News & EventsLitFest 2023 Videos

Transcript of A Conversation Meghan O’Rourke & Ingrid Rojas Contreras

- Good evening. I'm Michael Elliot. I'm the president of Amherst College and I wanna thank you for joining us here in Johnson Chapel or if you're on livestream joining us via livestream. Tonight, I am delighted to welcome you to Lit Fest 2023, the eighth iteration of Amherst College's annual literary festival, celebrating the literary life of the college and beyond. As some of you might know, I became president of Amherst College in August, and this is my first Lit Fest as president and as an English major of this great college. It is such a pleasure and an honor to return to this building where I became enraptured and entranced by the study of language, by the power of narrative, and by the ability of literature to both delight and perplex me and something that has only grown for me, a love that has only grown over the last 30 years, even though I feel as though I understand it less and less. I am delighted to be launching this year's Lit Fest. We once again have an incredible array of readings, talks, conversations, workshops with distinguished and inspiring writers. I'm truly excited to hear from tonight's featured guests, and I hope you'll join us from multiple events over the coming days. Tonight's event is the part of the National Book Awards on Campus Program, and is hosted in partnership with the National Book Foundation. We thank Jennifer Acker, Lit Fest Director and a 2000 graduate of the college for bringing this partnership about. Jen is the founder and editor-in-Chief of the Common and Director of the Magazine's Literary Publishing Internship, which gives Amherst students outstanding opportunities to participate in contemporary literary conversations while also preparing them for writing and editing careers. She's also the author of an unclaimed novel, "The Limits of the World," and a bestselling memoir, "Fatigue," as well as short stories, essays, translations, and reviews. I'll turn things over to Jen and to Ruth Dickey, the executive Director of the National Book Foundation, to introduce tonight's featured guests in just a moment. But first, I wanna acknowledge that bringing an event like Lit Fest to Life is a truly collaborative effort. I'm grateful to all of the community members across campus who've helped to make it happen, including our on-campus partners, the Center for Humanistic Inquiry, the Chi here at Amherst College, the Common magazine, the Emily Dickinson Museum. Lit Fest is also made possible by the generous support of the Croxton Lecture Fund, established by William M. Croxton class of 1936 in memory of his parents, Ruth Allen, Hugh W. Croxton. And now please join me in welcoming Jen Acker.

- Thanks Michael, and happy first Lit Fest. Welcome everyone. And a very warm welcome to Ruth Dickey from the National Book Foundation, who will say a couple words about the partnership and the foundation in just a moment. So every year when Lit Fest comes around and as I get nervous that no one's gonna show up in the dead of winter, I ask myself, why should they show up? Like, why should you all be here when it's hailing and whatever else it's doing outside? And you may be asking why we choose to hold this event in February. And my answer has always been that it lights up the winter. As Amherst own motto, as some of you may know, is Terras Irradient or Let them enlighten the Lands. I think the Lit Fest theme should Libri vitas Irradient, or Let Books enlighten our lives. And I'm talking less about wisdom here than about warmth, because good books are quite simply our good friends. Literary voices have always kept me company. I grew up in rural Maine with not so many companions as an only child, and books were as crucial to my sustenance as the vegetables that my father farmed. For all the other virtues that books possess, the ability to expand knowledge, to cultivate empathy, perhaps the most important is the way they combat loneliness and make us less afraid of the world. And I'm setting aside Stephen King and other horror writers for the moment. So let's just bracket that. We do live in a world of more or less constant threats. And I find that what truly calms me the most is reading a novel or a nonfiction account with characters that stand up on the page because they've been brought to life by purposeful and precise sentences. And I'm not talking about escapism, which is just sort of a mindless emptying. I mean that full body engagement that comes with excellent prose and poetry. The voices of good literature speak to us and the quality matters. I am not drawn in if the writing is messy or confusing or clunky, I put those books down and I remain alone. So a festival like this one, which celebrates the power of truly dynamic writing spreads the joy of literary companionship. No matter how big our families are or how many friends we have, we still need books to keep us company. And if we can have a literary experience in which we share in real time with members of our community, then that's the best of all. Even for those of us who are introverts and have known in some moments to choose books over people, some of you can probably relate. At his inauguration this fall, President Michael Elliot asked, what does it mean to love a place? And even in February, I hope this weekend helps to answer some of that question. And now, welcome to Ruth.

- Hello everyone. My name's Ruth Dickey. I have the tremendous pleasure of serving as the executive director of the National Book Foundation. Thank you so much to President Elliot and to Jen for that lovely warm welcome, and for eight years of partnership between Amherst College and Lit Fest and Team Book. I promise to keep this very brief so we can get to the very best part. But I did want to offer a heartfelt thank you to the many people who made this evening and this weekend possible, especially the president's office, Jen Acker and the Common, Amherst College's conferences and special events team, especially Christina Ladue and Mary Jane Plasik. This is my first time at Lit Fest also, and what a treat it is to see the way the entire campus and greater Amherst community has gathered to celebrate great books and the people who behind them February weather be damned. Thank you to all of you here in this room and everyone tuning in online for joining us tonight. At the National Book Foundation, we do our darnedest to reach readers all over the country in all 50 states through free topical programming in person and online, and through book distributions for young people and adults alike. This month I've launched a special newsletter, Read with NBF to share behind the scenes interviews with our 2022 National Book Award winners. I'd love it if you'd subscribe and tell me what you think. For tonight's program, it's a privilege to get to celebrate two of our 2022 National Book Award honorees, Ingrid Rojas Contreras and Meghan O'Rourke. These authors expanded the way that I think about memoir and investigative non-fiction with their beautiful books, "The Man Who Could Move Clouds" and "The Invisible Kingdom: Re-Imagining Chronic Illness." These books challenge inequities of bodies, of class and of healthcare, and show us new ways of understanding our past and our present. How lucky we are to sit with their words on the page and in conversation tonight with Amherst lecture and author of "In the Antarctic Circle," Dennis James Sweeney. Questions tonight will be handled by note cards in the pew back in front of you. Please write your questions legibly, we hope. And Amherst staff will come around to collect them. Dennis will try to squeeze in as many as possible. These beautiful books are available for sale with thanks to Amherst books, although we've heard there's a hiccup and sadly that Meghan's book is not in here with us this evening. So we encourage you warmly to follow up and get it from Amherst Bookstore or get it online at bookshop.org from your favorite independent bookstore anywhere in the country. After the program, the authors will be signing books. And now I'm delighted to introduce you to our authors. Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia. Her first novel, "Fruit of the Drunken Tree" was the Silver medal winner in first fiction from the California Book Awards and a New York Times editor's Choice. "The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A memoir," was a National book award finalist. Her essays and short stories have appeared in New York Times Magazine, the Believer and ZYZZYVA, among others. She lives in California. Meghan O'Rourke is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness" and "The Long Goodbye," as well as the Poetry Collection's, "Sun in Days," "Once and a Half Life." Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker and the New York Times, and others. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, and a Whiting Creative Non-fiction Grant, she resides in New Haven where she teaches at Yale University and is the editor of the Yale Review. And Dennis James Sweeney is the author of "In the Antarctic Circle," winner of the 2020 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, as well as four chapbooks of poetry and prose, including "Ghost Home, A Beginner's Guide to Being Haunted." His writing has appeared in Five Points, Ninth Letter and the New York Times and the Southern Review among other publications. A small press editor of entropy and former Fulbright Fellow in Malta, he has an MFA from Oregon State University and a PhD from the University of Denver. Originally from Cincinnati, he lives in Amherst where he teaches at Amherst College. Thank you all so much for being here this evening, and please join me in welcoming these authors to the stage. And enjoy the program.

- Hello, it's so wonderful to see all of you. And thank you for these wonderful introductions and it's so great to be with you, both Ingrid and Meghan tonight. Would you please bring us in to our conversation with reading some of your work.

- Oh yeah. And I'm happy to begin. Hello everyone. I'm very happy to be here with you and looking forward to the evening. I'm just going to read from the beginning of the memoir. "They say the accident that left me with temporary amnesia is my inheritance. No house or piece of land or chest of letters, just a few weeks of oblivion. Mami had temporary amnesia as well, except: where she was eight years old, I was twenty-three. Where she fell down an empty well, I crashed my bicycle into an opening car door. Where she nearly bled to death in Ocaña, Colombia, in darkness, thirty feet below the earth, I got to my feet seemingly unharmed and wandered around Chicago on a sunny winter afternoon. Where she didn't know who she was for eight months, I couldn't remember who I was for eight weeks. They say the amnesias were a door to gifts we were supposed to have, which Mami's father, Nono, neglected to pass. Nono was a curandero. His gifts were instructions for talking to the dead, telling the future, healing the ill, and moving the clouds. We were a brown people, mestizo. European men had arrived on the continent and violated Indigenous women, and that was our origin: neither Native or Spanish, but a wound. We called the gifts secrets. In the mountains of Santander, the fathers had passed the secrets to the sons, who passed the secrets to the sons, who passed the secrets to the sons. But none of his sons, Nono said, had the testículos required to be a real curandero. Only Mami, strong-willed, unafraid, more of a man than most men in his eyes, whom he liked to call mi animal de monte, could have housed the gifts. But Mami was a woman, and such things were forbidden. If a woman came to possess the secrets, it was said that misfortune would soon follow. Yet, as eight-year-old Mami recovered from her injuries after falling down the well, and as her memories returned, it so happened that, from wherever her mind had gone, she brought back the ability to see ghosts and hear disembodied voices. The family says Mami was destined for the secrets, and since Nono couldn't teach them to her, the secrets had come directly to her. Four decades later, when I suffered my accident and lost my memory, the family was thrilled. Tías poured drinks, told one another with an air of festivity: There it goes again! The snake biting its own tail! And then they waited to see how, exactly, the secrets would manifest in me. This is a story that happens in Spanish, where Mami and the tías call each other vos, the archaic "thou," but they use tú with me, the informal, tender "you." Theirs is the way of speaking in Ocaña, where our family is from, and where language can sound like a colonial fossil. In Spanish, our stories are slow then fast, and we cackle, constantly. Mami and I are spooked by the way our lives echo each other's, so we don't often discuss our amnesias. But, increasingly, this is an itch I must scratch. I scrape and scald at its touch, only to want to probe into it again. The tías ask me to tell them what it was like to live without a memory. I focus on trying to communicate how surreal it was, how cinematic. The tías roll their eyes at me, but they do so while looking at one another, like I am a bad television show they are watching and can safely comment on. Such a gringa this one, no? What they really want to know is what I dreamt. For Mami and for me, during our bouts of amnesia, our waking lives were punctuated by a constant state of confusion, but our dreams were grounding. Mami's dreams were sequential, and in her dreams she was a ghost. In mine, I had no body, and as I say this to the tías out loud, I realize I, too, believed I was a ghost. We have a word in Spanish for the walking of the dead - desandar. To un-walk. To walk until the walking is worn thin, to walk until the walking undoes even itself. That ghosts have a particular way of walking is an idea we inherited from the settlers who invaded the continent, but what is intrinsically ours is the sense of porosity, an understanding that we live between the real and unreal, and that often they are one and the same. So, to us, the living go on ghost walks too." Thank you

- That was wonderful. It's wonderful too to be here tonight in this chilly, chilly night. And I was remembering that the last time I was at Amherst was for the graduation of my brother 20 years ago, no, two years ago. And he's here tonight, which is a wonderful rejoining. So I'm thrilled to be here to talk with you. I'm gonna read just a couple of paragraphs from my book, in a chapter called Impersonation, it's chapter four. And this chapter is trying to do the work of animating from inside from within, something about the lived experience of certain kinds of chronic illnesses that bring with them symptoms we don't understand very well. Symptoms like brain fog and fatigue that are often deemed subjective, but are deeply real. These symptoms bring with them a kind of language problem because we don't know what they are, and we don't know how to describe them. Impersonation. "One of the hardest things about being ill with a poorly understood disease is that most people find what you're going through incomprehensible, if they even believe you are going through it. In your loneliness, your preoccupation with an enduring new reality, you want to be understood in a way that you can't be. Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him. The 19th century French novelist, Alphonse Daudet observes in his book, "In the Land of Pain." Everyone will get used to it, except me. Worrying that your symptoms are psychosomatic or even imagined is part of life for many people with poorly understood illnesses. Although the experience of illness is not just in the head, it is also not just in the body. The person enduring such an illness faces a difficult balancing act. On the one hand, she must advocate for herself even when doctors are indifferent or ignorant and not be deterred when she knows something is wrong. On the other hand, she also must be willing to ask whether an obsessive attention to symptoms is going to lead to better health. The patient has to hold in mind two contradictory modes, in other words, insistence on the reality of the disease and resistance to her own catastrophic fears. I found it hard in the fall and winter of 2012 to strike that balance. I was increasingly worried. After all a terrible anxiety attends chronic illness. Over time, it becomes difficult to untangle the suffering from symptoms like pain, from the suffering inflicted by the anxiety over the possibility of more pain and worse outcomes in the future. This does not mean that the illness is in the mind, rather the mind, that machine for making meaning makes endless meanings of its new state, which may themselves influence the experience. It was in this recursive hall of mirrors trying to adjust to my body's ailments that I lived. There is a loneliness to illness, a child's desire to be pitied and seen. But it is precisely this recognition that is elusive. How can you explain and identify your condition if no one has any grasp of what it is you suffer from and the symptoms themselves wax and wane? How do you describe a disease that's not always there?" I'll stop there. Thanks.

- Thank you both. It's just so wonderful to get to hear you read your work out loud after having read these books and sort of inhabited them for a while. Both of these books hold so much. In the case of "The man who Could Move Clouds" it navigates a multi-generational family legacy of curanderos in the context of Colombian history. And "The Invisible Kingdom" tells a personal story of chronic illness against the background of our medical systems, difficulty navigating such illnesses. So I wanted to ask to start us off, when did you decide to set out on the journey of these books? Was there one moment when you decided you needed to write this down?

- I can start. I think, you know, I always wanted to write this story. Growing up, my grandfather died when I was one year old, but I always heard stories about my aunts and uncles and they would describe him moving clouds. And then as I was growing up, I also met different people who my grandfather had treated and he used to have like a healing business in his house. And curanderos usually use like a mixture of plant knowledge and prayer and ritual and it's just a mix of, yeah, medicine and older indigenous things and newer, modern things. And I was just always really fascinated by that story. And I always really wanted to tell it. I think that it was probably after I lost my memory in 2007 and when I regained my memory and remembered that story, I think it was the first time for me that I suddenly knew how to tell it. So for me, it just really took kind of like the everything being gone and then returning again. I just saw it in a different light that I hadn't seen it before. And I think I just, I suddenly knew exactly how I wanted to tell it.

- That's interesting, this idea that everything being gone can create the void that makes you wanna fill it, right. I think something similar happened for me actually, which was that as the book recounts, sort of, my story of getting sick, which the book recounts is a difficult one to tell because I didn't have a dramatic beginning to the illness. It kind of came in waves, starting when I had just graduated from college. But it was, in fact, after my mother died, I got very, very sick with a virus and I really never recovered. It was kind of like falling off a cliff suddenly. And I think into that absence came this desire to find language for what felt like a void that was unnavigable in some ways. And I think what happened for me as a writer was that I quickly began to feel that what was a biographical problem, which was that I was ill was actually also a literary or a linguistic problem because the nature of my illness was to resist being named or categorized. And so there was no way for me to experience my illness as almost anything but a kind of linguistic literary problem as well as a biographical one. And I think it was the moment I understood that what I was looking for was language, and that in the absence of language, I was radically alone, like many, many other people, ironically this invisible kingdom. That was the moment that in a way a kind of quest began, not only to get better, but actually to find the language for the experience that I had no language for.

- I'm so glad that you brought us to that question of language 'cause it's something that struck me about both of your books, trying to find language for something that the medical system maybe isn't recognized or has trouble recognizing, right? Or trying to find language for like the supernatural or an inexplicable force. And yeah, I'm just really curious about how that process took place for you. Like how do you find language for the things that resist it or for the things that don't have language yet?

- I guess one of the things that I really love doing when I'm writing is if there is, if there is a mystery living in a story, I try to resist the impulse of solving the mystery and instead of just sitting with the mystery. And so for me when I was recollecting stories for the book and thinking about what stories would go in there, one of the most amazing stories to me is that the night that my grandfather died, my grandmother had this dream and they had, she loved him very much and he was kind of a toxic man. And they were separated, but she had this dream that night and he came and they made love in her bed. And then when she woke up there was dirt all over the mattress and then there was mud in her underwear. And she somehow knew that that meant that her estranged husband had died. And so the next day when people told her she already knew, and she just repeated that story over and over again of the dream that she'd had. And to the day where when I was growing up, she would tell that story to us and she would say, "I knew at that moment what it was like to make love to a ghost." And so, you know what I mean? And so it's a story that's so beautiful and regardless of how the dirt ended up there, it's almost like if we try to solve the mystery of the earth on a mattress, then everything, the meaning is lost. So for me, I just try to preserve the meaning and sometimes that meant allowing myself to sit with the mystery.

- And it reminds me, in your case, Ingrid, of you talk also about kind of the artificial distinction between like fiction and non-fiction or like the true and the untrue. Does it play into that for you as well?

- Yeah, yeah. I think and when I first started to think about this book something that happened in writing circles was that I would be told, I would be writing a story about my grandfather and I would say people said that he could move clouds. And people would be very corrective to me about that. And they would say, no, that's fiction. And they would try to kind of try to make me write that way. And then in the beginning I had just arrived to the US, and I think that I, for a while thought that maybe I was wrong. So for a while I thought, yeah, maybe my life or what my family, our culture is fictional. But in the writing of the book, I started to think about the politics of what we call fiction and what we call non-fiction. And the politics has to do with who is the one who gets to say this is real and this is not, this is history and this is folklore, this is religion and this is whatever the other thing.

- Absolutely. And it feels like a political question, in your case too, Meghan, giving a name to here to , things that the body does, finding that name or sort of advocating for it. And so I'm curious, I'm also asking for a friend kind of thing in this situation 'cause I have a chronic illness and I've also tried to figure out how do I find the language to describe my own experience? Excuse me. So yeah, I'm just curious, like, how did you do that in your case?

- Yeah, well I got so wrapped up in what Ingrid was saying and thinking, it's interesting how there're overlaps in books that are so very different in some ways, but I think in other ways have a shared set of concerns about the work that language can do not only to name what might otherwise go unnamed and therefore either unnoticed, poorly understood or actually never even seen, but also how language is inherently in many cases political, right? So part of the work of describing that I'm doing in the book is not only explaining to myself what was happening, but using that act of explanation to start to try to make a larger social point, which is to ask why we actually put so little stock into the testimony of those who live with illness, right? That the language of people who are sick is often regarded as a kind of either degraded language or almost the language of people who are somehow infantalized by their illness, right? So in the medical system, patient's testimony is actually one of the least important factors in making a diagnosis. So there's even like a, you know, weight to various factors and of course lab tests in our biomedical age are the most important thing for many good reasons. But I became very, very interested in how did we get to a point where the person inhabiting the body became almost by definition an unreliable narrator. And was that an evolution that we knew we had embarked on, that we all wanted, that we were comfortable with, and what did it tell us about our society and how we think about health and illness and our own discomfort with, in particular illnesses that can't be resolved, that you can't muscle through, that you can't sort of just do it and come past it.

- I'm wondering too, how research plays into this, how building sort of the compendium of information that you give us. For both of you, maybe I'll ask this of you right now. Meghan these conversations that might happen between patients and doctors, these things that might be outside of the book form or not often attended to, as you're saying about patient testimony. What was it like kind of trying to gather research for this book and use your conversations with people to try to also bolster what you're talking about?

- Yeah, so I think in my case, as I just said, I got mysteriously ill, it took, if you can believe it, 15 years before I got any kind of diagnosis. And then I got a lot of diagnoses, so that was great. But the title, "The Invisible Kingdom" in the book is meant to evoke the fact that in fact the kinds of illnesses that I'm writing about are all too common. And in fact, autoimmune disease is on the rise in Western countries for reasons that are themselves poorly understood. But that rise is pretty well documented, right? So I was interested. The research came into the book because the very early, well, from the very beginning, I knew that I wasn't only telling my story, I wasn't actually particularly even that interested in my story, except insofar as it became this angle onto the problem of finding language for something that so many people were experiencing. I was interested in my story insofar as it helped animate this murky lived experience of people who often are not believed. So I knew from the beginning that research was really, really crucial because research was the way I would answer the questions that I had as a person to whom this happened to be happening, including why was it hard to be believed, why in an age where you can get a diagnosis for ice cream headache, it's called Sphenopalatine ganglion neuralgia, right, you can go get that, I couldn't get a diagnosis, right? Like it was really intellectually interesting. The other reason research was really clearly important to me was that as a person with an illness, I had been lurking on message boards as one does, as a 21st century patient. I was in all these groups. And a narrative, and it was a narrative, that I saw over and over again was a narrative of people saying, I have an autoimmune disease in which my immune system is attacking my body, and therefore something about my life must be wrong. I'm living an inauthentic life that is causing my immune system, which is supposed to defend me, to attack me. So me is what's wrong, right? And this seemed patently wrong to me, right? Because we know that there's a reason that these diseases are rising in western countries, there's theories that have to do with changes in the microbiome, chemicals, food, et cetera, et cetera. So I thought, okay, this is really interesting. All these people are individually telling themselves a story that in some sense the culture is feeding them. And it's a very common kind of story that we tell in this country, which is that you as an individual are responsible for your illness. But in this case, it's very clear that there are these social political, you know, underpinnings that we actually need to look at, this invisible kingdom as kind of the product, sorry, of a kind of a social problem. And also illness itself is not as isolating as it is. It's the thing that also connects us all, is our mortality and our fragility. Right? Does that make sense?

- Yeah, so thinking about how the research brings that collective story together in a certain kind of way.

- Yeah, exactly.

- Thank you so much for that. And I'm thinking about, you know, the collective story that you're telling Ingrid too, right? Largely a family story, but also beyond your family for sure, and maybe how research played into that, I'm curious.

- Yeah, the research was fascinating. And yeah, Meghan, as I was reading your book, I was also just really fascinated by all of the things that our books share and then so divergent at the same time. With research, something that happened was that I couldn't find what I was looking for very early on. And part of it is, for example, like I went to the village of Ocana which is where my family is from. And I was doing what I would think is kind of like the basic research of I'm just gonna get down the family tree and I'm gonna find the documents for everyone in the family. And I went to this place that was right next to the church, and they keep all the records of baptisms. And I just, I could find my mother and her parents. And then on each side what happened was that the husband or like the father would be, was born out of wedlock. And so then that meant that that document only had the mother's name. And so it was then became very difficult very quickly because I couldn't work my way up. And I kept asking for, I kept making approximations of, okay, so say that they got pregnant here, and then they were born here. And I just started to guess and just ask for more and more books. And I couldn't find answers to anything, but I just kept taking wild notes when something seemed similar. And I went back, like, I was just there for four days just asking for books. And at some point they gave me one of the oldest books that they had. And I opened it and I was looking at it and I was actually admiring this very beautiful calligraphy. And when I tilted up the book, the pages were not connected to the book itself and so it started to slide down. And then the paper grain just kind of tripped over itself, and it all just became a cloud of dust that just filled up the room. I like breathed it in. And for me it was just this metaphor of we are not in the record, like people like us are not in the record. And it just, that question or that moment led me to look into maybe older documents or just the history of colonization and what happened through that. With curanderos, it would've been that very early on during colonization there would be like the Spanish Inquisition. And so anybody who was practicing indigenous things that would be witchcraft and then you would be sent to be tortured. And so a lot of that went underground. So I just finally started to find the answers about, why is it secretive or why is there no history that I can look at? And inevitably it just led me to oral traditions and it led me to discover like, oh, that's where it lives. Like we're not in the record, but it lives in oral traditions and it lives in a different way. So I started to lean into that different history.

- I love that story, and I remember that moment from the book so well. And it made me think a lot about the book form, right? We're kind of at Lit Fest celebrating the book form together and thinking about what that can do. And so it made me think about what does it mean to bring these stories into the form of the book, right? And particularly in non-fiction. You're both coming from other genres, from fiction writing in your case and from poetry and journalism. What does it mean for you to work in non-fiction? I feel like we often ask, we say in poetry, what can poetry do in the world, what can fiction do in the world? But like, what can non-fiction and non-fiction book do in the world for you?

