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It is hard to find good memoir written by and about people who are not famous. And yet, these are some of the best memoirs to read. They are so much more relatable than celebrity memoirs. This is what inspired me to create Definitely Not Famous, a podcast where I interview memoirists about their stories. My goal with this podcast is to elevate the stories of everyday people who truly are More Extra than Ordinary.
Imagine not being able to read. Every time you see a sign on the road, you don't know what it says. Every time you see a label on a can of food, you don't know what it means. Imagine how hard it would be to do your grocery shopping? This is what life was like for Arne Stewart, a person who survived as an adult who could not read or write.
Rebecca Hogue:Arne Stewart and Janet Lee are the more extra than ordinary forces behind the book, Always Ask for Help.
Rebecca Hogue:Welcome to Definitely Not Famous. I'm Rebecca Hogue, your show host. In this podcast, I seek out memoir authors who are not celebrities, at least not yet, and interview them about their books. I'm looking for stories that are more extra than ordinary.
Rebecca Hogue:I met Janet Leigh through my first podcast, Demystifying Instructional Design. When I asked her how she came to be an instructional designer, she spoke of her time as a teacher of high school students who were struggling with literacy. This led to her telling me about the story of how she met Arnie Stewart and when she initially committed to writing his book.
Janet Lee:And one day, there was a presenter who came to the school, and we all crowded into the library. And this guy, he was 59 or 60 years old, and he was shaking, and he looked scared.
Janet Lee:I thought, oh gosh. This guy's gonna be a terrible speaker.
Janet Lee:And I looked at my students. I gave him that teacher a look. Don't you dare do anything wrong. So he starts talking, and he said, my name is Arne Stewart.
Arnie Stewart:I grew up in a little mining town in Cobalt, Ontario. I spent two years in grade one, two years in grade two, two years in grade three, two years in grade four, and one hour in grade five. I don't know what happened in school. I knew I was always hungry and always ashamed and afraid to ask for help. I just couldn't seem to get the ABCs, and I really don't understand to this day why not.
Janet Lee:So he proceeded to tell my students the story of his life and how he lived in a parked car for a while. He ate food out of a garbage can to survive. He but his trick was he always bluffed his way through. So instead of reading the signs to go anywhere, he would just get in behind the bus and follow the bus wherever he was going. To get his driver's license, he took it seven times.
Janet Lee:And every time, he would mark a different box until he finally passed. He was like the Forrest Gump of Literacy, and my students were totally enraptured by him. A lot of them cried. And one boy at the end, he came up to me and he said, miss, if you look in the parking lot, see that car? I said, yeah.
Janet Lee:He said, well, my family lives in that car. I live in the car in the parking lot, and I'm asking for help. Can you help me? And I'm asking because of Arnie. That day, I went and I found Arnie before he left, and I said, you don't know me, but my name's Janet Lee, and I wanna write your book.
Janet Lee:I wanna help you speak to more kids. So that's what we did. We got together, and we ended up traveling around. We spoke to 72 audiences about always asking for help and how important literacy is.
Rebecca Hogue:When Janet first met Arnie, he was doing talks with the Literacy Coalition. He was volunteering his time talking to students to help them understand just how difficult life is when you cannot read. Arnie was traveling from Niagara Falls to school gyms around Barrie, Ontario to speak about life without literacy. As someone who could not read, he would follow the bus on the highway to figure out which exit he needed to get off at. He would drive around town street by street until he found the school that
Janet Lee:he was supposed to speak at. Janet shared just how more extra than ordinary Arnie truly was. The literacy coalition found him places to speak. So they found him a place where he could speak in Barrie, Ontario. And they would say, here's the address.
Janet Lee:Here's kinda where it is, and you gotta be there on this date. The literacy coalition thought he could read. He couldn't. He could. He was bluffing them too.
