News & Events LitFest 2024 Videos

- Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us. I know this is the time of afternoon that calls for a coffee and a walk. There is coffee, but thank you for being here indoors with us. This is the ninth year of LitFest and we are already planning ahead for the 10th birthday celebrations we're gonna have next year. As Jen said last night, it's also the fourth year running that we've had this combined student and alumni reading. I've read at the last three and now, having just crossed the divide from student to alumni, have the pleasure of hosting this one. My name is Olive Amdur. I am, yeah, what's called the literary editorial fellow at The Common. So I, it's a position for a recent graduate. I work full time from the basement of this library and do a kind of combination of editorial work and then things like sending emails to you all if you're subscribers or donors or anything like that. And I ship out issues. So I spend a lot of time, I spent a lot of time this semester shipping out Issue 26, which is our most recent one, and we just sold out of it. So that's very exciting. Yeah, and I've also had the opportunity to dig into a lot of editorial work. So I read our submissions queue and I pick out things that I wanna work on. I think the amount of care and attention that The Common gives every piece is really special and I've learned a lot being a part of that. And if you're not familiar with The Common, I should also say we are a literary magazine based here in Amherst College. We publish fiction, nonfiction, poetry, interviews, and reviews and art as well. Twice a year in print and then pretty much, ooh, all the time online. And we think pretty broadly about a sense of place in our work. And so we love, especially when everybody is on campus with us, celebrating this place. So without further ado, I will move to explaining this event and how it'll work. We have three Amherst College alums here to celebrate kind of post write, post-college writing work, and then five interns from The Common who are here to, yeah, give a sample of either work from The Common or work that they have written themselves. We're gonna alternate back and forth and I will introduce the alumni authors and at the end we'll have a chance for questions. So if you have any kind of, yeah, anything you're curious about in any of these pieces or you wanna know about writing here at Amherst, that is your chance. There will also be time for book signing. There's some copies of the alum books for sale, courtesy of Amherst Books. There's no intern books yet, but I'm sure they would sign something for you if you wanted. Yeah, so thank you all again for being here. And I wanna ask Sarah to come on up and read.

- Hi, my name is Sarah. That's a loud mic. I am the Wood fellow at The Common. I'm a junior at Amherst College and I'll be reading a piece today. It's an excerpt from a piece called "Inorganic Enemies," and it's kind of starting from the setting of a hospital and it's from the view of a intern. And this intern meets some very odd patients. So... It is a silver tireless world that she wakes up to. At 6:30 a.m., the clouds speaking into a window were gray and quiet. She brushes her teeth with mint toothpaste and fixes herself a cup of coffee. By 6:50 a.m., she leaves. It takes her an hour to drive to the hospital. The supervisor hands her a clipboard and the intern steps back and sinks into his shadow. In the world of hospitals, life swirls back past as frozen camera stills, like the cart that puts by with surgical scissors and IV bags. Like the old grandma who hobbles in for her weekly checkup on the cancer crawling up her bones. The most interesting thing that happens today is the surgery that her supervisor does. He snaps on blue gloves and the intern watches that long needle inch towards that patient's eye until it seeks in. The patient does not flinch. The intern excuses herself from the room. Outside, she's almost hit by an ED team rushing a stretcher across the hallway. On the stretcher, a girl meets eyes with the intern for a brief second before being whisked away. The intern cannot help but wonder, "Will all interactions to solve like this in the future turn brief and fleeting?" She heads home at 10:30 p.m. when the sky is dusky and the city's brilliant. She cannot fall asleep. She sets up to take a few sleeping pills and crawls back to the coolness of bedsheets, to the mercy of dreams. When she falls asleep, she uneasily dreams of different types of starlight. The way the screen of her phone glows when her mother calls her to come back home. In the dream, the phone rings and rings and she leaves it and turns away. The next day, the intern is assigned to the girl who passed by on the stretcher. The supervisor tells the intern that the girl has some sort of sickness. It slows down things that are not supposed to be slowed down, quiets things that are not supposed to be quiet. Try to find her heartbeat. When the intern walks in and places the cold metal stereoscope against the girl's thin chest, the girl shivers away and the intern says, "I'm sorry." And she's not quite sure what she's apologizing for. She tells the girl, "I need to take your temperature." And the girl tilts her head up and the intern pushes a thermometer into her ear. The girl shivers again, "I'm cold." The thermometer beeps and whip a warning. 80 degrees Fahrenheit it reads, even when hypothermia sets in, when the body's at a 95 degrees Fahrenheit. The intern calls out for her supervisor and he comes running. "What's wrong?" he's asking her, but she has already seen it, the flash of silver on the girl's hand. She grabs the girl's hand and pulls her blue gap sleeve up and now everyone sees it. Underneath the blue gown, it shines. The metal runs all over the girl's arm, a silver cast that seamlessly melds with the receding skin.

- Thank you, Sarah. Next up, I am gonna introduce Dr. Lisa Biggs, Amherst College Class of '93. Lisa Biggs is a performance study scholar whose research connects the creative arts to contemporary politics. In her award-winning first book, "The Healing Stage: Black Women Incarceration and the Art of Transformation," which is for sale back there, she argues that Black cultural practices such as poetry, song, dance, and theater are essential to the healing work of women behind bars, as well as to ongoing efforts to resolve human conflicts and transform criminal legal systems. In addition to her academic work, Dr. Biggs is an actor and a playwright, a former member of the DC-based Living Stage Theatre Company. She has appeared in productions with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at Cultural Odyssey, Links Hall, eta Creative Arts Foundation, the African Continuum Theatre Company, the Kennedy Center, and elsewhere. Her most recent play afterlife tells the story of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion from the point of view of the women and girls who lived through it. Dr. Biggs currently serves as the John Atwater and Diana Nelson assistant professor of the Arts in Africana studies at Brown University, where she offers courses in Black cultural studies, African-American Theater and performance, US prison history, and critical ethnography. So welcome to you.