- Well, we were just talking about this a little bit, weren't we? It's interesting. So there was this moment when I walked out of a doctor's office on a kind of humid New York Day, and she had really patronized me and I was really suffering and I had high hopes for her. She was someone who'd been highly recommended to me. And she just kind of was like, well, maybe you just need to try hard. I can't even remember exactly what happened, but I came out and I started to weep and I just remember leaning against this very dusty car on the street and feeling as profoundly alone as I had ever felt. And in that moment, flashing on this image, it's not a lie to tell you this, of this invisible kingdom, right, of this idea that there were just many, many, as profoundly alone as this experience had made me feel, I was actually one of millions. And so for that reason, it became very important to try to tell this my own story and the research that I did in the form of a narrative. And in the form of a narrative in particular that would have the capaciousness to kind of problematize or into question other kinds of narratives that we told. And the reason I wanted to build a narrative of it was that it seemed that no one could, right? This was a story that no one wanted to hear and therefore was a story that I and others couldn't in fact tell. But interestingly, to tell it, I wrote the first chapter and then I was completely stuck for a year. And finally I realized I had to write some poems about the experience. And I began to write these lyric essays where there was no possibility of solving the mystery, the essays, the poems were about the language being incommensurate to the experience. And it was only after I wrote those poems and allowed myself to kind of wildly fail that I could go back to nonfiction, which had, at its heart this task of actually trying to communicate, right? Trying to say something. And something about the experience of writing the poems allowed me to find a narrative form in nonfiction that was truth telling and that told the truth about all that could not be said, right? Does that make sense? But hopefully in a way that also gives you a sense of urgency and propulsion that there is this mystery that we're after. But there's something about the non-fiction that interests me the most brings into it silences and like lacuna and ruptures and the cloud of dust and all that can't be found 'cause otherwise it's not true, right? So I had to discover that through playing with different forms and genres.

- I think for me, I guess there was one moment where I knew for sure that I had a book in my hands. And so it happened when my aunts, like my extended family found out that I had had amnesia like my mother and everyone got very excited. And then a few weeks after that, two of my aunts and then my mom had a dream where my, independently of each other, they just all dreamt that my grandfather came and said, I want my remains to be disinterred. And so, because it happened to three of them, and we say like, when you have a shared dream like this, it's kind of like a peer reviewed dream. So then that meant that we just, we were like, well we have to do it. And so we just bought tickets to go to Columbia and we were like, how do you disinter a body? Like what do we do with the body? Like we just had so many questions, but there was this like that, I just, I knew at that moment as I was getting on the plane and we were going to do this, I knew at that moment like, this is a book and it had to do with this receiving an errand from the dream world, like that concept to me was so fascinating. And I was always just really interested in the cycles in families, especially in mine. And I think for everyone, there's probably cycles within everyone's family where you live something out that maybe your mother lived out. And it's strange that it's repeating like that. Yeah so for me it was, I just couldn't, just after getting amnesia, I just, I had the hardest time just even understanding that my mother had amnesia as well and that like the two people that I knew had amnesia. So it was just, yeah. And so yeah, I think that, that was the moment where I just got so excited about the journey back and what it would mean to disinter this person that everything came from.

- I feel like at this point in the conversation, I really wanna ask about ghosts, something that comes up in both of these works. I also wanna say for those of us who are writing questions, I just wanna remind you to do that and I'll ask a few more questions of course. But please write down questions you might be interested in hearing the author's answer. And we'll collect those and in a few minutes, we'll ask them. But I have these two quotes and I have to read them back to you, forgive me. But you have this sentence or this phrase in the mannequin move clouds, you say the pliable texture of memory has its uses. It leaves breathing room for the ghosts. And Meghan, you have this sentence that you're talking about kind of at the nadir of your illness, this idea of like the ghost of your self kind of inhabiting you in some way. You say "ghosts haunt themselves into being." So I'm wondering what kind of ghosts have inhabited these books and what do you do with those ghosts once they arrive? I don't know if it's connected to this mystery, you know, or this kind of like the things that are difficult to language here, but what happens when a ghost is in the text or in the process of writing it maybe?

- Yeah, that's a great question. I've never been asked this question. I think for me writing, maybe it's because I'm a poet. Poets are always disappointed in the poem, right? Poem is never what you think poetry is. And so for me, any act of writing is an act of failure, the sort of failure to catch up with thought, the thought trying to catch up with the word on the page, the pencil, the typing. And I think of each book as being a kind of palimpsest, that term that describes ancient tablets that would have the mark of writing below the surface, previous writing, other writings, perhaps other hands writing. And so the ghosts, literally that ghost is the ghost of a self that I had lost in the book, but I couldn't write the book without animating that loss. But I also, I couldn't reanimate the loss, right? So there's a kind of paradox or failure there. So I'm very interested in my writing in looking at where we usually paper over loss or we paper over ghosts and hauntings and we put them behind the wall. And I kind of wanna welcome the ghosts in, I think, the ghosts that trouble narrative, that trouble tidiness, that trouble the home and ask what happens when we look at them. Yeah, that's an abstract answer, but I think that's part of what's going on. And the palimpsest is connected to it, right? It's like this idea that there's, we're all haunted by ourselves in the past and the writing that's come before us, the thinking that's come before us, the thinking around us.

- I think that I just, I felt the most like a ghost during that time when I had amnesia. And part of it was that I was walking around a space that was supposedly mine, like my apartment and I couldn't recognize anything. And I would take journals from the bookshelf and open it and couldn't recognize the handwriting, but I knew that it was supposed to be my handwriting. Or I would look at, take out the ID and see my name and read my name a hundred times and it still wouldn't be familiar to me. When I was writing the book, I was just fascinated by that feeling of being suddenly outside of your life. And for me it, I would've guessed before having amnesia that that would be a very sad, or I don't know, tragic or distressing experience. And I was the happiest that I've ever been in my life. I've never been happier than when I had amnesia. And I think that it was just this, I had no, you know how you just sit and you're like, I can't believe that I said that at that party. And you're thinking about a party that happened 10 years ago. When you have amnesia, you have none of that. So you're just kind of sitting and it was this, it was kind of waking up into this state of astonishment. I was just astonished by everything. There would be sunlight coming through the window and I would just kind of be losing my mind. And it was this kind of, this act of being present that I still kind of try to hold onto or I try to kind of call back. But it's very difficult when you have a memory 'cause you're thinking about that party 10 years ago, you know? But I think that there are many ghosts in the book. Probably the ghost of my grandfather is one that is throughout. Like he appears in dreams. He's someone that touched so many people's lives in a good way, in a bad way. And I also kind of grew up, my mother would do, sometimes I would see her do exorcisms and that would be something that was part of my language kind of growing up, having seen, yeah, so many, many types of ghosts and hauntings.

- I'm thinking about how both of these books, of course have illness and healing both deep within them. And I wanna ask a question about healing, like if that can happen in this work, especially maybe it's inviting the ghosts in or like letting them inhabit the work in some kind of way. I've been asked about my own work, was this healing for you, was this therapeutic for you? And I always kind of resist that question, so I'm not sure that I'm asking that. But in the context of talking about curanderos or in the context of talking about how we can make our medical system better, what does it mean to heal for you, for this work maybe? That's a big question.

- Yeah, I'll answer it. I think that sometimes healing is just sometimes living with whatever happened to you. You know, sometimes healing is not returning to a place where before something happened, but just kind of making room around, you know, whatever happened that is now different. So kind of growing around a wound or learning to carry something. I think from just watching my mother and the people who would come to see her, one of the most, you know, the things that she was the most popular for was that she would fill these like soda bottles with water and she would breathe prayers into it depending on what someone wanted. So there were a lot of people with broken heart that would come she would breathe prayers into this water to help them with the broken heart. And it was, I don't know what was happening, right? But I would see the change in people as they came back. And you know, whatever was happening, the water was doing something, right. And as a teenager, like any teenager, my sister and I would just make fun of my mom all the time for this. And we would just be mocking her and we would blow into each other's cup of coffee and we'd be like, you'll get an A in math today. And we just, you know, and then at some point my mother gave us water for healing and for some reason, she first gave it to my dad 'cause she said that we all had to take the water. So my dad did it first. For some reason, he went to the bathroom and threw up and we were like, that's really strange. And then she gave the water to my sister and my sister was just kind of like, fine, I'll take it. Are you happy now? And she took it and then she had to go to the bathroom and throw up. And then I was like, I don't understand, like, what is going on? And then I took the water and I threw up. You know, so there's, and I like after that, like whatever happened, I have no language for, and it's kind of, it's still unnamed, but I know that after there was this feeling of release, and again, like right, you sit with the mystery of that. Like I'm not sure what it does, but I know that there's something to someone caring for you in that way, or there's some wounds that we have that are so deep that nothing can touch. And maybe someone breathing into water and a prayer into water and giving you that is a way of touching that and we respond maybe. So yeah, that's my answer about healing.

- Thank you.

- It's hard to say anything after that, that was just yes, all of that, that's amazing. You know, I think what I can say is that I always resisted, or maybe still do when, when people say, oh, was it therapeutic for you? But I actually wanna say that in some way, writing this book was therapeutic for me. I mean, that wasn't why I wrote it. I wrote it to try to find a container for this experience that I thought needed to be made legible. And as it turned out, finding a story where there was no story was an incredibly transformative experience for me. And actually not just finding it, but then hearing from readers, which as a poet I don't always hear from readers. One does a little bit, but poetry for me is really different. It's just much more internal. It's almost like meditation. It's just about language itself. But there was something dynamic and kind of transaction, not transactional, but social actually in the experience of publishing this book that has been really, really interesting to sit with and think about. And I think it speaks to why we're here tonight, which is just that story. There's a reason we tell stories. Stories are healing, stories told well, told honestly, told bravely, told with humor, told subversively, we need stories in order to live as Joan Didion said, in a slightly different way. But I think too that there's a way in which writing and reading can be forms of ritual. And you were talking about ritual, and I think that for me, that act of sitting quietly in a room present with something is an act of ritual. And one thing that was really true when I was sick, and I heard this from many of the people I interviewed for my book, was that they felt they couldn't begin healing or even adjusting to being a chronically ill person because so much of their energy was dedicated to persuading other people of the reality of their disease. And one person said, I can't adjust to my illness because I have to make everyone else believe it's there in the first place. And so energetically, if that's what you're doing, you never are able to get to the healing. And so I think there was a way in which the book was that act of persuasion that then sort of facilitated that too, if that makes sense.

- Thank you so much. I think I'll ask one more question and then we can have some audience questions. So if whoever's in charge of the basket wouldn't mind collecting and bring it up in this direction, if there is a person in charge of the basket. Do we have a basket person? We could self appoint. Oh, thank you so much. If you wouldn't mind collecting those and bringing those up, that would be wonderful. Just walking through the aisles and grabbing anybody who has a question for us tonight. But yeah, in the meantime, I think I'll ask us one more thing to bring us a little bit full circle with, you know, I asked you at the very beginning like what was, what started this, you know, what made you have to write this book? I also wanna know what got you through the hard work of writing it? What brought you to this place, you know? What was maybe the one thing, even if there were many things, that allowed this work to be possible.

- It took me 10 years to write my book. And the way I got through it was that every day would sit down at my desk when the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC started. And the little like jingle to the music would just get me going. So that's the facetious but true answer. It wasn't candles or discipline. It was like, okay, Brian Lehrer is starting, I've gotta get to my desk. But I think the deeper answer, and this is something I say to my students all the time, 'cause they're like, well, maybe this is a book or maybe I wanna write this book. And, you know, having a book, writing a book, I was like having a book, it's like having a child, you live intensely with it. It takes you out of the world around you. It takes you away from the sunlight coming through the window. It takes you into its own world in which, for me, at least when I'm writing a book, it's like I'm walking through the world and debris is coming at me that suddenly I'm like, that debris is related and that, and that and that, and the world starts to make sense in the sort of scope of this story. So you have to just be obsessed with your book, I mean, to the detriment of even yourself and other aspects of your life, I think. And in my case, that obsession was, I felt that we were ignoring the lived reality of millions and millions of people. And I felt an incredible, it was my duty in some sense to try to animate that experience, explain why we were ignoring it, and hopefully try to, you know, through the power of story, facilitate a conversation and start making change. There was a kind of end point for me in that.

- I love this idea about obsession. I think that's a beautiful way to put it. I think my own obsession or the thing that got me through it was just thinking that I hadn't so much seen curanderos in non-fiction, that I had seen them in fiction and loved those books. And I just really wanted to see that in non-fiction. Facetiously baths for me were the thing. I had all of these bath bombs that were amazing. But I would, a lot of... I have like this tray and I would bring the computer into the bathtub and write in the bathtub. Which if it's not connected, if it falls, you'll be... You won't die but you will feel like the shock of it. So I did kind of research it and was ready for that.

- I've wondered this for a long time. So I'm glad now I know.

- If it's not plugged in, you'll be fine, but it will hurt.

- As writing does.

- So that got me through.

- That's great. Thank you so much. We have some great questions here. Thank you all so much for sending these up. First that folks have, what is the biggest challenge about writing non-fiction and your up, sorry, about two biggest challenge about writing non-fiction about your own experience. What made you choose non-fiction rather than a fictionalized form?

- Yeah, well, in my case, it was really important to bear witness to reality, a reality that I felt was going ignored. And so it felt like I had to bring the full weight of reporting and research and my own experience and the sort of reportage on myself to do that. I think the hardest thing in a way, from a technical point of view when you're writing non-fiction is that, about yourself, is that you are yourself in the present as the author creating the book, and you're writing about a past self who does not know what you now know. And you want to, on the one hand, be true to that self and enact that self, but to pretend you know nothing of what you now know would also be false and dissatisfying. And so it took me, I would say like about a year to find the voice and the structure that was capacious enough to allow me to both inhabit that prior self who did not know what was wrong and was desperately searching for answers, but also be able to pivot to this present day self who had done eight years of research talking to like leading scientists in the country and interviewing a hundred people with illness and reading everything I could read. And I had to figure out how it would be persuasive to the reader and not disorienting for me to go from, the state of not knowing that it was trying to evoke and summon up to this kind of expertise. And that was the hardest thing to figure out, like kind of from a technical point of view.

- Yeah. I would agree with that. I guess for me the story was so good already that like even if I wanted to embellish to make it better, I wouldn't even know what to do. You know, like it's just, it's already just so, like every element of it, I'm like, that is great storytelling. Like, you know, whoever was in charge of this amazing. But I think for me trying to put into language what amnesia was like, was probably the hardest part, trying to kind of get across what is the state where you don't know who you are at all and you can't remember your parents, and like what is that state of being and how do I put that into language?

- Thank you. We have a question from Meghan. How does the process of writing about grief differ from writing about chronic illness or illness that doesn't result in death, like non terminal illness? How can one through literature grapple with terminal illness and what's the difference of doing that with chronic illness, I suppose?

- Yeah, I mean, as far as I knew, I did not have a terminal illness, right? So I don't know them much about writing through terminal illness, except insofar as this illness that I have will be with me till I die and might contribute to my death. But so the difference in fact for me, with chronic illness and grief was that there was a kind of propulsive narrative element for this book that there wasn't in grief, which is that in grief you're in it and it's very intense and you're actually waiting in some ways for it to ebb. So in my previous work of non-fiction, I wrote about grief after the death of my mother when she was 55 and sort of chronicled a year of living with very, very intense grief. And so that book was really challenging to write because in a way it was sort of had an anti narrative, both books do, but this one in that book, you're waiting to go from intensity to kind of a release of that intensity, but it didn't have like a dramatic ending. The ending was kind of like, I feel a little better now. Whereas in this book, there really was this search for an answer to what was wrong, and there's a way in which I get that answer. It turns out to be much more complicated than I thought it was going to be. And it turns out that the quest I was on was the wrong quest in some sense. But actually the more I thought about this book, the more I realized this was a book that actually did have a kind of dramatic arc, even though part of what I'm writing against are illness narratives that have like a dramatic reveal in which you recover. Because in my book, I don't recover. What I learn is how to live with a body that is imperiled, you know?

- This is a question for Ingrid. When telling the stories of others in combination with yourself, how do you balance staying true to their experience? How do you stop your biases and views from perhaps changing what others felt and saw?

- I really enjoy writing a scene out as I remember, and then calling that person on the phone and saying, this is what I think and this is what I think happened and this is what I think, you know, about why you were doing that. And then the person will usually have something to say about that and they'll be like, you're completely wrong. That is not what happened. These were my intentions, I was going through this. And then what I like to do is to then introduce that into what I've already written. 'Cause I don't really believe that anybody holds the true account of something that happened, but I think maybe we get closer to a truer account when there's multiple versions of what happened and memory is so pliable and so personal and emotional actually that what we may remember just may have to do with what we were living through at that time specifically. And I love to insert those complications into the text. And sometimes that would mean having really difficult conversations with family, what I would be talking about difficult times and if there was any kind of like harm doing or wrongdoing, then I would have to be upfront about what I thought about that. But as part of my own process for non-fiction, I feel that if I am going to say something in the book, that I would rather have it be a conversation first before I write it. So if I'm not willing to have that conversation, then for me, it feels like I haven't earned the, I don't know, what it takes to be able to put it down.

- Thank you. For both of you, what was the most effective kind of encouragement you received that helped you finish your book?

- Hmm. That's a good question. I don't know. I mean, I had small children and they kept saying, when are you gonna finish your book and play with us? So, I dunno if it was, it was a kind of encouragement, but they still are like, do you remember that year when Daddy took care of us? Yes, I do remember that year. Yeah, maybe that probably is truthfully the strongest encouragement I had.

- I was writing a lot of the book, a big bulk of the book during pandemic, and I'm friends with , and he was writing his novel that is coming out soon. And we were just getting on Zoom every once in a while, and every time when one of us would hit some kind of milestone, we would send the other a bottle of wine and then we would, you know, get together and kind of celebrate. And we just did that at different moments throughout. Yeah, so I would say that was really, that was one of, that was like a, such an encouraging part of it.

- That sounds much better. I'm gonna ask my children to send me bottles of wine.

- This writer says, thank you both. This is a question for Ingrid. What does it mean for you to be writing about your family in English? Did you encounter any interesting translation problems?

- I did all of the time. You know, what was fascinating is that when I first like, I think for the first couple of days of amnesia, I did not remember that I spoke Spanish. And so it was only after my phone rang and I looked at my phone and it said Mother, so I knew that it was my mother calling. And then she started to talk in Spanish. And I was just like, I can understand Spanish, this is amazing. And yes, Spanish is my first language. I think that I'm always trying to, when I'm writing, what I like to do is to have language seem like it's, you know, on the outside English, but on the inside Spanish. So Spanish in wolf's clothing is what I like to say. And I try to do a lot of transliteration and I think the language is more interesting that way. So I try to think of everything in Spanish and then do a very quick internal translation and just do, kind of try to do the wrong translation. I try to do kind of like a clumsy translation. And I find that there's a lot of poetry that comes from that, from just doing it wrong.

- Thank you. Thank you both from the pre-health community at Amherst. This work is so very important. This is just a thank you. And could Meghan speak about long COVID and its connection to your book?

- Absolutely. Yeah, so I was, I don't know, close to being done with my book when the pandemic started. And in fact, part of my book was already about, in particular, autoimmune disease and other diseases that are, some researchers increasingly think are what they call infection associated chronic illness. So the kind of illness that I'm most specifically writing about are illnesses that through a kind of accident of biography and environment, including exposure to viruses, your body doesn't respond the way others do. And instead of recovering, you kind of take a hit, right? And you don't quite get better. So I was talking to virologists and they started saying, you know, pandemic's coming and there's gonna be a big problem potentially because we don't know anything about what this virus does to the portion of people who may have long-term effects. So that's just a long way of saying that. Early on I started lurking on message boards and kind of looking to see what's going on? Is anyone saying they didn't get better? And by April, end of April, I was seeing people say I got sick in March and I'm supposed to be, you know, the whole idea then was it was 14 days. And you know, I'm on day 36 and I'm still sick and this is what I'm experiencing. So I started reporting, I started following people and talking to them and began writing a piece that I then published in The Atlantic, which was one of the first pieces about long COVID a long feature where I followed people for the first year of what was going on. And basically for me, it presented this challenge, which was that it's so tied into what I was writing about, but I wanted to have a really ethical relationship to it, and not to kind of like tuck it in as a reason my book was timely and to just sort of say, and now long COVID. So it really took about an extra 18 months with the book just to report out that long COVID section that's a half a chapter. But I felt that ethically as a non-fiction writer, I needed to really, really spend time with this and think about how long COVID mapped on to what I was already writing about, how it was different. And what I can say is that essentially it mapped very, you know, completely onto what I was already writing about, which is this idea that just for some people, you are genetically susceptible to not recover fully from a virus, you know, that might be Epstein-Barr virus, that might be other viruses too, but in particular Epstein-Barr and SARS Cov2 seem to trigger this kind of long-term inflammatory reaction. Or also maybe there's viral persistence in a more significant cohort of people than other viruses. So I had the feeling a little bit of being like the first at an accident scene. You know, it was not a good feeling, but it felt like, okay, I'm here and I've gotta stay here and really see this through.

- There's a couple questions about audience in here or like thinking about how you approach the folks who are reading the book. One is, do you prefer to think of writing as a process for yourself or something towards others? And the other is, when writing your stories, do you first think of who your audience is or does that come later in the process? So you can answer either or both.

- I mean, all of the, you know, like everything, all of those things in a way. I think for me, poetry is very, when I'm writing poetry, I'm not very much thinking of audience because one's tastes in reading poetry are so singular and idiosyncratic that it's much more about language as a material and thinking about what can't be said in other mediums. But in a book like this, I definitely was thinking about audience and I had a very specific thought, which was that I didn't want this book to be read only by people who are chronically ill. It's very much for people who are chronically ill. I really want chronically ill people to read it. But I also very much wanted people in the medical establishment, loved ones, caretakers, people who have no connection to chronic. Because chronic illness is such a major part of American life at this point, even before COVID and now more than ever, that I had to really think about audience because I had to think, how is the person who's not having this experience, how am I gonna make them interested? How do I ask them to spend their time thinking about this? And that's where kind of my work as an editor came in 'cause I had to put on my editor hat and think, okay, how do I pull them along and how do I edit my work to do that? What about you?

- I was thinking about, I think that I wanted to tell the book like how my family tells stories. So I constantly in writing the book, if I ever got stuck, I would just call my mother and be like, can you tell me a story? And I would pay attention to what she does when she does it orally. And she's an amazing storyteller and probably the person that I learned about writing the most was from her. And I'm just really fascinated by the structure that she uses. And so in this book that was something that I was thinking about. So I think that I just wanted the reader to feel as though you're listening in as my family is, the style in which we would tell it and the way that the story shifts and turns. It's very much how we would say it out loud to each other. Yeah, so for this book, I really wanted that feeling there.

- Thank you. I think I'll ask one more question. We have time for one more. And I wanna say before I ask that question, after we're done, we'll move some tables outright there and we'll do a book signing. And if you'd like to get a book signed, or even if you can't get a book tonight, because I know we're out of Meghan's books right now, I'm sure we can find something for you to sign and we can put it in the book later when you order it. So don't be shy to come up and say hello and get something signed. So we'll line up in that aisle right there and I'll ask our last question. So at what point do you discover or understand the purpose of the story you're trying to tell? At what point in the process of writing these books?

- I think probably at the end, probably I reached the end the first time, the first draft and understood what it was about. Sadly that happens to me. That happened with my novel as well. I had to reach the end of the book and then say like, oh, it's about this. Yeah, I don't know, that's just how I work I think.

- Yeah. Very similar. So this book took me a long time to write, partly 'cause I was sick, partly cause I had children in the middle and my father died, but it was with me for a long time and I was thinking about it for I'd say eight years. And in about a year, seven and a half, I had a moment and I went racing downstairs from my little attic office to my husband who was having his coffee. And I said, "I know what my book is about." And he said, "what?" And I said, "uncertainty." And he was like, "I dunno if that's gonna sell." But I really did. I was like, the moment where I was like, oh, right. I thought I was writing toward an answer, but actually I'm writing toward a proliferation of possibilities and uncertainty. And in fact, my book is about what the 19th century poet John Keith calls negative capability, which is the term he uses to describe, he's trying to figure out what makes a great artist great as opposed to the much more full ranks of the good. And so in trying to figure that out, he writes to his brother and he says, I think basically what makes a great artist great is that they have negative capability. They're capable of remaining in uncertainties and they don't have what he calls this irritable reaching after fact. And it's such a great line. And it was really in that morning when I thought, oh, right, that's what this is about. It's about learning to live in uncertainties and what happens when you realize that your quest, which is to find answers was the wrong quest. And the real goal of your quest was actually to become educated about. It's like your amnesia story, the power of the sun coming through the window even as you're suffering. The now even without answers and what would happen if we all undertook the radical act of being in uncertainties together.

- What a wonderful place to end. Thank you both so much for this conversation. Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you so much.

