I found Ann Bauer through her posts on X during the fight to reopen schools. In 2021, few people with a public voice would say that closed schools were hurting children. Ann said it in Minnesota, over and over. I was saying the same thing in New York. Her posts made us “Open Schools Parents” feel a little less alone.
Ann paid dearly for that post. In our conversation, she tells me what speaking out cost her. She lost friends. She lost work. She lost her place in the city where she and her husband built their lives. But she didn’t back down. In the end, she and her husband left Minneapolis for Kentucky.
Ann was a writer long before that fight. She has published three novels and a memoir. Her essays have run in Salon, Tablet and The Free Press. Her latest essay there is a tribute to L. Frank Baum, the man who wrote The Wizard of Oz. She writes about hard things in plain language, and that’s rare.
Together with her husband, Ann recently co-founded Storyalīz, a reading app. It serves classic books in short installments of about 900 words. You can read one in a few minutes, the way readers once followed Dickens, chapter by chapter.
Ann has written about falling reading scores and how many adults no longer read books at all. Kids who were out of school while learning to read are still paying for it.
In our conversation, we talk about:
What the school closures looked like in Minnesota
What speaking out cost her, and why she did it anyway
Why she left Minneapolis
Her writing, and why reading matters for kids and families
Listen to our conversation above.
Try Storyalīz with your kids.
Watch 15 DAYS, our film about America’s pandemic school closures, here on Substack.
What is your child reading right now?
Tell me in the comments.