- That was quite a mouthful, thank you. I just want to thank everyone for the invitation and to read from the book, to come back to campus, and to be part of this celebration of literature. I'm gonna read a little bit from the book, but as was shared in my bio, I'm an actor, so I'm gonna try and do a scene in a monologue. Usually, one does this with a partner, so we'll see how well this is. I'm gonna channel some performance studies history and back in the day, they always used to perform at the lectern. One side was one character and the other side was the other character. And then someone would be in the front, the middle. Anyway... So just a little bit about this idea of theater for incarcerated women. Just as I'm sure many of you know, during the war on drugs, the number of folks behind bars skyrocketed, buried in those statistics with a number of women who were incarcerated. If you look down at just the number of Black women who were incarcerated between 1980 and 2020, there was an over 850% increase in their numbers. Not because they were more inclined to break laws, but really because of changes in policing and in sentencing practices. So in response to the war on drugs, in some spaces, just a handful of them in the US and in around the world, people began to offer arts programs. And I had the chance for about almost 10 years to go to sites where these programs were happening. Two in the US, sorry, three in the US, one in Johannesburg, South Africa, two prisons, and two jails. And my big question is like, why are we doing theater in here? 'Cause theater is not going to end the war on drugs. Theater is not gonna end mass incarceration, it's not gonna end poverty, it's not gonna end addiction, it's not gonna end domestic violence. It's not gonna end child molestation. It's not. And I knew that 85, 95% of women behind bars are survivors of domestic violence and an equal number of them are survivors of sexual assaults that happened before they were 13 years of age. And that those who turn to drugs and alcohol primarily do so out of an attempt to heal themselves, to not really heal, I should say, but to soothe themselves, to take away the pain. 'Cause where they have asked for help, they have been denied. Where they have asked for help, they have not been believed too many times. And so because the experiences were killing them, they have turned to other substances to take away the pain. But at a handful of sites, by the late '20s, by the 2000s, people were making theater. And I wanted to know why. Why and really why they called this work healing. As a theater person, I have often called theater work healing. So I was trying to understand what they meant. And so some of what I learned is this. Stage healing, which is the term that I coined in order to describe what they're doing. It is a practice of self-repair that is generated and sustained by women behind bars in collaboration with the volunteer theater artists who direct their drama programs. That term is deeply embedded to Cara Page and the Kindred Healing Justice Collective who characterize healing justice as how we can holistically respond to and intervene in generational trauma and violence to bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, our hearts, and our minds. Prentis Hemphill explains that making this active intervention makes listening to and collaborating with people who are imagining transformative responses to harm other than feeding Black incarceration. Healing justice recognizes that locating alternative non-carceral responses to harm doing requires finding ways to develop and to honor practitioners of very many different disciplines and modalities with the capacities and skills to be with trauma, to know themselves well enough to navigate the complex train of emotion, and to guide others toward change. So the people who I write about are just those theater practitioners. Everybody cannot do this work. Everybody should not try. You have to be really deeply grounded, well regulated, capable of being with people on truly what is often one of the worst days of their lives. And that's just getting past the security, the officers, and then you get to the workshop with people who may also be dealing with loss of family, loss of job, sense of deep hopelessness, steep sense of guilt, a lot of anger, and a lot of shame and shut down. So the places that I worked, that I studied, were astute at creating spaces in which people who are really facing some of the worst experiences that one might imagine and welcoming them in, saying to them through song and dance and poetry and storytelling and jokes and improv that I see you just as you are. I welcome you as you are. My job is not to shame you. My job is not to rehabilitate you. It's certainly not to punish you, but it is to meet you as you are and to create a space so that you can share whatever is on your mind. They did that in the absence of other forms of care behind bars. And the reason that women came to the programs in some cases for decades is because they were the only place in their carceral facility where they could show up, they could be their whole selves, and they could discover something else. Theater programs for incarcerated women that I write about offer invitations for people to, yes, reflect upon the past, but also they invite them to meet themselves by uncovering all the layers of shame. The public shaming, the familial shaming, the personal shaming, the anger. And so they might meet themselves through play. And it's a good time. So an example of one of the pieces that I really love that came out of this work, and just to let you know, I'm gonna use pseudonyms in order to protect the identities of the incarcerated women at the center of this study. But a story I like to tell is about a play that I call the pink dress. So true story. New warden gets job at a women's maximum security facility in the Gulf Coast. And he notices that on the compound of about 1,200 people that there's a group of Black women kind of butch in their attire. They are wearing their uniforms out of compliance in what he called too masculine a fashion. So their uniform is a baggy white T-shirt and oversized blue jeans. And sometimes the weather's right, like a long sleeve blue jean jacket, not a femme outfit by most people's definitions, but he decided that a group of them were wearing their uniforms in too masculine a fashion. And so to punish them and to teach them about proper feminine ladylike behavior, he identified a group of them and he stripped them and he told them that they had to wear what became known as the pink dress, which was basically a bed sheet dyed bright pink with a head cut out for the hole, a hole cut out for the head, and that was translucent. So you could see the form of their bodies and their underwear as they went about their daily business on the compound of 1,200 other people who were wearing the standard uniform. One of those women came to was a drama club member and she came to drama club rehearsal Saturday morning wearing the pink dress. And let me tell you, initially everybody fell out laughing 'cause it was the most hideous, ridiculous thing they had ever seen. And she was a butch lesbian, right? They were like, "I have never in my life imagined that you would be wearing a dress, much less that hideous thing." But she started to cry. And so the mood quickly changed and they had the conversation then about what had happened. And collectively they realized that the warden had misread what was going on at that facility and the importance of Black lesbians in the community there. And so they decided that they were gonna use their theater program in order to stage an intervention. And in the middle of a piece about beauty that they're already working on and they got approved to perform, they built this set of five scenes in a place they call Pinky's Boutique. So the main character is a person called Starkey. Starkey actually kind of like looks like me today. Short black salt and prepper hair, but she's wearing kind of a white uniform, but kind of looking kind of butch though, bigger shoulders that I have. Anyway, so she's a formerly incarcerated person. Scene one, she goes to her parole officer who says to her, now what skills do you possess? She replies, "Well, I could do just about anything. I mean, I can lift, I can stock shelves. What do you need?" She replies, "Well, I don't have anything for stocking at this time. Hmm, I do have something in sales." "Sales? What would I have to do?" "Well, it's a lady's boutique. There is a stipulation. You have to wear a pink dress." A pink dress. And after she sees Starkey's response, the parole officer, 'cause it's a theater, right? Makes a take to the audience and says, "The nerve of her coming in here, demanding assistance. I guess she don't realize that I'm her parole officer and I hold the keys to her freedom. She can either accept this job or," Starkey's says, "Oh, oh, okay, no." At this point, I have to do what I have to do. Very good. Gives her the address to Pinky's Boutique, a women's clothing store. Scene two, the receptionist. Oh, I should say the parole officer's wearing a bright pink suit. So is the receptionist. Think '80s, bright pink. Okay, so Starkey walks into the salon, receptionist says, "Welcome to Pinky's Boutique." Starkey replies, "Hello, mama. Ooh, I came for the job, but I would sure like to work on you." Receptionist says, "Uh, let me get the manager." She exits and Starkey takes this moment to look around the store. She realizes that there's some mannequins, what she calls dummies in the script. And there's some mannequins in the back who are all wearing pink ballroom dresses just to make a point, right? This is a pink, they sell nothing but pink clothing in here. So Starkey says, "Man, even the dummies look good in here. What?" Scene three. Manager comes in wearing a pink suit, says, "May I help you?" Starkey replies, "Ah, they sent me for the job and I cannot wait to start working up in here." The manager says first, "Well, you know what? Here's a copy of our sexual harassment policy. Here's a copy of the rules and regulations. You gotta wear a pink dress and stilettos. Here's the application, fill it out. Meet me back here at one." Starkey exits, two people who are working at the store also wearing pink dresses run up to the manager, "Oh my God, you possibly hire her. She act like something wrong with her. Like she just came out of rehab. She looked like she gave, ah." The manager goes, "Ah, some of y'all just came out of rehab. Let's get lunch." They exit. Okay, Starkey comes back in moments later, right? Nobody's in the store except for the mannequins who are frozen in the back. "Hello?" Starkey says. "Hello, hello? I guess I'm early. I really need this job and I am tired of being what everyone else wants me to be. I'm good just as I am. Lord, why can't they accept me for who I am just as I am 'cause I'm proud of who I be. 'Cause God created perfection when He created me. They say that beauty's only skin deep, I say that's a lie. I feel beauty is love and it comes from the inside. So what? My stomach isn't flat, I'm still a lady. The reason for that is I carried not one, not two, but three babies. My hair is mine, it's natural, and I like it like that. Does that mean I'm not a woman 'cause it's not down my back? My breast used to be firm. It sags now. Not a perfect pick, but that's all right with me because it's nothing that a support bra cannot fix. I put on a few pounds so when I walk, I wobble. I'll never be a contestant on 'America's Next Top Model.' Society tells me that I should look better because I have cellulite. When I walk, my thighs, they rub together. My eyes are not blue, hazel, green, or gray, but I don't need contacts to see a mile away. God made my nose the way He wanted it to be. That's why I am not self-conscious and can smell insecurities. I am a phenomenal woman. God's work at his best, holding my head up high, and wearing beauty around my neck. When I look at myself in the mirror, I can't help but a grin because God made me perfect. He made me just as I am." Now, in the magic of theater, the mannequins standing behind her come alive and say, "Yes, you can do it. Believe it yourself, believe in yourself." And then they freeze. Okay, so, and at that moment, the manager comes back in and this is how this scene resolved. She says to Starkey, "15 years ago I was imprisoned and somebody gave me a chance. See, I know what it means to be judged even before you open your mouth. Folks stop being your friend when you tell them you've been incarcerated, family not trusting you because they don't see you as a family member. They see you as criminal, a convicted felon. My God is a God of second chances and I am willing to give you a chance. But I expect great things from you. Can you lift boxes, stock shipments when they come in?" "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I can do that, I can do that." "Well, I've been thinking about our dress code. Do you have a pink T-shirt and maybe some pink pants?" "Yes, yes, yes, I do, yes I do, yes I do. Thank you so much." And they exit together. Now I know I'm over time, sorry. The reason that I wanted to share this story is because I think it really epitomizes the work and you have to read the book to get all the details, but of what it takes in order to create a space in which a group of women who have already been penalized by society for what they have done to themselves and to others, and additionally penalized by the correctional facility in which they live. What it takes in order to prepare them to tell this story that could have gotten them and their program shut down because of its, I'm gonna say explicit critique of the criminal legal system. Instead, what happens at the end is at the end of the performance is that this show that happens in a women's carceral facility with an audience of 300 people and little old me sitting in the front with a couple other volunteers, it ends with people in the audience on their feet, singing and dancing, affirming this story, including the officers who are working that day. It also ultimately contributes to a transformation in the uniform policy. The pink dress is no more. But the work that theater artists that I have been curious about is about really using performance, using theater, dance, storytelling, poetry, improv, play in order to create the conditions for women to address the things that are hampering and limiting them so that they can meet themselves with a greater sense of their own capacity and with greater ease so that with that greater ease in themselves, they can have greater ease with other people. And working together, they can figure out ways of transforming institutions. And that is not reform. That is transformation. And that is what they want. And that is what we need. Thank you.

- Yeah, book for sale at the back of the room. Next up is Sam.

- Sorry, one second. Yeah, like Olive said, my name is Sam. I am a senior Amherst College. I'm also the Apple Field fellow at The Common, and I'm gonna be reading something from The Common today. This is the beautiful "Issue 14" with a paint tube, which is like one of my favorite covers of ours. This is a excerpt from a story by Kenan Orhan, who is a Turkish American writer who writes surreal stories about family exile and memory. This is an excerpt from a story called "Into Air," which we published in our fall 2017 issue, and it's set in a mining camp in Siberia. I'm sitting in her living room after visiting Ivan again. I'm running my fingers over the bumps of one of her canvases. She's making tea, unworried about the plant next to the flame. She plucks mint leaves and drops them to the floor in a small pile of green up to her ankles. "Will you help me with something?" she asks. But I ask, "What's the point of your art?" She brings me a cup of tea and stands in front of me, looking at the painting. "I don't know." She gets a cup for herself and leans against the wall watching me. I visit Ivan in part because she keeps asking me to to see if she can get a reaction out of me. But truthfully, I am worried. The nurses know ray of sunshine. "What do you need?" I ask. The knights are stretching out, lazy black cats waking from their naps. The radiators come on at dusk. The smelting plant blocks out the sun. Nickel flakes, not stars, decorate the sky. She goes to the easel encased by the shoots of vines. She goes to the window and peels a few leaves from the stems of a fern. She goes back to the kitchen. She's stirring the air in here. She's building a vortex and it's curling around my throat. She is restless. Her paintings are voyages without escape. I put the cup of tea down and go to her. "What is the something that you need?" I ask. She pulls at the tips of the vines. She pulls at the swirled leaves, she pulls at the ends of her hair. The room feels small, the walls sucked in, and I think she might start pulling everything toward her, pulling the pots and the paints and the brushes and the seeds and the easel and the watering can and the microwave and the stove and the radiator into me. Thank you.

- I think, okay. Sophie is next.