 

Transcript of Readings by Amherst Alumni Authors and The Common Student Interns

- Welcome, everyone. Thank you for coming out on this beautiful snowy day for attending the eighth annual LitFest and the third annual reading by Amherst College alums and "The Commons" Literary Publishing interns. This is our first in-person one so that's very exciting. I'm Sophia Belimova, Literary Editorial Fellow at "The Common" and Class of 2022, and I'm excited to have everybody here. The way this event is going to go is we will hear from students and alums in alternating order, and then I have a couple of minutes at the end for a brief Q and A. Afterwards, there's going to be a book signing right there behind the periodical shelf. To attend other LitFest events, please visit amherst.edu/about/literary-amherst/litfest. There you can view the full schedule and register for all the wonderful events happening on campus. You can also buy books by visiting the LitFest website or get them from Amherst Books. Finally, I want to thank President Michael Elliot for supporting LitFest and the wonderful folks on the LitFest Planning Committee for helping us put together these fantastic events. Amherst has long been known for its literary history, including writers, scholars, editors, and is affectionately known by many as the writing college. This afternoon I have the pleasure of presenting readings by Amherst alums who have gone on to become acclaimed authors and brilliant current students of the college. All students reading today are interns at "The Common", our professional literary magazine that publishes contemporary writing with a strong sense of place. So without further ado, let's hear from our first reader, Olive.

- I don't how how high it's gonna get. I'm Olive. I am a senior here at Amherst. I study English and SWAGs, which is our kind of fun name for gender studies. I am what's called the Wood Fellow with "The Commons", so it's kind of just a senior intern position. I help out Sophia, who is an even senior or non-intern, as well as the current other interns. And I'm gonna be reading a portion from my senior thesis, which is loosely about kind of things and the ways that we relate to them as part of relating to other people in place. So it doesn't have a title yet, it should soon, but. There's a gravel trail around the lake and the air fills with the sound of our footsteps crunching on it. Logos from the souls of our shoes stamp the soft parts of the dirt and a thick summer green sticks to the sides of mountains. Ferns, a confessional, is what I would call this if it were a poem. Around the corner a patch of them comes into view, light falling across spines and spores, the same angular way it does a chlorinated swimming pool. "Glory be to God for dappled things", the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, "for multicolored skies, the luminescent skin of trout in a stream, the light wings of finches." I grab a fern at the base of its stem and tug. It snaps off. "Tree", I say and hold it up. It looks like a balsam fur or a white pine or any other kind of evergreen. I run a hand at the length of the fern. "Bush," I say. In my fingers is the cluster of leaves I have broken off, which hold their shape as long as I pinch my fingers. Spaghetti. The bear stem in my other hand wiggles like an al dente noodle. Confetti. I toss the broken fern into the air and its pieces fall like paper from a cannon on New Year's Eve. Have you ever walked down a busy street in a city on the first day of January? The sidewalk then is really what I picture when someone says the word dappled. It's gray surface strewn with colorful shards of paper and a faint dusting of gun powder. Ingredients for celebration. Tree, bush, spaghetti, confetti. The truth is on that walk, I repeat the movements over and over until I pick at least one fern from every patch we pass and the gravel behind us is spotted with broken bits of them. Confession is a funny thing because it never absolves you of everything you want it to, as sorry as you might be. Years later, I lead a group of young children down the same trail. There's a list of facts I've learned to tell them. Those things lining the stems of ferns are not leaves, but fronds like on a palm tree. And ferns are one of the oldest plant species on earth. They grew before the first dinosaurs evolved and in some places keep growing up to 10 feet tall like trees, but somehow they have learned the sequence too. "Tree, bush, spaghetti, confetti," I hear behind me. There are green fronds scattered along the path. "Please don't pick them", I tell them again and again while we walk. Ferns don't like to become spaghetti. They ask how I know. Praise is the final line of Hopkins' poem.

- Beautiful. Thank you so much, Olive. I'm gonna introduce our first alumni author. Ted Conover, class of 1980 is the author most recently of "Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge", one of the New Yorkers best books of 2022. His other books include "Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing" which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and "Rolling Nowhere", based on his Amherst thesis research. Conover has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and written for publications including "The New Yorker", "The New York Times Magazine," and "Harpers". So let's hear from Ted Conover.

- Thank you, Sophia. Thank you, everybody. I am very happy to be back at Amherst. I'm proud to have a long association with "The Common" and it's great to see people in person, talking about writing. This book is about five years of my part-time living in a remote part of Colorado where people buy five acre plots of land for very little money, maybe three, four, five, $6,000 and live on a shoestring in very challenging circumstances. I am from Colorado. I had no idea this kind of place existed until a sister of mine sent me some photos and I got curious, how do you live out there, who lives there, why do they endure these hardships? And I volunteered for a local group out there that started a rural homeless shelter years ago when at this time of year unhoused people were freezing to death, and more recently started a rural outreach program to keep these off-grid people from becoming homeless. The goal is to keep them where they prefer to be. So, the book describes my getting to know people, getting to learn about them from them, and I'm gonna read from a passage that begins on a day when I volunteered in town for La Puente. The pandemic meant that clients at La Puente's Alamosa Food Bank could no longer come in and browse the shelves. Rather, they lined up outside and then one at a time waited to be served. The food bank, put out a call for some extra hands. I signed up for a slot, others did too, including La Puente's Director of Outreach, Callie Adams. Before the doors opened, I helped unload a van that had brought donated produce from Walmart and other local businesses, including boxes of melons, lettuce and rotisserie chickens, cooked but now frozen. Then I started packaging grocery bags of potatoes and onions and placing carts of them near the table set up at the front door, Callie staffed the table at the door, signing people in and then sharing their orders with me and other volunteers who filled them. Most of the clients had been there before, they could come once a week, but early in the afternoon, a first timer, a young man wearing a big backpack said he had just arrived in town and was looking for "snacks." We had a few things that qualified, packets of cookies, day old pastries, yogurts. A friendly female volunteer asked if he knew his way around. He replied aggressively saying that he'd already heard about camping by the river but didn't plan on it because quote, "I hate homeless people." Next, Callie took over explaining that she needed to sign him in. "Can't I just take those snacks?", he asked gesturing at some, "As soon as we get you into the system", she said, "it'll just take a minute." He began digging in his heels, said he didn't want to answer questions. A lot of activity on our side of the table kind of stopped as we waited to see how much of a problem he was going to be. Callie stayed perfectly even in her manner. "First name, last name?" He was Benjamin Franklin he said. He was born on today's date 200 years ago. His first language was Russian and his ethnicity was purple. I felt myself getting annoyed at the way he appeared to be trying to provoke Callie, and at his disrespect for the simple process. He was after all about to get food for free. I was wondering whether Callie might tell him to leave, whether there might be a scene and if volunteers like me might need to back her up. But we took our cues from her and she was unshakable, not challenging anything he said. After he finally received his "snacks" and went on his way, I asked Callie about it. "How'd you stay so calm?", I asked, truly curious. "I might have lost my temper." "I just don't react to snarky answers", she said, "I taught high school for too many years. Obviously he has mental health issues." She explained how she trained her AmeriCorps volunteers to deal with this kind of situation. "It's hard for them because often they want to engage. They have a lot of ideals, but this is not the right person to engage with. They're not assholes, they're just in crisis. You have to repeat that to yourself." She went on, "When they're personally attacking you, demanding service from you in a violent way, that's yelling at you. Otherwise they're yelling to you because they're frustrated and in crisis. There are a lot of people who come in very angry, not at us, but at the situation they're in." I thought about that for some time. Not reacting felt unsatisfying to me, like tamping down a natural response. But then I pictured Callie in a classroom and thought of the way student misbehavior could be unrelated to a particular teacher. In that kind of institutional setting, it wasn't always personal. Some students were just going to act up, and I could see that the humble storefront of the food bank was an institutional setting of a sort. We had what he wanted and that gave us power over him. That seemed to be what he was reacting to. Callie's experience had given her wisdom and it was of a piece with an ideology that underlay much of what La Puente did, which was in my own paraphrasing, "you can't really know their pain, so don't judge." But what about judging? Wasn't forming opinions part of what made us human? I grappled with this problem on the flats, that's this high alpine plane that I lived on, where I was surveying my neighbors about whether they'd gotten a COVID-19 stimulus payment from the government and what they decided to do with it. This was a happy subject for most of them since life tended to bring few of these windfalls. I started with the Grubers. This is mom, dad, five daughters, homeschoolers, and I rented a corner of their lot for three years for my little camper trailer. Most of the many windfall went their, yeah. Like many Americans, they had received stimulus payments totaling $3,200. Most of the many windfall went to paying off debt, especially to Sam and Cindy whom they still owed for their property, but also to their neighbor "Car Wash" Kevin, who'd sold them an old Toyota Sedan on credit. Then they bought a new generator and wood for an addition to the house Frank was building. Finally, they bought computer equipment including a special printer and supplies and a laptop. Stacy described this to me in terms of making money. The equipment would allow her to sell custom vinyl stickers to friends or to strangers at crafts fairs. But from the custom Broncos T-shirt she'd made for Frank, I could see that some of its value was in pleasure, in things they made for themselves. Another neighbor showed me the shiny used ATV he had bought. I knew that his household had some debt and no savings. I brought the subject up with Matt Little, this is the outreach worker who showed me how to do the job, when we met for coffee. Immediately he saw why I was interested. It's about toys versus what you need, right? He himself had spent $500 on an assay fee to learn about how much precious metal was in an ore sample. He was a mining hobbyist, I guess you could say. Ore sample. As well as $3,500 on a "shaker table." It's like a big sluice box to help in extracting ore from rocks. By contrast, his mining partner, Luke, had bought a $500 welding rig, which he don't need, and a dredge, a floating machine that sucks up silt from the bottom of a creek while the operator stands nearby in the water. But none of their mining claims had a real creek where they could use it. And it was hard to picture Luke in the water. Yet there's a lot to be said about spending for pleasure and people on the flats had precious few opportunities for it. That spring, Stacy and Frank had met a family that arrived the past year from Pennsylvania and lived in a trailer about a mile away. The family had become briefly famous when their oldest child, a son, 15, disappeared one afternoon during the winter. He was a handsome boy. When the sheriff's office posted a notice announcing that he was missing, someone commented that he looked like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. There was speculation that he might have met someone online who'd driven in and picked him up. The sheriff's office and many neighbors joined in the search for the boy. At first, they focused on the canyon along the river. When that was unsuccessful, the high school principal loaned the sheriff's office a drone. Together, they used it to buzz around various prairie dwellings, abandoned and otherwise. The sound of the drone prompted the boy to open the door of the trailer where he'd been squatting to see what was going on. The drones camera spotted him. Deputies arrived soon after. The boy had since gone back east to live with his grandmother. Apparently he had had differences with his stepmom in the trailer on the flats, but Stacy and Frank, in the course of joining the search, should become friendly with the family. So one day when I was visiting, Stacy asked me if I, as a volunteer for La Puente, would consider driving the dad into Alamosa. His truck was outta commission, but he'd received his $1,400 stimulus payment and there were things he wanted to buy. I went there directly to talk with him about it. The family's trailer was improbably small, hardly larger than my camper trailer, and I could barely believe that five people, well now four, live there. In place of a lawn, it was surrounded by a sea of discarded clothes. I tapped my horn and the dad came outside. He wanted to buy a new go-kart and motorbike from Tractor Supply in Alamosa he said. They were holding the items for him and he was eager to go ASAP, and he didn't trust his truck to get him into town and back. I thought a go-kart? I told him I needed to check my schedule, but would let him know the next morning. I returned home to think about it. This did not seem to be an errand that would rise to the level of free help from La Puente. It would require a commitment of probably half a day and all for a couple of things that by most people's standards were not necessary purchases and possibly not even wise ones given the family's modest resources. I made myself dinner, drank a beer, and decided not to do it. But later, as I lay in bed, I changed my mind. It was actually something Zara had said that made me. After moving from the prairie into town, she told somebody that she'd avoided things like vodka because, quote, "I got six kids. I can't afford to have that. I gotta pay for water and take care of them. That's why." Whereas others, they spend their money on the wrong things because that's what make them feel better. Go-karts and mini bikes weren't the same as vodka, but they did seem to fall into the same category of possibly unwise purchases that would make a person feel better. In the morning, I texted Stacy to tell the guy I could pick him up around lunchtime, and that's not the end of the story, but it's where I will end today. Thank you.

- Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing that. Now we're gonna hear from Sophie, one of "The Commons" interns.

- Hi everyone, I'm Sophie. I'm a sophomore English major and I've been working at "The Commons" since this past summer. I do a bunch of things, but one of the main things is writing our weekly newsletter, which some of you might be subscribed to. So I'm going to read a non-fiction piece that I wrote over the summer for the magazine, and it's about my experience moving to Tokyo, Japan last fall. It's called "Inconvenience Store." The superiority of Japanese convenience stores, conbini, is no longer a secret to the world. Although most residents of Japan consider these corner stores an unremarkable albeit essential element of daily life, the rapid spread of Japanese soft power in the last decade has elevated conbini from a matter of insider knowledge to a must-see attraction. Prior to Japan's strict COVID-19 travel restrictions, tourists would flock to Tokyo's conbini to bask in the novelty of a 7-Eleven that boasts fresh salmon onigiri and matcha purin instead of slurpees and $1 coffee. Popular chains like 7-Eleven and Family Mart are clean, well-stocked, and seldom overcrowded. However, there is one convenience store chain lesser known to foreigners despite its ubiquity in Tokyo: Don Quijote, often shortened to Donki. I first visited one of its stores when my family moved to Tokyo last year, returning after nearly 20 years to the city where I was born. When I returned home during winter break, I did my best to avoid entering Donki, such was my aversion to its garish yellow branding and overflowing displays. My dad shared my apprehension, so we would wait outside and twiddle our thumbs whenever my mom wanted to stop in and buy something. She would insist that their prices were unmatched and exit the store with a highly specific kitchen tool that we apparently needed desperately. I succeeded in evading Donki until the end of my visit, when I discovered that no other store sold my preferred face wash. As soon as I stepped foot in the store, my senses were inundated. Don Quijote makes no attempt to follow the traditional model of neat and unobtrusive conbini; its aisles were bathed in flashing lights and lined with neon signs brandishing sale prices. My head spun as I followed arrows pointing to various products, and I soon abandoned my mission to find face wash, instead pausing every few feet to gawk at gimmicks like teeth wipes and heated eye masks. In addition to the visual excesses, the incessant noise created an atmosphere closer to a nightclub than a retail store. Countless miniature video screens played advertisements on a perpetual loop, their tinny voices shouting at me to buy this mascara and try this muscle ache cream. My temples began to throb and I grew frantic as I stumbled past the video screens, struggling to remember the one product I needed. Thank you.

- Thank you, Sophie. Our next alumni author, in addition to being a Choral Society alum and former Sabrina Marti Dumas Amherst Class of 1998 is also a mom, teacher, and creative entrepreneur from New Orleans. She's passionate about promoting childhood literacy and for the past 15 years, she's worked with children and teachers across the country to encourage a love of reading both in and out of the classroom. Her stories combine science, humor, family, and magic, while adding much needed diversity to children's books landscape. Her latest book, "Wildseed Witch", is the start of a middle grade series that explores the impact of social media and the fear of getting in touch with ones greatness. The second Wildseed Witch book "Charmed Life" will be released on May 2nd, 2023. All Right, Marti.

- So wait a a minute, I gotta check, like Sabrinas still exists, right? You were so, okay. All right, sweet. Excellent. I know I'm like more repping the blue stockings at this moment 'cause like, I mean, I'm doing that, but that was an accident. I'm definitely a Sabrina all the way in. So, I only write stories that feature children of color. It is a personal mission of mine. There are lots and lots of books that have people of color in them, and as I was a classroom teacher and building my own classroom library, I had a really hard time finding books that had brown people as the protagonist where their pain of being brown people was not centered or driving the plot. And I don't like that. Those books are totally necessary. We need them. It's like a part of our history collectively, everybody, we all own it, it's ours, right? However, it is not the totality of any child that I have ever worked with or met or known. And so then it's really important to me to keep adding to that landscape. So every book that I have is inspired by a real human child that I have known at some point and I've known a lot, I did teach elementary school for 13 years. So then that, you know, like I got a lot to choose from. And in addition to being a mom and an aunt and all those kinds of things, so there's that bed. But also just understand that as a mom and an aunt, everything I write has an ulterior motive, everything. So you just, maybe list, like listening about it. So this book is "Wild Seed Witch" and it is so flowery and it is so feminine on the cover and we honor these things, but also we honor the very real kid that is in this book. So this is Hasani. Hasani has just turned 13. It is the summer after seventh grade. She has a YouTube channel. That's her plan for the summer. She's got like maybe like 12 subscribers right now, you know? But she's like, if she could hit 100, like she's gonna be like, "What?!" Like it's gonna be amazing. And also she's like low key trying to parent trap her parents back together, but she honestly has no actual plan about that. It's just like a thing that's happening. Well, one day her dad comes and picks her up and he's gonna bring her to his house for the weekend. And as they're driving, you know, she's like trying to check her social media like see, you know, like, has anybody watch my video? Do you have any more minutes left on the thing? And her dad's all like, "Oh, Sandy's big on social media too." And Hasani's all like, "Who's Sandy? And her dad's all like, "My friend, you'll meet her when we get to the house." And she's all like, "Why is she at the house?" And her dad's like, "'Cause she lives there." Okay, great. So then Hasani has feelings, you know, like big feelings. And the next thing you know, a bridge that they need to cross to get to her dad's house is made inoperable because it is covered in morning glories. Well, where I am from in New Orleans, morning glories grow like weeds. They're like everywhere and she doesn't know what has happened, but her outburst has attracted the attention of the witches who cannot let that kind of power go unshaped. So here we have it. All right. So I'm just gonna read you a little bit from it and I'm drama, so like if you are not, then you know like you're totally excused. Like you can, 'cause I can only be me, people. All right, here we go. So, The next day, a woman with a little pink umbrella showed up at my house at the crack of dawn. My mother always gets up that freakishly early, and I was up because something kept dinging even though my phone was on silent. It took me a few minutes to figure out that the sound was coming from my computer. I must have left YouTube open after I collapsed after my rant. The dinging was notifications for MakeupontheCheapCheap. I had 81 new followers and 147 new likes, and the count kept climbing. Pretty much all the likes were on the rant video, but my eyeliner tutorial had exactly one new like and comment from a user named _AnnieOaky_. "New subbie here! Love your stuff. I did a vid of me doing your tutorial." I picked up my phone and replied to _AnnieOaky_ with the link to the hug gif I had been saving. I was so happy I could have cried. Another ding. My follower count went up by one, and I ran into the living room shouting, "Triple digits! I broke into the triple digits," only to realize that my mom was not sitting alone with a cup of tea and her journal. She was fully dressed, sitting next to a plump lady with dark brown skin and straight black hair. The lady was wearing a pink suit with a matching hat, and a pink flowered umbrella rested against one knee. My mother had even put out an arrangement of purple flowers and put saucers under their mugs on the coffee table. It looked nice. I, on the other hand, was still wearing the same jeans and t-shirt I had worn to my dad's house, my hair was all stiff and smushy because I fell asleep without a satin scarf, and I was pretty sure the right side of my face was plastered with drool. "Sorry", I said, "I didn't know you had company." The two of them stood up, the pink lady rising so gracefully that she didn't disturb her umbrella. My mom gestured toward the guest. "Actually, she came to see you, Hasani. I wasn't going to wake you, but since you're up, this is Aimee Lafleur. She's from Les Belles Demoiselles: Pensionnat des Sorcieres in Vacherie." I raised an eyebrow. My mom spoke French? "Belles Demoiselles is a finishing school for talented young ladies like you," Miss Lafleur said. "I came to offer you a position in our program this summer." I blinked. Even in English it didn't make sense. Me? Talented? I was good at a lot of stuff, math, comics, finding my mom's keys, but nothing you would call a talent except... "Like, for makeup?" I blurted out. Miss Lafleur had seen my eyeliner video. "For magic," my mom said. She said it gently, like maybe I might be afraid or something, but legit, I was thinking what a shame it was that she wasn't there because of my Dollar Store Eyeliner 101 video. Miss Lafleur's makeup was perfect, but she was probably using really expensive products. It's hard to get perfectly smooth lines with stuff from the Dollar Tree, and I can do it pretty much every time. Skillz, yo. The trick is you have to kind of roll it around in your hand to warm it up, but leave the cap on until... "Hasani," my mom's voice popped me out of my eyeliner reverie. "I just want to make sure you understand that Miss Lafleur isn't talking about pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Belles Demoiselles isn't like circus camp for stage magicians." "I beg to differ," Miss Lafleur said smoothly. "Our girls can do anything they choose to. If Hassani wants to be a stage artist or street performer, that would be entirely up to her." "Yes," my mom said, "but my point is that Miss Lafleur isn't talking about slight of hand. She says you can do real magic." My mom was holding my hands, looking into my eyes. I was looking back at her, but I wasn't. Real? Magic? I think we'll stop there.

- Wow, that was so much fun. All right, now we're gonna hear from Kay.

- I have to... Okay. Oh. Okay. I'm Kay. I am a sophomore economics and English major and I've been an intern for "The Common" since just this past fall. And apologies in advance, I'm gonna bring the mood a little down, but I'm gonna be reading parts, the first and last part of a three part poem that I was working on this January as part of an interning project. It's titled "Evergreen" and has a short epigraph at the top that reads for Willem 2002 to 2016. One. Your evergreen forest knit from pine bows and hemlock is frayed by even the gentlest winds without the swell of your breath to shelter beneath. Roots loosen quicker than I can tie them, slipping through my fingers to tangle deeper into the earth. Still I forge in circles for lines of poetry hidden between the trees for you caught river lit and moon drenched in the heartache of it all. I find only silence that twists around my ankles and I've grown tired of chasing enough for my ears to hum louder than my own steps, tracking white like snow, like ash crumbling from the clouds, from the tip of the mountain, from the trees that do not change so I do not know how many times the seasons have come and gone again. The waiting makes a hurricane of me. Gasping rain. Three. I have returned only twice to your family's cabin since your funeral, both times in the past year, both times for your mother. Do you remember the nights we spent outside the cabin in this tent burrowed in the blanket forts? We curled together like spiders and the hearth, the ones we'd cup in our hands and bring outside before letting your father light the firewood. Our hands were so small then. She died twice in this life, your mother. The second time from cancer, We always fell asleep with a flashlight on. Do you remember? Some nights I half waked to the sound of your mother unzipping the tent. She'd switch off the flashlight, pull the blankets to our chins, give each our noses, then our foreheads a kiss. Your mother told me she had lost two children that day you left, but I could not believe her. I still cannot believe her and for years she tucked me in almost every night. Your mother is the only mother I've ever known. You always said it was too quiet here, but it is even quieter now. I have now missed you longer than I knew you. Under the sky you made constellations, knitting stories between the stars. I closed my eyes and the earth seeping through my skin, the smell of the trees, is enough for me to fall into the sound of you speaking again. At the tip of the mountain where we scattered your ashes, then hers, your father holds me for the first time since I changed my name. He gives me his old pocket knife. The one meant for you with the hemlock handle. The last night I ever saw your mother, she crawled into the tent beside me, curled up like a child against my chest. I held her, placed a kiss on her nose, then her forehead. With the tip of your father's knife, I carve a hole in the sky to make a storm.

- Beautiful. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you so much for sharing that poem. Catherine Newman has written a gazillion columns, articles and can bean recipes for magazine's, newspapers, and her essays have been anthologized. She's the author of the memoirs "Waiting for Birdy" and "Catastrophic Happiness", the middle grade novel, "One Mixed-Up Night", and the bestselling kids "Life Skills" books, "How to Be a Person" and "What Can I Say?" "We All Want Impossible Things" is her first novel for adults. She's the ADC of creative writing at Amherst and lives mere blocks from the zoo where she and Michael Millner, also class of 90, preconceived their wonderful children. Let's hear from Catherine.

