Be a Spark: Sparking Civility & Storytelling with Alexandra Hudson
Overview of this Episode
In this episode of the Trust Your Voice podcast, host Sylvie Légère sat down with Alexandra Hudson, Founder of Civic Renaissance, to inspire you to spark civility and interest in understanding the human condition through stories.
In this conversation, Sylvie and Alexandra discuss:
Deepening people’s understanding of the human condition through ancient stories.
Defining civility and the best way to practice it.
Understanding suffering, love, hate, vengeance, competition, joy through stories.
What stories are teaching us.
Connect with Alexandra:
Website: https://alexandraohudson.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexiohudson
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexiskye09/
Alexandra published a book about the difference between politeness—a superficial appearance of good manners—and true civility, you can get your copy here The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal the Society and Ourselves. And enjoy her new series, Storytelling and the Human Condition, for FREE—and get a month subscription to Wondrium—by joining nearly fifty thousand other readers of Civic Renaissance!
We hope you enjoy the episode! Tell us what you think by leaving a review on Apple podcasts. Stay tuned for more episodes and be sure to subscribe to the Trust Your Voice podcast on your favorite podcast player.
Episode Transcript
Sylvie Legere 0:02
Welcome to the Trust Your Voice podcast. My name is Sylvie Legere. And as a civically engaged entrepreneur, the co founder of the policy circle and a mom, I've noticed that too often we underestimate our leadership potential, and we forget that we can be a catalyst. I believe that no matter where you are in life is meaningful conversations, like the one we will have today that ignite new ways to think about our purpose, you can be a spark for others, you just need to trust your voice, even if it's a little shaky. So let's start the show.
Sylvie Legere 0:31
Hi, this is Sylvie. Today, I am sparking a conversation with Alexandra Hudson, who is a writer, a popular speaker, and she's the founder of Civic Renaissance, which is a publication and a full intellectual community that's dedicated to beauty, goodness and truth. She was named a 2020 Nova journalism fellow. And she is the author of a soon to be released book called The Soul of Civility, timeless principles to heal the society and ourselves, and also an online course that is just coming out and we will be diving into what it is. So the reason why our conversation I think is relevant today is that I hear so many complaints about the lack of civility in our society. And also, I feel that there is all around us really a relentless quest for happiness for perfection. And I think these two areas really make it seem that we have forgotten what the human experience is about. It's not all perfect. So I hope that the conversation will inspire you to spark civility around you, and spark your interest in understanding the human condition through stories across continents and time. So like, see, welcome to the show.
Alexandra Hudson 1:46
Thank you so much for having me. And if I may, for a second, just affirm you. And thank you for having this theme of spark in your community as spark in your world. That's such an exceptional notion. And it's actually one that central to my book on civility, but like also my life's work, it's central to my theory of social change, which it sounds like we share that, you know, we can't change the world. But we can change ourselves. We can't make other people and our public leaders and foreign, you know, leaders more democratic or humane and kind and gentle or more civil. But we can change how we engage in the world around us. And by reclaiming our sphere of influence, and elevating how we treat our family, our neighbors, and who we are in our community, we can make a powerful change in the world around us. So that relocating our locus of control, reclaiming our sphere of influence, that's central to my theory, social change central to my book on civility, and also reclaiming the agency we have over the stories we tell about ourselves and the world around us that's part of that agency to.
Sylvie Legere 2:49
Thank you so much and right because we can only model right the behavior that we want to see around us. So I'm excited for a conversation because this is you're really going back to ancient times and trying to bring the lessons of the past, to the present. And I feel like this is really lacking today. So I really share your passion for social change. Let's start first by you know, love to dig a little bit more about your story. And how a young person like you became so passionate about deepening people's understanding of the human condition through ancient stories, really, men and women have wisdom from the past, and it also contemporaries.
