Marrie Stone – the quirky and curious side of a quintessential writer, interviewer and idea seeker
By DIANNE RUSSELL
Photos by Mary Hurlbut
Of the many roles Marrie Stone has inhabited – lawyer, writer, radio interviewer, panel moderator, wife, mother – all somehow involve psychology. So it’s no surprise that “therapist” is the title Stone would have chosen had she not become a corporate lawyer.
The underlying thread in all of her many endeavors is curiosity. Her passion for wanting to understand the psyche of those she interviews is apparent. “I like to discover their inspirations and motivations, essentially what makes them tick,” said Stone. “I love ideas, the ideas behind the art, and the philosophy behind how people think and work.”
Focusing on emotional truths, Stone skillfully accomplishes her goal without judgments or preconceptions.
“Years ago, I read a quote by Rumi, ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there,”’ she said. “It’s become a guiding principle for how I think about interviewing. And life.”
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Stone with an eerie sculpture, dated 2007, purchased at last year’s Festival of Arts’ Pageant’s Bizarre Bazaar. It was created by artist Lou Rankin who died in 2016. Rankin was inspired to create his dark art pieces after 9/11/2001.
Stone began honing her interviewing skills when she started co-hosting Writers on Writing at KUCI FM, which was broadcast from UCI. The weekly podcast, launched by author Barbara DeMarco-Barrett in 1998, featured interviews with writers, poets and literary agents. “In 2007, Barbara asked if I’d ever thought about doing radio,” said Stone. “Now I’ve been doing it [interviewing] for 15 years.”
At KUCI, Stone guest hosted 36 shows of Real People of Orange County, which featured the lives of OC’s best and brightest. She also hosted The Chat Room, a show aimed at college students covering a broad range of taboo topics about sex, relationships and dating.
Last year, Stone and DeMarco-Barrett left the station and Writers on Writing is now a podcast on Apple, Amazon, Spotify, Stitcher and wherever listeners get their podcasts. They also created a Patreon page with extra perks for listeners.
“During the pandemic, I started interviewing – and still do – in my pajamas in my closet at home because it perfectly replicates a sound booth. The clothes act as acoustical panels like you’d have in a studio,” Stone said.
To date, Stone has interviewed more than 600 authors of literary fiction, genre fiction, biography, poetry, memoir – including Pulitzer Prize winners, National Book Award winners, Booker Prize winners, NYT bestsellers, as well as poets and prose writers.
The art of interviewing
“People want to be seen and understood, it upholds the idea that their lives matter,” Stone said.
One of her favorite interviewees is author George Saunders, who she’s interviewed four times. “He’s accessible, very calming and he’s so present, as if you are the only person who has ever asked him a particular question.”
Stone admits that on occasion, the conversations have taken a strange and unexpected detour. “An interview with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Lucinda Franks turned into a discussion of whether or not children have a right to their parents’ stories, which had nothing to do with her book.”
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Stone has interviewed more than 600 authors
In answer to the question, “Who would you love to interview, living or dead?” Stone replied, “The literary icons I’d most love to interview would leave me tongue-tied, so probably best I can’t interview them. Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy all come to mind. They all seem to see the truth about human nature and Marilynne is so spiritual. I’d just love to pick their brains on how they see the world, our future as a species and the meaning of it all. Is that too much to ask?”
One thing leads to another – stint at Stu News
Before Stone became the arts columnist for Stu News, she penned 50 of their well-known series “Laguna! Life & People,” featuring many of Laguna’s legends – John Gardiner, Mark Chamberlain, Bob Mosier, Peter Ott, Judge Paul Egly and Arnie Silverman – to name just a few.
Sponsored by Laguna Beach Arts Alliance, for the past year, Stone has provided readers with exceptional insights into 150 of Laguna’s artists, performers and personalities. “I love the research and psychology behind how they create their art,” she said. “I’m drawn to anything artistic or intellectual and interviewing artists combines the two. For each week’s articles, I interview 5-10 people.”
To honor her coverage of the town’s artists and organizations, last month Stone was named the keynote speaker at the 2022 Art Alliance Awards and received a “Louie” award statue for her work.
Fact or fiction
Although Stu News readers have only been exposed to Stone’s non-fiction, she is also an accomplished fiction and essay writer. Her fiction has appeared in Writing in Place (2020), The Write Launch, Issue 21 (2019), Coffin Bell, Vol. 1, Issue 3 (2018), Into the Void, Issue 8 (2018) (nominated for Best of 2019 in Small Fiction), Reed Magazine, No. 150 (2017), River Oak Review, Vol. 2, Issue 5 (Winter 2008), The Rambler (accepted for publication) (2007) and The Writer’s Journal (2004).
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Hard at work
Stone’s articles and essays have appeared in Pegasus, Harbor Day School, St. Mary’s School, Pelican Hill, Orange Coast, Tableau Magazine, Blue Door Magazine and she’s contributed essays or ghost writings for local photographers’ books (including Jacques Garnier, Robert Hansen and Mitch Ridder.)