- Okay, thanks for bringing the mood down. I'm gonna read from this novel, which is the narrator is a person whose best friend of a gazillionaire is dying in a hospice, but I'm gonna read two sections. One is with her daughter Belle. This is a person who is suspiciously the same age as me. If you wanna picture that. Jonah is still over at Shapely, that's the hospice where her friend is dying, that'll come up again. And Belle has talked me into taking a walk in the woods at the end of our street. It's the best idea anyone has ever had. This guy is a gray slurpee, so cold and wet that I get a brain freeze when the wind blows. I clutch my head groaning and Bella says, "Oh my God, Mama, can you please not have an actual heart attack?" "No, no", I say," It's good, it's great." We see oddly intersecting Vs of geese. Are they coming or going? We can't figure out which way any of them are flying and we wonder if passing each other gives them an uneasy feeling. We hear them honking and we imagine they're saying nervously, "Um, guys?" I'd point out the willows already turning golden in the the late February light. Belle nods. I tell her about the owl I heard in the night, Thumper and Jelly standing wide-eyed by the windows, still as stones. "Do you think when cats hear an owl they think of themselves as predators or prey?", Belle asks. And I say, "I don't know, maybe a little of both." "Wait," Belle says suddenly, "is the thing in your gut flora or fauna? "Flora", I say. And she says, "Yeah, right. I guess gut fauna might be kind of a lot." We talk a little bit about a piece I'm writing. I'm just, I'm so... I can't see anything ever. Sorry. Not to alarm you. It's called, we talk a little bit about a piece I'm writing. It's called "Sad Pantry." Belle thinks I've said "sad panty" at first, which makes sense given the sorry state of my underwear. "Is it a listicle?", she asks disgustedly. Somehow emphasizing the testicular nature of the word. "It's not. It's about making dinner out of a single can plus a single dry good. You know I say like tomatoes and rice or chickpeas and noodles." "That's maybe even sadder than the panties", Belle observes, "though maybe not as sad as your last piece." This is probably true. That piece was called "No Use Crying, Things to Do With Spilled Milk" and it was a listicle. "Any luck on the job front?", I ask. She's looking for something part-time. "Kind of", she says, "I think Dad's gonna help me get catering work. Everything on Craigslist is just people wanting someone to like come and clean their fish tank in the nude." I laugh. "But how does it pay?", I say." "Eh", she moves her hand side to side, "not as much as you'd hope." We talk a little bit about college, which is on Belle's mind. "A year from now, all my applications will be done", she says, "I mean, knock wood, but how crazy is that?" She wants to go to a women's school. "What is even the point of being otherwise?", she says, and her dad and I love this. At her high school's recent college fair, another mom had sighed and said to me, "Don't you wish you could do it all over again?" "College?" I'd said. "God, I don't know. I don't really think I have the energy anymore to be date raped every second." Honey had laughed at least, bless him, while the other mom backed away, presumably into a more normal type of small talk. Sorry, I realized that's awkward at the college where I went to college. Where are my manners? "Never leave me. I don't sob now." to Belle. "I know", I say cheerfully instead, "College, I can hardly believe it." We trudge on through the glorious slush, the fresh metallic air. I'm having a memory of Belle as a toddler in these very woods, running out ahead of Honey and me with her dangly, little stringed mittens, her little blue hat with its pompom, and then turning to run back, Honey bending down to scoop her up every time. "Thank goodness you're back.", he said over and over again, "We missed you." I'm also remembering scrolling through pictures on my phone just a few years ago. "Did you take these?", I'd asked Jules. Jules is the other kid. It was a dozen photographs of Honey and me standing under the trees fighting. Honey's arms were raised in surrender, palms up. I zoomed in to look at my face, my mouth pulled into a short grim line, my forehead bunched up like an angry dish towel. I had never seen myself so ugly. "Yeah", Jules said guiltily. "Wow," I said, "I'm sorry you had to see Dad and me fighting like that. "Yeah", she said, "it was really unfun." It really was. It was the unfunnest. We watched a documentary once about this famous artist who makes all these beautiful sculptures out of leaves and moss and snow and dirt. It's a thrilling film. You watch him assemble shards of ice into a glittering dome. beach stones into a gray rainbow. sticks into an enormous nest. Everything is gorgeous and ephemeral. And then there's this one scene like it got cut in from another movie of him popping home to grab a sandwich. His wife is there stirring something at the stove and she's got like 15 tiny children hanging from her like she's a possum. She's fully exasperated and she says, "Can't you take one of the kids with you?" Very breezily he says that alas, he cannot. And then it cuts to the next scene where he is making a sculpture out of dandelions, like he is literally in a meadow picking flowers. This is the work he's doing and all you can think is really, he couldn't bring one of the kids along? I'd watched it with Honey. "I hope she leaves him", I said. And he said, "Seriously?" And I felt myself fill with fury like I was a bucket under a tap. Even now, whenever I see one of those famous Lichen collages or pebble spirals or whatever, I can still feel all that rage sloshing around. Even the word "wife". I just picture all of us stirring oatmeal at the stove, knee-deep in everybody's diapers and feelings. Now I'm gonna read one other passage that's not as angry but less cheerful. You can pick sad or angry. Okay. This is a little shorter. It seemed normal when I picked it. And that's where I was wrong. Okay, she's now at the hospice with her friend Edie. "Hey", Edie says, shy suddenly. Can I ask you something? Are you shagging my brother? I decide I'm gonna fall into the carpet and fake having a stroke. "Of course", I say. I pull my chair closer to the bed and sit. "What do you think happens after you die?", she says. "Oh", I say, "gosh." I was raised in a fully atheist household so not much is the short answer. "Just toss me in the dumpster when I go", my dad likes to announce. And when I'm like, "Dad, I think funerals are actually more about..." He interrupts me, "In the dumpster!" "Okay"?, I say, "The dumpster it is." When the girls were little, they were confused about whether people believed that heaven existed in the sky, like the earth's sky. This was legitimately confusing actually. Is it heaven just for this planet or for the whole universe they'd wondered. "I guess the whole universe," I said. All of motherhood was ad-libbing religious ideas. Sorry. And they countered with many picky questions about clouds, pearly gates, angels sitting around in the blue, no dark matter in sight, and I realized that everything I knew had probably come from a Gary Larson comic or maybe an episode of "Looney Tunes." "I believe there's some kind of energy", I say to Edie now, I am winging it. "Something that's not exactly you, but that's like not not you." Edie nods politely. "Like it's halfway between people's memories of you and something that's more like a material fact." This I might actually believe, "Some kind of animate stardust." "What?" "Maybe you turn into a kind of free floating consciousness that surrounds the people you love so that you're kind of there with them still and the air they breathe is somehow made out of you." Edie smiles. She's probably picturing all of us coughing and wheezing out a lung full of her consciousness. I am such an asshole. "I'm sorry", I say, "I can hear that I'm not making any sense, I guess I'm not sure what I think besides that the people we lose stay with us somehow. What do you think?" "I really don't know", she says, "I feel like you just described more about your experience after I die than mine. Will I be somewhere with my own sense of myself?" "I don't know. I hope so." "It's so frustrating that I'm stuck in this stupid, sick body," she says. "It seems so inessential somehow, but then there's really nowhere else for me to go." I picture unzipping my own body and wrapping her inside of it like a shared coat. "I would give anything to keep you", I say through the sob that's gathering in my throat. And she says, "I know you would. I would give anything to stay." "Soon, I'll be a stranger in a strange new place" I sing to her and she closes her eyes, smiles. Mostly She says, "I'm just really, really thirsty." The body and its petty demands. Grief is crashing over our heads like a tsunami. This miraculous soul is about to be homeless, but thirst is thirst so I fill her night, this one beautiful night, the only here and now we've ever got with sprite. Thank you.

- Thank you, Catherine. We are truly experiencing a spectrum of human emotion this afternoon. So we're gonna hear from Sarah next.

- Hello, my name is Sarah. I use she/her pronouns. I'm a sophomore in English and com-sci double major, and I've been an intern for "The Common" for around like three semesters. And today I'll be reading a story, a short story I worked on with "The Common" over the summer. It's called "The Tiger" and it's this short surrealist fiction story, like another genre tone thing going on here. And I'll be reading from an excerpt from the middle of the short story. So at this point of time, we've been introduced to the narrator and her younger brother who lives with a tiger inside of their house. When the Tiger falls asleep and the violins play their lullabies and the dictionaries doze in their dreams, only then do we crawl into the soft warmth of our beds and release our real conversations into the silent air. They curl like smoke and glitter against the ceiling, a constellation of stars that breathe with unsaid thoughts, and it is here that I offer a new proposal. We should play a game with the Tiger. My younger brother coughs, and chalk dust dribbles off his chin like milk. When he finally exhales, his breath comes out in a wheeze. What game? Let's catch her. Like tag? my brother mumbles. That does sound fun. So the next morning, we begin preparing. The Tiger has the eyesight of a sharpshooter, I tell my brother. She can twist her head 360 degrees to spot you hundreds of miles away. Like an owl, my younger brother says. He wraps a washcloth around his forehead to push back his hair, but the cloth is too big. It dangles over his eyes, and he carefully tucks it back into itself until the corners disappear. To get close, we have to be silent. We have to learn how to disappear. My brother crouches. He tucks his legs and arms under him like a washcloth, and his limbs disappear. He presses his face against his knees. Like this? he asks, and his voice is muffled. Exactly. We decide to trap the Tiger in our bathtub. We leave a trail of rice to our bathroom and close the curtains because cats don't like water. But then we realize that tigers don't like rice. My younger brother sweeps up the rice, and I drop uncooked pork dumplings on the ground and crush them underneath my feet so the raw meat seeps out like crushed snail innards. We fill up the bathtub with cold water and close the curtains once again. The Tiger has the strength of 30 soldiers, I tell my brother. Once she catches you in her jaws, she will never let you go. Like a rabbit, my brother says. He is fashioning a spitball gun from rubber bands and wet paper towels that he has found above the sink. The spitballs have dried, and he pops them into his mouth like gum and sucks on them. A rabbit? He spits out the balls. Rabbits jump high, he says. Rabbits don't eat meat. I've never seen the Tiger eat meat. I consider this. True, I say, so we approach the kitchen and sweep the crushed pork dumplings from the floor and feed them to the family dog. He sniffs the pork dumplings and swallows them whole. He watches us stamp tofu dumplings onto the ground. And after we finish, we watch the dog throw up outside. Do we have to clean that? my brother asks. No. The Tiger might see. It'll decompose, I say. But when I am asleep, my brother slips outside. I wake and spot him through the window. He brushes the half-digested pork dumplings into a plastic bag. Under the moonlight, the pink meat glistens. A few black dots are peacefully sucking in the red juices. They buzz unhappily when they are swept aside. My brother tosses the bag into the large trash can and tiptoes back inside.

- Awesome. Thank you Sarah. So, last but not least, Mark Vanhoenacker is a native of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a 1996 graduate of Amherst, a commercial airline pilot and the author of the international bestseller "Skyfaring", as well as a columnist for the "Financial Times" and a frequent contributor to "The New York Times." In his latest book, "Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World", "a love song to cities in the world over" according to "The Wall Street Journal", he explores the storied metropolis he visits as an airline pilot through the lens of the hometown his heart has never left.

- Hi, everyone. I just wanted to thank the Amherst community for making today possible, and particularly the team behind LitFest and "The Common". My job takes me all over the world to three or four continents a month probably. And I often have a copy of "The Common" with me, and when I'm finished with it, I tend to leave it where I've finished it. That might be on a train in Delhi or in a cafe in Tokyo, maybe not a convenience store, but... And you know, we all think of the lives that words go on to have and sometimes they go on long journeys as well so I'm happy to be doing my part. I grew up in Pittsfield, which is about an hour and a quarter west of here. And if Pittsfield isn't on your mental map yet, I would like to put it there because it was the site of the very first intercollegiate baseball game in the US in 1859 between Williams and Amherst. And 164 years later, it would be ungracious of us to dwell on the margin of our victory that day. So I won't go into that. I will say though, that Williams, after the game was done, they challenged the players, the Amherst players to a chess match and we won that as well so there we are. So when it came time to go to college, to choose a college, Williams was maybe just a little too close so I decided to come over the mountains to Amherst. And yet Pittsfield has always remained with me. There's something about going to so many cities for work over so many years and having lived abroad for many years, and as I've gotten older, I realized that Pittsfield is indeed the lens through which I see the world and that's in some ways the premise of this latest book, which is called "Imagine a City." And I thought I would read three brief sections from the book. The first starts in Pittsfield, and then I'll move on to some more distant places. Autumn 1987. I'm 13. It's after school. I'm in my room, at my desk. I look out the window over the driveway and toward the garage. It's late autumn and it's almost dark out. There's frost in the corners of the window and snow is falling. I look across the room, at the light-up globe on my dresser. I go to it, flip the switch on its cord, and watch as the darkened sphere turns blue in the failing light and starts to shine as if it were in space. I return to my desk. I sit down, pick up my pencil with my left hand, and rest its tip on the sheet of graph paper. I love airplanes and cities and so, not for the first time, I've drawn a simple map of the world. I'll draw a line that begins in one city and ends in another. But which city to start from? I set down the pencil and look around my room again: at the model airplanes perched on my dresser, on my desk, and next to my old Snoopy on my bookcase. There's a green-and-white Lockheed TriStar and a mostly white McDonnell Douglas DC-9. On the plane I assembled most recently, a gray DC-10, I notice that the decals aren't attached very well. Maybe, I think, I could have done a better job, but these decals are a pain. You have to soak them in a bowl of water until they loosen from their backing, and then align them on the aircraft's fuselage or tail without tearing them, even as they're drying out and curling up. Sometimes I ask myself if I really like assembling model airplanes; maybe I only like having the airplanes afterward. The flagship of these models is a Boeing 747 in the blue-and-white colors of Pan Am. On a December night two decades or so from now, an hour before I pilot an actual 747 for the first time, from London to Hong Kong, I'll walk around the plane to conduct the preflight inspection and when I look up at its sail-like, six-story tail fin I'll recall this model, and this window by my desk, and the view it offers from a house that by then will be the home of someone else... And the second section that I'll reach today I'm in Abu Dhabi for work, which is a city I used to fly to frequently. And my colleagues and I from the flight, we've gone out to sing karaoke, which is what air crews do all over the world. And I've come back to my hotel room and it's late, I think it's midnight or so, but I'm still on London time and so I'm not quite ready to sleep. But I am thinking about what cities have meant to me and what I might like to write about them. I cross the room and sit down at the desk. I look down at the small metal plate on which an arrow indicates qibla, the direction of Mecca. From this marker I can estimate the initial direction of the great circle route, the shortest distance over the surface of a sphere, that would run from Abu Dhabi back to London; it's not so different from the heading that a pilot might initially follow, if any pilot ever has, to journey from Abu Dhabi to Pittsfield. And at this desk I remember that for many years I've wanted to write about what cities have meant to me. I want to record my journey from one city, my small hometown, to so many real cities that are each a thousand times more fascinating than anything I imagined as a child. And I want to be open about myself as I write this, even if it's not always easy. I know that's the only way to try to understand my deep love for the hometown I was once so keen to leave. I have other, more matter-of-fact reasons to write this book. Most pilots love their job and tend not to want to retire when the rules say we must. When my days and nights of flying are finished, I want to be able to remember all I can about the cities I saw. In addition, while years may remain before my retirement, I'd like to share now what I love best about many of these cities, not only with my family and friends, but with readers who might not travel as often, as far, or in as extraordinary a manner as a pilot does. And extraordinary is the right word. Long-haul airline pilots today are given an experience of cities that no one else in history has ever had. Two decades into my career, in an age in which it often seems that the urbanized future of our civilization is taking form directly before my eyes, my experience of cities as a pilot remains a source of deep fascination to me, one that's distinct from my love for flight itself. During a single flight we may cross above dozens of cities, most memorably after dark. On some journeys the lights of a sleeping and apparently silent settlement beneath us, one that, if it doesn't have a major airport, we may not be able to name without consulting our navigation charts, suggest Coleridge's ancient mariner, passing "like night, from land to land," and the fragility and even the loneliness of what an observer arriving in our orbit might regard as only one more of the universe's strains of bioluminescence. On other flights, when I see a gathering of dim lights stitched into the far-below floor of a Siberian or Nigerian or Iranian night, I'm struck instead by a sense of warmth, even intimacy, and by the possibility that I'm looking down on an evening much like the most peaceful ones of my Pittsfield childhood. Then we descend. If we do so at daybreak, the returning light allows us to see how wilderness, farmland, inhospitably steep terrain, or thousands of miles of open ocean give way to our destination: one of the largest cities in history, perhaps, which has grown through its own long centuries, and which now, on this latest of its mornings, and in the last 20 minutes of our journey, expands to fill the jet's windscreen with a maplike view of its awakening streets... And the last section. So this book lands in many of the world's largest cities such as Tokyo and Delhi and Lagos. But one of the things you realize when you go to the cities again and again, is that they often consist of many smaller cities which they've absorbed as as they've grown. And also that many cities orbit them much like moons around a planet or planets around the sun. And live in some reference to the metropolis at their center. So this is about a city called Petropolis, which is just north of Rio Degenero. And there's a little bit of Portuguese in this, so I apologize in advance for anyone who knows how awful my Portuguese is gonna be. Petropolis. To reach the cool and fragrant air of the city of Petropolis you must leave the Atlantic Ocean and Rio de Janeiro behind and take the highway that leads north to the interior. Rio is known from every postcard as a city of mountains. The nearby city of Petropolis is hardly known at all outside Brazil, but every Rio-bound pilot to whom you describe the city's location will know exactly where you mean, because the mountains around Petropolis are higher than those of Rio and so, on aviation charts, they are shaded in more alarming patterns of colors. The poet Elizabeth Bishop, long after the last of her visits to her boyfriend in Pittsfield, lived in Petropolis with a woman named Lota, and remarked on the "clouds floating in and out of one's bedroom", a pilot's dream of a city's air, perhaps, and when Bishop described the mountains around Petropolis as "highly impractical," it's as if she was thinking first of the aviators who must carefully weave around these hills on their way down to Rio. Reversing this journey on land, the road that leads up from the heat of Rio seems to know that no direct approach is possible, and so it makes wide arcs within the folds of the hills in order to climb to the city whose motto is Altiora semper petens, Always seeking what is higher. From a rattling bus I look across the steep valleys, these V-shaped volumes of Brazilian sky, to catch sight of farther stretches of the road we're on, and I can't conceive of any arrangement of curves and climbs that could possibly get us from here to there. Finally we enter the city, through a gateway on which is written cidade imperial and Petropolis. This is the Imperial City and the City of Peter, of Pedro II, the last of Brazil's emperors, who fell in love with the city's cool, clear air and made a kind of summer capital here. Deposed after 58 years, his line ended and a republic founded, the fate of Pedro II is nevertheless one that every emperor after Constantine must dream of: he is buried in a city that bears his name. Like many pilots, I was drawn to the city by an alternative, aeronautical, royalty. Alberto Santos-Dumont, whom many Brazilians consider to be the true father of the airplane and who, I'll just pause there to say if you ever enter a discussion about Alberto Santos-Dumont versus the Wright Brothers, just back out immediately because it is highly controversial. We always think that the Wright Brothers, but there's a debate about that. So Alberto Santos-Dumont, whom many Brazilians consider to be the true father of the airplane and who, in the age of pocket watches, worked with Louis Cartier to design the first wristwatch, so that he could check the time without lifting a hand from his airplane's controls, lived here. After his death his heart, in the tradition of French kings, was removed from his body. Encased in a small golden sphere held by a winged figure, it stands in a glass box on a pedestal in a museum in Rio. Many of his other belongings are here in his small home here in Petropolis. On this, my first trip to the city, my two colleagues and I are happy to explore the house of the great aviator, but I'll fall in love with something else here: the Palacio de Cristal, the Crystal Palace, a greenhouse-like structure set in a small, lush park. The Palacio, which opened in 1884, is made of simple cast iron and long, vertical panes of glass. Each of its main walls is three panes high. There's not much else to the Palacio, though some of its panes are fronted by curlicues and each of the floor's brown tiles is decorated with sand-colored fleurs-de-lis, and the corners of the structure are fattened with column-like adornments that echo the trunks of the trees outside. The inspiration for the Palacio was London's Crystal Palace; its parts were made in France and then shipped to the Brazilian highlands, where in 1884 a grand ball celebrated its assembly. On Easter Sunday of 1888, around 100 enslaved persons of Petropolis were manumitted in the Palacio, in an ceremony that foreshadowed the abolition of slavery throughout the country. The building also served as an agricultural exhibition hall, a skating rink, and as a venue for the elegant dances of the city's summer society. Today, the Palacio's chandeliers, high in this stilled and delicately boxed portion of the city's air, and so many years after the music and voices of the Brazilian court were last reflected by so many walls of glass, are bleached and bone-like in the thick tropical light, while a plaque outside describes the structure as um marco que honra os mais elevados aspectos da alma petropolitana, a landmark that honors the highest aspects of the Petropolitan soul. The otherwise sparse design of the Palacio has an unexpected detail, one that reminds the visitor that the balls once held here did not take place in the black-and-white realm suggested by old photographs: while most of its windowpanes are of ordinary, clear glass, a few are blue. In the Palacio, on this spring day, these panes seem to redouble the sky's color as it falls through them, forming richly marine-hued parallelograms that fall at angles on the carefully laid patterns of the tiled floor. As I walk slowly through the Palacio it feels right to step over or around these, because the color appears to be precious, perhaps, or because the eye naturally registers all such low laid blueness as water. The Palacio is one of the most peaceful places I've been. This calming effect is hard to explain, since, aside from its chandeliers and a low, empty stage, it contains nothing. Perhaps it's only that its simple iron outline acts on the city's air like the frame of a photograph, sustaining a moment that might have been lost, though otherwise it is like any other. Whatever the reason, as I walk away from the Palacio I look back and I know I won't ever forget it: this quiet place where blue shapes fall from the sky, touch down, and migrate with the grace of shadows; a volume that suspends and steadies us, as if it were filled not with air, but with clear water; a palace of glass that's open to all, though nearly everyone in Peter's city is busy somewhere else.

- All right. Thank you everyone for this incredible reading. Let's do another round of applause. So we are just a little short on time, but we will turn it over to you, dear audience members, for a very short Q and A. Let's take one or two questions. Feel free to go up to the microphone and yeah, let's hear them. I guess I can start us off with a question while you guys come up with your thoughts. I have a general question for everyone, both interns and authors. So suppose I am a writer that's just starting out and maybe I have a lot of stories to tell, but not a whole lot of knowledge, routine, discipline, et cetera. What would you recommend to an emerging writer? Is there a book, a piece of wisdom, a process or anything that sparks the creative process and keeps you going?

- So, write. That's it. That's the whole thing. Just go ahead and do it. Whatever you're telling yourself that would make you not, like, ignore that part and just do it.

- And read.

- And read, and read.

- They're here, I'm guessing they read, but yes, and read, okay.

- And read things that make you want to write.

- Something that I would also share is like, don't shy away from sharing your work with other people 'cause a lot of times getting other perspectives, whether or not they're like editors, you know, just like your friends and stuff, having like their perspective, their feedback on your writing can definitely help you grow as a writer. Like, if you never share your writing, then, like, it's harder for it to improve, even though I do think that just writing is the most important part of improving.

- Speaking of having other people to check your work while writing, writing communities are great, this is a great time for me to promote "The Indicator." It's a student run lit mag. Great writing community. Students at Amherst College who wants to join. Yes, actually. But yeah, a writing community allows you to, like, I think sometimes writing is a process where you kind of write and you're like, "Ah, this is terrible." But then when you give it to someone else, they're like, "No, it's not that bad."

- I wanna also say don't be afraid to ask for help. I came to write later then some people. I was writing for myself, but I didn't start to write for publication until, I don't know, eight or nine years ago. By that time, several people from my class were in writing jobs or in journalism jobs and they gave me a lot of help. And now I occasionally get emails from students who are recent alums and as today symbolizes, it's a community to draw on so don't be afraid to ask people.

- [Audience Member] What kind of help did you get?

- I got advice because I was trying to write, I mean, I think every kind of writing is different, but I was trying to write articles for newspapers, the travel articles, that kind of thing. And I didn't know how to go about contacting editors and a friend who was already an editor said, you know, "Every day I get 10 or 15 emails from people, you need to be one of those people." So you find those email addresses and you write your pitches. But I think every kind of writing is different. But for newspaper articles, that was something I just didn't know, and I was told that by someone who worked at one.

- We got a question from the audience from Henry on a card. I presume this is for Marti. How do you capture the spirit/personalities of the children you write about?

- That's a great question because you can't put a whole human in a book. That's just not really possible. So then that's I guess where the, like, crafting side happens, because you're gonna take, which is why you never tell anybody that they were your person. That's step one. Don't tell them that it was them. Okay. Because you can't put all of them in there. So it's not gonna be fair, true representation even if they feel real in the book, but you have to pick two, max three, salient things about the person. And because I'm writing novels, like, for like a very particular age group, that whatever the, like, core conflict of the story's gonna be is how I decide which of the salient features of the human that I'm like using as a model will end up being put on a page.

- All right, well if there are no further questions, we can transition to the book signing that's gonna be happening over there, behind, in between the two sets of shelves. Thank you everyone once again for coming to this wonderful event and for our .