- Hi, everyone. As Olive said, I'm Sophie. I'm an editorial assistant at The Common and a junior here at Amherst. I'm gonna be reading a poem from our latest issue, "Issue 26." I realized I should have brought a physical copy like Sam, but all I have is my phone. So this is called "Sonata" by Virginia Konchan. This is a torn map of the forsaken world. There are lines even wolves cannot cross. Every voice and epitaph, then a little tune from the neighbor's garden apartment, suggesting a rondo or circle of fifths. Plato said, "The soul is a perfect circle." Perfection, from the Latin perfectus, meaning a hollow object, complete. When a child, I spake as a child. Then I clung to childish things. String theory, interconnection, held fast by grace and gravity. That too has occurred to me. The trick is to stay embodied, seeking guidance, blessings, or propitiation from the gods. I spread the atlas on the floor, confuse it again with territory. There's no allegorical signifier for which God stands except the market's invisible hand. I don't feel crazy today, but the light coming in through the windows accentuates the dirt-caked surfaces, the intervening themes. When Schubert passed of typhoid fever at 31, he left us a vast oeuvre, an unfinished symphony. Thank you.

- All right, standing up for this one. I'm gonna introduce Blair Kamin, Amherst College Class of 1979. Blair was the Chicago Tribune's architecture critic for more than 28 years, a run that featured a highly public battle with Donald Trump and won Kamin the Pulitzer Prize. Pulitzer Prize, depending on how you're taught to say it, for criticism inspired by the lectures of Amherst College art historian Joel Upton, came and embarked upon a path that ultimately led to Chicago, the first city of American architecture. He has authored or edited five books, including three collections of his Chicago Tribune columns published by the University of Chicago Press. Among his other works are "Amherst College: The Campus Guide," which was one of three Amherst College bicentennial books that were honored this month by the Amherst Historical Society. And that one is also for sale back there and will help us understand far more about this place. So Blair.

- Thank you, Olive. It's really great to be here. I don't know if any of you have seen these little literary playing cards. There's a wonderful mistake on mine. It says that I graduated in 1989. I actually graduated in 1979, so I wanna thank LitFest for making me feel 10 years younger. Being an architecture critic, when I was out for a walk this morning, naturally I noticed something on a building that bothered me and it was the cornerstone at South College, the first building that was erected on this campus, beginning in August of 1980. Townspeople from Amherst gathered, they brought granite brick. People built bonfires so they could sleep overnight. Women cooked. It was like a barn raising. And this highly significant moment in the college is marked by this cornerstone, which is covered almost entirely by a gutter that runs right down the facade of South. So it's kind of a metaphor, this covering, this near erasure of history that really, to me, epitomized the state of the college's general understanding of the architecture on this campus. There had been a book written by Stanley King, a president of Amherst, called "The Consecrated Eminence" in the 1950s. By the early 21st century, it was out of date. And with respect to any presidents of Amherst in attendance right now, it largely focused on fundraising details. You know, stuff like that. Yeah, I know. That's what it's all about, right? Anyway, and it didn't really talk that much about architecture. So Carol Clark, a professor of Art history here, and I conspired about 12 years ago to convince, persuade Biddy Martin to sponsor an architecture guide to the college that would rectify this grievous void in the college's understanding of itself. So I had the honor and privilege to research and write this guide with the help of many Amherst students. And the task for me really was to write the guide, but not doing it in a way that sounded like I was like a cheerleader. Rah, rah, rah. You know, like a Chamber of Commerce booster. So I'm just gonna read the introduction to the guide and you'll see at the beginning how I try to inoculate myself against the charge that I was like a rah rah cheerleader. In my line of work in which everyone strives to be a card carrying skeptic, no one wants to be accused of writing a love note. A love note for the uninitiated is a fawning article, a piece of puffery to which no self-respecting reporter would attach his or her byline. This guidebook aims to be a different sort of love note. A passionate, full throated appreciation of Amherst campus, yes, but also a demanding assessment. One that does not hesitate to call out instances in which the college and its architects have failed to aim high or have fallen short. To me, that's true love, not blind admiration or rabid boosterism, but an esteem based upon a searching eye, a generous heart, and a mind open to all forms of experience. In that spirit, these pages paint a picture of the Amherst campus that reaches beyond the visual to the multisensory. On the college's spectacular hilltop plateau, visitors breathe in the same intoxicatingly fresh mountain air that inspired the poets Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. Pine trees scent that air, especially around the War Memorial, which looks out to the softly sculpted ridge lines of the Holyoke Range. The granite interior stairs that ascend to the elegant simplicity of Johnson Chapel, their treads worn by the footfalls of myriad generations remind students that they're walking in someone else's footsteps and that someone else will walk in theirs. While Amherst is a community in space, an intimate face-to-face college rather than an impersonal university, it is also a community in time. Its history now spent stretches back more than 200 years and its campus seemingly fixed, but always changing exerts a strong gravitational pull, the power of place. By place, I don't mean a dot on a map though this particular dot is about 90 miles west of Boston in a verdant agricultural valley where the crops include asparagus, sweet corn, and tobacco. Nor by place do I mean a self-aggrandizing institution of higher learning that accumulates buildings by fame designers like celebrity autographs. By place, I mean a college where the whole and the parts are an equipoise where the landscape, the buildings, the administrators, the professors, the staff, and the students combine to make a whole that is more, much more than the sum of its individual parts. These parts I hasten to add include the intangible ingredient of memory, the stories that help bring inert brick, stone, and glass to life. This book is full of such stories. There's the one about Emily Dickinson's grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, paying repeated visits to a dying one-legged farmer named Adam Johnson and beseeching him to donate his fortune to the fledgling cash-poor college so it could build a proper chapel. There's the 1938 hurricane tearing out a beloved alee of maple trees, the College Grove, and clearing the way for the present main quadrangle. There are the white fraternity brothers who in 1948, take the principled stand of leaving their national organization after it suspends them for pledging a Black student. Their white column mansion-like frat house is today the college's African American theme house. And there are the women who, after co-education began in 1975 and '76, deposited flower pots in the urinals of previously all-male dorms to make their presence felt. Presidents change as do pedagogies, professors, and the profile of the student body. But as long as distinguished buildings and landscapes are not destroyed, they serve as a constant, one that imbues a college with a distinctive character. Amherst distinction arises first and foremost from its sight, a hilltop that is the highest spot in the town of Amherst. This hilltop, home of the college's Greek Revival Johnson Chapel and four flanking buildings that form College Row, is rained by hills in every direction. The Holyoke and Mount Tom Ranges to the south and southwest, the Pelham Hills to the east, Mounts Sugarloaf and Toby to the north, and the approaches to the Berkshires to the west. As George Harris, the college's president from 1899 to 1912 observed in an essay titled, "The Amherst Landscape: The Hills Border," open quote, these are President Harris' words, "The hills border just at the right distance all around to be softened into rich colors of sunset and sunrise, haze and storm without losing their distinctive character. Every season of the year, spring with its bright tender green, summer with its palms of cloud and foliage, the gorgeous coloring of a New England autumn, and not least, when the cliffs and bare trees peep out from under their mantle of winter, or it may be are wrapped in a fleecy robe, woven by the large wet flakes of a later winter storm. Every season of the year, nay, every hour of the day adds for the observant eye some phase of beauty unimagined before." Close quote. Amherst buildings tend toward elemental simplicity with clean, sharp lines rather than picturesque frills and elaborate silhouettes. They are akin to the simple, but powerful buildings of the Connecticut River Valley. The weather, brown tobacco sheds, long and gable, and the white meetinghouses set alongside the green carpets of town commons. Many structures stress the virtues of one building harmonizing with another. The buildings typically are arranged in quadrangles, but unlike their walled counterparts in Oxford, Cambridge, or New Haven, the Amherst quads have openings between buildings. They are ventilated, as it were, to take advantage of the panoramic views afforded by the hilltop site. This dual character, a mixture of comforting enclosure and expansive openness extends to the Amherst town common, which is flank by nearly as many college buildings as the main quad. With the exception of the gates that control access to Pratt Field, no gates guard the entrance to the college in contrast to urban universities like Harvard or even the Pioneer Valley institutions of Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges. The absence of such borders is a sign of an ongoing comedy between town and gown that dates back to the college's beginnings on that very hill nearly 204 years ago. Thank you.

- I have a lot of very specific questions for Blair later. Alma is reading next and I would encourage you to pay attention to their earrings. Earring.

- Hello, I'm Alma, I'm a junior, and I'm the graphic design intern here. I'm sorry, Blair, for the year mishap, the trading cards. So I'm not a writer, so I'm gonna be reading a very recent poem from our January online poetry feature. And I don't know why, but two years in a row I've read poems about bees. So I brought a bee earring today, just one. This one is called "Holy Saturday" by William Fargason. I woke up hungover in the dull light that fell in lines across the sheets. I didn't even drink that much. I didn't kill myself last night, even though I wanted to, even though the thought came in strong and unannounced like a breeze through a cracked door. This morning I walked into the living room where above the sliding doors, the long horizontal windows cast beams of light across the floor. In the corners of the frame, I saw a yellow jacket or maybe a hornet struggling to get out of a window it couldn't open. The world on the other side must have seemed so close. When I got closer, it fell to the floor where I saw it was a bumblebee, those heroes of the insect world, the kings of pollination. I grabbed a plastic cup and a paper towel, scooped him up as gently as I could like I was an elevator the bee was stepping onto, watching his little legs sense the plastic. I could do this one good thing today, even if the bee didn't know I was saving him by containing him, even if releasing him meant I would be alone again in my apartment. I took him outside into the cold spring grass and flower beds. I bent down among the mulch, I aimed the rim of the cup to the edge of a daffodil blooming in the sun. The bee left the cup and went straight into the bell of the flower, covered himself in pollen. I left him alone and went back inside to my walls and my lamps and my air conditioned air that came back to me from the fan that spun on the ceiling. Thank you.