Alexandra Hudson 3:30
I would say my parents are my primary, you know, formative intellectual influences. I was raised in a home that was intellectually omnivorous, there was nothing that was off the table, my parents just love to learn and love to expose us to as many different educational subject matters and content. So the you and I share a love of the classics of kind of the Greco Roman world and the great books in general. I my parents certainly loved that. But they also love learning from other cultures as well, and other you know, disciplines and traditions. And in terms of how this relates to my course really quickly. So my series is called storytelling and the human condition. And it's coming out in February, my father, always for birthdays for Christmas, sometimes for different is no reason at all, would gift me with teaching company content, a series, of course, Greek mythology, American history, astrophysics, whatever it was, and that was a huge part of my educational experience. So it was an honor when the teaching Company The Great Courses reached out to me about producing a series and creating a series for them, because I was raised on their content and they were just a big part of grounding me in the great conversation and the human condition in asking big questions and ideas and being intellectually diverse both in my home but also that was a kind of that they were central to my education as well. I kind of just felt like it was coming full circle to be able to do that. So that was like a big part of a big intellectual influence. My mother also teaches you. She's called the manners lady. And one funny tidbit I discovered over the course of writing my book, The soul of civility that's coming out October 10 2023, was that there are no fewer Silvia than four women in the world today who are internationally renowned authorities on etiquette and manners that are named Judith. They are all named Judy. And my mother is one of these women is International Etiquette experts who are named Judas and my mother. She's called Judy, the manners lady. And there's also Judith Martin, who is also well known Judith, she's the Washington Post columnist, also known as Miss Manners. And there are two other ones. And funnily enough, they all have roots and ties in Boston, for some reason as well. So just kind of a funny, funny tidbit from this world. So I was raised in this home raised by the manners, it my mother, that was very attentive to social norms and social graces and social expectations. And I remember growing up, always kind of questioning them, why do we do things the way we do them, and I always never, I never really wanted to just abide by a norm because or rule because that was just the way they do it, or the way that it was done. I always kind of hungered for a deeper understanding of the deeper reasons why we do things the way we do them. And so to some extent, my book is a reflection of a lifetime of reflecting on our social norms, the norms that support our free society that support human flourishing, that support human community that allows us to become the best version of ourselves in friendship and in society with others. And I would say, that is where both these projects intersect. They're zealously pro human, is zealously interested in question of these foundational questions related to the human condition and what it means to be human and the life well lived. And they both realize that they're both fundamentally pro social in nature. civility is a social virtue, we don't need it in isolation on an island. And the act of storytelling is integral to life well lived, it always has been across the human experience. And it's also an explicitly social endeavor as well. We understand who we are in context to other people.
Sylvie Legere 7:00
Well, let's touch on that a little bit. Because some things that you explore is that the human experience right is the same today as whether you live like centuries ago, people experience suffering, love, hate vengeance competition, like the list goes on. And you've really embraced the history that brings us insight to understand that. So yeah, that's not really seen in the school curricula today. It's almost like if everything that we do today is brand new, and I think that's what you're all about is saying, no, what we are living today is actually how people have lived in the past and what people have lived and we can learn from it, we can learn to appreciate it. So share with us, you know, those types of stories that you are using to revive the sense of civility and also what they can teach us to appreciate our life,
Alexandra Hudson 7:52
I had some great insight Sylvie, this notion of storytelling, being this powerful tool that educators have harnessed and deployed across history and across culture, to help educate a new generation and educate society as a whole stories hold our values and they embody our ideals as a society. And that is why every culture they have you know, origin stories, they have epic poetry, they have literature and novels, myths that help people answer these foundational questions about the human experience. Who are we? What does it mean to be human? Why are we here? What is the best way to live? These are some of the primary questions that anyone and everyone needs to grapple with, asked for themselves and answer in order to be truly educated and fully self actualize. Again, those those questions now we asked them orient us in the world, across time and place, people have asked but they're not also answered those questions of who are we? Why are we here? How do we live through stories? Today, we're in this post enlightenment scientific world where we're very skeptical of stories, we like to be evidence based. We don't want the squishy stuff of storytelling, we'd like to think we're value neutral. And we're we're beyond that. And what we don't realize is that is even that itself is a story, a story that places evidence and science at the center is itself a story about about the world as well. So we all bring our stories to our education, whether we realize it or not even denying that storytelling matters. That isn't itself a story. And so one thing I talk about in my course, I have an episode on storytelling and moral instruction, exactly on this tradition of harnessing storytelling, to cultivate an instant and a new generation ideals about how to live in the world. And one story I tell them is about George Washington. Still the what do you think is the most common most popular story about George Washington? Can you think of it?