Phosphorescence: Special Edition, A Poetry Event with Victoria Chang and Tyehimba Jess

- I just want to welcome you to this special edition of Phosphorescence, which is a a monthly event presented by the Emily Dickinson Museum. You can find past programs on our website, which is emilydickinsonmuseum.org. You'll also be able to find the new lineup, the 2023 lineup on that website in a few weeks. So I'm Jane Wald. I'm the executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, which is owned by the trustees of Amherst College. It's located just two blocks north of here on Main Street, and it's a real privilege to welcome Victoria Chang and Tyehimba Jess to Amherst College's 2023 Lit Fest. Now in its eighth year, Lit Fest is sponsored by the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College, the Common Magazine and the Emily Dickinson Museum. And it's made possible by the generous support of the Croxton Lecture Fund and especially the amazing efforts of the college's offices of conferences and special events. Emily Dickinson's Lexicon, which for years she once said was her constant companion, defined phosphorescence as a faint light or luminousnous of body unaccompanied with sensible heat. So to Dickinson, phosphorescence was a kind of a shimmering mystery, a transformative essence that in her own language, elevated plain print vitalics, facts to real learning and prose into poetry. Now, Dickinson didn't use this word casually. She placed it carefully in a letter to one of her most treasured and admired friends, Samuel Bowles, who was editor of the Springfield Republican, a leading newspaper of the day. She wrote, "You're coming welds anew, that strange trinket of life, which each of us wear and none of us own, and the phosphorescence of yours startles us for its permanence, a permanence that phosphorescence really wasn't supposed to have." That was its rarefied significance to Emily Dickinson. And by the way, when she talks about his coming, that reference was evidently his attendance at the 1875 Amherst College commencement. So in that vein of luminous phenomenon, the Phosphorescence Poetry Reading series celebrates creativity and all the flourishing diversity of today's contemporary poetry scene. And that echoes the spark of imagination in Emily Dickinson's own revolutionary poetic voice. So with us today are two remarkable poets, Tyehimba Jess and Victoria Chang. So welcome to you both, and on behalf of New England. I apologize for the five degrees last night and hope you find a warm place later on. Victoria Chang is the author of "The Trees Witness Everything," published just last year, it was named one of the best books of 2022 by the New Yorker and the The Guardian. Her non-fiction book, "Dear Memory," was published in 2021 and was named a favorite non-fiction book of 2021 by Electric Literature and Kirkus. "Obit" came out in 2020, and was named a New York Times notable book, a Time, must read book, and received the Los Angeles Times book prize, the Anisfield Wolf Book Award in poetry , and the PEN Faulkner Award. It was also long listed for the National Book Award and named a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Her previous books include "Barbie Chang," "The Boss," "Salvinia molesta" and "Circle," and she's also written and published at least two children's books, "Love, Love," and "Is Mommy," as well as an anthology of Asian American poetry. Victoria's forthcoming book of poems, "With my Back to the World" will be published next year. She's the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and lives in Los Angeles, is a distinguished faculty within Antioch's low residency MFA program. So we're delighted you're with us Victoria. Thank you. And I'll also introduce Tyehimba Jess before we have readings from from both of our guests. Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, "Leadbelly and "Olio." "Olio" won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield Wolf Book Award, the Midland Society Authors Award in Poetry, and received an outstanding contribution to publishing citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the Books of Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. "Leadbelly" was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series, the Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the best poetry books of 2005. Tyehimba Jess is a and NYU Alumnus. He received a 2004 literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004/2005 winter fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam team, and won a 2000 2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in poetry. He also had a Whiting fellowship in 2006. He presented his poetry at the 2011 TEDx National Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannon Literary Award in poetry, and is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. He's the professor of English at the College of Staten Island, and his fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals as well as numerous anthologies. So please welcome Tyehimba Jess. So I've asked Victoria and Tyehimba to read from their work and then we'll invite your questions and discussion with them. There are a few copies of their books available at a table in the back, near the door, and after the program they may be happy to sign books for you. And unfortunately, there aren't as many copies as we'd hoped due to some unforeseen circumstances. So we encourage you to pick up your own copies later or order from bookshop.org. So Victoria, can I ask you to get us started with some poetry?

- Thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much, Jane, for inviting me and it's such an honor and pleasure to be on a stage with you today. I'm just going to read for a little bit, I'll keep an eye on my watch and I'll just be reading from those three books that that came out in succession and I think of as sort of someone mentioned it to me, they thought it was kind of like a trilogy and I thought maybe that's a good way to think about it. So I'll just start with a few poems from my book "Obit," and there's really nothing you need to know except that my mother passed away a pulmonary fibrosis and my father had a stroke, and they had both since passed away, but lots of, they appear in all of these poems. Music, died on August 7th, 2015. I made a video with old pictures and music for the funeral. I picked Hallelujah in acapella because they weren't really singing but actually crying. When my children came into the room, I pretended I was writing. Instead, I looked at my mother's old photos, the fabric patterns on all her shirts, the way she held her hands together at the front of her body, in each picture, the small brown purse that now sits under my desk. At the funeral, my brother-in-law kept turning the music down. When he wasn't looking, I turned the music up because I wanted these people to feel what I felt. When I wasn't looking, he turned it down again. At the end of the day, someone took the monitor and speakers away, but the music was still there. This was my first understanding of grief. My mother's teeth died twice. Once in 1965, all pulled out from gum disease. Once again, on August 3rd, 2015. The fake teeth sit in a box in the garage. When she died, I touched them, smelled them, thought I heard a whimper. I shoved the teeth into my mouth, but having two sets of teeth only made me hungrier. When my mother died, I saw myself in the mirror, her words in a ring around my mouth, like powder from a donut. Her last words were in English. She asked for Sprite. I wonder whether her last thought was in Chinese. I wonder what her last thought was. I used to think that a dead person's words die with them. Now I know that they scatter looking for meaning to attach to like a scent. My mother used to collect orange blossoms in a small shallow bowl. I passed the tree each spring. I always knew that grief was something I could smell, but I didn't know that it's not actually a noun, but a verb that it moves. Let's see, maybe I'll just read one more from this book and then I'll move to something else. Grief, as I knew it died many times. It died trying to reunite with other lesser deaths. Each morning I lay out my children's clothing to cover their grief. The grief remains but is changed by what it is covered with. A picture of oblivion is not the same as oblivion. My grief is not the same as my pain. My mother was a mathematician, so I tried to calculate my grief. My father was an engineer, so I tried to build a box around my grief along with a small wooden bed that grief could lie down on. The text kept interrupting my grief, forcing me to speak about nothing. If you cut out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky, no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it with a blue frame, place it face up on the floor of an empty museum with an open atrium to the sky, that is grief. So I will read, I'll switch to this book called Dear Memory. And when my mother passed away, I thought, oh, I'm done writing about her. And then I found all these boxes in the garage and there were a lot of cool papers in there that I found. I, you know, knew my grandmother's name, knew my grandfather's name, knew what city they were born in, things that I didn't know. But what I didn't expect was having all this information only led to more questions and more grief. So I just started writing a letter to my mother and then it just opened up all these epistolary things that I wrote with some collaging and to teachers, to all sorts of things. And so I'll just read the first one. It's called Dear Mother. I have so many questions. What city were you born in? What was your American birthday? Your Chinese birthday? What did your mother do? What did your grandmother do? Who was your father, grandfather? It's too late now, but I would like to know. I would like to know why your mother followed Chiang Kai-shek, taking you and your six or seven siblings across China to Taiwan. I would like to know what was said in the planning meeting. I would like to know who was in that meeting, where that meeting took place. I would like to know the people who were left behind. I would like to know if there are other people who look like me. I would like to know if you took a train, if you walked, if you had pockets in your dress, if you wore pants, if your hand was in a fist, if you held a small stone, if you thought the trees were black or green at night, if it was cold enough to see your breath, to sting your fingers. I would like to know who you spoke to along the way, if you had some preserved salty plums, which we both love, in your pocket. I would like to know if you carried a bag, if you had a book in your bag, where you got your food for the trip. Why I never knew your mother, father, or your siblings. I would like to have known your father, to know what his voice sounded like, if it was brittle or pale, if it was blue or red, to know the sound he made when he swallowed food. I would like to know if your mother was afraid. During college, I spent several weeks with her in Taiwan. She bought me bao zi or buns every morning. The bao that steamed in small plastic bags with no ties and sweet dou jiang, tofu milk, always too hot for me to drink. She sat there and watched me eat. Complained to me about your brother's wife, complained of being sick and how no one would help her. Do you know how long it took me to figure out how to call an ambulance? And then when they came, she refused to go. I still remember how the two men stared at me, as if I could move a country. Listen, it's the wind, that's the same wind from your countries. Sometimes if I listen closely at night, I can hear you drop a small bag at the door. I hear the sound of the bao touching the ground and the wind trying to open the bag. But when I open the door, there's nothing there. Just the same wind, thousands of years old. Happy birthday wind. Happy birthday mother. April 6th, 1940. I know this now. All the nurses, doctors and morticians asked me, so I memorized it. Your American birthday, April 6th, 1940. I said again and again as if I had known this my whole life. And then I'll just read a few tiny poems. I call them miniature poems. And they're from this book, "The Trees Witness Everything." And they are syllabic poems. So they're all in syllables. And yeah, I'll just read a few, and then I'll read maybe like one new poem, and then we'll be done. And these poems also use W.S. Merwin's poems as titles. So as if to, I constrained myself doubly so. Far along in the story. Once I sat in rain, opened my mouth to the sky, I yearned to be changed. Each drop was a small knife. At first I fainted. But when I woke up, all the ticking had gone. And all the centuries were one. My choices no longer hurt. Losing a language. We were born with a large door on our backs. When will we know if it opens? Snowfall. We say the snow falls, but it really seizes. Because it is light, it takes seven years to grab. By the time it does, the old wars are over and my mother is dead. But it lands on the new wars, melts on a different mother. Still morning. No mornings are still, the newly dead move the most. They force flowers to dilate. Rain at night. To be the last drop of rain each night is sadness. It shuts the last door and jumps. The gods. The fact that leaves can't be put back on trees makes me think that you do not exist. The lovers. There is a wildfire starving on top of a lake. See how the water holds fire but cannot end it. We insist on love, when all we want is mercy. And I'll read one more. This is my reading packet from the Zoom reading days. So that's why I'm flipping through all of these. So yeah, I wrote this book that are all ecrastic poems, and those are poems written in response to any kind of artwork really. And I wrote poems in conversation with the poet, the artwork of Agnes Martin. And I'm sure many of you know her, but if you don't, she's, she works in these grids sometimes, and I just love her work so much. This one is called Friendship 1963. And the pieces in the MoMA, it's huge. It's 10 by 10, and it's one of two pieces she made using gold leaf. So it's shimmers and it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life. So I'll just read this to you and then look forward to hearing you read. Friendship 1963. I came to the city so I could see gold, but when I arrived, the leaves were gold too and I became confused. I called the front desk four times and Angel answered each time. By the third call, he ended with, "talk soon." In the morning a different man answered and I burst into tears. On 53rd street, small children kept on running into me. A father yelled so loudly at the boy on the scooter that I thought he knew I was carrying death on my back. By the time I arrived at the museum, there was a long line. The bald man in front of me kept turning around to look at me. I could tell by his forehead that he could hurt me. When I finally found the room, I was the only one in there. Everyone else was below me in the Picasso room. While I stared at the gold rectangles, two attendants talked about whether to work overtime and get paid time and a half. I wanted to tell them that there's no such thing as time, just time and a half. Sometime in the night, Etel Adnan had died. I had just seen her paintings the day before. The crowds were large and I wondered whether our looking had accelerated her death. When I took a photo of Agnes's piece, I saw my dark reflection on the gold. I started counting the grids, but the bald man came up next to me. Suddenly there are two dark shadows on the gold. I asked him to step away, but when he said no, it was Agnes's voice. Thank you.

- Thank you so much Victoria. Thank you. And Tyehimba, would you share some from your work?

- Well, phosphorescence, that was indeed phosphorescent. Thank you Victoria, that was very moving. I have to say I've read Obit in particular several times and taught it to my students. And if you haven't read that book in particular, I would say it's very, you know, it's a very moving experience. In the spirit of rolling with the 1800's, so to speak. I'm going to reach back in the 1800's with some Dickinsonian contemporaries from Olio. And this one in particular is a interesting gentleman that's a Blind Boone. Blind Boone became a very famous piano player. However, when he was born at the age of six months in 1865, caught encephalitis and that's swelling of the brain. And if you don't cure that you will die. The only cure that they had for encephalitis minus, you know, didn't have any antibiotics or any penicillin. The only cure the doctor had to relieve the pressure on the brain, was removal of the eyes. So that's how he became Blind Boone. But he ended up being a very, very successful piano player. Blind Boone's Blessings. Bless the fever in that night, in the sixth month of my life, bless the fever for it gave me sight. It swolled my brain to fit God's gift. It brought the hand that would lift each eye from my infant skull. Bless the sweat, my baby ball, bless the horse that hauled the surgeon through dusk dark half drunk and swearing into mine. Bless the flame, it's sterilized the metal of the spoon. Bless the path between lid and bone. Slipped and slid by that instrument of my deliverance from sight. Bless the handling of the knife. Bless that night that gave me night, wrapped it 'round my bloody face, whispered how I could be grace notes, arpeggios a piano roll of sound, copying each note from everything around me. You see, I'm sure at first there was the hurt and the scalding pain. But then again, bless an infant's too short memory. All I know is what lies beyond light. I've learned this is what's right for this one right here. Yes, bless the fever, then listen close, spare an ear to this piano and shut your eyes closed. So I was curious, how do you tell your, how do you tell your kid, mommy, how did I get blinded? What happened to my eyes? And this poem is about that. Blind Boone's Vision. When I got old enough, I asked my mother, to her surprise, to tell me what she did with my eyes. She balked and stalled, sounding, unsure for the first time I could remember. It was the tender way she held my face and kissed where tears should have rolled. They told me, I'd asked of her the almost impossible. To recount my blinding tale, to tell what became of the rest of me. She took me by the hand and led me to a small sapling that stood not much taller than me. I could smell the green marrow of its promise, reaching free of the soil, like a song from earth's royal dirty mouth. Then mother told me how she newly freed, had prayed like a slave through the night when the surgeon took my eyes to save my fevered life. Then got off her knees come morning to take the severed parts of me for burial, right there beneath that small tree. They fed the roots climbed through its leaves to soak in sunlight. And so she told me, I can see. When the wind rustles up and cools me down, when the earth shakes with footsteps and when the sound of bird calls stirs forest like the black and white bustling 'neath my fingertips, I am of the light and shade of my tree. Now ask me how tall that tree of mine has grown to be after all this time. It touches a place between heaven and here. And I shudder when I hear the earth's wind in my bones through the bones of that boxed up swarm of wood, bird, and bee, I let it loose and beyond me. This Blind Boone, interesting fella. Lived to a ripe old age, as a piano player, played rag time and all kinds of other tunes, whatnot. One of the many characters in this Olio. I think I'll read a couple more from, perhaps from someone else in the book, and one of those folks, so contemporary of Dixon. Well you know what I think it'd be good to pay homage to the first black singing super group with, of international renown. Who traveled the world and were, you know, and really are still singing today. I talk of the Fisk Jubilee singers who are the real first propagators of the what is known as the Negro spiritual. Out of Fisk University, talkin' 1871, roughly teenagers. I tell my students they're the age of my students, That really gets 'em, because they were, and they were nine young, ex-slaves who didn't have much to do, didn't have any Xbox, or any internet to entertain 'em after classes, so they sang to each other. They sang cabin songs and they sang spirituals. Eventually they went around the world on a missionary task, both one of religion and one of proving the humanity of black people. So this is a Fisk Jubilee proclamation. And accompanying each one of these, these poems is a listing of black birch churches that were burned to the ground throughout American history. So let's just, I'm going to take a moment and say this one is dedicated, amongst others to a Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, 1822 Cross Ankle Church in Palm Meadow, Georgia, 1899 Greenleaf Presbyterian Church in Keeling, Tennessee, 1900 Red Top Church in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. 1915 First Baptist Church in Cadre, New Jersey. 1926 Fisk Jubilee Proclamation, the epigraph from the Bible. Psalm 96, oh sing unto the world a new song. Oh, sang undo the world with blued song, born from newly free throats. Sprung loose from lungs, once bound within bonded skin. Scored from dawn to dusk with cawful and lash, every tongue unfurled as the bodies flag, every breath conjured despite loss we've had. Bear witness to the birthing of our hymn from story depths of America's sin. Soul worn Psalms, blessed in our blood through dark lessons of the past struggling to be heard. Behold the bold sound we found in ourselves that was hidden, cast out of the garden of freedom. It's loud and unbeaten, then soft as a newborn's face. Each note burst in loose from human bondage. Fisk Jubilee Singers. Maybe a couple more. I think we got, yeah, couple more we got. And this one I think how we doing you all good? I like to take a pulse, make sure there's-

- [Jane] Keep going.

- They ain't snoozing on me, ya know? Poetry- People think you know. Anyway... Edmonia Lewis, I was fascinating in that she was probably the most successful African American visual artist of her time. Native American and black. Born not far from here in upstate New York. Went to Oberlin College, didn't have the best of times there. Eventually left, went to, went overseas to Greece to really experience the carving out the stone and actually, you know, claiming the stone for herself and started a sculpting career, eventually was very successful, had commissions of $50,000 or so back in the 1800's. So, this is one of her sculptures. This is from the perspective, I did a series from the perspective of the sculptures. This one is one, Hagar in the wilderness. If you remember Hagar from the Bible. I ain't getting, it's Saturday, ain't Sunday, but I ain't trying to get too Bibley on you. But, here we are, Edmonia Lewis Marble, 1875. My God is the living God, God of the impertinent exile, an outcast to carve me into an outcast, carved by sheer and stony wheel to wander the desert in search of deliverance, the way a mother hunts for her wayward child, God of each eye, fixed to heaven, God of the fallen water jug of all the hope of vessel holds before spilling to barren sand, God of flesh, huned from earth and hammered beneath a will immaculate with the power to bear life from the lifeless, like a well in a wasteland, A maid in the image of a God that knows flight, but stays me rock still to tell a story ancient as slavery, owed as the first time hands clashed together for mercy and parted to find only their own salty blessing of sweat. I have been touched by my God in my creation. I've known her caress of anointing callus across my face. I know the lyric of her post across these lips and yes, I've kissed the fingertips of my dark and mortal God. She has shown me the truth behind each chisel blow that's carved me into this life. The weight any woman might bear to stretch her mouth toward her one true God, her own beaten marble song. So. Maybe, I think I'll leave it at that.

- [Jane] Okay, thank you.

- Thank you.

- So I see over both these seats to my left, this kind of cloud of luminescence that we've been, that we've enjoyed this this morning. So in a, we'll take questions from the audience. There's a microphone right here in the center aisle, and if you have a question for either of our guests, please just approach the microphone and we'll, take the questions in turn. And perhaps while you're thinking of your question, I can begin with one that, you know, your works are so distinct from each other, but in a setting like this, of course, we're always tempted to wonder where the overlaps are. And your works are about telling stories, about uncovering histories, about memory and witness. And so I have taken a couple of lines of yours. So Victoria in "The Trees Witness Everything," your poem, 'It is March,' ends with this question, "How do I live in the past, but right about tomorrow?" And in "Olio," 'Jubilee Mission," which is one of the Fisk Jubilee Singers entries ends with this, "Our home is our voice gathered and honed and wedded and sharpened, cutting slave days down to sermon up salvation." So I, for each of you, I think there's a, there's kind of urgency to memorialize and preserve stories that express identities and create legacies for those who come after us. Is, and I wonder if you could comment on that. Is that what sort of one of your main goals or how do you see that?

- Yeah, I mean it's so interesting and fascinating to hear you read because I learned so much just from hearing you read your poems and had all these things that crackled in my brain because I actually write a lot about historical figures, or I've written a fair number of persona poems and I'm was a, his, an East Asian Studies, so an Asian History major in college and am interested in things that have happened, uncovering things that people don't know about stories. And right now I'm working on a longer poem called Eureka, and it takes place in Eureka, California where the Chinatown was burned down. And yeah, I've just been thinking a lot about that when I was in the Emily Dickinson bedroom this morning working on a poem and how it was kind of around the same time period. And so I was thinking about just all these intersections of time and history and memory and story. And so that's constantly on my mind and interested in history, my own history, personal history in the recent books, but also, you know, how we fit into the scheme of history and what our responsibility is or interest and or interest to bring these stories forward.

- Oh wow, that was a great answer. I think, I hear the history in your work, Victoria, I really do. I feel, and I was thinking about the poem you were with the poem or the writing that you had, that had these questions for your mother about where she was from and who was making the decision to make this journey, these various journeys and at these various decision points. And I think attached those questions are how were they feeling? How did they process these decisions? What was going on in their lives? And those are the many of the questions that I am thinking about when I'm writing about folks from the past. Because in many ways, they're making sim decisions that are similar to the ones I'm trying to make today. They may not, the ones I'm making are very, you know, clearly in my mind they're not as desperate so to speak. They're not as, there's not the life and death kind of gravity behind the decisions, but in certain ways their decisions about, you know, how to carry one's work forward, how to work and walk with integrity, how to preserve one's mission, so to speak. And all of those things are really very interesting to me. I think one other thing that I think, I was thinking about when I was listening to you, Victoria, is the element of surprise, which is something I encounter so often in reading your work and going in one direction and then all of a sudden, wait, oh, I did not expect this to happen or that to happen. I'm talking about line by line, word by word. You're going one place and then you're, suddenly you end up in another place. And I think that is a really, that is an element that I, it's, it can be hard to think like that when you already know the course of somebody's entire life, you know, when you already know what's going to happen. But then, but, and I think that surprise happens in the middle of creation, you know, so it's in the discovery for the author as well as the reader, hopefully.

- That's so interesting, I've been thinking so much about what you've been saying because in my, I have a Saturday morning poetry group and we're called the Unicorns and we meet every Saturday to talk about poems and we are reading Muriel Rukeyser's Book of the Dead or poems from there. And I, that's exactly what I was thinking about, like how do you write about history and atrocities and in Rukeyser's time, you know, current events related to a mine. And when you know the answer, you know, you know the outcome, you know what happened, like how do you make art with that? And you can, cuz she did. And you have and you know, I have, but it's difficult. Like it's one of the challenges when you're making art based on historical events and yeah. And I see a lot of the elements of surprise in yours through sonic elements, like from word to word I see how those your brain is moving from language to language, sound to sound, to sort of transform the direction of the poem in unexpected ways. And, but yeah, that is what I've just been kind of mulling over in my head a lot, so I appreciate that.

- Yeah, thank you, that was tremendous. Very interesting and brings me back to kind of the difference between memory with a kind of interior purpose and witness with kind of a public and political goal. So we are joined with an by an online audience and some of our viewers have sent in some questions. There are a couple about inspiration. Where you get inspiration and who is your go-to poet for inspiration and the pure joy of poetry?

- Well, inspiration, okay. I would say for myself, a lot of inspiration has come from the music so to speak, capital T, capital M music and an attraction to black music. And, its, and the way it has carried us, and salvation us in so many different ways, but also in the people behind the music and what and what their lives were like and what their struggles were like, but also connected with that are, is a frustration when I find out things that I feel like I should have known them in grade school. I feel like I should have known who Edmonia Lewis was in grade school and now there's a stamp, you can go out and get yourself a Edmonia Lewis stamp. I'm very glad to say. But I feel like there was so much, so many dynamic stories that really complicate, you know, the story of this country that we live in. You know, that, you know, you think it was one way, but it was really three or four or five or six or 700 different other ways as well at the same time. And so that, those are the stories that really make, intrigue me. Yeah.

- Yeah, I think, I mean may I build on that or just learning, you know, I'm in just intensely curious and I feel like at any point in time, like right now I'm sitting on the stage and I feel like there are things that I think I understand, or there are things that I think I know, whether it's about myself or about other people or about history. And then like tomorrow I'll realize today in this like moment of bubble of like confidence and knowledge that I may have about something, I was wrong or I had the wrong information or misinformation or I didn't have a deeply enough or nuanced thinking. So I think that's always interesting to me. Like I think back on like five years ago I thought I knew everything about this, or I thought I understood myself so well and then I didn't. And so yeah, I think I'm constantly interested in learning and curiosity, you know, everybody I meet or everybody I see or everything I look at changes something about me. So what a gift, you know, to be alive. And I think to myself, I'm not that young anymore so I want to kind of grab everything, the molecules or just live as much as I can by being curious about everything around me, everyone around me, history that I don't know about myself, which is an endless, you know, kind of learning that we never really, you know, master, I hate that word, but we never really master ourselves, which is really what makes it so fun. It's like there's, you know, it's the search, right? It's the search with no, nothing to find at the end. And that's what I think gives me inspiration as a person, but also as an an artist.

- Well, so there's the search and then there's the research and the cast in "Olio" is so, there's so many stories, so many characters, so much to talk about. I wonder, Tyehimba, what was your, what was researching those stories, like for you?

- Well, I just went and bought a whole library of books that I had, cuz I know if I took check 'em off from the library, I wasn't going to return them on time, so I'd have a whole bunch of fees. And I tracked down, I had a few, there were a few, there's a bibliography in the back of the book with, you know, complete listing of the various books that I used. But there were a couple of, a few books that were, that kind of laid out the general topography so to speak, the general map of where I wanted, of, where I was, what I was interested in. And from there I kind of, I would identify someone and I would be really just interested in their story and if whether or not I could make it work in the context of these other stories. So, it was, there were, in that journey, there were a lot of stories that I just couldn't, I couldn't make work. There was, there's a few stories I worked 6, 7, 8 months on and I was like, ah, I just, I can't make it happen. So the book took about seven years to, to write, but you know, there were a lot of pit stops and stumbles along the way.

