Author Paul Griffin didn’t just ask Iola High School senior Jake Skahan to share his story. He coaxed it out of him.
It started with the usual “getting-to-know-you” chitchat in an auditorium filled with a couple hundred of Jake’s peers on a Tuesday morning.
“Jake, what’s your dream?” Griffin asked him.
“To be a physical therapist.”
“What are the steps to get there?”
Jake will attend the University of Saint Mary in Leavenworth next fall on a football scholarship. The school has a good physical therapy program. After he graduates, he’d like to return to a small community, perhaps Iola, to establish his career and start a family.
“You’re killing it. You have it all mapped out,” Griffin said.
The author, who spoke to students from seven area schools this week as part of the Author Visit Program, then told his own story about working as an EMT in New York City. That 15-year career started one morning when he was running along the East River and watched a plane flying erratically overhead. He came home and saw his wife standing in front of a television set.
It was Sept. 11, 2001, “and you know the rest.”
Like Jake, he wanted a job that would help others.
“So Jake, as you’re moving up the ladder, you’re going to be a director of physical therapy and I’m the guy who’s going to hire you,” Griffin continued. “I ask one question and I’ll know if you’re the one for the job. What’s your story?”
Jake talked about his younger brother, Mason, who has disabilities and special needs. Taking care of his brother shifted his perspective.
“You see the good inside people. You’re more optimistic,” Jake said. “It gives me that drive toward helping others.”
Griffin wasn’t done. He pushed further.
He told another story, about a 15-year-old orphan in Bogata, Colombia. She was one of 20 children who were about to age out of the orphanage to make room for younger children, and she had one chance to get adopted. On a website, she shared her story, a heart-wrenching tale of survival filled with specific details about how she sang to collect money for her family.
After he told her story, Griffin asked the audience to recall details. She found an old ski hat; people dropped coins into it as she sang. Why was the hat sad?
“The pink thread fell off,” someone called out the answer.
“Those details help you remember the story,” Griffin said.
Because of that story, Griffin and his wife adopted the girl. “That story” helped her get into a high school for students who are musically talented. She was recruited to college and given scholarships for singing.
“She used that story to get herself a part in an opera. She’ll use that story to get into graduate school. That story, those details, changed her life.”
Griffin turned back to Jake and asked him to tell a story about his brother. In front of the entire school.
“I was about 9 years old,” Jake began. “I had a friend over. It was about 9 o’clock at night and we’re in my room and I hear these heavy footsteps running down the hallway. I look out and see my dad carrying my brother on his shoulder with my mom and my grandma running behind him. They say, ‘We’re going to the hospital.’
“Once they were gone, me and my friend were like, what do we do? We call my other grandparents and stay the night with them. The next day I hear my brother is in the hospital, having seizures. He was transferred to Children’s Mercy and stayed there over a week.
“I remember all that time, not knowing what’s going to happen to my brother, if I was even going to still have my brother. I’ve always had that in the back of my mind, worrying about that.”
IT NEVER gets old, seeing a kid figure out the power of their story, Griffin said.
His presentation isn’t the typical author talk. He brings students from the audience to the stage and asks questions to teach them how to tell their own story, weaving anecdotes from his life as examples.
“It keeps it fresh, every time,” he said. “You never know what story is going to be told or who is going to tell it.”
He once received a note from a student who was considering bringing a gun to school and shooting classmates. He listened to a child tell about being raped by her mother’s boyfriend.
“By telling their story, they can flip the script and make something happen. They can make life-saving changes. They can get closer to their dream,” Griffin said.
His ability to draw a story out of the youth he meets goes back to 1989, after he graduated from college and took a job working with at-risk, incarcerated teens. He worked in the conflict resolution unit.
Not long after he started, his unit was asked to talk with students after a school shooting.
“It was mostly just firing questions until they came to the answer you hoped they were going to come to, which is ‘I don’t know why we were fighting.’ If you really drill down deep enough, they would come to the realization of ‘this is stupid.’”
Griffin would work with other groups and organizations, such as churches, to conduct similar workshops in juvenile detention centers. He continues to work with incarcerated and at-risk youth.
Now, as an award-winning author of young adult novels, he uses similar techniques to reach students across the nation.
“You see the kids light up when they figure it out. That never gets old for me, being witness to that, seeing somebody make a connection that could potentially change their life,” he said.
“There aren’t many ways I can think of to make a day more thrilling than seeing somebody make a change, because very few people do and it’s hard for all of us. We fall into patterns. Seeing a kid break a pattern… Yeah, I don’t get tired of that.”
DEB GREENWALL, organizer of the Author Visit Program, first saw Griffin’s presentation in 2019 at a children’s literature festival.
“He was so magical, how he gets these kids to tell their story,” she said.
She wanted to bring him to Iola, to speak to high school students in particular.
“The high school kids don’t get to hear author talks like the younger kids do. They’re so busy and it’s hard to pull them all together,” she said.
Griffin worked with the local program to make it happen. They started by visiting fourth- and fifth-graders at Iola Elementary School on Tuesday morning, then met with Iola middle and high schools students at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center before traveling to Yates Center to speak to fifth grade and middle school students.
That evening, Griffin signed books at Iola Public Library. He used that time to speak at length with some of the children who attended. The event drew perhaps the largest attendance at a book signing at least since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to staff.
On Wednesday, Griffin visited with fifth grade and middle school students at Humboldt, Crest and Marmaton Valley.
Funding for the Author Visit Program is provided by the Helen Gates Whitehead Trust.
Advertisement
Advertisement