Sylvie Legere 9:53
I don't know. Like, you know, it was our first president.
Alexandra Hudson 9:56
Exactly was our first president. He's kind of the archetypal mythic for If you're in American history, and one of the most famous stories about him there are a lot, but one of most famous about him is the time he chopped down his father's cherry tree. And when his father asked him about this grievous misdeed, he admitted it to his father. He said, I cannot tell a lie paw I did cut it with my hatchet. So he confessed to his father that he had cut down the cherry tree. And the legend has it that his father was so overjoyed that his son was honest about his misdeed that he didn't even care that he had cut down his father's prized possession, and He forgave us and embraced him. And that story reveals a lot about the American psyche, we really value integrity, we value honesty, and that interweaves and supports this societal narrative in our country, about how with honesty and integrity and hard work, we can succeed in life. So that's mythic, on many levels there. But what many people don't realize is that that story never happened. George Washington's first biographer was a gentleman they Mason lock Weems. And the year that Washington died, he wrote a biography. And I put that in quotations of George Washington that is chock full of stories that never actually happened. But they were stories that reveal they weren't literally true. They were mythically true and they embodied greater ideals about what Weems thought we should aspire to an American history and they did illuminate ideals about Washington's persona and character. But it's really fascinating that a lot of these stories about Washington that we hold to be true didn't actually happen, but they still endure, because again, they support and perpetuate these broader myths that we have. And so this notion of, of harnessing story, to inspire us to cap to illuminate our ideals and give us something to aspire to. That isn't we see time and time and time again. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, those embodied ideals, and Achilles be protagonists of the Odyssey, and Odysseus, the protagonist of The Odyssey, their stories, illuminate ideals of the ancient Greeks, whether it's to moss and rage and courage and Achilles, or in the case of Odysseus, the value that he embodies, and again, this is the word that Homer uses more often to describe Odysseus than any other word. In Greek. It's called poly made tea, and made tea in Greek means practical wisdom, applied wisdom. And so poly make tea means many applied wisdoms because he was just so adaptive, and ingenious, he was kind of like an intellectual MacGyver, like you put him in a box, he's going to find a way out to escape, you know. And so that is a value, that the sort of applied wisdom that Polly may teach is something that Odysseus and body to the ancient Greeks, and He illuminates that ideal that the ancient Greeks valued chefs on the role on Beowulf, like across history, Thor, and Norse mythology, like these heroes across history and culture, who they are, and even their mistakes, embody what a culture values and doesn't value.
Sylvie Legere 12:58
So share with us the types of stories that you are reviving, and what they can teach us today. And I know that one of the things that we talked about is that stories embody some values that drive human behavior, human interactions, and really the good life like the right way of interacting, they also embodies some human emotions that we have to recognize that we are feeling and that we are not alone. So it really elevates and justifies our human experience. So share with us the types of stories that you're reviving, and also how you're just stuck opposing ancient times and contemporary stories.
