Sally “Alex” Poppe has worked in conflict zones like Iraq, the West Bank, and Ukraine. In this captivating interview, she shares her life journey from a burnt-out actress and marketing professional to a highly impactful career in international aid. With grace and strength, she recounts the raw, emotional, and real stories from her new memoir, ‘Breakfast Wine.’
Full Interview on Spotify | YouTube
Pre-order ‘Breakfast Wine’ – https://bookshop.org/p/books/breakfast-wine-alex-poppe/22155518?ean=9781627205948
I’m so excited about your memoir, ‘Breakfast Wine,’ please let me know when and where I can buy it.
This is my ARC. That’s an advanced review copy for people who may not speak the lingo of the publishing world. It’s a really exciting time for authors to see the physical manifestation of their book and send it out to get reviews. The book comes out on June 10th on Apprentice House Press. You can find it on bookshop.org and you can also pre-order it on Amazon. You can also pre-order it from a local indie bookstore, which would be my preference, or bookshop.org to keep bookstores alive. It’s also important to pre-order, it helps writers’ books come to the top of the ranking so more people can find it.
Where does the title ‘Breakfast Wine’ come from?
For friends and people who are fans of True Crime, there’s a great podcast called ‘My Favorite Murder.” That’s a True Crime comedy podcast from Karen Kilgareff and Georgia Hardstark. Breakfast Wine was a term they coined in episode 75 and to me it brings to mind Dionysus and a little bit of Greek mythology. There was a fair amount of drinking when we lived in Iraq and Breakfast Wine was punchy and fun.
The summary of your book is full of drastic twists and turns about your personal experiences and at the end, you talk about finding a way home. What is home for you?
When my father passed, it was a reason to come back- his passing was real untethering. This question comes up many times in the memoir, especially through the lens of my adult students who had lived through the United States invasion of Iraq and then ISIS destroying their homes in the south. So it’s this question of, what ties you to a place? Is home just a construct to hold onto or is it a construct to let go of?
Where was your father from?
He was a Berliner and when he was around five years old, World War II was raging and my grandmother, like many German women did, boarded him outside the city. He was five years old living among strangers without his parents, which is already difficult. He remembers running through this field at the farm, trying to get to the farmhouse while the Allied forces were strafing the field. When he came to the United States in 1947, Germans weren’t allowed to have foreign currency. My grandmother had these gold rim plates and a camera and my dad bought some currency on the black market and folded it into where the film would be on the camera and they came over on I believe the SS Harlan.
They sold that money to live on and my dad had to go to night school to learn English and put himself through Northwestern. He was the epitome of American self-reliance and that ‘pick yourself up by the bootstrap’ story that we all learn in social studies. I personally don’t think it’s as accessible today. Looking back as the memoir has forced me to, there is a logical sense to it given his background, story, and deep commitment to social justice issues. He wasn’t particularly religious, but the kind of person who believed in ethics and fairness. My father taught me that conducting yourself every day when no one was looking mattered. It doesn’t matter if you’re cleaning the floor, or running a company, it is a privilege to have a job.
Can you talk about the acclaimed journalist who presented the teaching opportunity to you?
It’s Jere van Dyk, he’s written many, many things. I love Jerry, I met him at a book signing for his book ‘Captive.’ He had been kidnapped by the Taliban and held for 45 days and written a book about it when I met him at a reading. I had him sign my book, and I asked him a couple of questions which led to becoming friends. He became like a mentor to me, and he was very instrumental in encouraging me to go to Northern Iraq for my first teaching assignment there. He is my favorite person to have a meal with, because the stories are incredible.
He encouraged me to keep writing, and he encouraged me to go to Northern Iraq which turned out to be the best decision I have ever made. I joke in the memoir that it was equal parts curiosity and desperation, because I was at a dead-end job, I wasn’t making enough money to even have health insurance so I was back waiting tables at an unglamorous restaurant- I was so lost and so I went and it changed everything.
You talk about experiences like dining with a hitman to humanitarian aid drops, how did those experiences change, or not change you?
I am sitting with a government minister on Christian affairs and his brother with the rumored hit man and we’re drinking tequila and they’re smoking a shisha pipe. The alleged hit man started talking about how he is tired of sleeping with his wife who looks exactly like Angelina Jolie. It was just so typical to me, this idea that no matter how beautiful or young your partner is, there’s going to be some guy saying he is tired of being with her. That seems universal culture to culture, so that didn’t change me at all.
In terms of things that changed me, we had these two aid drops that didn’t go well. A lot of things go wrong because, despite our best intentions, we didn’t do it very well. We were trying to ascertain how many people were living in these buildings so that we could report this data to the agencies for where to deploy resources. We knocked on this door and were welcomed by these young Syrian Kurdish guys who made us tea. They didn’t want to give us too much information, I don’t know if they came in legally or illegally, we were just there to tell them where they could get services and wanted to see how many people were in each unit. I remember being struck by their generosity when they had so little. In my mind, I think this is a normal reaction when you are confronted with a situation you haven’t seen before and measure it to what you know. I start imagining they were loosely related, probably from the same village, did their mom pack them food to go, and I catch myself romanticizing it. I have no idea what their lived reality is, because of my birth gifts, but their generosity was unforgettable.
How do you intend for your memoir to have an impact?
My hope is that if you’re a middle-aged person and you’re thinking about shaking up your life, this might encourage you to do it. I think it’s important in our storytelling that we see ourselves or people who look like us so that we think we can do it too. I want people to know that if they want to change their lives in a profound way, it’s doable and you’re probably going to be okay. I also want people who might not have a lot of empathy for refugees to maybe read the book and have a perspective shift on what drives people to leave. It’s not easy, obviously, to leave everything you know, your community, your language, education, and everything you’ve ever spent your life trying to build. Whatever the factor, whether it’s exceptional poverty or violent conflict, it’s made it so bad to be there that you’re willing to risk your life to try to be somewhere safe.
There’s a lot of gender-based violence throughout the book, it’s one of the themes. I think we need reeducation and to realize that we don’t need solitary confinement and terrible treatment to punish people further when restriction of freedom is a punishment alone. We should be working to rehabilitate them, give them skills, and support them when they’re out so they don’t reoffend. There are a lot of great lessons to be learned, but I would love to shift some perspectives on prison sentences, on refugee camps, and realize that anytime you see people in temporary settlements or temporary living condition, its doesn’t mean it’s a refugee camp with tons of access to resources. I’d love for the book to have people question what they assume they know. It’d be lovely if we could have discourse, it’d be even greater if we could pester our political leaders to change. Moreso to motivate ourselves to volunteer or get involved, educate ourselves, or have a discussion with someone who thinks completely differently than we do to reduce polarization and increase social cohesion at a time when this country is really divided.
