‘This American Life’ podcast features AC alumna’s traumatic letter
Posted Tuesday, September 03, 2024
Author: Mickey Alvarado
While listening to the podcast “This American Life” on his way to work a couple of weeks ago, Adrian College Spanish professor Nick Kaplan found himself captivated during a piece called “Letters! Actual Letters!” when the narrator in the episode titled, “Dear Alice,” surprised him by mentioning they had attended Adrian College.
The podcast, published August 16, is about snail-mail, letters that are sent through the postal service. There are multiple parts to the 59-minute podcast, which Kaplan suggests you hear out, but if time doesn’t allow the relevant part about Adrian College in “Dear Alice,” written by Nicole Piasecki and produced by Chris Benderev, begins around 11:45.
Piasecki graduated with cum laude honors from Adrian College in 1998 with a Bachelor of Arts in English-Writing and a minor in Spanish.
The Act One description of “Dear Alice” says, “Writing a letter decades after an event that shaped her life was the only way that Nicole Piasecki could make some sense of it.”
Piasecki reminisces about school life, her favorite teacher, Alice, and a traumatic shooting at Chelsea high school where that teacher’s husband shot and killed her father, the school superintendent.
She mentions being at Adrian College when she found out her favorite teacher died from cancer, on the anniversary of her father’s shooting.
“I know exactly where I was when I learned that you lost your battle with cancer,” Piasecki wrote to Alice. “I stood courtside in the main gymnasium at Adrian College. I wore my baggy, white shorts, a bulky knee brace, and jersey No. 25, covered with a bright gold warm-up top. My blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and it was wispy on top from my sweat. I was a sophomore at Adrian and had just finished playing an NCAA, Division III basketball game. My mom came to watch my game because it was the second anniversary of the day your husband killed my dad, and anniversaries held a weakening force for us. It seemed that we should be together.”
The episode is 18 minutes long.
“Her story was heartbreaking,” Kaplan said. “To know that she is a college professor today and teaches some of the same books she originally read with her teacher in high school shows the impact teachers have in their students’ lives. It must be so difficult to love what you know and know where it came from while continually being reminded about such a painful memory.”
To listen to the podcast produced in collaboration with WBEZ Chicago and delivered to stations by PRX The Public Radio Exchange, visit “This American Life.”
The podcast’s stories reach more than 3.5 million listeners each week, with two million downloading the weekly podcast and 1.6 million listening across 500-plus public radio stations.
A written version of this essay titled “Maybe We Can Make a Circle” first appeared in Hippocampus Magazine.
Piasecki’s bio says she’s a Denver-based creative nonfiction writer, educator, and editor. She is a senior instructor for the English Department at the University of Colorado Denver, and also works as a consulting editor for nonfiction at Copper Nickel. Her creative work has been featured in Mom Egg Review, Longreads, Hippocampus Magazine, Literary Mama, Gertrude Press, and the Brevity blog. She earned a M.A. in English at the University of Colorado Denver and MFA in creative writing at Colorado State University.