A panel moderator and host of “conversations with” events, Stone has appeared at Literary Orange, OC Public Libraries, Laguna Beach Books and the Miami Book Fair and will moderate a panel on public art at Laguna Art Museum tomorrow night (Saturday, June 4).
Innate curiosity
Although Stone always possessed an inherent curiosity, its nature changed over the course of time.
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Born in Sun Valley, Idaho, her parents lived in Hailey, Idaho until Stone was 9 months old. “My mom chose that city because they had a hospital that didn’t require an overnight stay for deliveries,” she said. From Idaho, the family moved to Seattle and then to Walla Walla where they lived during Stone’s younger years (5-14 years old), eventually moving back to Seattle when she was a teenager.
“From fifth to seventh grade, I wanted to be a doctor,” Stone said. “I was obsessed with it. I ordered a microscope and a slew of microscopic organisms –amoeba, paramecium and who knows what else. Then I had a few medical charts you’d see in doctor offices hung on my walls. I also was obsessed with the invisible man and woman anatomy kits and I had an anatomy coloring book that I’d pour over forever.”
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Although the sculpture bore no formal name, it is known as “Bird God”
“I had a weird curiosity about how things worked, so I ordered some fetal pigs from Caroline Biological Supply Company and dissection manuals. At my birthday party when I was in the seventh grade, we dissected them and then chased each other around waving the tongues. It’s a wonder I had any friends.”
Certainly not your typical party game, but nothing about Stone is typical.
Family matters
From 1968 until 1982, her mother Valerie was a flight attendant for a variety of airlines: West Coast Airlines, Hughes, Air West and then Republic which became Northwest. Her father Lanny served in the Vietnam War and was a commercial pilot for Continental until 1999. From 1978-1985, her parents owned a wrecking yard next to the Washington State Penitentiary. Stone’s younger brother Ryan, an engineer, lives in Denver, Colorado with his wife Lori.
Ditching her desire to be a doctor – Stone admitted she wasn’t particularly good at math – she chose a different path. “I went to Occidental College, majored in philosophy, and then worked for two years at Smith Barney before starting law school. At Smith Barney, two of the brokers were old school and there was no room to move up.”
A chance meeting
In 1997, between her second and third year of law school, Stone served as a summer intern at the law office of Brobeck, Phleger and Harrison – at their office near John Wayne Airport – and met her future husband, Jeff Rovner. “I got the position because of my time at Smith Barney and my office was right next to Jeff’s,” she said. Their first “date” was at a company function at the Magic Castle.
“I passed the bar exam in 1998, the same year we moved into our house,” Stone said.
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Stone’s Laguna home since 1998
However, motherhood altered her path. “I retired when I had [my daughter] Haley,” Stone said. “Because corporate law has very high stakes, it’s extremely stressful.”
There’s no doubt that this is a family of creative and idea-driven humans (and one feline).
An attorney, Rovner is the Managing Director for Information at the law firm O’Melveny & Myers LLP, a professor of information technology and knowledge management and a magician member of the Magic Castle in Hollywood. He’s the inventor of Concept Companion, a tool to promote conceptual thinking.
However, his artistic passion is photography. A board member of the Festival of Arts, Rovner has exhibited his fine art photography at the Festival of Arts since 2017. This summer, he will introduce his new “Powered by Ideas” portfolio at FOA.
This fall, Haley will be entering her senior year at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She’s majoring in computer science and minoring in Entrepreneurial Leadership and Innovation (ELI). She has an internship this summer with Fireman & Company, consulting to law firms on designing internal intranets. She’s ultimately planning a career in intranet design and/or software design.
The family shares the house with Theo, a regal ragdoll cat, who sometimes wakes them up in the morning by knocking over the pawns on their chess board.
“When I was young, if I could have seen into the future and looked at a photo of the family I wanted, that photo would be one of the many we have now in our home,” Stone said.
Much to be proud of
What might surprise readers is that Stone is an avid fitness buff, and in 2020, reached her personal goal of lifting 220 lbs.
Stu News turned the tables on Stone and asked, “What are you most proud of – both personally and professionally?”
“Despite not enjoying the practice of law, I’m glad (and I suppose proud) I went to law school,” Stone said. “The intensity of the training stayed with me, and it has made me a more precise thinker and writer. Law school trains the mind into analytical thinking and that’s probably paid dividends in every area of my life. And somehow people seem to take you more seriously if you tell them you practiced corporate law. LOL.
“Personally, of course, Haley is my pride and joy,” Stone continued. “She’s a never-ending process of discovery for me. We’re so different in so many ways, so it’s been amazing to watch her reveal herself over these 21 years. She’s kinder, gentler and more emotionally intelligent than I’ll ever hope to be, so I’ve probably learned more from her than she’s learned from me. But it was an honor to usher her into the world and help her find her place in it.”
To the delight of her Stu News readers, it seems Stone has found her place as well. Her curiosity about “what makes them tick” has resulted in a variety of stunning excavations into the minds of authors, artists and performers – and thankfully, with more to come.
For more information about Marrie Stone, go to www.marriestone.com.
To visit Writers on Writing on Patreon, go to www.patreon.com/writersonwriting.