of untangling. Writing is untangling.”

Some might even say it’s like weeding a garden.