Alexandra Hudson 13:39
I love that question. Thank you, Sylvie. So the thesis of the course is that the human condition is defined by the greatness and wretchedness of man. We are the pinnacle of creation, we have reason we have well we have freedom, we have volition, and agency these are things that plants, animals, other forms of life don't have. And we are capable of incredible humanity, humaneness and altruism and generosity and gentleness. But we're also defined by ego, selfishness and can be incredibly cruel and barbaric, both to the natural world around us and to our fellow man. And so this duality is in our nature, and the stories I choose to answer your question, illuminate this dichotomy, the duality and our nature, the greatness and wretchedness of man. And we see this duality in our storytelling as well. Our stories reflect our nature, of course, because we're the ones telling it and I show stories across history and culture that have had been used to, as we were talking about a moment ago, instill and inspire greatness and values and virtue and character, but also stories that dehumanize, debase and degrade for example, the propaganda we saw during World War Two and the Third Reich that analogized ethnic minorities and Jewish people to wrote in and horrible stories out like like that. So we know that story is there's a duality to our nature, greatness and wretchedness. And there's a duality to our storytelling. Because of that duality in our Atreus that's kind of the kind of stories that we tell. And the second part of your question about how I juxtapose old and new and how I put different media, and types of storytelling in dialogue with one another, that was a really fun puzzle, to kind of think about how I wanted to organize the course. And I wanted it to, again to be representative across discipline across media across culture, because I wanted it to represent the human condition, not just the modern kind of Western condition, right. Another uses of my course, is that all great art tells a story about the human condition. So it made sense to not just appeal and draw from novels, right or play. So those are the obvious sources of storytelling. So one example of how I do this and put the old and the new and different media and dialogue is in my lecture on death. I have a lecture on episode on death and the afterlife. And again, this is another aspect of the human experience that every culture across history, and time has conceived what happens when we die? What happens to the soul do we continue to live on or not, we just go to the ground and nothing happens. That's it. To explore this theme of death in the afterlife. I put something very old as I'm very new and dialogue together I draw from Dante's Inferno, Dante, Allah Gary, the last medieval man. And he wrote this trilogy called The Divine Comedy that's divided into into three parts, Inferno, which explores hell as the part of the afterlife Purgatorio, which explores purgatory, and para desea, which explores heaven. And so I explore the inferno as part of this exploration about death and the afterlife and embodies the medieval view of death, where the medieval view of life was that you know, just whatever your lot is, in life, good or bad, just endure it, because you will get your reward in heaven. It was very other worldly centric, and that's kind of reflected and the Divine Comedy as well. And so I put Dante in dialogue with a very modern treatment of death in the afterlife. Michael Shermer is a big Hollywood producer, he brought us the office parks and rec I'm calling in from Indiana right now. And Parks and Rec is a treasured work of art treasured series of stories here. And he also brought us Brooklyn, nine, nine. And a more recent project he worked on was called The Good Place, which is a whole sitcom about the afterlife. And I think that's kind of really interesting, because it's kind of irreverent. A lot of people treat death really soberly and really severely, like we're afraid of death, that might be our primary fear as a species. And our primary definition of existence and mode for living is trying to avoid death. And so it's kind of a typical and unique, that Michael shirt dedicated a whole sitcom about death and exploring the afterlife. And the concept of the Good Place is that this young woman, Eleanor footstrap, who's played by Kristen Bell, wakes up in a waiting room that's kind of like a doctor's office, a mid level doctor's office. And all of a sudden, a kindly man opens the door. This is Ted Danson and he says, Come on, and Eleanor are waiting for you. So she enters the office and sits down. And Ted Danson says, Eleanor, you've died. Welcome to the good place. Congratulations, you've made it here. There's a twist, though. She realizes that she's not supposed to be there. She knows that she didn't lead a very good moral and upstanding wife. She in fact, was incredibly selfish and mean and unkind. And so she's like, oh, there's been a cosmic blip. And somehow I ended up in the good place when I shouldn't be in the bad place. And so the whole first season is her trying to cover up this cosmic clerical error that must have happened, that has allowed her to be in the good place when she knows she should be in the bad place. So anyway, that's just to answer your question, one example of how I put old and new and dialogue. Dante allegories, Divine Comedy, in dialogue with a very old kind of classic core can article work in dialogue with a very contemporary work, and people might not necessarily put Michael shores good place in the canon of great works of art. But again, my thesis is that all great works of art help us think more clearly about the human condition and tell a story about what it means to be human. I thought that that really helpfully illuminated this conversation about death and how we explore data.
