News & Events LitFest 2023 Videos

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.