- I meant to print mine out, but I'm yet another, I was gonna say teenager, I'm 20, on their phone. But yes, my name is Kay. I am an editorial assistant for The Common. I'm a junior here at Amherst. Last year I read a really sad poem. I'm not gonna do that this year. I've been thinking a lot about joy and how to write about it and what it means to write about joy through all the violences that occur every single day like in this country and elsewhere in the world. But I'm gonna be reading a prose poem I wrote, or three quarters of it for time. And I guess to preface, on the page, there are names of people, some of whom are in the audience or on stage blacked out. So I'm gonna try and represent those with silences, small silences as I read, but yeah. While I was driving today, I almost swerved into the side of the road because my gaze was fixed up towards a swarm of starlings moving in such a delightful way, contracting and expanding how my belly does when I remember to breathe and what told me is called murmuration. Here they were, swooping and plunging their bodies into variations of stipplings against the sky, which was purpling with clouds and broad streaks that reminded me of brushstrokes as they sweat paint across their canvas with one hand in their back pocket and stood the same way the first time he said my name, which was the first time anyone said my name like unpaired. And then I slipped myself into his pocket, into his hand so I could learn the every crevice of his palm. These days, my fingers still remember the path they trace, but forget what it felt like and I instead find myself thinking of his hands, caressing the space around me, to hold me without touching my hands cupped towards to me, and I wanna hold you in my palms and put you up to my ear and just listen. And finches are supposed to chip sharp-like collarbones, which I scooped moonlight into while we fold our whispers into the tree house we built. But the finch and I made instead warbles with a warped little throat and I have yet to reach out my hand to, and ask if they'd like to dance to her song because sometimes, I dwell too long on what should and shouldn't be. Though I think if we did dance, we would look something like how we already do when we walk tripping over one another. But at night, I find myself spending more time checking whether it's looking at the stars than I do looking up myself. And instead of pulling my coat tighter around me, when the cold nibbles at my neck I pull closer against my hip. When skips, her sandals slap against her feet like fish, which is also how, and I kiss like fish. And somewhere in this, I learn that all we can really do is just be. Sometimes I'm but one small creature turned over on my back with my legs wriggling up in every which way and I cannot turn myself over. So I'm made to just listen to the low hum of my reaching reverberations, gasping to be felt. Here, I think about what a delight it is to watch my beloveds do the things they love. What a delight it is that when, presses their fingers into my arm, my arm presses back. And when I say I love you to, I mean goddamn, I love you. Like come here and crawl into this sweater with me and let our warmth entangle. It all spins and spins and spins like a Ferris wheel at the tip of my tongue and I taste it all at once.

- Thank you, Kay. I'm gonna end with more poetry. Anne Pierson Wiese, Amherst College class of 1985. Anne's first poetry collection, "Floating City," published by Louisiana State University Press, received the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award. Her second collection, "Which Way Was North," for sale at the table in the back, was released in September of 2023. She has received the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the South Dakota Arts Council and the Discovery/The Nation Poetry Prize. After an eight-year adventure in South Dakota, we are welcoming her back to the East Coast. She and her husband, writer Ben Miller, have recently returned to live in New York City once again. So Anne.

- Thank you. Thank you, Olive, and thank you Amherst and everyone here and everyone at The Common, all these wonderful Common people that I just got to meet this morning and they're all so smart and so fabulous and so talented. So I'm really, really delighted to be here. It's been many, many years. I won't say how many since I've been back on campus and this is a great way to start coming back maybe a little more frequently. I'm gonna read six poems today and the first five are from the collection, my new collection, "Which Way Was North," and then I'm gonna close with a poem that's a little bit newer than that. And the collection is, for those of you who don't buy it, the collection is split into two halves, one of which deals mostly with upper Midwest themed poems and the second half deals mostly with New York City themed poems, and the ones that I'm gonna read here, I'm gonna kind of switch back and forth between the two halves. So I'll start with a Brooklyn poem, "Sharp Shadows." On our kitchen wall at a certain time of year appeared what we called the sharp shadows. A slant of Western light found its way through the brown molt of fire escape, hanging onto our Brooklyn rental building for dear life and etched replicas of everything in its path. Each bubble and flaw in the blue glass, the blade of every knife on the rack, the fine hair standing along the back of my arm. I can't remember which month out of 12 they came, only that we were stunned fresh every year to stumble upon such undying perfection in our kitchen or anywhere. Lives being dreams with the edges mostly blurred. And whenever any of my family, friends, or acquaintances ask, why did you move to South Dakota for eight years? I direct them to this poem instead of trying to explain it myself. "Wild Grapes." There were grape vines climbing up one end of the clothes line in their yard. Tentative green tenterhooks with curlicue citrine shoots no thicker than hairs floating on the summer air, pointedly ignored by my grandmother. Every August they produce several diminutive clusters of grapes, the color of opals. "Not fit to eat," my grandmother said, which may or may not have been true. She'd grown up a child of sharecroppers and in later life was resolute in her refusal to engage with the dirt or anything that came out of it. Birds were her thing. Laser-like purple martins that skimmed, but never touched the ground. Electric finches in their branch heaven, even sparrows, so modest yet possessed of wings. My grandfather, with his encyclopedic knowledge of cattle, crops, and roads, dwellings, weeds, and lunch counters could probably have told me something about the grapes, but it never occurred to me to ask since the clothesline and everything attached to it was women's work. By the time I knew them, my grandparents didn't say much to each other beyond what was unavoidable. I remember my grandfather flipping his table knife around, holding the blade, pointing the back end at a bowl of butter, my grandmother passing it. What my grandfather loved was heading uptown to the F&M Cafe at 5:00 a.m. to sit with his cronies, sip weak coffee, smoke a pipe, converse about more ways than one to skin a cat, jack of all trades, master of none. I was from far away, a city where grapes from some nameless other place accrued in slain heaps beside the apples and bananas in the A&P. This was before kiwi fruit came to the USA or cable TV or anything digital. Back then, all the clocks still had faces. I never ate one of the clothesline grapes. They were so local, they were off limits. After all, I only came for summer visits and although I was young, I knew the distance between tasting and living. So now we're in the backyard in South Dakota, "Doves Drying." I didn't know doves could look like machine parts. They were out there early after rain on the crushed red rocks in the fire pit, elevating one wing then the other at angles suggesting breakage. Sheared flywheel blades, bent feather rotors, hidden breasts, two discs of dawn, a pair of them like always together. Together wet, together drying. At first I thought the strong wind overnight had blown in metal scraps from the street work down the block. Then I saw injured birds and thought, "How will I finish them off?" But they were whole, methodically exposing their flight gear to the new air, tendons warming luxuriously. Doves, anvils of melancholy. There is hope when such invisible weight can fly. This is a poem that I suppose could be either place as it happened. I wrote it in New York City, about a church in New York. "Middle distance." In the church, midweek at noon, there is a middle distance between the piercing blue window of pure belief and the bone vault housing my heart's disbelief, a dim yielding distance related to my prayer. Another day's delay before you are nowhere for death fixes all distances like a new nail. "Thinking About Moss." This poem is about a spot on sixth Avenue in New York, Manhattan. Outside a deconsecrated church turned nightclub on Sixth Avenue remains a thriving patch of moss. Green as spring, even in winter. Tucked along the edge of the foundation, it renews itself imperceptibly beneath our eyes, proof that people and their constructions change more quickly than plants and less predictably. We gather and disperse under this pretext or that, flying our beliefs like bright kites while the string lengthens and then snaps. Which of us could say how long that moss has lived there, sacred in its busyness, absolute by nature? Even if we stop to watch, we can't see it working. Garbage men, early in the morning, bowl trash cans down the avenue in the milky light as if aiming for a strike. Waiters poise for a fervent smoke at the curb before plunging back through the front doors of restaurants. Street cellars of all stripes hover like parapet hosts, torn between showcasing their wares and consolidating them for a quick getaway if the cops show up. Humans, we jingle like bells with our need to be noticed. We ring in our towers, balanced on air. And the last poem is called "Oriole," takes place in Minnesota. The bird comes out of nowhere, alighting on the deck rail beside us. Its saffron feathers shocking, like fire, like neon, like a tear in the otherwise ordinary air, oozing color from the other side where streets are paved with gold and everything too bright to keep living in this world, finds a place. The passage being death and/or memory, and/or imagination. Humans often believe that birds show up representing the dearly departed and we are no different, my aunt and I. She, newly bald and skinny from chemo, and me after dinner on the deck, talking over details of the trip we will take for her surgery. If my cousin were alive, it would be her sitting here. But what we have is this Baltimore oriole, it's breast the color of the highlights in my cousin's red hair. When we were little, I called it orange and made her mad. After that, I fell in love with her like everyone else. My aunt and I agree that never before have we been so close to such a bird. It's almost near enough to touch. All the days you spend with someone you love turns into this. A wild otherness that lands and burns and leaves as it will with no warning and no guarantee of return. Thank you.