Sylvie Legere 19:34
Hi, I'm gonna take a moment to tell you about the Civic Leadership Engagement Roadmap clear. It's a self paced leadership program to become a more impactful citizen. This virtual program features one on one coaching mastermind, peer groups, networking opportunities, and curated activities that are really designed to help you build connections with local policy leaders and decision makers. This year, CLER's offers a special program for women who are members of the military and veteran community. To learn more, visit the policycircle.org.
Sylvie Legere 20:12
So let's talk a little bit more about that course. Right, which is called storytelling in the human condition, and it's coming up on one dorium.com. So you're covering the human condition is such a broad topic. How are you structuring this course, in a way that it's really digestible? And I think like when you and I talk, it sounds like you cover the big pieces of the human experience, including things like forgiveness, for instance, or how did you structure the course around each pillars or piece of the human experience? Just a little bit about how the course is organized?
Alexandra Hudson 20:46
I puzzled over this for quite some time. And I ultimately decided to start at the beginning. So the first episode is defining our terms, what is the human condition on what are stories and how a storytelling venues the first episode looks at defines the human condition through two works of art that are called the human condition. One is by Hannah Arendt, the Jewish German philosopher, who wrote a book called The Human Condition. And the other is by Masabi Kobayashi and a Japanese filmmaker who created a epic three part trilogy called the human condition, and both are incredible masterpieces. So that's how I start the series. And then the rest of the series progresses through origin stories, after the introductory lecture that I start on origin story. So in that episode, I put in dialogue, the Judeo Christian narrative of origin stories, and put that in conversation with other origin stories in ancient Greece and ancient Babylon, and Chinese mythology as well to help us understand, again, how we answer these questions about who we are, and why we're here. Those are central to how any culture understands how to live their life. The stories are reflective of how people experience the world. So origin stories, and then I progress through the human experience, I go to suffering, I go to pride, I go to storytelling and education and moral formation through to materialism. And power is incredible, how common this theme of why the lust for things and acquisition, and the pursuit of power leads to unhappiness. And we find that across history and culture as well, through to humor and tragedy looking at how, what is the role of laughter, this collective effervescence, that people have turned to and delighted across history and culture, to finally ending on freedom? What is the role of human agency and harnessing that to create new stories about beauty and the world around us or to create stories out of tragedy, and that final lecture by bring up Hannah Arendt and I book on with Rand who has a great intellectual influence on me, she was a PhD and a genius. She studied with Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg, I think, in Germany, and was an academic and a journalist. But she she worked all of these titles, and she instead called herself a storyteller. That was the title that she held on to as an incredible life story of agency and kind of both storytelling and and harnessing the power of story in her own life. And I put Han Arendt and dialogue with Phyllis Wheatley, and I love sharing the story of Phyllis Wheatley. She's the first African American published author and her story she was ripped from her home in West Africa, and brought on a slave ship called the Phyllis and sold to a wealthy merchant family in Boston called the Wheatley family. And so her old identity was destroyed, and her new identity was constructed entirely around slavery. Again, her name was Phyllis named after her slave ship and her last name Wheatley is named after her slave family. But she was brilliant. And the Phyllis family educated her they taught her ancient Greek and Latin. And she was proficient in these ancient languages and English from an