- [Jane] Were were you writing poems as you-

- [Tyehimba] Yes.

- [Jane] Learned about.

- Write research, research, write. And to Victoria's point, you know, you only, you can only give the best research that's possible at that time, you know, I mean there's things that I may find out that, or frankly that I have found out about some of the things that I've written that like I didn't, I did not know, that information was not even available when I was researching the person or the subject. And then later on, information comes out and you're like, oh wow, I wish I'd have known that. Like, Edmonia Lewis, like they found out where she was buried a little teeny tiny town in England somewhere. She, I nobody knew where she was, but, and I, you know, I can imagine having like some kind of mention of that in one of the poems. But it didn't happen. But it did, it worked anyway. But what all I'm saying is that it was a, it was research, write, research write. You know, and take the best stab at it that I could, given the most exhaustive research that I could complete at the time.

- And Victoria for "Dear Memory," you, tell me if I've got this wrong or right, but you knew there were things you didn't know, and at first you didn't know where to find the answers. But then there was this kind of, in a way a process and a, and not exactly a trove of material, but things that came to you. How did, what did you do to sift through all that?

- Yeah, I mean I think, I mean I think this is what I find so interesting is like everyone, I always think about this like everybody in this room, like we have so many secrets, and then we have so much history that we just don't know. And in how generation, from generation that information changes and morphs is interesting to me. So yeah, I didn't know anything and I have a terrible memory, but I suddenly had finished like a whole bunch, like basically the whole book without realizing it was the book and then suddenly remembered that, oh I think I may have interviewed my mother once a long time ago when I was younger, and I had lied and said that I was going to write an article or something. And then, yeah, and then I had recorded it and then I was frantic, I was looking for it, and it was on the, you know, desktop the whole time. But yeah, I remember it was hard 'cause, but she would talk to me but my father refused to talk to me cuz he said it was stupid, you know, the project is dumb kind of thing. Like, you know, he's a engineer and this, you know, like the world of the universe of feelings maybe wasn't something he was quite as interested in. So also there's trauma, right? There's trauma in rehashing things and my and my mother had left two countries and he had left one. So, you know, these are things that it's hard to get that information out of people. And but I had done that, and then listened to the recording and was like, oh wow, that's so great. I knew some of this, but somehow I had also buried that information and memories. And so I think things are important to us at different times in our lives. Like things I didn't care about at all, not that long ago, suddenly it was like the centrality of my life, and I find that interesting cuz we do that as a country too, in case you haven't noticed. So that process is interesting to me. Like how do we bring ourselves to a greater sense of awareness so that we're not just going through life, not caring about things that we really should be caring about. And so that was that process of writing that book.

- Again, just a quick reminder that there's a microphone at the front if you'd like, if you have a question and would like to ask one of our guests. And let's see, I think, yes, thank you.

- Oh, okay, this is good. So I was thinking about how this is sponsored by the Dickinson Museum, and Dickinson as we know, liked to write on like scraps of paper and that kind of affected the way she wrote and clearly these two books have very interesting like physicalities. So I guess this is not so much of a direct question, but a request to speak more about that attention to physical form. Cause I'm really curious how you came to these two sizes and the way that especially "Olio" unfolds.

- Well, "Olio," I have to give a lot of props to the publisher. Wave is an extremely unique publisher. There's almost no other publishers that I could think of that would've taken the risk that they did. Frankly, there's four pages in that book that they basically fold out to eight and a half by 14. The book is eight and a half by 11. They fold out to eight and a half by 14 or whatever and they neatly tear out of the book, which I encourage you to do. But really it was because of those pages that the book is that particular size. And it was just being crazy, just being nuts, just being like, you know what? This is a form that I feel like carries the thing that I wanted to do and I don't know what's going to happen with it, but looks fly to me. So let me, let me see what happens. And, I was frankly very, lucky because I, they're an excellent publisher and they're, they're bibliophiles. So there you go. Victoria?

- Yeah, I mean I think the way things look is just a part of the poem and so we have a lot to play with, but we're kind of, you know, wed to these standard sizes for likely commercial reasons, but, you know, to be able to create in all this physical space that we actually have to create is such a fun thing to do. And I think I'm always really attracted to books like "Olio" that really don't seem to think about those physical boundaries as much. And so yeah, I'm constantly trying to think about that, you know, trying not to think, okay, I'm stuck on this eight and a half by 11 sort of thing. Right, so yeah.

- [Audience Member 1] Thank you.

- I had a very similar question, but I did want to ask a little bit, Tyehimba, your work with like the McCoy twins and how you kind of break the sonnet form open. I was wondering if you would be willing to explain like, how you went through that process, like getting to a point where you could read one poem like five different ways, and where that came from?

- Well, you know, that came from, in my previous book "Leadbelly," there's contrapuntal poems and in this book I wanted to carry the idea of contrapuntal poems forward, but I just wanted to, you know, double down on it a little bit. And the way to do that was through form. I chose sonnets because sonnets, well sonnets are, they're very forgiving in a lot of ways. And they're 14 lines, that's a lot of space frankly, to get what you need to do, and do what you need to do and get out. But also they're very familiar to the, to a 19th century sensibility. And I wanted to be in conversation to a certain degree when you, when you're reading about somebody for four or five or six months, and researching everything about them, you know, and trying to understand the world that they lived in, it's like, and you're trying to bring their story in a responsible, you know, way. It is almost like you are in conversation with them in my mind. So I wanted the, I wanted that level of familiarity across, you know, generations so to speak in time periods. As far as making them contrapuntal, you know, the first contrapuntal sonnets were with Blind Tom. And if you look at those poems, you can see how they, some of 'em are like one side, one side and then they slowly meld, and by the time they got to the point where they could, you know, meld with a section down the middle, it became apparent to me that if I just worked certain things, if I just reworded certain things different ways, then they would be have a plasticity which would allow an up and down reading. But it has, you know, the real, in order to not have it just be a gimmick, which I think is critical, is that it's fitting, it's trying to fit with the motif of a few different motifs. One is a syncopation, which was critical to the understanding of ragtime music. Another one is double consciousness referring back to W.E.B. Dubois, who's mentioned in the beginning of the book and kind of plays a role, kind of a distant role in the book. Another one is the idea of call and response and the black church says, can I get a amen?

- [Audience] Amen.

- All right, there's some people here went to a black church at one point, so, so it's a call and response or you know, respond and retort if you so wish to have that kind of dialectic happening throughout the book. Also to introduce a plasticity. And in the case of the McCoy twins to have the reader experience going through the body of the poem tracing the body of the poem in the way their eyes would trace the bodies of the McCoy twins, but trading places and absorbing their stories. So there's a lot of different rationales that I needed to have in place in order to make that worth it.

- [Audience Member 2] Yeah, amazing, thank you.

- Thank you.

- [Jane] So I think we have time for a couple more questions, so please.

- Okay, there we go. I think I have two separate questions for Victoria. First, something we've been talking about in class is like these different ideas of grief and softness and like transformation. So we're sort of curious for you and this question can go two ways, like how do you grieve through your transformation or how do you transform through grief, and is there any like softness in that grief and how would you, and like what does that look like?

- Yeah, I've been thinking about some of those things as well. I was telling Jane that I was reading a book on the plane here called "Racial Melancholia" and it's just something to think about, you know, I think it came from reading a review that a critic had written about the, like the tone of my books or one book being kind of very melancholic, and it felt like a, it was a criticism and that made me think about melancholia and racial melancholia. And then I'm just doing a lot of reading and research and you know, a lot of people have studied things long before me and so I'm constantly trying to learn, but there's, you know, there's something different about like the Asian American experience and there's something different about melancholy related to the Asian American experience. And I have this intuition now looking back on it, that there's something different about, you know, like my particular family grief and also grieving as an Asian, a Chinese-American, Taiwanese-American diaspora. And so I'm kind of thinking about all of those things and what does that mean for kind of personal like transformation. And I used to say a lot of, you know, our, you know like our culture in America can be very much so like this sort of fix it culture, you know, you have to move on and everybody thinks, you know, everybody kind of moves forward really quickly and so you feel like you too have to do what everyone else is doing. And I've just decided to just sit in my own grief bubble for as long as I want and just experience it in my own ways and allow myself to feel all those things at my own pace. Which I know intuitively has a lot to do with my family culture, but also my culture at large. And so, yeah, so now I'm just doing a lot of reading and thinking about things like that. I don't know if it will turn into anything, but I do find it sort of interesting to kind of read what other people have studied about people like me, if that makes sense.

- Thank you. And for, Tyehimba, I was really another form question, but there is a lot of like interesting shapes in how the words take place. I think one reminded me of a butterfly almost. So I was curious like which came first, like the words or the sort of shape that they take place or like the shape or the words?

- Wow, that's a hard one, huh. Well, I guess ideally form and function work on an equal level. So form serves function and function serves form. That, the one you're talking about, you're talking about the McCoy twins, I think, that was planned out beforehand. The only issue was what was going to go, how it was going to be completed, and what was, what were going to be the subjects of the various, their various poems. But I think that what you're asking is really is about form meeting function, and function meeting form. But also it's about, in poetry, a little commercial for poetry, 'cause I think it's the most experimental form like form or genre that you can have because you can typically, you're allowed a kind of agency with the space on the page and the white space on the page, that typically doesn't happen in other forms. And so you can do almost anything in poetry it's crazy. You can be as formal and tight and rigid as you want cuz there's so many forms, there's so many rules with so many forms. Oh my god. But then you can just be all over the page at the same time. So that's the great thing about poetry. It teaches you extreme economy, but also it gives you the ability to be extremely imaginative with the shape on the page.

- [Audience Member 3] Thank you.

- [Jane] For our last question.

- Yeah, hi. I wanted to say thank you for coming and I have a question directed towards both of you, and it's about legacy, and when writing about legacy, I feel like there can be the worry of like doing these people that you're writing about justice and representing their stories accurately, and though arguably I think you guys mentioned before, it's hard to know the full reality of these stories just because they were past figures and you weren't there. But, I guess I wanted to ask how you grapple with the boundary between representing or trying to find the truth in their stories and also like your personal interpretation and the theme that you're trying to go with for your works, yeah.

- Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's difficult whether you're writing memoir and someone's still alive or you're writing a history, like something based on something that actually happened. Yeah, it's really difficult to kind of toggle that back and forth and you know, cause I'm thinking about Muriel Rukeyeser's "Book of the Dead" and how she toggles back and forth between like very journalistic historical, like it almost, you know, cuz she was a journalist in historical aspects of what happened, and then sort of this lyricism and lyric moments when she as an artist kind of enters in moreso through her imagination. And arguably even when you're just saying like, this happened, this happened, this happened, you know, there's editing, you know, we're still curating what we choose and also how we choose to display that information. So that's not really answering your question. But I think that for me, there's always a responsibility absolutely, but there's also a responsibility to the self and the own imagination. And I think that, you know, I get asked this question, especially related to memoirs, like, oh, you know, people will be upset. And it's like, well you can always write it and nobody's sitting on your shoulder looking at you. So you can always write what you want. You know, you, that's your experience really, and your interpretation and your vantage point. Now if it goes out into the world, then you can kind of then put, you know, your editing hat on. But you know, at the end of the day we can only do the best that we can. And with historical things you just do a lot of research, you know, like I went to Eureka, I went to talk to the people there, I took tours, I went to the libraries and the museums and did archival research, and then there are gaps everywhere. And then you fill, as an artist, you fill those gaps in with your imagination. So I think we just do the best we can. And I did love that form question. I loved your response too, cuz I get asked that question a lot too. I think it, it's fun to sort of have things come while you're write, it's like it's all happens at once it seems like too. So I didn't mean to add that in, but I love, I always loved that. I loved hearing your response about form.

- Well I like what you were saying, I have yet to write a memoir cause I'm too scared. But I was, I liked your take on what, especially in regards to, here's the thing, you know, I think it's really critical to get the a really as clear an understanding as you were saying, going and visiting the site, doing the research, visiting the archives, et cetera. Understanding exactly what literally happened, when it happened. That's a critical, like knowing what the actual things are, what are the facts, and then having the imagination, allowing yourself to have the imagination to fill in between the facts, and also having an understanding that you will be in there. It's not going to, you have no way to completely, to conduit somebody else's consciousness in there. You are literally filling in and you, you know, you chose the subject for a reason, and part of the reason you chose the subject is to find out more about yourself. That's the reality. So you are going to be in there somewhere and you might as well not, it's just important to acknowledge that and understand that and say, I'm going like, I know in this person's life this happened, that happened, this happened, this happened. Now I'm writing this poem there at this particular moment, making this particular decision about with these particular factors. You know, given that situation, what would I think? You know, cuz that's when you are in the mix. That's, you know, no matter how many, you know, accents or whatever, you know, you put on it, et cetera, in the bottom line, you're going to be there. You know, and that's just, that's, you can't get past that. And that's the beautiful thing. That's a good thing. You know, because you are talking about the past, but you're talking about we're not, you're talking about issues that are still reverberating in the present and then into the future, you know? And you're there witnessing in between those spaces. So you have the, you know, you have the opportunity, just do one's best to get the facts straight. Cause it, you know, you don't want to be, you just don't want to be the person who, cause this has happened to me. I just, I confess. Poem, it was a poem about a car, it was an old poem I used to about, about a car and my dad's car. It was really my mom's car. And I was talking about, yeah, it had a 457 and duh, duh, duh, duh. And then this cat comes up after the reading. Like, yo, actually- those cars had a 327 cuz the weight ratio was two, duh, duh, duh. It was like, it's like, oh shit, I didn't ask for all this yo! So, you know what I'm saying? There will, that will happen. That will happen. And they'll people who will come in with details that you just did not know. You just had no, and that's okay, you know, but just trying to get to do your due diligence to get, cuz there's been enough sloppy erasure and obfuscation. There's been enough of that. You know, we have, you know, you have the opportunity to come in and tell a true, clear story and also with the understanding that you're coming in with your understanding and bringing your imagination to it. That's what I would say.

- That was a great question and two great responses. Thank you. I am so sorry we're out of time because I think, we've launched into some wonderful discussion and I know I have a lot more questions, pages of them, but we'll have to stop here. And I want to thank you both for what you've given us in your poetry and for joining us here for this eighth Lit Fest.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

Transcript of Valeria Luiselli in Conversation with Jennifer Acker '00, Editor-in-Chief of The Common

- I'm Kirun Kapur. I'm the director of the Creative Writing Program here at the college, and I'm delighted to welcome you to the eighth annual LitFest. A snowy, lovely LitFest. And to tonight's event, a conversation between Amherst's own Jennifer Acker, and one of this year's distinguished LitFest authors, Valeria Luiselli. Whether you are in Johnson Chapel or joining us via the live stream, it's wonderful to have you here. I know we're in for an extraordinary evening. It may be dark and cold outside, but I think the conversation will be bright and warm. It takes many folks all across the Amherst campus to make LitFest happen. From the President's office to The Common, to the Dickinson Museum, to the Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and especially the special events staff. So many, many thanks to the whole LitFest committee and community for making this evening possible. You all can join the conversation by way of the index cards in the pew or on through the online form. You can write or type a question, and folks will collect them and pass them to Jen, who I know will work in as many of your questions as possible. So without further ado, I'm very pleased to introduce Jennifer Acker. She's the author of the acclaimed novel, the "The Limits of the World" and the bestselling memoir "Fatigue." Her short stories, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared widely in such places as the Washington Post, Oprah Daily, the Yale Review, among many others. Here at Amherst, she's an integral part of our literary life. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary magazine The Common, she oversees the publishing internship, and of course, she's the director of LitFest. Our guest tonight is the luminously inventive writer and artist, Valeria Luiselli. Born in Mexico City, she grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India. She's the author of five books, all of which challenge the boundaries of the terms fiction and non-fiction. These books include a series of experimental essays in "Sidewalks," the unclassifiable work of fiction "The Story of My Teeth," the innovatively constructed "Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay composed out of 40 Questions," and the expansive novel "Lost Children Archive." A novel within a novel which includes maps, inventories, songs, photographs, and more. Discussing "Lost Children Archive," the New York Times remarked, "The novel truly becomes novel again in her hands, electric, elastic, alluring and new." Luiselli is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Dublin literary award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the Carnegie Medal, and an American Book Award, just to name a few. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's, among many other publications, and she's been translated into more than 20 languages. Luiselli's endeavors, however, are not limited to the page. Other projects include a ballet performed at Lincoln Center, a pedestrian sound installation for the Serpentine Gallery in London, and a novella in installments for workers in a juice factory in Mexico. As the 2022, 2023 Harvard College visiting professor of ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration, she's been working with collaborators to develop "Echoes From The Borderlands," a sound piece that documents the histories of violence against land and bodies in the US-Mexico borderlands. But no matter what label we put on her medium, Luiselli's work celebrates the protective powers of storytelling, the centrality of the imagination to knowing and understanding, and the necessity of creating the fullest most plural archive of narratives for approaching the truth. Please welcome our authors.

- Thank you, Kirun. Thank you everyone for being here. And thank you to Valeria. She has been traveling for something like 36 hours and just got here 30 seconds ago, so we are very grateful, and just want to give you a really warm welcome and say how happy we are that you made it.

- Thank you so much. I'm also delighted to... Hi everybody, nice to see you. And indeed, I've been traveling for 36 hours from the tip of the Baja California peninsula via Atlanta, lost connection overnight, all with my toddler, which means that I've been talking either to Delta staff or to a toddler for 36 hours, so I'm so happy to be here talking to an adult and with adult faces.

- We'll carve out this adult conversation with you, with yeah, no toddlers to distract for at least an hour and 20 minutes. I wanted to begin with a couple of questions about place. As we heard in Kirun's introduction, it's a part of your biography, it's a very strong part of your work, you grew up in many places, and a lot of your work is really rooted in exploring places both private and public. So I wanted to ask a personal question about how you use the word home, yourself, and how your characters think about that word as well. Like, when you develop characters, is it important to you that they be from a particular place or not?

- It's a very difficult question to start with, but it's a very good question. I'm not exactly sure what I call home, but I think that it has always been through the process of writing a place that I am able to make myself at home in it to some degree. So it's strangely only really the places that I've written about that I feel somewhat deeply rooted in me as not only places, or not only spaces but places, right? And I've always, to a degree, in the homes I lived, in the apartments that I've rented for year or two in the cities that I've lived in for its months or maybe years made an effort to somewhat root in them through writing, right? I think there's something that's like literary memory, right? Like, when we have read about a city a lot, and maybe go there for the first time, there's a process of recognition, right? And it's in a way similar with writing, when you've written about a place you are more deeply rooted in it than when you have it, I think. Yeah, so what do I call home? I'm a combination of beds, bathroom mirrors, hotel rooms, cities, all of which maybe have come together in my imagination and formed some other literary space, right? And I think spaces like the US-Mexico borderlands and particular places in the borderlands are more alive in me than maybe cities where I've lived just because I've spent so much time inside them when I've written about them.

- And when you wrote about places, are there particular aspects of those places that you're trying to capture and are there research components as well as experiential components?

- Yeah, it's hard to answer that in a general way. It really depends on what place I'm thinking about, right? So for example, I recently wrote a long, long piece for this project that I'm working on right now, "Echoes From The Borderlands," and I wrote a piece about a copper mine in Bisbee, Arizona. I don't know, some of you have been there, it seems, and that was a town that I had never gone to until maybe five or six years ago. And it was through speaking to people about how they see the town through asking, for example, a minor to describe the open pit copper mine, and kind of understanding how a minor looks at rocks or thinks about color in the concave space, sort of through people's eyes that I think I am able to situate myself in a new space. And I tend to never disconnect myself from the space in which I'm writing. I remember many, many years ago when I was writing what you've just called an experimental book of essays, and I thank you very much for that generous description of a book that I wrote between ages, 21 and 25, so it was indeed experimental 'cause I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was trying to teach myself both how to write and also how to write in Spanish because it is my mother tongue, yet I had never written in it. And it's a book about Mexico City, a city where I was born, but had never really lived until then. So I was trying, I think through that book to root in space very deeply, to go back to kind of your first question to. And I remember, I used to rent an apartment in the now very hip but not then, Colonia Roma, and it was perpetually in construction, everything around it. So there was always noise of machinery, and things being torn down, and a kind of feeling of the house shaking at times, not 'cause of earthquakes, but that too, but mostly sort of the kind of work going around the house. And at the beginning thought, there's just no way I will ever be able to write a book in this complete lack of silence. I didn't even have children yet. And so I thought, "Well, instead of trying to encapsulate myself against the noise of the world, let me just open the window physically and metaphorically and see what happens to my writing then," right? And I think it was a very good choice because what was coming in the next years were children and even noisier places and life just getting sort of fuller and more uncontainable. And it was a good choice from then on to decide to open the window because I would not have written anything, I think, if I had tried to write against the noise of everyday life.

- There's a lot of use of public spaces, I think, in that book of traveling through public spaces. And I think you wrote about public spaces such as streets and subway stations become inhabitable as I assigned to them some value and imprinted experience on them. And it reminded me of the Chinese-American geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, who thought that space becomes a place through the experience accrued in them. And is that how you think about this distinction between space and and place? Or how would you describe difference?

- Right. Definitely through experience lived, inhabited in a place, turns space into place, but I think reading does too, right? And not only, well, I mean, I'm saying this, and I realize, I'm saying it almost as if reading were kind of different from experience. And I would not draw that line so thickly, right? I think the experience that we experiences that we live through reading are often as alive in our memory as experiences lived outside the page, right? It depends, I guess, more than anything on the intensity with which they imprinted it themselves on us, right? And sometimes a reading experience can be so vibrant or so... Or come at the right moment that it imprints itself with equal power than a lived experience. And so what you read is from my novel "Faces In The Crowd" where the narrator comes to a new city and has no experiences in those streets and in those spaces and fields, the ultimate experience of foreignness. And tries to trick her own experience of foreignness by reading or memorizing bits and pieces of literature, poems, fragments in particular places, so that 125th Street stop sounds like or feels like Emily Dickinson or another particular corner reminds her of a poem by Wallace Stevens and so on and so forth, right? So if there is no experience, the question is, can literature come in to fill space and turn it into something of a home through the connection of words or stories or thought?

- So do you tend to remember where you've have read things? Like, do you have that sort of spatial association of meeting?

- Very much so. Very much so. I do, I remember sometimes, yeah, where I read a particular idea or a line more than sometimes other important parts of a novel. Maybe the plot escapes me, but I remember a line that I read in a particular chair, indeed.

- Mm-hmm. I wanna ask you a little bit about the structure of your books. Many of them are written in short sections, like these short trench sections that build on each other and accumulate. And I wonder if that is reflective of how your mind works or only having short bursts of time to work in, Alice Monroe wrote short stories because she was raising kids, small kids, or if there is so of this is a more theoretical approach about how you like to build the work.

- No, it's not theoretical at all. I think it has to do with a combination of the two things you've just said, right? Real life circumstances, like how many hours do I have or how many minutes of concentration might I get? And also how does my attention work? And I think that during the pandemic where we had a completely different experience of time, all of us, because our normal everydayness was so shattered. And I was home for so many hours a day and I thought, "I'm going to pen a novel, it's gonna be like some kind of sexy vampire series and I'm not gonna tell anyone about it. I'm just gonna write under a pseudonym and this is what I'll do in the pandemic." And I tried and I failed absolutely because it turns out it's really hard for someone with my kind of ramifications or I don't know, probably something neurological of a structure, impossible to think of something like chapter one, it just felt monumental, like, what is a chapter? How do you do that? So I've never written a chapter and I've been a professional writer for 15 years or so, and it turns out it's really hard to write a sexy vampire novel and I didn't do it. And I hope one day to maybe achieve a kind of maturity that allows me. So if you see a vampire novel in some years, it's not signed by me, but happens in Mexico City and maybe New York. You'll know. You'll know she did it. But all this to say, I've kind of made peace with the fact that I can concentrate very well on short fragments, and then I just kind of rework them as if they were like a small sculptor of some sort and just kind of take them apart and put them back together and take them apart again. And what's always a challenge for me is because it doesn't matter how many times I've done this, it's as if I haven't learned how to do it. So next time I begin a new book, my question is "How did I do this last time?" And then usually when I finish a book, the question is "How the hell did I do this?" Like, there's always a feeling of walking a little bit in the dark. And sometimes I'm very fine with that, like, I think that it allows me to explore and have fun and always feel very much alive with what I'm doing since there's no blueprint and there's a sense of risk and following something unknown. But more than anything, I think the interesting thing for me every time, is okay, if I can only work with fragments, how do I connect them, right? And that has changed every time with every book. Like how does this tiny piece connect with this tiny piece? And how do I find an architecture inside of, or with all this material, right? So now for example, I've been for four years working on a book, it was called "Maternity Leave" and it was about a mother and a daughter, but I've taken so long to write it that since then I've had another daughter, and so I'm not sure about the "Maternity Leave" conceit anymore. And I still to this day, after four years, have just scattered fragments, and I have not found the internal architecture yet, and that's what I get for not knowing how to write a chapter, you know?

