Reading · From Somewhere with Anna Sale

I’m not sure how I first heard about Peter Santenello’s work. Likely, someone I know posted one of his videos about Appalachia. My algorithms tend to light up when there’s grabby West Virginia content. And I clicked, interested to see how this latest story about where I grew up was told by an outsider.

If you’re from somewhere where others usually write the script, you know how it goes. There are the quick establishing shots of familiar tropes. In southern WV, it’s coal cars on railroad tracks, homes off the road that have seen better days, empty storefronts. And Peter’s video showed some of this, but a few minutes in, I realized this is different. Peter wasn’t building a familiar argument from a few quick soundbites. He was visiting.

His videos remind me of the kind of human, on-the-ground reporting in American communities that I have always been a fan of. Like, the legendary radio show State of the Re:Union hosted by Al Letson. Or W. Kamau Bell’s United Shades of America. Or even the book that collected Charles Kuralt’s reporting from the road that sat beside my Grandpa’s recliner.

That’s how I feel when I watch Peter’s video. They grab me into a place I didn’t know I was all that curious about. For example, another episode I loved is about Humboldt County in California, which, yes, gets into weed, but it also tracks the different migrations of people into the area that have made for a wild and specific cultural mix. Plus, it ends in a musical number.

This week, I talk to Peter about his storytelling approach and his winding career path before he found success on YouTube. He didn’t come up through newsrooms or go to film school. He’s run a car detailing business around Tahoe, tried to break into tech startups, and traveled. It wasn’t until he was in his early 40s that he found an audience online, starting with videos he made in Ukraine. He met his wife there, and they moved back to the US during the pandemic, where he decided to bring his travel video approach to his own country.

You can watch all of Peter’s videos on his YouTube channel @PeterSantenello, and his new book is Your Fellow Americans: Dispatches from Across the Country We Call Home.

Also: for Death, Sex & Money Plus listeners, we have a conversation for young people who are overwhelmed and anxious about managing money. I talk to Beth Kobliner, author of the classic money book for young people, Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties, which just got a new update. Listen to our conversation: When it Comes to Money, Gen Z is More Screwed and More Savvy

We’ve been hearing listener responses and stories about our episode last week on romantic feelings in the therapy office. We shared one listener’s story about a romantic relationship with a therapist that started when she was 19, and how now in her 50s, she views the power imbalance, secrets, and violations of professional ethics.

Afterward, we heard back from one listener who shared about her marriage to her once-therapist, a process that involved professional disclosure and transparency:

I am writing to respond to the episode on erotic transference — I am a psychotherapist myself, and I’m married to someone who was formerly my therapist ….I suppose I’d like to offer an example of a circumstance when a treatment did end in a romantic relationship and it was ultimately positive, because these stories do exist and I think they’re rarely shared, perhaps for good reason.
I was in treatment with this therapist for 5 years, he in his 40s and me in my 30s. In the last year we began discussing my romantic feelings for him. We spent a few months considering the potential transference involved in these feelings. After some time he admitted his own feelings to me and we mutually agreed to end the therapy. We spent a good amount of time processing the ending of the treatment during which time he would not accept payment as it didn’t feel like therapy anymore to either of us.
Over the next few months he shared that he had consulted with several of his professional mentors over the years that we’d been working together to try and make sense of his own feelings for me. They considered all of the possible countertransference involved. I asked to meet with his consultants and see his notes about our work, wanting to understand as much as I possibly could about what was happening on his end. Everything I saw corroborated what he had told me, and confirmed that he had been having these feelings for a long time. He has confessed to me that he often questioned himself and whether he should have terminated the treatment earlier. We met together with his mentors and I asked them if they thought there was something inherently corrupt or exploitative about us being together someday. We received their blessings , which was very important to both of us because we wanted to keep ourselves open to scrutiny. We eventually began dating and moved in together , and got married and pregnant a year later. Having been in several long term relationships myself, I can say it’s the healthiest and most loving relationship I’ve been in by far….
I think what makes our story different is that there were and are no secrets. He called the licensing board himself and informed them of his decision, there was no action taken because I would’ve had to report the relationship. I never felt exploited, manipulated, or taken advantage of. We still talk openly about the complicated nature of our origins, nothing lives in the shadows.
I share this in part to challenge the notion that feelings in the therapeutic context are always transferential in nature. Sometimes they are just romantic and like many other romantic relationships, they begin in complex circumstances.
—Name Withheld

We’ve heard from parents, health care professionals, and current users — those who are still quite enthusastic but others who feel a dependency they wish they could shake. Share your stories about cannabis in your life by recording a voice memo and sending it to us at deathsexmoney@slate.com.

It was a big Billy Strings week over here. I listened to The New York Times interview with him on The Interview over last weekend, and it was one of those listens that left me feeling heart-filled and hopeful for the rest of the day. The clear-eyed and loving way Strings talks about growing up around addiction, and the close, relational way he learned to strum a guitar with his dad, made me feel even more awe at his virtuoso playing, which he shows off at the end of the episode. It got me scrolling back through pictures that showed up in my feed a few days before when Billy Strings popped into The Empty Glass, a legendary bar in my hometown, and played with local musicians and other artists who’d just played at a live recording of the public radio show Mountain Stage. What a guy! (This also counts as “more field trips” kind of content I like to see.)
Looking back at the State of the Re:Union archives reminded me of Lu Olkowski’s incredible reporting in this 2012 SOTR piece, one of the best radio stories I’ve ever heard. Listen to Pike County, Ohio: As Black as We Wish to Be.
I so loved the novel Empire Falls by Richard Russo when I read it years ago, and book critic Ron Charles has a nice review of Russo’s latest Under the Falls. I’m a sucker for stories of the complications of trying to go home again, and I was particularly touched by the coda at the end about Russo’s role in Charles’ own leap from English teacher to professional book critic.
At my daughters’ last riding lesson of the summer, their teacher told me about Monty Roberts, a horse trainer who championed collaboration and nonverbal communication over domination. He died late last month at 91. ‘“Respect and cooperation, he believed, would inevitably trump forced servitude,” wrote The New York Times in his obituary.
If you read this newsletter, you know I’m a consistent fan of The Writing Shed with Tommy Tomlinson. This week’s tender and honest essay about his two years on GLP-1’s felt especially special.

Until next week,

Anna

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