incredibly early age and just consumed the great book. She loved Virgil, she loved Pope and she was just voracious and intellectually omnivorous, and imbibed and consumed whatever was around her and given to her and she was an incredible poet in her own right. She famously wrote a poem for George Washington, who we touched on earlier and praised him for his leadership for his character for his integrity again, all these attributes that he was admired for in his day Washington wrote back to her and said, Thank you so much for your poem, she invited her to the White House as a guest of honor, which is incredible. Again, this is at a time when she was a young slave woman, and George Washington owned slaves. So just that's just incredible act of generosity and hospitality for him to do that. What's incredible about her story, in addition to what I've shared so far, is that some of the most powerful white men in Boston, including her slave owner, John Hancock, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, including the governor of Massachusetts, state senators, the most powerful All men in the state, wrote a letter and signed a letter to a local publisher saying, please publish this young girl's work. She's incredibly talented. And we testify that this is in fact, her work, please publish it. And so her work got published. That's what made her the first African American published author. And I just love that story of people in positions of power coming alongside her and championing this young, under her, like this podcast is called press your voice, right? Like, imagine this young woman, and a society where everything about the society is telling her that she has no voice, that she has no agency. But then totally unexpectedly, all these people come around her and give her a voice. They give her a platform, they help her get her book published. And so one poem in particular is what I analyze. And again, this is exploring the theme of freedom, storytelling and freedom, how the stories we tell, both cultivate and affirm our freedom and help us lead better lives. So she tells out and one of her poems, it's called being brought from Africa to America. And she tells a story, again, that we've shared that I've shared already of being ripped from her home and be being given this new identity as a slave. And she says, you know, this is this is a tragedy. But the story doesn't end there. She actually spins this tragedy on its head and says, Actually, there is some goodness that has come out of it. In fact, I was brought from a pagan land to a Christian land. And she credits the fact that she was sold into slavery, for helping her find Christ. Her Christian faith was incredibly important to her throughout her life. She was friends with the Whitfield's and part of the second awakening in American history. So it's just absolutely remarkable that she could choose to harness the power of storytelling to redeem this otherwise unconscionably traumatic and tragic story of being torn from her home, her family, everything she knew sold into slavery, given a new identity. And yet she has the ability to step back and say, Actually, I see the good here, I see that there is goodness here. And I'm grateful for it almost she says, and so if she can do that, out of her trauma, and her tragedy, you know, what can we do? How can we tell better stories in our lives that account for and allow us to thrive and flourish despite the traumas and setbacks that we endure? So she's so inspiring and incredible figure in history for so many reasons.
Sylvie Legere 27:18
So that's such an inspiring story. And like you said, you always can look at your circumstances differently, and then spark a new path. I'd love to kind of end our conversation with, you know, and you touch on this a little bit. What do you want people to take away from the course taking the course? It's about like 12 courses, right of 30 minutes each? And then what do you want them to carry in the daily life? You touched on inspiring people to tell their story. But also, I think, it sounds like you also want people to embrace their human experience, as it is, whatever the circumstances that they are living, the experience that they're living, to see it perhaps differently through those ancient and also current stories is that would you want them to take away?
