From Pub Chats To Podcasts: How St Andrews Secretly Taught Me The Grown-Up Art Of Conversation

Alumni Relations
Tuesday 5 October 2021

Storyteller-musician Sam Shaber spent a First Year Abroad at St Andrews between 1990 and 1991. Her first blog described how her time here ultimately paved the way for her current role as a spokesperson for people struggling with infertility.

 In this follow-up blog she reflects how bar-hopping at St Andrews quietly shaped her future as host of the acclaimed IVFU – a podcast about making families the “new fashioned way”.  

In 1990, as an American First Year at St Andrews, the world of pub chats was all new and thrilling to me. It was such a grown-up, independent feeling to be drinking late nights at the Student Union, Castle Tavern, The Vic, The Central–– even in the old, drab comfort of David Russell Hall’s Strachan Suite. It was “mature,” but also rebellious. And let’s face it; it was fun. 

Over various pints in various carpeted booths, I met a med student fresh from Nigeria, a Londoner who’d lived with her boyfriend on a boat in South America, an Irish poetry student who recited Yeats like quoting The Beatles, and a woman who described for me in detail the night her mother came out to her as a witch. That was a particularly intense evening.

But what I didn’t realise at the time was that a new skill was secretly being developed during this late-teen debauchery. Not just the skill of putting away pints of Tennents without breaking a sweat (wish I could pull that off now –– oh, 30 years later!), but the very underrated and underestimated skill of conversation.

Often the answers to my questions launched further questions. Often those further questions taught me something about myself in relation to my new friend. And often, these conversations gave me something to think about for decades to come. (Especially the one about the witch.) 

But it wasn’t just about how different we were. It was also about how alike we were, what we wanted in common, what we loved, experienced, regretted and celebrated together. It was the beginning of a new kind of empathy that I hadn’t explored before.

I might be old, (or as I like to say, “on the old side of young”), but I believe those pub chats at St Andrews in 1990 gave me more to grow on than any phone text or Direct Message could today in 2021. And I realize now that they helped prepare me for my current role as creator and host of the podcast IVFU. 

IVFU is a series of intimate, no-holds-barred conversations with intended parents, doctors, egg donors, surrogates, adoptive and foster parents and more, all of whom know the struggle and rewards of building a family the “new-fashioned way.” I created it after my own eight-year battle with infertility because I needed to find people I could sit back and talk with who would understand what I was going through, give me thoughtful answers to probing questions and teach me something new from their point of view. When our son Darwyn was finally born, via egg donor and surrogate, I felt driven to support others going through it, to bring light to the often underexposed subject of fertility treatments and alternative family creation, and to ask the questions ­– and share the answers – that could ultimately destigmatise this experience. 

Season 1 of IVFU was largely recorded with my guests and me in one room, at one table, sharing the same space. (And, in true pub tradition, often the same bottle of wine.) Many of them were close friends with whom I felt comfortable having the tough conversations, like a woman who’d had her twins through IVF, and my own reproductive endocrinologist (RE) who shared her revealing reasons for entering such a demanding field. But I also found I felt comfortable asking those tough, intimate questions of people I was meeting for the first time, like a three-time egg donor who told me why she put herself through the process over and over again, and a woman who was doing IVF on her own, reluctantly borrowing money from her parents and still struggling to cross that finish line.

And then Covid 19 hit, and I thought that was the end of IVFU. Because how do you ask intimate questions when you can’t be in a room together?

Thankfully, Season 2 of IVFU has been born (pun intended) thanks to a new kind of pub – Zoom – with a group of guests as diverse as those I met on the late nights at St Andrews. (No witches, though.) 

This season, I get to ask lesbian moms about the negotiation over which partner carries the baby. I ask a priest and a rabbi about their personal fertility experiences and their work counseling others. I learn from a Black woman doing IVF on her own about the shortage of Black egg and sperm donors. I also talk with gay dads who built their family through foster-to-adopt journeys, and gay and straight female comedians who had to reckon with their identities in the course of trying to become mothers. 

I’m so grateful to all of my guests for their willingness to talk openly and boldly about the details of their experiences, and I feel that it’s a combination of me being comfortable asking the questions after so many years of “practice” and all of us having a shared passion for helping others touched by this issue. 

Little did I know when I was sipping those generous pints at the St Andrews Student Union that my future was taking shape with every drop. And while I managed to do a respectable amount of coursework in my time there, (the Irish poet helped with that), I will always be grateful for those nights of human interaction and development that nurtured the art of conversation. After all, if lager be the food of life… well, the rest is history.

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