What I find beautiful is the fact that we have decided to not only continue telling each other’s stories about our glorious past or our complicated past, but most likely our glorious past. We’ve decided to tell stories via statue, via symbol, via commemoration in this fashion. I think that that’s fascinating, and I like to feel fascinated. But like most things that I get fascinated about because I’m just like, oh yeah, tell me more. What was the story that was there before and what does that mean? What does that mean that we could make this shift and change the narrative of an entire geographic location because somebody was able to overpower somebody else? Why would we choose to tell the story we tell from that area? Why, why, why, why, why? Everything should take you down a tunnel of why, and it’s not that you’re not going to find answers along the way, it’s just that those answers will lead you to more why’s.

And eventually you realize that asking all those questions, asking all those whys, infiltrates the way you see everything else after. Everything else after, well, you’ll have those whys and you’ll want to continue to ask them.

LA: Ashley, this has been such a fascinating and thought-provoking conversation, and thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and your stories. If people want to follow you and your work and listen to Monumental, where can they find you?

ACF: Well, they can find Monumental wherever you can listen to podcasts.

LA: You don’t say?

ACF: You don’t say, and I am also all over the place. You can find me at my website, AshleyCFord.com. I have a book called Somebody’s Daughter that you can pick up wherever you want, and I am also online in most places as Smash Fizzle.

LA: Thank you so much.

ACF: Thank you.

LA: It’s been really lovely.

ACF: I had so much fun.

LA: Oh, I’m so glad. That’s it for today. Thank you to the podcast, Monumental, for letting us use a clip. See you next week.

Thank you for listening to Women Who Travel, I’m LA, and you can find me on Instagram @lalehannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus, James Yost, Vince Fairchild, and Pran Bandi. The show is mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound. Jude Kampfner of Corporation for Independent Media is our producer. Stephanie Kariuki is our Executive Producer, and Chris Bannon is Condé Nast’s Head of Global Audio.