Janet Lee:And no matter what they tried, he was still, like, kind of lying to them. And they thought if I could give you an address, you'll be able to get there. Well, he couldn't. So what Arnie would do is he would get in his car the day before in Niagara Falls, and rain or shine, snow or sleet, he would get on the 400 knowing where kind of Barry was, and he would drive there the night before, go round and round in circles. And if you know where this school is, it was in Innisfil, so it's not anywhere even near Barry.
Janet Lee:It's off by the by the lake. Anyway, he would go round and round and round and round until he would find the school, and then he would sleep in the parking lot overnight because he was afraid he would get lost and would be late, and he didn't wanna be late. He would sleep in the parking lot. And in the morning, he would oftentimes be frozen inside his car because you know what it's like. It was just snow and sleet, and then the doors would be shut.
Janet Lee:He'd have to jam his shoulder against the door and get out of the car and realize his face was full of whiskers because he'd slept there. He had a 09:00 shadow. He slept there overnight. So he would go to the lake and hopefully, sometimes it didn't work, but hopefully be able to break the ice and shave in the water and then go in and speak. That's why he kinda looked like he did the first time I saw him because he had actually slept in his car.
Janet Lee:Now that's no reflection on the literacy coalition that sent him. They had no idea he was going through this, or maybe they would have arranged a hotel for him. They had no idea that he was taking time off work.
Rebecca Hogue:About a year and a half after Janet first met Arnie, she was no longer a classroom teacher. She worked for the school board as a literacy consultant. When she was tasked with training teachers, she returned to her promise to Arnie and designed a comprehensive plan to bring his story into classrooms. Here's how she told it.
Janet Lee:When I met Arnie, I was in a classroom. And by the time I circled back to my promise, it was probably about a year and a half. So I had left the classroom and had been promoted to consultant at the board office. And one of my tasks was to train teachers to recognize the students that needed help. And when I was tasked with that, I thought, I know exactly what to do.
Janet Lee:I gotta get back in touch with Arnie and see if I can enlist him to go with me into schools. And what I'll do I don't know where it just came to me in the middle of the night. I thought, I know. I'll do, like, a before, during, and after thing with him. So I'll think about, like, what did I wish I knew about Arnie when he came to the school?
Janet Lee:I wish I had had a conversation with my students. I wish that we had done a little research about where he grew up or looked at a picture of him and made a prediction about what he might be coming to talk about. So that's what I did. I put together this little package that was like, okay. So this is the picture of this man, and he's gonna speak to us.
Janet Lee:What do you think he's gonna speak about? And when you looked at the picture, you could see he was in the picture I would send was him in a library. So you could see books, and the students would always say, oh, he's a professor. And they'd say, actually, no. He's an adult with low literacy.
Janet Lee:Let's think about that. What kind of what kind of problems do you think he might have had in life? And if he couldn't read, you know, tomorrow, I want you to think about looking around your life. And if you can't read something, how that would affect you. And so they would have questions coming into his presentation.
Janet Lee:And I love that generating questions piece, and that's the part I knew how to do, my my literacy background. Right? So the students would come, and they'd have their questions with them, and then they would be totally riveted and wanting to hear him tell his story because the teachers would prepare them. They would say, when he gets here, I want you to look at your questions and as you know, see if he answers your question.
Rebecca Hogue:Unable to read and write, Arnie had his stories memorized. However, sometimes during the presentations, he would lose his place. Although Arnie was a great speaker, his talks were sometimes confusing. Arnie wasn't able to bring notes to stay on track. One day, he realized that he could ask Janet for help, allowing him to get back on track with his talk, but also modeling the behavior they were hoping to teach the kids.
Janet Lee:He had this canned speech. He had these stories memorized. He knew what would get the students to laugh or smile, and he naturally knew how to tell a story that had a a a middle, and an end. But he never had note cards. So what I did, I have all of the titles of his stories in a logical order on a piece of paper in front of me.
Janet Lee:Every time he told one of those stories, I would put a mark by that story. And he would tell the next story, and I'd put a mark by that story. He'd get to, like, the fourth or fifth story, and he would get confused, and he would stop. Before we were together, he would just tell something, whatever else came to mind. And his stories be were very confusing before we met.