Alexandra Hudson 28:03
Yes, thanks, Sylvie for that question. Well, first of all, I'd like to say I invite everyone listening to this, to enjoy the course absolutely free. You can even claim your free month of one gram to be able to enjoy the series, alexandraohudson.com, forward slash story. And there you just enter in your email, and you get an access code to claim your free month of one gram to enjoy the course privacy free. So we'd love everyone who's interested in learning more about how stories can help us lead better lives. To check it out and write to me I'd love to hear your thoughts about it. But to your question about what I would like people who enjoy the series to take away Yes, you're right, there's 12 episodes 12 lectures in the series, I would like people to appreciate with greater depth again, as I said, the greatness and wretchedness of man, the beauty and tragedy and universality of the human condition. Yes, we are better in some ways than other cultures, other periods in history, just in terms of our abundance and wealth. But we're also deeply the same in all the ways that matter most. We share a nature we share the human condition with people that have come before us it is a connectedness with people and other times in places, but also with people with whom we differ today. They're just affirming the universality of our humanity of our dignity. Again, there's this humanistic lens just as high view of humanity that is an undercurrent for all of my work. And especially in this course, this is a no way a comprehensive treatment of the human condition or the human narrative tradition, right? Like I hope that it sparks in people a hunger and an interest in learning more and learning more about you know, other narrative traditions and other cultures and other stories that I think that's what all great courses and all great books do is don't offer you know, pat answers like the final word in a subject that it just it awakens or encourages people to continue their journey of lifelong learning on their own path wherever they Take some And one last note you in your introductory comments, your framing comments you talked about how we're living in this age of a strange perfectionism, salivate. Like we're not very gracious and charitable. We are very intolerant of mistakes. And in fact, when it was centralize and reduce people to one aspect of who they are often, they made a mistake. 20 years ago, they were thoughtless with someone with at the grocery store or something and someone captures it on video and all of a sudden, it goes viral and someone's life is ruined. They're fired from your job. And they're defined by, you know, one thoughtless tweet or one moment of being unkind to someone. And that low watermark of their life or their day becomes who they are, and we want to cancel people want to destroy them, and make sure they never do anything like that again. But you know, as Alexandra Pope said, To err is human to forgive is divine. And what's beautiful about that, as the thesis of my course, on my life's work purports, greatness and wretchedness, right, like we are going to fall short of these ideals of perfection and we're going to be unkind, we're going to be ungracious from time to time, we're not going to be perfect. And that's just what it means to be human. And to accept expect perfectionism from everyone at all time, is just unrealistic, setting ourselves up for disappointment and a recipe for anti flourishing, really, like, there's no freedom to create. There's no freedom to edit freedom to innovate, it's to expect perfectionism and the intolerant of failure is anti human.
Sylvie Legere 31:22
It is and and we see it, you know, just like to add, I mean, we see it with the level of anxiety, the mental illness that we are experiencing in our youth, and also in adults, because we have this bar of perfection. And everything that is being presented and expected is perfection. And we rarely tell those stories of actual failure, redemption, forgiveness, they're not part of our general narratives. And I think like what's also the reason why I wanted to have this conversation with you is I think, like this course, could be really essential for teachers, today, teachers of social studies, teachers in all grades to go through this course, because it will give them real content and material to then translate and bring to their classrooms. So I really hope that our listeners will take the time to share this with teachers in their lives and share this episode and also share the course on wandering them with the teacher in their life so that they can really embrace ancient stories and teach it and embrace teaching ancient times. So thank you so much for being here. And for being on the podcast, Lexi is really great. So tell us one last time, how we can follow you follow your platform, sign up for the course,
Alexandra Hudson 32:36
I'm on, you know all the social media platforms, but I would really invite you to sign up for Civic Renaissance, my newsletter and intellectual community. And again, going to alexandraohudson.com forward slash story. That is how you can both sign up for civic Renaissance, but also get your free month of Wondrium. And that's how I want to thank you for listening, taking the time to hear a little bit about the journey of creating this course and how I hope it helps people just think more deeply about the stuff of humanity or connectedness and the greatness of wretchedness of man and how to use storytelling to help us lead better lives. That's my hope for everyone. And I hope just as a thank you, you'll, you'll avail yourself of the free month of Wondrium at alexandraohudson.com forward slash story.
Sylvie Legere 33:20
Well, thank you so much like say it's really a pleasure to have you on the podcast. So thank you very much.
Alexandra Hudson 33:25
Thank you love being here.
Sylvie Legere 33:27
Thank you so much for joining us. I hope that the conversation today gives you hope in the human condition, and will spark you to explore Alexandra Hudson's platform to inform your understanding of the human experience so you can be a force of good kindness and virtue in our world. Thank you for joining me Sylvie Legere on my trust your voice podcast. I hope that this episode brought you a new way to think about your voice, how to trust yourself and how to use your voice for good in your life and in your community. If you liked this podcast, be sure to leave us a review in Apple podcasts. And subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player again.