- It's a real privilege today to welcome Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky to Amherst College's 2024 Lit Fest. This is the ninth year of Lit Fest, and it's a wonderful partnership between the Center for Humanistic Inquiry, the Common Magazine, the College's Office of Conferences and Special Events, the Emily Dickinson Museum, the President's office and this year the Jones Library as well. We're grateful for the support and participation of colleagues all across the college, especially the English department, President Michael Elliot and his office and for the support of the Croxton Lecture Fund, and also a big thank you to the National Book Foundation. So Emily Dickinson once said, over the years, her lexicon was her constant companion and that lexicon defined phosphorescence as a faint light or luminousness of a body unaccompanied with sensible heat. So to Dickinson, this phosphorescence was something shimmering, something that could not be pinned down, it was transformative. And in her own language, it elevated plain print to italics, prose to poetry and facts to real knowledge. In fact, it's once said that she panned the work of an acquaintance saying that they have the facts but not the phosphorescence of learning. So imagine being the subject of that deflating comment. So at a festival dedicated to illuminating great writing, here we are with two remarkable poets whose work glows with phosphorescence, it's Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris. Ilya was born in Odessa in the former Soviet Union, now Ukraine. He arrived in the United States in 1993 when his family was granted asylum. He's the author of Deaf Republic and dancing in Odessa, co-editor and co-translator of many other books and anthologies. He lost most of his hearing at the age of four after being misdiagnosed with a cold rather than the mumps. "Deaf Republic" is a poetic drama in two acts that opens with the shooting of a deaf boy in a public square by the occupation of soldiers. In protest, the townspeople go deaf or adopt deafness as a tactic of resistance and organize their descent through puppetry and sign language. "Deaf Republic" was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts Letters, Metcalf Award and Poetry Magazine's, Levinson Prize. It's had just an enormous impact. Ilya Kaminsky has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. He was co-founder in the late 1990s of Poets for Peace and currently he teaches in Princeton, New Jersey. Katie Farris is a poet, a writer of hybrid forms and a translator. Her most recent book is "Standing In the Forest of Being Alive," which Publishers Weekly named one of the top 10 books of 2023. She's also the author of the Chatbooks, "A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving," which won the Chad Walsh Poetry Award from Beloit Poetry Journal. Also "13 Intimacies" and "Mother Superior in Hell." Her earlier collection is "Boysgirls," a kind of a hybrid form book. Her awards include the Pushcart Prize, Orison Prize and Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review. She also is the award-winning translator of several books of poetry from French, Ukrainian, Chinese and Russian. In addition to her poetry and translations, Farris writes prose about cancer, the body and its relationship to writing. "Standing in the Forest of Being Alive" is a memoir, perhaps a journal of poems written while Katie was dealing with treatment for breast cancer at an alarmingly young age. At a time of isolation because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the political chaos of the January 6th assault on the Capitol. She also lives and teaches in New Jersey. And just to make it clear, Katie and Ilya are married to each other. What we'll do today is our guests will read from their work and then we'll have a conversation and ask for your questions. Ilya's poems can be accessed by the QR code on the card in your seat. If you don't have that QR code, please see if a neighbor has it or raise your hand. We also have numerous copies of the poems printed out. So if you would like to have those poems, raise your hand and they'll come to you in your seats. Also, yes, of course, we really wanna take your questions. So most helpful will be for you to write your questions on the cards provided, they'll be collected and passed up here to the stage so that we can share them with our guests. And also because we're going to do it that way, please keep legibility in mind as much as you can. Let's see, copies of their books are available for a sale on the table near the entrance and after the program they'll be happy to sign books for you. And the book signing table is also at the back. So join me in welcoming Ilya Kaminsky and yeah, Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris and Ilya will read for us first.

- Thank you so much for this very, very kind introduction and for welcoming us here with your generosity. It's really wonderful to be back in this town and I want to thank the students from yesterday which were absolutely delighted to chat with about poems and metaphors specifically. As you might have noticed it by now, I speak with a very heavy accent. The idea is that by the end of this 72 hours that we spent together, you will all speak with a very heavy accent. But just in case looks like more handouts available or you'll be able to follow on your phone, I recommend it, otherwise you will fall asleep. Okay, so without much further ado, since we only have 72 hours after all, I will read some poems. Okay? Can you follow, okay?

- [Audience Member] Yes.

- Alright. The first one is called "We Lived it Happily During the War." "We lived happily during the war "And when they bombed other people's houses, we protested, "but not enough. "We opposed them, but not enough. "I was in my bed "around my bed America was falling "Invisible house by invisible house by invisible house "I took a chair outside "and watched the sun in a six month "of a disastrous reign "in the house of money "in a street of money "in a city of money "in a country of money "our great "country "of money "We forgive us "lived happily "during the war." So the few poems I'll read are pages from "Deaf Republic," which is a story in verse about a pregnant woman and her husband who had a public gather and see a soldier shoot and kill a young boy. And in response to that murder, they see the whole community decide to stand up and protests the authorities by refusing to hear them, okay? "Deaf Republic Gunshot." "Our country is a stage "when soldiers march into the town "public assemblies are officially prohibited "But today neighbors flock to the piano music "from Sonya and Alfonso's puppet show "in Central Square. "Some of us have climbed up into trees "other's hide behind park benches and telegraph poles "when Petya the deaf boy in the front row sneezes "the sergeant puppet collapses shrieking. "He stands up again snorts, shakes his fist "at the laughing audience. "The army jeep swerves into the square "disgorging it's own Sergeant. "Disperse immediately! "Disperse immediately! "The puppet mimics in a wooden falsetto "Everyone freezes except Petya who keeps giggling, "someone slaps a hand over his mouth "The sergeant turns towards the boy "raising his finger. "You! "You! The puppet raises a finger, "Sonya watches the puppet "The puppet watches the Sergeant "The Sergeant watches Sonya and Alfonso but the rest of us, "watch Petya lean back "gather all the spit in his throat "and launch it at the Sergeant "The sound we do not hear "lifts the gulls off the water. "As soldier march "Alfonso covers the boys face "with a newspaper, "fourteen people, "most of us strangers "watch Sonya kneel by Petya "shot in the middle of the street "she picks up his spectacle shining like two coins "balances them on his nose. "Observe this moment "how it convulses. "The snow falls and the dogs run "into the streets like medics "Fourteen of us watch "Sonya kisses his forehead "her shout a hole torn in the sky, "it shimmers the park benches, porchlights, roofs. "We see in Sonya's open mouth "the nakedness "of the whole nation. "She stretches out "beside a little snowman "napping in the middle of the street. "As picking up it's belly "the country "runs. "Alfonso in snow, "you are alive I whisper to myself, "therefore something in you listens. "Something runs down street, falls, fails to get up "I run et cetera with my legs "and my hands behind my pregnant wife, "et cetera down Vasenka street. "I run et cetra "it only takes a few minutes, "et cetera "to make a man. "Deafness an insurgency begins "our country "woke up next morning "and refused to hear soldiers. "In the name of Petya we refuse "At 6:00 AM when soldiers compliment girls in the alleyways "the girls slide by pointing to their ears. "At eight the bakery door is shut in Soldier Ivanoff's face, "though he's their best customer. "At ten, Momma Galya chalks, NO ONE HEARS YOU "as the gates of the soldiers barracks. "By 11:00 AM arrests begin. "Our hearing does not weaken, "but something silent in us strengthens. "After curfew, families of the arrested "hung homemade puppets out their windows. "The streets empty but for the squeaks of strings "and the tap, tap "against the buildings, "of wooden and fists and feet. "In the ears of the town "snow "falls. "Alfonso stands answerable "My people, you were really something fucking fine "on the morning of first arrests, "our men once frightened bound to their beds "now stand up like human masts "deafness passes through us like a police whistle. "He then I testify: "Each of us, comes home, shouts at a wall "at a stove, at a refrigerator at himself. "Forgive me I was not honest with you, "life to you I stand answerable, "I run, et cetera with my legs and my hands etcetera "I run down Vasenka street etcetera "Whoever listens: Thank you "for the feather on my tongue "thank you for our argument that ends "thank you for deafness. "Lord such fire from a match "you never lit. "The map of bone and opened valves "I watched as the Sergeant aim "the deaf boy take iron and fire in his mouth, "his face on the asphalt "the map of bone "and opened valves "it is the air "something in the air wants us too much "The earth is still "the tower guards eat cucumber sandwiches "The first day "soldiers examine the ears of bartenders "accountants, soldiers, "the wicked things silence does to soldiers "They tear Gora's wife from her bed "like a door off a bus "observe this moment "how it convulses. "The body of the boy "lies on the asphalt "like a paperclip. "The body of the boy "lies on the asphalt like the body of a boy. "I touch the walls "feel the pulse of the house "and I stare up wordless "and do not know why I am alive. "We tiptoe this city Sonya and I "between theaters and gardens "and wrought iron gates. "Be courageous, we say, "but no one "is courageous "as a sound "we do not hear "lift the birds off the water. "Before the war, "we made a child "I kissed a woman "whose freckles arouse the neighbors. "She had a mole on her shoulder, "which she displayed like a medal "for bravery. "Her trembling lips meant come to bed. "Her hair waterfalling in the middle of the conversation "meant come to bed. "I walked in my barber shop "of thoughts "yes I thieved her off to bed "on the chair off my hairy arms, "but parted lips "meant bite my parted lips "lying under the cool sheets "Sonya! The things we did "Soldiers aim at us, soldiers aim at us "They fire "as the crowd of woman flees "inside the nostrils of search lights "May God have a photograph of this "in the piazza's bright air "soldiers drag Petya's body "and his head bangs the stairs "I feel through my wife's shirt "the shape of our child. "Soldiers drag Petya up the stairs "and homeless dogs thin as philosophers "understand everything and bark and bark. "I now on a bridge with no camouflage of speech "a body wrapping the body of my pregnant wife "tonight we don't die "and don't die "the earth is still "a helicopter eyeballs my wife "on earth, "a man cannot flip a finger at the sky "because each man "is already a finger "flipped at the sky." "Now the story goes down. But I'll just read one small poem that follows "and get out of your hair. Okay? This one is called "Lullaby." "Lullaby." "Little daughter, "rain water, "snow and branches protect you. "Whitewashed walls "and neighbors hands "all child of my Aprils "Little earth of six pounds. "My white hair "keeps your sleep lit." Thank you.