Janet Lee:But when we were together, he had this idea. He said, when I get confused, I'm going to turn to you, and I'm gonna model asking for help. I was like, what? He said, yeah. I'm gonna do this.
Janet Lee:I'm gonna turn to you, and I'm gonna say, Janet, I don't know. I'm confused. What should I what what story should I tell next? And all I had to do was look down at where we were in the list and go, oh, Arnie, tell us how you got your driver's license. He'd go, oh, I had to take that test seven times.
Janet Lee:You know there's 72 questions on and then he would just launch into that story. You'd be back on track.
Rebecca Hogue:In addition to modeling asking for help, one of the innovations from their talk was the Arnie card, a way for the kids to use Arnie to ask for help. I didn't quite understand the true power of the Arnie card until Janet explained it to me.
Janet Lee:Well, you know,
Janet Lee:that's the powerfulness of Arnie's story, that he what astounded us was that he could stand up and tell everybody his deepest secrets. He could stand there and say, I don't care if you think I'm stupid. Oh, but he'd used the word stupid. I was like, ugh. Yeah.
Janet Lee:You know, I don't care if you're gonna laugh at me. I don't care anymore because I'm gonna tell my story, and I'm somebody too. He's we all put our pants on one leg at a time wherein we all just want our our self esteem, and and it's okay to talk about the real the reality. I really fear for people with low literacy right now. I people who are struggling and who are flying under the radar now, they're just it's just not getting any better for people.
Janet Lee:It's not okay, and and it's not okay to ask for help. And when you're so terrified, and Arnie had psoriasis all over his arms and legs because he was afraid to tell his secret, he was afraid he would be found out. And as soon as he asked for help, his skin cleared up. Like, just amazing. And and when people are in having a fear response, they lose their voice.
Janet Lee:And that is what we're trying to give back to people, their voice. And that's what the Arnie card is about. When you put this on in front of somebody else with your name on it, it means I need help, and I can't ask for it. I'm gonna let Arnie do it. And, you know, it works in schools.
Janet Lee:It but it also works in banks. It works in the real estate office. It works all over my little town here. There's Arnie cards in the windows of the businesses that have talked to me and know about people with low literacy. And if you know what that is, you know when you go in there, those people will understand.
Janet Lee:They're trained to help you. So instead of giving you a form, they will come around the desk and will help you fill it out. They'll ask you the questions. They'll sit with you. If if they don't just tell you to fill it out on the kiosk, they'll do it for you.
Janet Lee:Mhmm. It's it's not enabling. It's supporting. You know? And this is for the the helpers as much as it's for the people who need the help.
Janet Lee:And if you don't know what support somebody needs, you can always ask ask them, how can I support you? Talk to me about this. Unpack this for me. You know? What are your questions?
Janet Lee:You know, I'm assuming this, but you talk to me. You know? And it's just it's just about tone of voice, really.
Rebecca Hogue:Janet is a force for literacy, but she's also a strong advocate for those with low literacy. I was super curious how she supported Arnie in writing the book. After a long day of talks at various schools, if they had energy left, they would turn towards writing. With the audio recorder in hand, Janet had Arnie tell the stories of his life. She used simple questions to bring out sight, sound, and feel, and helped coach him into sharing the details needed for the book.
Janet Lee:Arnie Central, my office. It was a room totally dedicated to his story and his world. I had a tiny white had a white MacBook. I did not have a good microphone.
Janet Lee:I had a little camera, and I had a recorder, like a voice recorder, which turned out to be horrible. Then I the audio is terrible from it, but the MacBook is great. The only problem was there was this fan that would turn on and off, so I had to produce the audiobook. And every time he would open his mouth, he had his false teeth would make a noise. So I had to edit out every throughout the whole thing.