- I mean, how did you do it in previous books? So like, let's take "Lost Children Archive," so composed of short fragments, did you have a number of fragments and then thought, "Oh, well, what's the thread here? How do I put them together? Or do you remember what that... How you found the through line for that?

- So maybe this conversation's gonna help me write the new novel, right?

- [Jennifer] It's therapy right here.

- It's feeling a little like therapy. I think that with "Lost Children Archive", I had like a very clear pulse because I had one or two questions that were guiding me very forcefully. And one of those questions was about how the atmosphere within a family may be taken over by a kind of electricity generated by children's imaginations. And what happens when you've spent enough time enclosed in a space of a car, for example, with children who are kind of reenacting reality and reinterpreting story in a way that the adult world starts to feel a little strange, a little strangified by that electricity. And I wanted to explore how a child's imagination may take over a narrative completely. And at the same time what that meant in more kind of longer generational terms. What happens when you hand down a story to a generation, and that generation reconfigures it in a way? So I had that to guide me, and therefore it wasn't that hard to put things together because whatever there is a plot in that story emerged from that kind of momentum, right? I knew I had to have a child takeover and I had to give that child enough elements in order to take over completely and tell the rest of the story.

- [Jennifer] Mm-hmm.

- And, well, there were other questions, but maybe I won't go into all of them.

- Well, I mean, in the way that you were just describing a building towards something in "Lost Children Archive," there's also a careful attention to absence and ghosts or what used to be somewhere, and that this is in some of your other work. Also, there's a keen observation of, or listening for the absences of past lives, or the remnants of past lives that have made it into the present. And so I wonder where that concern comes from, and is that something that's conscious?

- Yeah, it's conscious to a degree. I think I'm very interested in... Forgive me if this sounds a little French academic, I'm really not, I didn't mean it, but I really like finding in an archive enough cracks to kind of go into those cracks and find in them grains of detail that then allow me to construe more imaginatively. And so in order not to sound just Frenchy abstract, I'll give you a very concrete example with something I've been trying to work on for some time now. So three or four years ago, I was interviewing reenactor cowboys in Arizona and New Mexico. So these are usually middle-aged men who dress as cowboys and then shoot each other. And they reenact scenes from the American sort of western, southwest mythology. So it's just like Doc Holliday and Billy the Kid, and it's always kind of the same story with different little variations. And there's a very successful town called Tombstone where I was interviewing Doc Hollidays and Wyatt Earps, and then I went to a smaller town nearby in New Mexico called Shakespeare, which has always really elicited a lot in my imagination. And Shakespeare is a failed reenactment town, like it used to be a mining town like all of those towns, but then it failed as a mining town. So in order to reconstruct itself, it presented itself as a town for reenactments of the southwest, but it didn't quite make it for some reason. And so it became a rehearsal town where reenactor cowboys from El Paso and another and Arizona go simply to rehearse gun fights and lynchings and hangings. So if you arrived in Shakespeare on a given Tuesday, you might just see someone shooting at another person or hanging another person. And so, I mean, we all know America is scary, but this America, I find particularly so, but also particularly fascinating as it happens to be right at the border with my country, and or my other country, now I'm American. And the fact that it ignores Mexico so consistently is always something that has made me wonder, right? There's no Mexican characters in the reenactments, even as enemies. Sometimes in skit there's like a Mexican outlaw, but there's no character, there's no presence, right? So all this to say, I've been researching a lot on Shakespeare because ultimately my goal is to reconquer Shakespeare as a Mexican and take over the town. In fact, really, like, I'm really, really quite serious about when we give presentations on borderlands project, in case there's funders in the audience, I always talk about this because I'm interested in someone wanting to buy the town back 'cause now it's owned by one guy who runs these reenactment rehearsals. Anyway, so Shakespeare's there, one day, it'll not belong to me, but I will help buy it in order to turn it into a kind of borderlands counter reenactment space. But in the meantime, I've been doing all the archival research, I've been able to do, there's very little on Shakespeare, but there, for example, fascinating census, full of course of Mexican inhabitants that are not present in any of the narratives of the town. And so when I have, I recently, a couple of weeks ago, went to the border to... Well, I went to Phoenix, really to Tampa, to give a kind of workshop on Shakespeare in the borderlands. And since I'd never given a course on Shakespeare, I gave a course on Shakespeare in New Mexico, but this was four people who actually do know about Shakespeare, the guy, and they're like the borderland Shakespeareans. And so I'm trying to amass an army to eventually take over Shakespeare. And these guys were the only people ever, like so far that have been really into this idea and the Shakespeareans of course. And so I showed them the census after having showed them a lot of sort of sound recordings of the interviews I've done with the reenactor cowboys and pictures. And so we looked at the census for a long time and just made an effort to imagine, right? To imagine the lives of the characters or the lives of people who we can think of as characters that have been kind of left off stage. And it is in that process, I think, that I find something enticing for the imagination, right? Like, this is always that the story that has been told, okay, let's look at all the things that have been consistently ignored and let's start from there. Like, how did this person look? What was their job? Why did they end up in Shakespeare in New Mexico? And so on and so forth. And so, my work is very rooted in space, yes, in history as well, but I have the... I guess I'm not a historian, so I can happily just depart from the archive as well and use it for fiction making.

- Well, it sounds like some of the work that you're doing now is... Well, it's sound documentation, right? So how does the sound work connect to the fiction writing? Or do you see them as separate projects? So maybe similar desires of investigating history, but through different mediums. Obviously, there are sound documentators, documentarians in "Lost Children Archive".

- Yeah. No, I don't see them as separate at all. And the more time passes, the more I'm interested in sound, or in listening or simply the aural experience, aural as in au and not o, as the beginning of the imaginative process. I have felt an enormous decline in my own ability to listen with concentration over these past 10 years or so. I think because of the presence of our telephones and the way that we connect to information now. Those of us who are, I don't know, 35 plus, 40 plus, we grew up in a really different world in that sense. And, I very much do have a nostalgia for a quieter, a slower pace. And I have found that only in a kind of retraining of aural literacy, of really making an effort to sit in space and listen because you can't fast forward sound the way you can scroll images, you have to sit in time with sound in a very, very deep way. So it connects you to time in a way that maybe your other senses don't quite right, or the other great sense of ours, our eyesight, doesn't. So I'm interested in sound as such, and I'm interested in sound recording, and I'm interested in sound archives, but I'm more than anything interested in sound as a practice of writing and of just retraining our attention.

- Mm-hmm. That's interesting. You were speaking earlier about beginning your writing career, writing in Spanish, "Lost Children Archive" was written in English. Can you tell us about that journey from writing in Spanish to writing in English, and maybe some of the stops and the key moments along the way?

- Yeah, that's a good question. And I am gonna have to give a talk in Chicago Cat Center next week where that question's gonna be central to the talk, but it's coming from the Mexican side, so I feel like I have to answer different things to be... Like, if it's coming from the Mexican side, I have to say sorry before I become-

- [Jennifer] Because you've become a traitor?

- Because I've become a traitor and I write in the language of the empire, so I'm fully colonized. I mean, I started writing in Spanish because I really wanted to, I had been schooled in English, and maybe because English was the language of my schooling, I had a much more complicated relationship to it, right? It had been always a language in which I was scolded at school, and I was very often scolded at school, it was a language in which I was graded, it was a language that felt much less like a playground and much more like the language of a certain hierarchy. So I started writing in Spanish, but also it was not all playground to be honest. It was also, I think a kind of nostalgia for something not lived, but something that I was born into in some way, so it felt like a recovery and like a coming back home. And so I wrote my first book, which in Spanish is called "False Papers," "Papeles Falsos," and in English is called "Sidewalks," don't ask me. And I then started writing a novel in English that I didn't quite work in English, and I wrote it in Spanish and that was "Los Ingrávidos" in Spanish and "Faces in the Crowd" in English. But that began in English and then switched to Spanish.

- [Jennifer] Why the Switch?

- I think it was something quite trivial and mundane, honestly. I was living in New York when I began writing it, and so I was just functioning in English, and I was mostly reading in English, but then I moved to Mexico in the middle of it and my brain switched to Spanish, so I started writing in Spanish. And, I mean, maybe other psychoanalyzing reasons, I had just had a kid and I guess I was speaking, trying to speak Spanish to my kid, and who knows, maybe that had something to do with it. But in any case, I switched languages in the middle of that. And then there was little doubt in my third book, which was "The Story of My Teeth" because the way I wrote it, I had to write it in Spanish 'cause I decided to write it in installments for workers in a juice factory so I wrote it in Spanish. There was no back and forth for me there. And then began again the process of thinking English or Spanish. And it's a way in which I also procrastinate for sometimes years because I make notes in both, and just know or tell myself that eventually one note is gonna be really the beginning of the novel. And, I mean, sometimes it's really three years or four before I hit that note and start writing, actually writing. And so that happened with "Lost Children Archive". I wrote it in both languages and notebooks until something happened in English. And I said, "This is it. I have to follow this voice, this tone." And then...

- [Jennifer] And what was that voice, in that tone?

- It's just something quite ineffable. I think it's just like some something atmospheric, yeah, it's something that you kind of feeling in the air. There's nothing... I mean, it's composed of course of something rhythmic, so it can all probably be traced back to syntax. But what creates one syntax rather than the other is I think a mystery to be held as such, right? And in the middle of writing "Lost Children Archive," I wrote, "Tell Me How It Ends" in English. It was a commission originally for a magazine for Freeman's. And so I wrote it in English, and then I sent it to my editors in Mexico, asking them to search for a journal in Mexico where I could publish that essay. And they read it and they said, "No, no, no. We would like to publish this as a little book. So when you come to Mexico, let's have a meeting and talk about it." And I thought, that's kind of crazy, that's not a book, that's an essay, an essay for a magazine. It's not quite, doesn't have the gravity or the density that a book should have. And so I did go to Mexico a few months later and we had a meeting, which in the case of my editors means cantina mezcales. And by the third mezcal, they had convinced me that I was a trader to like the Virgen de Guadalupe, and my mother, and everybody else. And so I ended up signing a serviette. Then I learned many years later that Muhammad Ali had signed something in a serviette, so I was like, "Okay, that's kind of catchy." I signed something in a serviette, saying that I would self translate to Spanish, everything that I dare write in the language of the empire. That was the wording. And so I did rewrite "Tell Me How It Ends" in Spanish, and that's called "Los Niños Perdidos," "The Lost Children." And it was a really good exercise in the end because it did become a book in the process of being rewritten into my mother tongue. Like, it really was just an essay, and something happened with it in Spanish that it acquired that gravity that it didn't have. And what you read now in English is the retranslation into English of that Spanish second version. And yeah, now I'm both... The sound project, excuse me, is very easy because it's bilingual or actually multilingual. So if we record someone speaking in Apache, that's the language that we record in. And the parts that I write for the sound piece are both in Spanish and in... We'll just have to sit, I mean, with sound, it's 24 hours sound piece, so no one's gonna listen to it fully. As maybe two crazy people in the world might actually sit and listen to the 24 hours. And there'll be parts that you don't fully understand if you don't understand all the languages. And that's how life is also, and it's okay. I think anyone who knows English is really, really spoiled because no English speakers are accustomed to others catering for them, right? For everything is always available in English. And it's a good experience to have to not understand sometimes, and to know that if you don't walk the mile, you don't get to see everything or understand everything. And then the novel, I'm still procrastinating, so I don't know if it's in Spanish or in English, although the idea is that it's in English, but it's partly translated by my mother into Spanish. And then there's some kind of contention with her translations and my versions.

- Well, you spoke to this a little bit just in your answer, and maybe this isn't a fair question to ask you, but I was wondering if you... What you think sort of the differences between a bilingual or even a trilingual life, and a monolingual life. And you haven't had a monolingual life, so maybe you don't know, but do you have... Yeah, do you have thoughts about what those differences are either for a writer or for a reader?

- Yeah, I mean, I cannot imagine how I would be a writer if I didn't know other languages or at least attempt to read them or learn them. I mean, I learned a couple of languages as an adult, so I speak them really badly. But I think that just the effort, what it does to the brain to attempt to grasp another grammar and another phonetics is immense. And I think that anyone who wants to be a writer really should have that experience of the foreignness, of not penetrating a language. And then maybe slowly being able to touch at least part parts of its surface. I do think it's an important experience for the imagination. That said, there are plenty of amazing monolingual writers. So my theory just broke down, but deep down, I still feel it. I do think it's important indeed. I mean, and I do often wonder, for example, I lived in South Korea for four years, but as a child, and I was placed in an American school where they didn't teach Korean. And I do always sense that my life would be so much more interesting if I knew Korean, which is so much better.

- [Jennifer] Missed opportunity.

- Missed opportunity. My parents' fault.

- That's right. Lots to put on their shoulders. We can begin taking some questions, or if you have written questions or haven't already, we can sort of begin collecting those and get to some audience questions in a moment. We have a question collector somewhere, a basket in the back.

- A question collector is something that I would love to...

- If it's a profession here at Amherst. You have to study many years to become a question collector. So while people are thinking and bringing their thoughts forward, you spoke a little bit about "Tell Me How It Ends" and "Lost Children Archive" are sort of companion books. One is a novel one, one is an essay, both are concerned with undocumented children coming from Mexico or Central America to the US. Can you say a little bit about how that focus of undocumented children came into your life in such a focused way that you wanted it to be the subject of your writing? And then the two forms interest took or interest. Yeah.

- Yeah, I think that I was at a point then when in 2014 where I was trying to write a novel about growing up in post-apartheid South Africa. I grew up in South Africa in the mid '90s with the beginning of a democratic era in South Africa, the fall of the apartheid's regime and the presidency of Mandela. And I wanted to write somewhat biographical piece or novel about those years and what it meant to be a child going through a transition of that kind in a country. And then the so-called immigration crisis, and I say so-called because it was more, more accurately called a refugee crisis started in the summer of 2014. And I was crossing the United States by car with my family, and I could not quite wrap my head around the idea that there were tens of thousands and later hundreds of thousands of kids stranded alone and undocumented. And that the problem was being thought of as an institutional one. How do we process these kids rather than how do we really create a mechanism that protects these children that are arriving? And I couldn't wrap my head around the numbers, the reasons, the situation, and so that happens to us sometimes, right? There are particular political crises that hit us more than others. And this one was one that overtook and haunted my imagination to a degree that it didn't seem that I could really write about anything else because I couldn't really think about anything else. Everything felt kind of dimmer compared to that. And so I started really just documenting what I heard on the radio or read on the newspaper or thought or saw along that journey in that summer of 2014. And then when I returned to New York after that summer, I decided to more actively engage by becoming a translator in court, not a court translator, but a translator for testimonies that then would be either represented by a lawyer or not, depending on if a lawyer saw that they were, I guess worth taking. And my brother was simply to interview and to write a testimony in English that then would be handed to a lawyer. And it was somewhere in that process that I without first knowing and then more consciously started working on "Lost Children Archive." But then I stopped altogether because I realized that I was turning "Lost Children Archive" into a kind of receptacle for the work that I was doing in court or the stories that I was hearing. And I was doing no justice to either reality by fictionalizing it as it happened or to the novel itself, which then had to become this kind of political instrument that it really could not be, right? I don't know how to instrumentalize a novel in that way. So I stopped writing the novel. I thought I need to take a break, and understand what I'm doing, and what I can do and what I can't. And that's when I wrote Tell Me How It Ends" that is a much more straightforward, I guess, testimony of what I was seeing in court as a close observer of a situation. And once I wrote, "Tell Me How It Ends," I was able to return to "Lost Children Archive" with much more freedom, and with less of a feeling that the novel had to be a hammer with which to hit people on the head with because that's not really a readable novel, right? A novel has to be something much more complex, alive, ambiguous, and not really a standpoint, really just much more of a slice of life where there's people that talk, and there's children that sleep, and saliva, and divorces, and people that suck their thumb, not in that order, but in somewhat of a messy order the way life is messy, right? So then I was able to go back to it and just understand it in that way. And I'm glad that I was able to separate the two things at some point, even though they're both in very deeply connected. They do two very different things.

- Right. And you have also said about "Lost Children Archive," that it is novel about documentary form. I mean, it's called "Lost Children Archive," and it is an archive, the book is sort of structured in that way. And so can you say more about the documentary form that you were interested in and what you wanted to show about how we go about documenting things?

- Well, yeah, I guess to answer that question, I have to go back to the very idea of archive, right? And what this novel, I think, tries to do with that idea, which is to really strip it off its officialness, right? Like, archives are usually something that we consult as a kind of final receptacle, material receptacle of a connection to a certain past, and it has a kind of authority. And what gets archived is somewhat a final version or a final evidence of history. And so I was interested in rethinking archive in a way that what is amassed as an archive in the novel is quite heterogeneous. And in a single box for example, there is a series of maps documenting crossings, border crossings, but also in that same box, there is a volume of "Pedro Páramo" a very brilliant modernist novel written in Mexico by Juan Rulfo. And in that same box is maybe Ezra Pound's "Cantos." So the question there, and this idea of how this novel archives is what happens when you constellate objects that are usually not placed together, and how do they get resignified by being in a kind of in a similar place, right? In the same box, so to speak. So the novel documents through those, or through that very, I guess, heterogeneous notion of what is an archive.

- Mm-hmm. Yeah. So we have some audience questions. One of the first ones is about the imagination of a child. "So how did you connect with the imagination of a child so as to let it take over the narrative of 'Lost Children Archive?'"

- Well, in that period, I remember my daughter who's now a teenager, but she was little then, and every night... I was still young enough that I could write at night until really late, and still wake up the next morning and function. And so I would put her to bed and then I'd go up to write in a studio. And she would always say to me, "Oh, you're going with your little friends now, mama, right?" With a kind of irony that she still had then. And I mean, she had then already and she still has now. So yeah, it was my little friends indeed who were completely kind of taking over. There's no generic imagination of a child, I think, that can really work as a vehicle for a novel. I think that we see a lot of it in bad television or maybe in bad novels too, like a generic 10 year old that speaks like a generic cute something. But I don't think that works. No. I think we all, as spectators or readers, I immediately kind of sense the flatness of a generic 10 year old or a generic child, right? So I think the process for me in writing this particular boy that takes over the second half of the novel was, I don't know, but might be similar to how an actor trains for a role in the sense that I really think that I came to know, something grew inside me. Like, I really thought a lot about who this kid was, and imagine him and his voice, and the things he would say, the things you would read. And there was a lot of that person somehow either growing inside me or me inside them, who knows, that's where it gets really murky, and one goes to play with one's little friends in the attic. And it was only once, I think, that process had really reached a deeper level that I was able to sit with the novel and then kind of go with his voice. And strangely, all the slowness I had in writing, the female narrator became a kind of torrential thing with the boy. There was something a lot more fluid somehow in that. And I think it's because of the work that had happened without my totally knowing that it was happening.

- There's another question about "Lost Children Archive." "What was your thought process behind layering the 'Lost Children Archive' with multiple narratives of migration with the lost children of the border and familial migration?" I think this question is referring to the book within a book?

- Mm-hmm, yeah, probably the book within a book, but then also maybe some other bits and pieces of archive of other great journeys of a children along history. The 13th century peregrinations that's mentioned, the Children's Crusade and the "Orphan Train Riders." And I think, I was very interested in not circumscribing this story to the political moment that we were traversing then and are still traversing now because I didn't feel that it was, first of all responsible of me to try to capture it as such, but also that it was possible to really capture it. So I think what a novel can do at best is to try to understand the present in juxtaposing it with the many iteration of similar things in history. In this case, I was looking at forms of state violence against peoples, and in particular the United States, and its government against people whom the government has either deported, or internally deported into reservations, or internally deported into prisons, so all these forms of disappearing people or excluding them from the social fabric. And in juxtaposing, for example, the deportations of Central American children, most of them indigenous, some of them also mestiza, but most of them indigenous, and the deportations of Native Americans into reservations in the 19th century. I think that the novel at least tries to see how this kind of violence is structural, and not just something that is a new circumstance that we should understand as isolated but rather quite the opposite, that it's structural and that it happens over and over again with different names and different forms and with different details as well. But how do we address it if we understand that it's a much deeper structural violence, right?

- Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, maybe just one or two more questions here. One of them is, so "I know that besides being a writer, you are also a scholar and a professor. What do you think about the relationship between critical and creative modes of literary thinking?"

- And I think they're all creative. The idea that we have a creative writing versus the other whatever is I think quite ridiculous because no form of writing is critical or none is less creative. That said, I don't think I can really call myself a scholar, so thank you, whoever said that, very generous of you, but I have not published a single paper in my life, just a PhD thesis and it's pretty literary in its wording and maybe not too serious. So, I wouldn't call myself a scholar. I rely a lot on research, but I think that my passage through research is very much that of a fiction writer. Was that the question? Did I answer?

- Sounds good. Was there anyone who asked it who wanted to follow up? Argue with the answer? So maybe the last question circles back a little bit to this idea of absence, because it's about what you leave out. So "When writing non-fiction or creative non-fiction, you encounter the question of what you write and don't write for the purpose of the narrative. But in fiction, in your stories, how do you choose what to keep and what to leave out?"

- Oh, that's a great question. I have to ask myself that every day, but I forget, so thank you for reminding me. I mean, I think that... Yeah, I think my answer's gonna be a little mundane, so, excuse me, but it's, I think that's really how it kind of works. We have good days and bad days, right? And mostly we have bad days. And so mostly we write bullshit, and there's some days that are really good. And the only thing that you can do is sit every day just to see if it was a good day or a bad day 'cause if you skip a day, it might have been the good day, right? I finally understood this during the pandemic, one understood many things during the pandemic, right? 'Cause there was an ice cream vendor who in the middle of the pandemic would come with his ice cream truck, the music. And of course no one would buy him an ice cream because it was the middle of the... It was the beginning of the pandemic, so no one would go out and buy an ice cream in March. And the fear, I mean, how do you wash an ice cream, right? But the guy would come every day, and he came in March, in April, and May. And eventually, the neighbors would start going out for ice cream. It was like the clap at the 6:00 PM, I don't know where if you guys, wherever you were, there was a clap at 6:00 PM, there was the clap at 6:00 PM and the ice cream guy at 5:00. And it was part of the day, and eventually we all started going and getting ice cream for him. And I thought, it's exactly what a writer has to do. You just do it every day, and one day someone comes and buys an ice cream. It's one day, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm really extending them analogy and it's getting sticky, but one day you write a paragraph that's a little worth it. And so then that one sticks, that one stays. And you realize just upon rereading and rereading, and if you have someone as patient as... I don't know in your life who might be patient enough to listen to you read out loud, you notice when you read out loud how the energy deflates when you reach a really boring part, that one's out, and so on and so forth. I think it's more a process of erasing than anything, right? I think writing is more a process of erasing. And yeah, you have to trust... Maybe not erase the first time, but the second, if it's still not ringing, you erase it, you'd take it out.

- [Jennifer] And just keep going and doing it over and over.

- Like the ice cream guy, yeah.

- Thank you very much for this.

- Thank you very much.

- I want to remind the audience that there is opportunity and time for book signing, so books are for sale back there. We'll bring a table up front for Valeria to sign books. And thank you so much for being here.

- Thank you very much to all of you.

Transcript of Hilton Als in Conversation with Professor Frank Leon Roberts

- Good afternoon!

- [Audience] Good afternoon!