- Hello friends. Okay, now I'm official. Thank you so much to all of you here. I agree, it's been just a really wonderful experience, being able to spend time with the faculty, the students, the interns at the magazine. I'm trying to remember everybody's name. I know I'm gonna forget somebody, but Olive and Kay and Susan and Sophie. And then there was one more. Yes. Emily. Chosen totally at random, had nothing to do with the fact that I can see Emily Dickinson's face from here. All right, so I'm gonna be reading from my not quite so new book baby anymore. She's almost a year old now. Aw. Still making a mess. Still keeping me up at night. And the book follows as Jane so kindly sort of mentioned. It starts in about August, 2020 when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And it kind of follows through about the time of radiation and then the sort of uncertainty that comes after. I actually, usually I have a kind of a set list that I use at readings about a 20 minute long set list. And then when I was sitting here I thought, "Oh, this is so close to Emily Dickinson's house." And Jane works at Emily Dickinson's house, so I had to pull all the Emily Dickinson poems out. So it's a little chaotic. I've never read this order exactly before. So I hope you will bear with me as I'm trying something new today. But luckily it's starts the same. This is called "Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World." "To train myself to find in the midst of hell "what isn't hell, the body bald, cancerous, "but still beautiful enough to imagine, "living the body, washing the body, "replacing a loose front porch step. "The body chewing what it takes to keep a body going. "The scene has a tune, a language I can read, "a door I cannot close. "I stand within its wedge a shield. "Why write love poetry in a burning world? "To train my stealth in the midst of a burning world "to offer poems of love "to a burning world." This is called "Tell It Slant," which is of course a reference to Emily Dickinson's advice, which is to tell the truth but tell it slant. The word speculated just means spiky. It's like at a certain point in your Dr. Lee education, like you get enough degrees, you're allowed to just add random syllables, you know what I mean? Anywhere you want, just stick another syllable in it. So, "Tell it Slant." "You float in the MRI Glome, several speculated masses. "I name you Cactus, carcinoma be damned. "You make a desert of all of me. "Have I said it slant enough? "Here's a shot between the eyes. "Six days before my 37th birthday, "a stranger called and said, "'You have cancer, unfortunately.' "And then hung up the phone." I had the kind of miraculous experience of writing an op-ed for the New York Times. I did not realize how thoroughly fact checked these things are, but oh my God, I think they called my kindergarten teacher. They went everywhere and one of the things they could only confirm with me was the nature of that phone call. The editor called up and said, "It surely wasn't that abrupt." And I was like, "Actually, you're right." Afterward I said, "Do you have any more information?" And they said, "No, someone will be in contact with you "in the next two weeks." And then hung up the phone. So I think I actually softened the blow in the poem itself. It was a tough time. It was, let's not think too much about August, 2020, but a tough time for doctors. This is called "In the Event of My Death." And the cover of the book is this was my braid and my arm holding it. So that's sort of the central image of the poem. "In the Event of My Death," "What used to be a rope descending my vertebrae "to the basement of my spine grows thin. "In solidarity with my first chemotherapy, "our cat leaves her whiskers on the hardwood floor. "I gather them each pure white parenthesis "and plant them in the throat of the earth. "In quarantine, I learned to trim your barbarian hair. "Now it stands always on end, "a salute to my superior Barbary skills. "In the event of my death, "promise, you'll find my heavy braid and bury it. "I will need a rope to let me down into the earth. "I've hidden others strategically around the globe, "a net to catch my body in its weaving." So now beginning with my Emily Dickinson tribute, this is called "A Row of Rows." "We argue on the front porch, "whose turn is it to lecture the other. "Fruit salad or steak? "And was Whitman or Dickinson the greater epic poet. "We argue Whitman "about the ripeness of bananas, "the rawness of the meat, "and whether it's okay to throw apple cores in the street. "I hold, it is not. "A pleasant row of brows. "Little tugs on the strings of our love. "Just enough to pull our days taught." This is called, it's a very long title. "Finishing Emily Dickinson First Deacon "in William Blake's Church "of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell "in the Oncologist's Waiting Room." So this is the day that I actually went in to talk to the doctors about my cancer. I happened to have Emily Dickinson's complete poems, the newest version, I forget the editors, but it is a giant volume. And I was finishing it, I'd been reading it since February and actually finished it, yeah, in that waiting room, that's right. "Oh Emily, goodbye. "We met in February and parted in July. "I meet your sweet velocity in everything that flies "in moat and star and sphere, "in bird and phosphorus of God. "You preached obliquity, "your body steeple for the church of mystery. "Your bell rings on beyond." So many, many moons ago, when I wrote my first book, I wrote it in kind of prose poetry form. And that is, I consider my primary form is prose poetry, so I never break a line. And at some point I realized if I wanted to write traditional poems, I'd have to figure out how to break a line and I did not know how to do that. So I decided to learn meter because then I would know where you had to break the line. It's like you get five feet and then you have to break the line. Thank God. You know, I don't have to make that choice. And around that time I started reading Emily Dickinson and reading her ballad meter, her very famous alternating trimeter and tetrimetre lines. Nerdy stuff I know. But so much of this book was written in that meter and so much of it was really buried in Emily Dickinson is the ghost that haunts this book. So here's the original title for the book was "Emma Loma," which is a terrible title. It's awful but I couldn't separate the ideas. So it's, you know, Emily and then Olma's in like a solid mass, sometimes cancerous, sometimes not. But yeah, that's what we called it. Thank God people talk me out of that. But there's one poem still that has that title. So this is called "Emma Loma a Riddle and An Answer." "Will you be my death breast? "I had asked you in jest "and in response you hardened "a test of my resolve malignant magnificent palem zest. "Will you be my death, Emily? "Today I placed your collected poems over my breasts, "my heart knocking fast on your front cover. "Will you be my death chemo? "The shell of myself in the sphere of time "plucking, plucking the wool "of my hair from its branches. "Will you be my death Emily? "And keep the sky from reaching inside "you the voice, me the faithful echo. "Will you be my death, echo? "Do you know? No. "In which meadow mow, "the ginkgo grows goes, "which is fallow, which furrowed foes. "What is winnowed? What is woe?" This kind of has a long gloss and it's a short poem. So there's a wonderful poet Thomas Shalamoon, who Ilya is actually writing an introduction for a new translation of his right now. He is what we affectionately call a poet's poet, which is to say he's very strange. And poets go to him over and over 'cause he has this incredible explosive energy. And most people who are not poets have the experience of, "Huh?" Which is to be fair also the experience poets have. But also, "Wee!" So he once said that in one of his poems that Giotto the painter used his sketches of sheep in order to model his angels when he painted them. Okay, you know, I've looked at his paintings since I do not find his angels particularly sheepish or sheepy, but I guess it must be true if Tammar Shalamoon said it in the sense of a poetry fact. A poetry fact, you may not be able to take it to the bank, but it's true on some level, you know? Okay, second important piece, Jonah is from the Christian Bible, old Testament. Jonah was a prophet who he did not like the gig. It was dark, it was pretty freaking dark. And so he decided to run away. He got on a ship, there was a terrible storm, he fell off the boat. Whale swallowed him, like they do. But apparently they do. 'Cause a few years ago, do you remember seeing, there was a person who actually did get swallowed by a whale, kind of like Jonah. Anyway, so he in the belly of the whale made peace with his gig and the whale vomited him up. So happy story. And finally ambergris, ambergris, if you ever walking down the beach, actually I don't know if it would happen on the east coast, but yes it would. You're walking down the beach and you find this grayish yellowish lump, it doesn't look like much, but it smells like the most amazing thing you've ever smelled in your life. Gimme a call, we'll split the proceeds you have found ambergris, which is one of the most precious and rare perfumery ingredients. It also happens to be whale vomit. That's true. And one of Shalaman's books is actually titled "Ambergris," which I did not know before yesterday. Whale vomit. Yeah, I think that's everything. Okay. Oh, that's a real fact too. That's a real, real fact. That's not a poetry fact. All right. This is called "A Week Before Surgery I Practice My Body" Like Giotto's angels sketched from his studies of sheep. I opened the jaws of my back to the sky, eating my body deeper into this blue like Jonah vomited from the whale fragrant as ambergris, or plain as any woman who a week before mastectomy practices being opened. I don't think I've ever read this poem out loud. It is an homage to one of Emily's poems. Oh my gosh, am I gonna lose the, I'm gonna lose the title. Oh, that's embarrassing. "My Life a Loaded gun." Is that it?

- [Audience Member] "My life had Stood a Loaded Gun."