Janet Lee:So it was one second cut, delete, join it. There was no, like, ripple delete at that moment. So the audiobook is kind of a piece of art in itself, and and how I learned to be good at editing was listening to his story and pulling out the the noises that were in the background, but also he would say I remember a lot. I would just kind of listen for the flow of his story and take out any I remembers that were too many. But that room, it had a place for him to sit very comfortably.
Janet Lee:It had his banner hanging, had a lot of pictures of us and of his family around so that he could feel supported and safe while doing you know, while talking about his story. But when it came to actually describing where he lived, so he grew up in Cobalt, Ontario in a bit of a shack. It was it's gone now, just so you know. Like, there's nothing there anymore. That's how flimsy this place was.
Janet Lee:I said to him, well, what did it look like? He said, oh. And you can hear in the book, he says, well, it was a box. It had a bottom and a top, and it was a box. And I would have to pull that out of him and say, okay.
Janet Lee:But what was it like? Where did you sleep? And he'd say, okay. Well, there were steps, and then you turn in. There was one bed, and we all slept in that one bed.
Janet Lee:And then I'd say, okay, Arnie. What did it feel like? He says, well, I would look up, and I should have become a star teller at night because I could see through the the roof at the stars. And in the wintertime, the icicles would form, and they would come down, and they would be looking at you. And I thought, that's brilliant.
Janet Lee:And part of his writing like, I never tried to interject too much because it was the genuineness of how he described things that got me. So I would encourage him, and I kinda learned to keep my mouth shut. That's why a lot of times, you never hear me. You've there's very only very few moments where we talk together, but I try and keep my mouth shut. Because to me, all along, this was his book, and I didn't wanna interject.
Janet Lee:I didn't want to ask. Because when I did say, what does the school look like? He would say or what does your house look like? He'd say it's a box. And okay.
Janet Lee:But that's really not his way of describing it. I had to get to the point where, like, tell me more about that. You know? And then he would just he would do it, but you'd have to give him some prompts to get there.
Rebecca Hogue:The title of the book is Always Ask for Help. This had me wondering about a time when Janet needed to ask for help. She was an English teacher and had never written a book. Having started writing, she reached out to a writer's group for feedback. Unfortunately, that didn't go so well.
Rebecca Hogue:Fortunately for us, she found a great editor that was able to give feedback in a way that worked well for her. Asking for help is something that did not come naturally for
Janet Lee:me, And I struggled for a long, long time. I asked for help from my colleagues. I wanted them to kind of read over it. But at the same time, when you write a sort of memoir and you're including your own story in it, it's embarrassing. It was this journey I had to take of allowing people to know about me, allowing them to know that I struggled too, and I'm not perfect, and I don't know all the answers, and it's very apparent in this book.
Janet Lee:So asking for help for editing was really hard for me. It wasn't until I met somebody named Francesca Donlin, who the minute I met her, I trusted her. And she was a little far removed from my project, but I knew that she had experience editing books. And I said to her, alright. I'm gonna give you some money, and I want you to take this and tell me what's important about it.
Janet Lee:And then come back and talk with me. And we we did meetings. We had a collaborative document going. She would she would cut some things out. She would suggest I, you know, fill in certain pieces.
Janet Lee:And asking her for help and then having her come back in a way that didn't hurt me, didn't shut me down. You know? It was really important, and it was rare. I went to a writer's group and asked them for help, and they got into a huge discussion about whether or not I should include a certain part of this one piece of the story, and it made me cry. And I cried in public.
Janet Lee:I actually halfway through their conversation about my work, I got up and went to the washroom, and I cried. And I came back, and they were still tearing it apart. And it was really it was jarring, and it was very brutal what they did. And they still apologize today. Like, I've had people come up and say, hey.
Janet Lee:Sorry about what we did to your work because it shut me down. I mean, it was years before I could pick it up again, and that's what's taken so long. I mean, I say it's twenty two year journey. Part of that journey is me overcoming my self esteem. And when you ask for help, it's the way other people respond that will either make or break you, which is why I say if you pick something, make sure you're passionate about it.