- Thank you! I'm Michael Elliott. I'm the president of Amherst College. I want to thank you for your patience as we sorted things out this afternoon. Delighted to welcome you all today. It's an honor and pleasure to welcome you to the "President's Colloquium on Race and Racism," presented as part of "LitFest" this year. Before I introduce tonight's speakers, which is what you're really waiting for, just a few, quick housekeeping items. First, your questions are an important part of the conversation. We have cards in the pews. If you'd like to write down a question. Over the course of the afternoon we will collect them, and Professor Roberts will judiciously select among them as many questions as he can get to for our guest this evening. Second, as you may have noticed, Amherst Books has copies of Hilton's books for sale just outside the main doors, and there will be a book signing immediately this afternoon, after the Q&A. A table will be set up on the front of the stage where you can line up in the aisle with books that you'd like to have signed. Finally, just so you know, today's talk is being recorded and will be posted online within a few days. The Presidential Scholars Programs brings eminent scholars and cultural leaders studying intersections of race, racism, and American democracy to Amherst for short-term residencies. During their time on campus, presidential scholars present a public lecture, hold seminars, visit classes, and meet with students, faculty, and staff. In addition to doing all of these things, Presidential Scholar Hilton Als, as many of you know, has also curated an exquisite show at the Mead Art Museum, a new iteration of an exhibition that he originated at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York in 2019. The Mead is open until 5:00 today, and I encourage all of you who've not seen it to visit. "God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin" will be at the Mead until July 9th, and it presents works from renowned artists, such as Richard Avedon, Marlene Dumas, Kara Walker, Diane Arbus, and Alice Neel, alongside archival materials to explore Baldwin's life, work, and legacy in ways that reclaim with great tenderness, underappreciated facets of the multifaceted person that Baldwin was. I've heard Hilton say a couple of times now that he designed the show to give Baldwin back his Black, gay body, and I suspect that will be part of our conversation this afternoon. Hilton has described himself as always striving to illuminate the delicacy of complications, a phrase that I just love, and this show is a beautiful example of his genius in doing this. Something that feels exemplary even, and maybe especially, regarding our own understanding of our own lives. I hope you'll get the chance to see the show. It's been wonderful having Hilton here on campus this week. His intellectual generosity in person, matches everything that we know of his incisive and deeply personal writing voice, and I've seen firsthand how inspiring, encouraging, and energizing it's been for our students and other community members to connect with him. His visit will resonate with us long after he takes his leave, and we're tremendously grateful to him for being so generous with his time. I'd also like to thank the many staff members across campus who coordinated Hilton's visit, particularly Darryl Harper, the John William Ward Professor of Music and director of the Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and his team, who have so ably coordinated Presidential Scholars programming all year, and also colleagues from special events, from LitFest, especially Jen Acker, and the Mead Museum, especially its director, Siddhartha Shah, who have collaborated to make Hilton's visit richly rewarding for our entire community. Many of us here know Hilton Als first as a longtime staff writer and theater critic for "The New Yorker" magazine, where his reviews are not simply reviews, but evocative and provocative contributions to the discourse on theater, race, class, sexuality, and identity in America. He's the author of three lyrical and compelling books, "My Pinup," published in 2022, and recently long-listed for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; "White Girls," published in 2013, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the 2014 Lambda Literary Award; and "The Women," published in 1996. He's currently at work on a fourth book titled "I Don't Remember," about his experiences in AIDS-era New York. Als has curated many visual arts exhibitions, including "Alice Neel, Uptown," along with an accompanying catalog, and "Joan Didion: What She Means," which is currently on exhibit at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. If you're so unfortunate you can't make Hilton in Amherst, you can go check him out in LA. The 2017 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, a Guggenheim for creative writing, and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, among many other recognitions, Als has taught at numerous colleges and universities, including Yale, Wesleyan, and our colleagues at Smith, and currently holds appointments at both Berkeley and Columbia. In conversation with Hilton tonight will be assistant professor of English and Black Studies, Frank Leon Roberts, one of my new favorite colleagues at Amherst College. Professor Roberts is a scholar of 20th and 21st century African American literature and culture, and U.S. social movements, especially Black freedom movements. He's at work on a book about James Baldwin as an experimental playwright, and an edited anthology titled, "The Black Lives Matter Reader: Key Writings from the Movement for Black Lives." The founder and leader of several social justice-oriented, nonprofit organizations, he's the recipient of numerous honors, including a Ford Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, a Roddenberry Fellowship, and several residency fellowships. And already in his short time on this campus, he has made incredible strides in building of real community among our students. Please join me welcoming to the stage, Hilton Als and Frank Leon Roberts.

- Ah, good afternoon, good afternoon. Can everyone hear me?

- [Audience members] Yes.

- Good, good. Ah it is, first of all, thank you so much for being with us here today.

- Oh, gosh, no.

- You know, I was-

- It's been a great experience for me.

- It's been wonderful having you. Quick story to give you a sense of how popular you are among our students here.

- Um-hmm.

- Brother Darryl Harper can attest to the validity of this story, so the-

- Oh whatever, he's a lovely man.

- Yes, he is.

- Where is he?

- He's somewhere, yeah, there he goes.

- His center is so calm.

- Very relaxing.

- Yeah, very.

- So there were posters of your fabulous new exhibit at the Mead, "God Made My Face," and it says, "Curated by Hilton Als." And the posters were released by the museum, and I've been seeing them in the weeks leading up to today and I said, "Oh, I'll get one after the curator's talk, and maybe he'll sign it for me and I'll put it in my office."

- Uh-huh.

- The posters are gone, brother. The students are taking the posters off the bulletin board like Beyonce tickets. So that just goes to show you how happy we are to have you here.

- We'll have to make some more.

- I would love to get, if there's anyone here that can make that happen.

- Siddhartha, yeah.

- But I was telling brother president, Michael Elliot, that I've never, that we've never met before. You, when I think of you, I think of a passage from Toni Morrison's "Beloved," the passage that I know you know well. That you are a friend of my mind, right? You gather me, man. The pieces of me, you bring them together. And so thank you for-

- How can I follow that? I have nothing to say, wow. Nothing to add.

- Well thank you for being a friend of the mind of everyone.

- It's beautiful. It's funny that you, I mean, I'm very touched that you said that, and recently a gentleman said at Williams College, actually, he said that he realized that I was a devotional writer and I said, "Why would you wanna live with hate "for 50 years or 40 years?" The whole point, I think, is that we're present and we're alive to enormous complications and disagreements and love at the same time. So that feels like the project in some way.

- [Frank] Yeah, yeah. Well, as I mentioned, to get right into it, we talked about you're curating this extraordinary exhibit, "God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin," and we'll get to that in a second, but before we get to that, I wanted to ask, when did you first encounter Baldwin as a writer?

- As with so many things in my life, I think I must have first, I remember that there was, this is one of the terrible things about, that has happened in public schools, but there used to be book clubs, and for 75 cents I think, or a $1.50 a year, you were able to pick one book a month. And one of them was this book called "Notes of Native Son," and it had a painting on the cover by Romare Bearden, it was a collage. And I read, I had a very difficult relationship with my father, and I think I read "Notes of a Native Son" first. I wasn't from Harlem, so the Harlem Ghetto piece resonated for me in a different way. But the piece about his father-

- [Frank] Yeah.

- Was overwhelming. Cut to maybe three or four or five months later, I met a man named Owen Dodson, who was the first professor-director to work with Baldwin's play, "The Amen Corner" at Howard. And in his bookshelves, Owen often kept, had first editions of things, but he often kept the letters from the writers in the books. And all of these letters from Jimmy fell out saying, I'm grateful to you for the production at Howard and so on. So it was just a, my relationship to him was always based on having a connection to his personal and particularly his gay history in New York. And Owen was friends with, great friends of his from Paris, Gordon Heath, who had a club in Paris, Earl Hyman, great actors. So for me, he was not, he was inseparable from this group of gay men of color that I knew through Owen. So literature and life was always sort of converging where he was concerned.

- Wow, in addition to this being LitFest, this is of course also the "President's Colloquium on Race and Racism."

- [Hilton] Yes.

- And I want to talk to you about Black writing as resistance. We are living in strange and dangerous times for Black writers, Black journalists, and Black intellectuals. Of course, in America, we have always already been living in strange and dangerous times for Black writers and journalists and intellectuals, so this is-

- I think it's a, to be honest, I think it's a problem for writers in general.

- Well, this is true.

- And I think that intellectual projects or pursuits are endangered by fact.

- Hmm.

- So this goes back to your image, the question about images, and the fact that we live in a world that is framed by unrelenting imagery, takes away from inquiry, 'cause there's nothing to find out. You're seeing the thing. And so one of the things that I think is endangered, is the impulse to question or to believe really.

- [Frank] Yeah.

- That their voice makes a difference.

- Wow, so is there any, so then what do we do as the writer-

- Just keep working.

- Keep working?

- Keep working.

- Or is-

- There's nothing else, right? I mean, what's that wonderful thing that Baldwin said, "I couldn't sing, I didn't know how to dance-"

- But I could-

- "I was too short to play basketball, "but I had this weapon and it's that wonderful thing of" he said, "I knew that I would get my revenge that way." I don't feel like a vengeful person, but I do feel that I was given the gift of resistance-

- Mm.

- In my own family. And that means that you go out into the world with a lot of hope and little expectation.

- Mm, for anything else.

- Yeah. And then when the hope is met or when the expectation isn't dashed, it's just a gift.

- Yeah, yeah. Well, I would be remiss to be sitting here in all this purple and not talk to you about brother Prince Rogers Nelson.

- [Hilton] Yes. Your latest text, Prince, a paean to Prince, "Pinup," a paean to Prince.

- [Hilton] Yeah.

- Is this gorgeous meditation on the artist, formally known as the artist formally known as Prince. And you have this wonderful moment about halfway through where you describe meeting Prince in a dressing room in St. Louis.

- [Hilton] Um-hmm.

- Can you tell us about that moment? What was it like meeting Prince and how has he figured into your creative imagination?

- Well, he was just really extraordinarily beautiful to look at. He was like a beautiful turtle. It was like the shape of his head and his neck. And the thing that I noticed about him that was so fascinating was that he would completely light up when men of color walked into the room. Older gentleman whose respect he wanted, like Maceo and Larry Graham. And it was such a fabulous kind of thing that you couldn't help but notice it. And you couldn't help but notice how much he cared for that approval from them. If you go back into his biography, he had a very fraught relationship with his father and so on, so one felt that he was always sort of trying to make up this relationship. That was the first thing. The second thing was how carefully he listened to what you were saying. And his response was based really on having really sort of considered what was being said at that time. The overriding feeling too, was how much energy he had about creativity. And so what happened during this exchange, and then the next day when he asked me to come back, was that the other journalists were furious with me 'cause he was giving 15 minutes to each person, but I took up these hours and so they never got to meet him.

- [Frank] Yeah.

- And then he had me come back and it was such a beautiful moment. I was leaving after the show and I was backstage and this woman, great woman was saying, "Mr. Hilton, Mr. Hilton." And I turned around, she said, "Prince would've killed me if I didn't find you."

- [Frank] Wow.

- "He wants to talk to you again." So I said, "Oh, okay, sure," and ah-

- [Frank] I'll take it.

- And I remember we walked back and he was in his makeup trailer and he was, I mean, the show had just ended eight minutes before

- [Frank] And this was "Lovesexy"?

- Love, no, it was the, it was kind of a comeback tour-

- [Frank] Okay.

- After the legal stuff.

- [Frank] Yeah.

- And he was getting his eyelashes done, and he said, "No, no, no, number 14" to the makeup artist. And he looked at me, and I looked, and I said, "That is the most beautiful creature." And he said, "They found you, can you come back again, like tonight?" And it was to meet Larry Graham, Graham Central Station, do you guys remember those, that group? And they were Jehovah's Witnesses together with Larry's wife.

- [Frank] Right.

- And the idea, he didn't necessarily want me to be a Jehovah's Witness, he just wanted to show me more of himself. And then we went to, he rented out a bar. We went to the bar and I'd sort of go, I become de facto my mother in situations where I'm panicking. And I asked him if he'd eaten anything and, did he want something to eat? And he said, "No, no, just sit with us and I'll get something later." It was just, it was very simpatico.

- [Frank] Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Wow, speaking of your mother, also in "White Girls," you speak beautifully about the fascinating story of how you came to Hilton as a name.

- Oh, yes, yes.

- Do you mind sharing that with us?

- I don't mind at all. My mother was very, very close to my father's sister, whose name is Louise. And my aunt, we called her Aunt We, and Aunt We had a stillborn son. But my mother, when she was pregnant with me, said that if it was a boy, she would name him Hilton, which is what my aunt was going to name her son. My mother didn't expect to have a boy because she had four girls already. So then I popped out, and that's how I got my name. The name Hilton Ralston is my grandmother's favorite nephew from Barbados and I have a portrait of him that was taken in a studio in Barbados. And that's how the name came.

- Yeah, which you described quite beautifully in page 37 in "White Girls." I read, and just a quick programming note, I hope that you all are preparing your questions that we can have, that we're gonna unleash on brother Hilton momentarily. But I wanted to say, I read a fabulous interview with you recently where you described what we might call as your Wendy Williams morning ritual.

- [Hilton] Oh, yes.

- And now for those-

- [Hilton] I miss her.

- Yeah, Wendy Williams, those of us who are New Yorkers, fame, gossip columnist, and so much more. Just the walking, swishing, eruption of the divine.

- [Hilton] Yes.

- And now that sister Wendy is off the air, so first can you tell us about what that Wendy Williams ritual was?

- You've done your research. I had this ritual before I would start writing in the morning, that I would I would watch Wendy Williams because she didn't speak English, she spoke Wendy. And it was a way of clearing my mind for the English that I was going to be engaged with. And I would clean the apartment while she had a breakdown or told us about her bad marriage, or, she was fantastic. And so she went off the air and I didn't know what to do with myself except I guess I had to write more. And so now the ritual really is not so exciting. I usually read a little bit of poetry or something to loosen up and to generate a little heat.

- So lyric has taken the place of sister Williams.

- Yeah, I mean it's the same as Wendy, really. She's lyrical. She's singing too.

- Yeah, my final question before I open it up, these pandemic years have been tough for us, and also I think for the creative class, if we might call ourselves that, has been really generative for us. That something happened during the pandemic, which of course we're still in, we're living with it, as opposed to being over it, where there was more free time to think and to become more reflective and retrospective. How were the pandemic years for you as a writer? And is there anything about that moment that you think that we should continue to bring forth with us as we get on the other side of this, in terms of that space of deep reflection and attention to ourselves?

- Oh, that's a very interesting question. It was very helpful to me in terms of describing the moment. I couldn't make, I didn't make much headway with other things during that time. There were lots of demonstrations in my neighborhood and I wrote a long essay about that. I don't remember what else I wrote except I actually, I was doing other projects to connect with people more directly. So I worked on a little bit of a radio piece and a script. And I think I was always looking for ways to connect orally to people. But I did write a long essay, which got a lot of attention. And then it actually freed me to go back to my own work. So I think that what we can take away from, if we can take anything away from devastation, is what I saw when I got sick, pneumonia and so on, there were two things that I'll never forget. I'll never forget the refrigerators outside of hospitals with the dead.

- [Frank] Yeah.

- And that I had to pass to go into the hospital. And the second thing was, the healthcare workers' deep depression. I had never seen anything like it in my life, that there was, all they could do was kind of mop up the floor.

- [Frank] Um-hmm.

- So those are the two things that I don't think that we should forget. We shouldn't forget the dead, and we shouldn't forget those workers who wanted to take care of us.

- Wow, one more question, which will allow me to sift through these in-

- [Hilton] Sure.

- So this is a program you know, and me just not wanting to let you go.

- [Hilton] Absolutely.

- We are both men of the theater.

- [Hilton] Uh-huh.

- James Baldwin was a man of the theater. As you know, these post pandemic years have been in a really exciting time for American theater, Black theater, and you've written eloquently about so many extraordinary figures in the history of American theater. What have you been, what's the last play that you saw that really resonated with you?

- Oh, there's some really super talented people out there. There's a woman named Jackie Sibblies Drury, who won the Pulitzer Prize for a play called "Fairview," which is extraordinary. There's Michael R. Jackson.

- [Frank] Yes, Strange-

- Who wrote "Strange Loop," who has a new play coming out called, "White Girl In Danger." It's extremely funny, it's based on those Lifetime movies. And Annie Baker is a sensational playwright. So there are a number of people who are working, I think, to revitalize the theater and who believe in it. It's been a wonderful occasion to watch them grow up.

- Thank you for that. We wish "Strange Loop" was still on Broadway.

- [Hilton] I know.

- It had a great long run, but-

- [Hilton] Yes.

- All good things must come to an end.

- It's the kind of play where you feel actually, it would work as a film, I think.

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

- I could totally see that.

- Yeah.

- We have a-

- You need more time? It's okay.

- No, I've got it, I've got it here. We have a question about your upcoming projects.

- Yes.

- So you've announced the tentative title or the permanent title?

- It's the permanent title. It's called, "I Don't Remember," and it began, there's a Joe Brainard book, a very famous book called, "I Remember," where the poet Joe Brainard begins each line with, "I remember bobby socks, I remember Amherst," et cetera.

- [Frank] Hmm.

- And I started thinking about misremembering and what if you didn't want to remember because of something very painful. Brainard himself died of AIDS, and what if you didn't want to remember things? We for those, and it's a terrible word that I take apart in the book, this idea of survivors, that you don't really survive it, that they live with you. And so how do you live with the dead, is really what the book is about.

- [Frank] Wow, and we can expect that this year, right?

- Ach! My agent's here.

- We can pray and hope for it this year.

- I'm handing it in this year for sure because I, it took, I was telling the gentleman at our lunch that these three pages that had killed me, and then I was putting a lot of theory in and a lot of distancing that took me six years to get to myself and to describe myself. So we're almost there.

- We're almost there.

- Yeah.

- I love that. This is a question from Laura Curran says, "I love Alice Neel and was surprised you included her "in the exhibit." And thank you for introducing me to Alice Neil.

- [Hilton] Oh, isn't she great?

- That one image in particular, I think of, what is it, "Ballet Dancer," 1950?

- Oh yeah, the man, yes.

- My gosh.

- [Hilton] Yeah.

- Can you say more, introduce us to sister Alice Neal, if they don't know.

- Sure, Alice Neel was born in, at the turn of the last, at the start of the last century, century before last, in Pennsylvania. She came from a sort of standard Dutch reform, white family, and she moved to, she went to a school, an art school for women. And her grandmother said, "Well, why do you wanna be an artist? "Women don't do that." So she was always being confronted with what women could and could not do. She became involved with a very beautiful, lively Cuban scene in New York. And she didn't want to live in Greenwich Village because she didn't like Bohemianism. She preferred the world of Spanish Harlem and Harlem. And so she moved uptown with the father of her second child, a singer named Jose. And she began to paint the people in her neighborhood. I discovered her because when I went to Columbia, there was no such thing as Af/Am art or-

- [Frank] Right.

- History, and they had truly, like you could go to African art-

- [Frank] Right. Or oceanic graphic art, and there was a library, the art history library, Avery, and they have this book by this woman, Alice Neel. And I started looking through the book and I realized that it was what I had been looking for, that she had painted communities that I understood. And that in the, in her painting, there was never a condescending note, that everyone was allowed their psychological intensity and acuity. And I was very drawn to the fact that she was treating folks as individuals and not as standard.

- [Frank] Wow.

- Yeah.

- This is a question from Chris Grobe, the chair of our English Department here at Amherst. He says, "You spoke of writing as a practice of resisting the supposed self-evidence of visual images."

- [Hilton] Say that one more time.

- You spoke of writing as a practice of resisting the supposed self-evidence of visual images.

- [Hilton] Oh, uh-huh.

- Is that also how you understand your writing on the performing arts, or are theater, film, musical performance, et cetera, somehow allies in that project of resistance?

- Yes, they are, because they're about the ineffable. You can have a film and of course that stays the same, but your impressions of scenes and movements and actions are going to be very different from film to film. One of the things that Suzan-Lori Parks, one of your Holyoke sisters, has said, is that she loves the sadness of theater because it's going to be different every time. So I think that this, what I felt my project was as a writer-critic, was to describe the ineffable and the fact that it wasn't coming back.

- Wow, there are a lot of questions here about your approach to the arts and then a lot of questions about James Baldwin. I'll take another with regards to the former. It says, "I'm taking Dr. Frank's class, "The Revolution Will Be Dramatized," where we discuss-

- [Hilton] That's a great title.

- Where we discuss Eleanor Fuchs', "Some Questions to Ask a Play," this landmark essay for dramaturgy. Do you have questions that you ask a play?

- It's not so much a question as a statement, "Please don't bore me."

- [Frank] Mm, that's a good one!

- Yeah.

- [Frank] That's a real good one.

- I have a pretty good threshold for boredom, but I don't like theater that is telling me how to think about what I'm watching. I really sort of prefer theater that is going to unfold and enlighten me in some way spiritually, first. But to be told how to think about the lives on stage irritates me.

- [Frank] Mm, mm.

- Excuse me, that gentleman, isn't he the head of the New York Public Library now? Is that that guy? Oh my God, I was like, wait, I had like, lunch with him. I was like, oh my God.

- He's staring at you frequently, and you're-

- Wow. Okay.

- Okay, only at Amherst, folks.

- Yeah.

- Only at Amherst.

- Yeah. This is from brother Jared Loggins, in Black Studies.

- Sure.

- Baldwin talks a lot in his work about his father.

- Um-hmm.

- Can you talk about his mother's influence on him?

- Oh incalculable, I think that she saved his life. If you read the late work in particular, where he talks about her more openly, like "The Devil Finds Work," which is a very late masterpiece of, I call it fractured, and fractious literature, she's the one who didn't discourage him and who gave him permission. So there's a quote in our show where he would, next to the Avedon photographs of him, of Baldwin with his mother, and he said that as a child, he would say, "I'm gonna be rich and famous. "I'm going to buy you these, this thing." And he said, my mother would say, "Well it's a notion."

- [Frank] It's a notion. And he said it was something about the phrase that made him hear Black English in a profound way. And also that the fact that she wasn't disqualifying his dreams, that she was saying something that was in support of, without disqualifying the possibility, that it would be real.

- [Frank] Wow I love that.

- Yeah.

- We have another question here that says, "Who are you in lineage with past, present, and future?"

- Oh God, all of you, yeah.

- Well, one of the things I will say, adding to that, that I appreciate so much about your work, is how you draw from so many traditions at once. And I think I'd be remiss to not attempt to also take a moment to center your willingness to give voice to Black queer histories and stories. And I'm wondering if you could talk about that politics, the care with which you write about, for instance, Black women as well as queer Black men, is something that is unique and singular to your voice. And so can you talk about how those communities show up in your work and how you showed up through your writing practice?

- Well, I think that they showed up and show up in my work because it's what I grew up in. And when you grow up in a matriarchal society, Toni Morrison actually, who was a single mother, said something quite profound that I'd like to quote about that, and she says, "Who says "that it's a broken home, because there's no man there?" It was a real question. And I think that I didn't feel that. I felt that it was my family.

- [Frank] Yeah.

- And so this idea that women were less, was not something that I even understood, reading feminist literature when I grew up. There was always a different project, I think, with Black feminism and White feminism, and it's very interesting to talk to second and third wave feminists about this. But Black feminists have always been the head of the household, and that was a big difference. And so the power for me was always evident because they were raising us.

- [Frank] Um-hmm.

- And then the queer part makes any home different because you're ripping at the fabric of the family structure as people know it in the world. And you're adding an element or narrative that they couldn't have predicted. So it's the unpredictability that shows you who this person really is, are, is.

- [Frank] Yeah.

- Are, and how you can make your life towards that or away from it. It just took me a long time to understand that the love that I was seeking from people who couldn't cope with that part of my life, wasn't love at all.

- Um, yeah, I love that.

- Reminds me of that Nina Simone quote, quote, "You've got to learn when to get up when love is no longer being served."

- [Hilton] Yeah, that's right.

- Favorite Prince song? Do we have one, is there a Prince album?

- I think I quoted in the book, "Life Can Be So Nice," and it's a particular line in that song that makes me laugh every time. The song begins with him saying, "Scrambled eggs are so boring." And I think that says a lot about a lot of things.

- [Frank] Yeah.

- I love that song, I love the entire, "Sign O' The Times" is a masterpiece.

- [Frank] Yes.

- The album, there are many, many masterpieces and the late stuff, "Black Sweat," is a great, late masterpiece.

- I love those. "Black Sweat" I'm not familiar with.

- It didn't get a lot of play, it's a great, great song.

- Cool, I'm a fan of "Seven" and "Ladder."

- Okay.

- And may, maybe "Satisfaction," too, that's one of the ones that-

- Yeah, well, I love "Sister" and "Head," and all the naughty songs, too.

- Soon we're gonna list the whole catalog of Prince.

- Yeah.

- Right, that's what Prince does to us. A final question, what is Hilton Als' vision for his future?

- Um. Um.

- To finish my work and to be a good person.

- [Frank] Sounds a lot like Baldwin.

- Yes.

- [Frank] To be a good man and a good writer.

- That's right.

- And with that, we are so grateful. I just want to thank you again dear brother, on behalf of the entire Amherst College community. We know that we're gonna be opening it up for book signings, but thank you for being a keeper-

- Oh, that went so quickly.

- It zoomed by, am I right on time? Thank you for being a keeper of the culture and a keeper of the legacy and for keeping the legacy moving forward. We are so grateful to have you here and to be in community with you. And we're looking forward to reading what's next.

- Yes.

- From brother Hilton Als.

- I can't thank you enough for your generosity and care and the care and interest that I've experienced at Amherst. It's been exemplary, so thank you, thank you, and thank you all.

- Thank you, a round of applause, brother Hilton Als.