- "My Life had Stood a Loaded Gun." Thank you. I knew I missed part of it. Okay. And this is, so my mastectomy was on January 11th, which was about the peak of Covid deaths in America in the history of the pandemic before or since and six days before that, no, five days before that there was the riot at the capitol. So this is five days before the mastectomy insurrection at the capitol. "What is the door the bullet makes in the body? "America the gun, predictable, mechanical "possessed of several chambers. "If I reside right by your side, must I expect your dangers? "Who holds you holstered America the gun? "What is the door the bullet makes in the body? "What do we call it? Body?" Another one I don't think I've ever read. This is called "Scheduling the Bone Scan." So depending on, you know, every cancer is slightly different. Mine, I got chemotherapy before my surgery and after the surgery, during the surgery, they performed something called the sentinel node biopsy. And basically this finds out if your cancer has spread beyond the local region. And prior to that, MRI's, visualizations sometimes can see if a cancer has spread into lymph nodes and sometimes it cannot, especially with my type of cancer, invasive lobular carcinoma, which makes kind of little threads instead of lumps. So it's very hard to see on scans. So they perform the sentinel node biopsy and it turns out my cancer had spread pretty extensively from the breast into the lymph nodes. And after that, I received a bone scan and a PET scan, the first two scans to determine whether or not the cancer had spread beyond sort of the region of the body into the rest of the body, which would've made it a stage four, eventually terminal but untreatable cancer, basically. So this was about making that phone call, "Scheduling the Bone Scan." "The word bone tolls in your ear a bell. "What tolls? "The word? The bone? "The drum in your ear moves the hammer like a lever "a bone moves the word bone through your ear. "You repeat bone, your voice droning, "not silver, bronze, a duller, thud, "nothing ringing, instead a buzz. "The devouring sound, the insect, time." And finally, so we've kind of gone through chemo, surgery and then I finished radiation or I was at the end of radiation. I had like two more days left. You go in every single day for like 30 days in a row except for weekends. And it's by the end, especially if you've done the full rigmarole of, you know, chemo, mastectomy, radiation, you're getting pretty tired. And that day, so a funny thing, at least at my particular institution, like you walk in the door, there are like four people you may have never met before preparing where you're getting the radiation and you just whip your shirt off. Like I'm walking down the hallway to the room at this point because I've been doing it so long, I'm already whipping my shirt off. I walk in, to throw it on the chair and my doctor, my oncologist, my radiation oncologist is standing there. And I was like, "Oh." "I didn't expect you to be here." It's not a good sign. And she was like, "I gotta tell you, we did the scan "and there's a thing and we don't know "if it's cancer or not. "We can radiate it more "and if we choose to radiate it more, "it's gonna be kind of tricky." I had some quite extensive nerve damage in the course of my mastectomy. And she said, "Well if we continue to radiate it, "basically you're going to have problems with your arm "because the radiation needs to go through "every major nerve and muscle in your arm. "I can't tell you that might just be "a little bit of stiffness "and it might literally feel like your arm is on fire "for the rest of your life. "It might happen immediately. "You know, we're within the first week "after radiation, it might happen 20 years from now. "We really have no way of knowing. "And on the other hand, if we don't treat it "and it does turn out to be cancer, "you can't get any more radiation at this point "because you've been basically over radiated. "We cannot perform surgery because of where it is "and because your skin is so delicate post-radiation." And because the chemo unfortunately also gave me heart failure, I could not do any more chemo. So functionally it would be untreatable. So what do you wanna do? And one of the things I have grown to appreciate about this doctor, there is a lot of unknown in the medical field, a lot, a lot of unknown. And although we go to it expecting answers, a lot of times, those questions are posed back to us and we're forced to think about what we value and what we want. And sometimes doctors will take those decisions out of your hands. And traditionally they've been taught to do that, you know. But this doctor had a lot of humility and she came to me and basically said, I said, "What would you do?" And she said, "I've been up on all night "thinking about it and I really don't know. "To me this is such a 50/50 question, "you know, you really have to make "that choice for yourself." And I am grateful for that. So this is called, "To the God of Radiation" and it's about trying to make that decision. "Given the unexpected choice "between uncertain death and certain damage, "I find in the mirror a woman, breastless burned, "who in an advisory capacity asks, "'How much do you wanna live?' "Enough? "Oh god of radiation. "Let your light like a ship pass through me "your radiance exposing, "exposing what's inside me, like film a god takes, "but must you clutter the eaves of my scapula, "scurry the grasshopper nest of my heart, "sithe my nerves and cobweb my muscles "to the rungs of my ribs. "How much more can one body take? "Enough. "Light every deadly cell like a wick "burning in the paper lantern of my chest, "my chest, a thing, so ephemeral, "yet held so firmly in your fist." Thank you.

- Thank you so much for those two amazing, powerful readings. How, I mean, what's it like in your house when you know you're both composing and reading this way?

- In our house is very simple. One sentence, Katie is a superior poet.

- I think. Is that on? Can you hear me? Okay, good. It's funny because we write very differently. Ilya composes with pieces and I try to start with finished very imperfect poems and then strengthen them. So we do things very differently. But one thing we both do is read aloud a lot when we're writing poems and our offices are both on the same floor and occasionally it's like, "Shut up." "No, you shut up." You know, there is a lot of like cross stream and I wonder sometimes about what that does to poems occasionally. 'Cause I'm listening to his rhythms, you know, while I'm trying to keep mine going. So I also have a noise canceling headphones, which is very helpful.

- Well also if you have two cats and they worry, so they come consoling, you know.

- Especially when Ilya's reading because it's intense, you know? So they're like, "Huh huh, what's happening?"

- With staying with the household, just for a moment with "Rows of Rose," who won Whitman or Dickinson?

- In my opinion, and I love Dickinson, this is Ilya gets a question in his mind and he will ask anybody, including the male person, or my blessed, my father who almost came here today, who has never probably read a poem in his life, I guess maybe mine, I don't think so though. You know, don't you think Emily Dickinson is an epic poet? So he won.

- I mean, all the fascicles, I mean they are kind of based on stations of the cross and they're there to signify an epic journey symbolically.

- Yeah. That's really interesting. There's this kind of big debate has been about what is the unit of her poem? Is it a poem? Is it a fascicle? Are the fascicles really an arc? Yeah. Yeah. I wanna ask you Katie first. So this cancer journey is just incredible. And I know that, I'm sure there are people in this room, including me, who have been sort of on the same thing. And you know, when I saw the title of your book, "Standing in the Forest of Being Alive," I mean, in a way that kind of says it all to me. I remember sort of having been through radiation, chemo, surgery, I was in the dentist's office and the dentist complained that, you know, some of this chemo drug that you're taking, it's not really good for your teeth. And that was just infuriating, right? So, but you know, so there's this forest, it's a thicket that you can get lost in. It's also a place of beauty and wonder. Can you talk a little about how you know that, your experience of sort of how that works for you?

- That's a lovely question and I have not been asked it before. I think there are a couple, like certainly there was a Dante sort of reference there. There's also, I was in Atlanta through the course of this and Atlanta is in the middle of an enormous beautiful hardwood forest. And as a person who I grew up a little bit north of here in New Hampshire, and I love trees and I grew up in the midst of a forest as well, but primarily soft wood or mixed as it is here. Not these incredible tulip poplars, which are unbelievably tall. And I think, I was spending a lot of time walking and hiking in the earlier part of the pandemic right before I was diagnosed. And Atlanta's a fascinating city. There are all these little pocket parks in tiny little spaces of wilderness, kind of marbled into what is otherwise quite a busy and large kind of a city that has outgrown itself. And of course the symbolism of the tree, the renewal, you know, I was diagnosed and I had chemotherapy through the course of the late fall into the winter. Like I finished the day before, I think it was like Christmas Eve or something, it was like just right before Christmas that I finished chemo. And so I had this feeling of, you know, my hair falling out as the leaves were falling. I don't know, it felt cyclical. It felt like part of the journey. So I don't know, those are just some connections I had. I just kind of came out

- The final poem in the book.

- Sure. And there's the final poem of the book, which I think I'll read in closing, is also very much about uncertainty because as the book was coming out, there was still a lot of unanswered questions. And even now, I mean it's the nature of having had cancer, especially one that is difficult to see, where, you know, my cancer is, it very well could already be spread and growing and there's just no way of knowing that until it's quite advanced and it's so, I don't know, something about the uncertainty of it became wrapped up into forest and yeah.

- Yeah, yeah. Sort of a question for both of you is, you know, in "Deaf Republic" and in "Standing in the Forest," Katie, there's so much difficulty and trauma and there's also moments of beauty, love poems, all of this wrapped up into daily life. I mean, it's really some, you know, you go through bad things and you appreciate the good things that come along with them, as poets, how do you sort of make those choices in constructing, you know, what those moments are and where they go in a sort of narrative?

- I just talked, you talk, your turn.

- Okay, I'll do, as you say. I have a strange relationship to the word trauma. I mistrust it. Simply because we all come in this particular space crying. Is there any person, you know who arrived on this planet without Howell? I think Ginsberg didn't make up that word, he just told it from babies. At the same time, as soon as you haval, you're like, "Oh mama, hi, I want a hug." You know, literally. So how do we organize a narrative about this? I go to Ukraine pretty often, since the war started, I have been three times. The last time, less than a month ago. Children are born, there are weddings, there are birthday parties at night, there is a bombardment. In the morning, my uncle calls me, "Let's go out, "let's go to a restaurant." And I'm like, "Should we have a conversation "about what happened last night?" And he's like, "No, you know what we should have "a conversation about?" And I'm like, "What?" And he's like, "So some people have to go "to work in the morning." You get the point?

- Yeah.

- I mean, after a while people just need to go on and live no matter what is happening, we don't have a choice. We gotta make those time vicious.