Janet Lee:Because those moments where you ask for help and they shut you down or they turn you away and they tell you no, those moments will will just kill it. I'm at the point where I I can ask for help, but it's still scary. And I hope that's part of this project that people ask for help, but those of us who can help other people do so in such a way that it maintains the integrity of the asker.
Rebecca Hogue:Having written and published the book, Janet felt the need to continue to find new ways to tell Arnie's story. The idea of writing a book about someone with low literacy didn't sit right with Janet. The book would reach people with high literacy, but it wouldn't reach people with low literacy. With the book finished, Janet took the next big step and started working on telling Arnie's story through film. My promise was just to tell his story,
Janet Lee:that it wouldn't die. And that's my that's where I'm going with this project. I I'm fulfilling the promise. I I feel like the book is there, and that's one way to fulfill the promise. But the other way is, like, if I'm worth anything, if I learned anything, I know that a book is not the medium that gets to people like Arnie.
Janet Lee:If I learned anything, it's that my promise was not the smartest promise. If you think about it, a literacy project. Let me write a book. It's great. And for those of us who are literate, we can read it.
Janet Lee:There are some of us who like to listen. So if you wanna listen to it, the beauty is you can hear Arnie because I recorded him. It's him. It's not somebody else. It's actually there are a couple family members who who filled in a few places that were too that the the quality was eroded too much to to keep, but most of the audiobook is actually Arnie's voice.
Janet Lee:Yay. And some kids, that sort of thing. But what I know gets across, I know that movies, I know visual representations of this really matter. And but but I'm running into some issues because the stories of our the story Arnie told of growing up in Cobalt, of his box, of a house, of a cold, of sleeping in his car the night before he came in to speak at my school, those are lost. How do we represent those?
Janet Lee:Well, in a documentary, you can do a recreation, and that's fine. But if you've ever seen a recreation, I know that there's that stop in your head that goes like, oh, okay. Yeah. This isn't really Arnie. I don't know if you ever think that.
Janet Lee:But if you it's it's very subtle. But when you watch a recreation in a doc, you can tell it's not the real footage, and it interrupts your understanding of it. So we wanted to do a different way of telling those stories, and I got this idea. The students gave us letters, and in the letters, many of those kids drew drew what they thought Ernie looked like when he was little. And they drew these great representations of him and his car and clouds, the sun, rainbows, flowers.
Janet Lee:And I thought, well, what if we animate the actual students' art? And I have it still. I'm still in Arnie Central right now sitting in the office full of all the archives. So I went back through all of the letters, and I scanned them in very high definition, and now we're bringing those actual pictures to life. And it's layer it's layered.
Janet Lee:And that's how I feel, you know, this is the perfect time for this project. Because had I completed it back then when I was just recording him on my little MacBook, I would've needed a whole different set of production. I may have done recreations, but because it's been so long, we are at a time where we there's no problem layering different animations for less money because of the the programs we have and the know how that we have these days. And it get across this idea that, you know, Arnie's stories are real and hard hitting and sad. But with the the aid of the children's illustrations, they become genuine.
Janet Lee:And through those kids' eyes, it's it's touching on a whole different level. Like, you're just blown away that he told these stories to the children, and the children are telling the stories to you through their art. And to me, it's just poetry. It's so beautiful. I'm so glad it's taken so long because this is woah.
Janet Lee:You know, on my vision board, I've taken everything off of it, and there's one Post it note on there right now, and it says, make an outright masterpiece. And that's my whole thing. That's what I wanna do. This is a masterpiece of of all the people that have come on board and helped me and helped us tell his story, his family, organizations of film people, and all and, you know, people who wanna give us their money to help, but people who also lend their support and their expertise. You know, everybody believing in this is gonna make it a masterpiece.
Janet Lee:This thing is gonna get across the promise. You know, my original promise was about a medium, a book, But now it's gonna be something that will reach the people that need it most. And that's what Arnie's whole mission in life was, to help people, to help one person. And and I think that this is gonna do it.
Rebecca Hogue:In the making of the film, I was curious. The audiobook is four hours long, so there is no way that everything in the book would make it into the film. I wanted to know about something about the book that's likely not to make it into the film.
Janet Lee:On page 100 of the book, it says, congratulations. You made it to page 100. And there's a bunch of teachers, like stars and gold stars down, and it's Arne because he said when I got to page 100 of Huckleberry Finn, I broke down and cried because never in my life did I thought think I could read to page 100 and that only smart people could read that far. One of the reasons why I had to publish it the way I did was because I wanted page 100 to be special, and publishing didn't understand that and wouldn't do that for me.
Rebecca Hogue:This has been a passion project for Janet for more than twenty two years. She's finally succeeded in publishing the book. I asked Janet about what advice she would give to aspiring memoir writers.
Janet Lee:Allow people to help you. And if they say they will and then they don't, allow them to go. Because it's okay. You will attract the people that will support you in this journey. And if they can't, you need to be able to cut them pretty sooner.
Janet Lee:And and, also, if there's something you wanna write about, it's that thing that keeps you up at night that you should write about. It's and it's that moment, the pivotal when you go, alright. This is something that means this is my reason. This this. And because that reason, the passion for that topic you choose will get you through the really hard times because there will be hard times.
Janet Lee:And I said just recently, this is a marathon. It's not a sprint. You have to be able to keep going no matter what. And, you know, sometimes you do have to put it down. And there were moments where I was about to throw stuff away.
Janet Lee:I got was I was like, you know what? This is never gonna happen. Nobody cares. Nobody I'm throwing this out, but don't don't throw it out. You need a break.
Janet Lee:That's part of the journey too. Like, if you can put it down and you feel like, well, I quit that. I'll never do that. Well, that's not necessarily true. Maybe it's the timing, that you need.
Janet Lee:You just need a minute. But pick something that you're super passionate about, and that'll get you through the hard times with this. And you know what? Like, have the audacity to tell the story. You don't know who needs it.
Janet Lee:This could be the reason somebody picks their life up again and keeps going. It's awesome. You can't can't pretend to know why you're doing what you're doing. You just have to you just have to tell the story. Janet has set up the website, alwaysaskforhelp.com.
Janet Lee:On this site, you can see the latest information about the project. You can also purchase the book directly from Janet. All of the proceeds from the book go towards our project. And we also are fiscally sponsored by a company called From the Heart Productions. And there's a link on our website where you can click and go and donate directly to our project.
Janet Lee:What we're needing right now is, we need funding to finish production. So we have this animation team who are on board, and there are students involved who are getting internships. But there are also leaders who are award winners, and they're pretty much doing that out of the goodness of their hearts right now. So if we can raise some funds, it would be fantastic to be able to pay the leadership, the people who are pulling these students together and getting exemplary work from them and training them at the same time. Once the animations are complete, we'll move into postproduction, and our editor is the person who we will need to fund to finish and to cross the finish line with this project.
Janet Lee:So the link, like I said, is on alwaysaskforhelp.com.
Rebecca Hogue:I want to thank Janet for being my first guest on Definitely Not Famous, More Extra Than Ordinary. I'm sure you'll agree that both Janet and Arnie are more extra than ordinary. The easiest way to support this podcast and the creation of the Arnie documentary is to purchase the book using the affiliate links in the show notes. Show notes are published on definitelynotfamous.com. Thanks for listening to Definitely Not Famous.
Rebecca Hogue:This podcast is brought to you by Rebecca Hogue, the host and the producer for the show. To support the show, please consider purchasing the books using the affiliate links in the show notes. Alternatively, you can support the show using Patreon or PayPal links available on the show notes website, definitelynotfamous.com. I'm looking for more authors to talk to. If you have read a great memoir and want me to interview the author, please complete the listeners form on the website.
Rebecca Hogue:If you're an author and you'd like to be a guest on this podcast, please complete the author guest form on the website.