- I'm gonna take a slightly different tack to that, just in terms of craft, thinking about craft, which is, you know, as I was writing this book, I was writing the poems very much as everything was happening. Like I would have a chemo treatment and then within two, like I would have, it was every two weeks. So usually after about a week I was feeling okay, especially earlier on. And I would work on a poem for four or five days. And right before I'd go in for my next treatment, I would post like a poem and a little update and a selfie, something like that. That happened, I don't know, within the first three or four weeks probably of starting chemo, I started doing this as a practice. And surprisingly a community sort of emerged around that, which is a really beautiful thing for me. Especially at that point, you know, I couldn't see anyone. Nobody could see anyone, but I especially couldn't see anyone 'cause I was so immuned compromised. There wasn't a vaccination yet. It was a tough time for, well literally everybody. And so I was writing them in very much in the heat of what was happening. And one of the things I knew, even as I was doing it, once I realized that there was an audience, which is to say somebody out there reading, anybody out there reading was that even in those moments while I was trying to make sense of what was happening to me, that the poems were not just for me. And because of that they couldn't just be screeds and rants and self pity. Although I wrote a lot of those, a lot, a lot of those. But what I wanted both for myself primarily, but for other people too, especially in that moment, was to also acknowledge the humor and to also acknowledge that there were really beautiful moments along the way. And also acknowledge the incredible feeling of, for me, there was an almost ecstasy in that time of being so clear about what I was here to do. You know, I was here to connect with the people who were close to me and I was here to write a poem. And if I only had 12 more months on earth, those were the two things I was gonna do. By God, I was going to finish this book, you know? And it would, you know, and regardless, I guess whether it remains in print or not, still the book in a certain way always outlives you, you know? So how do you give the best of your self? And how do you literally hand somebody a book and say, "Read this, it's about cancer. "Who wants to read?" No, you have to be like, "But it's funny "but it's kind of sexy in places," you know what I mean? Which is not to say that, you know, there isn't a time and place to acknowledge pure devastation. And I think I tried to do that honestly in several poems through the book, but I also appreciate that throughout there has to be breaks. You need a break. I needed a break. Everybody needs a break. So at a certain point put a bunch of poems up on the wall. I acknowledged all the points where the darker poems were. And I literally was trying to intersperse with lighter pieces on the way. So I thought very carefully about, you know, I used color coding and I wanted like two light pieces for every very dark piece, you know, things like that. So there was a lot of thought about how to create space. And also because without space, the drama of the darkness cannot make an impact at a certain point. At a certain point you just shut down and it rolls right off. You know what I mean? So you need both, you need the contrast.

- Yeah. But you really talking the about in somewhere is a stone and you're beautifully talking about it and also composition. Music without moments of silence in it is just continuous noise. It is silence inside music that makes rhythms happen, right?

- I hate the word tone. I have to think texture. 'cause tone means absolutely nothing to me. But I can find the metaphor of texture. You know, there are some that are heavy in the hand and some that are lighter weight, you know, like that to me. I can-

- Welcome to our manager.

- Stop talking about tone.

- I'm gonna just remind you if you have-

- So other argument we have with about chaff.

- If you have questions, please write 'em on the cards and they'll be collected and brought up this way. And then I'll read them and then share them with both of you. So this is the second anniversary of the occupation of Ukraine. So we can't not talk about that with "Deaf Republic." So I wanted to ask a little bit about poets as witnesses and prophets. So you wrote "Deaf Republic" before this invasion and now with Navani's death and the tussle over his body. I mean, you know, I see Bucha, that shooting just overlaid right on it. So what do you think of that work now on this second anniversary? Do you feel, I mean it feels timeless in a way, but wow this is happening, it's happening right now.

- Yeah, it's happening right now. I think, nothing like this happened always. The question is when it happens to you. The book took a long time to finish. Partly because, and I spoke a little bit about that to students the other day, forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but I don't make up a different answer in 24 hours, you know. The book is written by somebody who was an immigrant or a refugee coming from the fellow part of USSR, to United States. Now, I don't know if there is anybody in this room who had an experience of USSR, but if you did, you might remember that Gloria Nafi had all those images on TV, the whole TV shows about homelessness in America. And we laughed, we thought it was propaganda and then we arrive in America. So the book is about experience of somebody who comes from literally a fallen apart empire and empire who quote unquote won and see surprisingly so many similar images and is unable to make sense of what is happening. And it took me a long time to finish the book simply because I knew that I needed to be honest to that experience of a person who has one foot in one place, which is former USSR, currently Ukraine, the city of Odesa and another foot at that time in San Diego, California. And miles from the border is where Katie and I lived our first place together. And you know what happens in the border in the United States. The children are in the border in the United States. How do you reconcile that with the images of violence in childhood? How do you write a book that is true to post experiences? And that was a challenge for me as a writer. And as I told the students yesterday, I needed to find a genre. And a genre for me was that a fabulism, a fairytale. Because fairytale is something that speaks across fantasies, you can read a fairytale from another country and it feels absolutely true to your experience as a child. It also something that cast as spell, which I was interested in because I grew up in a Jewish family where a fabulism was important. Having said that, of course the war in Ukraine is happening right now, but my friends it has been happening for 10 years. We just didn't pay attention. I mean 10 years ago, the whole peninsula of Crimean was stolen. Who paid attention? When I was leaving USSR, right, about two years before we left, Putin wasn't even the president of the Russian Federation. There was another president Yeltsin two hours from where we lived in the Republic of Moldova airplanes, bombed high schools. I wrote about it in my first book but people thought it was a fairytale. Okay. What am I supposed to say? You know, the word witness is a complicated world. I'm not going to sit here claim to be witness my family lives in this, I'm not a witnessing them, they're my family. You know, witness puts you at a certain remove and makes you a very serious person. I'm not a serious person. I'm gonna tell seven jokes in one sentence. What I want to tell you is when we here in United States act like we are in the Mount Olympus overseeing travel and the rest of the world that is not witness. When we talk about Ukraine and say, "Doom, doom, doom, doom. "Horror, horror, horror, horror," that's not witness either. That's one sided witness, we gotta honor people who survive. We gotta acknowledge the fact that they have a right to have birthday parties and go to restaurant to make jokes despite the horror that happens. We also gotta acknowledge what is happening in our country. We can't just say, "Oh, I'm putting a witness, "I'm beating this mask on my face. "I'm witness." And the fact that there is a dead kid in the middle of my country, it's in the middle of your own country for God's sake. Okay.

- So I'm going to go to some of the questions from our audience. This one is for you Ilya. Would you ever see a play adaptation of "Deaf Republic?"

- Would they ever, sorry. Sure. I would say that if you want it, you can have it. I'm probably not gonna be involved. Simply because I translate myself. And I think that adaptations or translation becomes, we have great translators in the room here right now. Watson right here who translated one of the best living poet a Delia brother. Thank you. As you know, translation is you basically become that poet in a different language. It's kind of fiction, but you try to make that fiction too. So I don't really try to compare every word or say, "It should be like that." It's your art. Go do it.

- Yeah, thank you. Let's see, a question for each of you, from, let's see, for you, Ilya, in "Dancing in Odessa," you have conversations with dead authors. How did you go about writing those conversations? And then there's also a question for you, Katie here.

- Well, I guess I'm let you to be in conversation with the living author and my home. Death author, you know, number one, that book was written by 21-year-old kid, so cut him some slack. But it's good to remain 21-year-old. So I'm gonna put that hat on and try to answer the question. At that time I thought that dead authors should not be on a pedestal in bronze. They should be like cats and ducks in your house, you should play with them. You should make them feel alive again. Otherwise you make them even more dead.

- You said at that time that's how you felt. Do you now feel like they should be bronzed?

- No, not necessarily. But maybe 21-year-old poet should be a little more humble.

- Okay. My question is, how do I pick my poem names? This is a really good question because I find poem names very difficult. My favorite thing to do, and it doesn't always work, is to read the poem and try to find a line or a part of a line, especially an unexpected part and create a poem titled that way. So for instance, Emma Loma was my concept, right, of the book where Emily Dickinson crashed against cancer. Conceptually fine, as a title, terrible. You know, like to go back in and sort of use the things of the book, which is to say the literal words that are there for me always works much better than using a concept of a title, if that makes sense. And part of that is because for better or worse, I don't know what I'm going to write most of the time. You know, like I'm often just sort of like, I'm half conscious and I'm trying as much as possible though to open the door and let the part of me that is not thinking do the writing, that part of me that is not thinking should not do the editing, ever. But she can be a really surprising and fascinating writer. Terrible editor though. But a good namer of poems.

- I think for both of us in our practice, we would say that the community, the writing community is very important. Simply somebody who would tell you, "Okay, stop and continue this, this, this, this and that." And it's an amazing thing that you guys have so many of you are in college now, pay attention. You know, some of the folks in the room might end up being your friends still 30 years later and telling you the truth of what to be or not to be and do or not to do and what are other options.

- And sometimes the people who are your best readers are not your friends. Which is not to say you can't be friendly, but you know, I have people that I trade work with and we do not talk about any other parts of our lives. People I've traded work with for a long, long time. We're not friends, but we're good readers of each other's work. So that can also be a valuable thing to think about. I don't know, 'cause I'd never really thought that until it happened. I thought we had to be close. But oftentimes the closest people are much too nice.

- Well we have so many wonderful questions and I think we have time maybe just for a couple more. Here's one that I have a particular interest in this question 'cause I had one a little bit like it. In "Deaf Republic," silence seems to be a multifaceted symbol. On the one hand it is how the townspeople resist oppression. On the other hand, it signals complicity. The townspeople remain silent as they watch their compatriots like Alfonso die. How do you reconcile these two uses of silence? And if I can tack on something of my own, is silence, quiet and deafness different or the same?

- Thank you. I think I got the question. I would say in the book there are at least five or seven depending on how you read different definitions of silence. And I don't pretend to settle on one simply because in one lives, according to Shakespeare, there are at least seven definitions of silence. Seven stages, right? For example, there is a silence of a person being silence at the morgue. There is a silence between two hours when language is not necessary. I say, "Hmm." And you say, "Hmm. Hmm." Or you say, "Hmm, hmm," more likely. So forth and so on and we can keep talking for the next hour without saying the word. Then there is a metaphysical silence. Most of our religions, most of our meta physicians will tell us things like the silence of God is God. A great statement, right? But then there is silence that deaf people with a capital T, the nation of deaf people, the culture of deaf people who tell you simply doesn't exist because deaf people don't believe in silence. In writing of this book, I have asked many deaf writers to believe in silence. Not a single one said yes. And now think about it, there are at least 7% of people on this planet who happen to be deaf or hard of hearing. So if 7% of people in this planet do not believe in silence, what does it tell us about our metaphysics, our religion, our philosophy, which takes so much of conversation in the concept of silence. I think of silence as a kind of a metaphor that is too large, so it breaks up. It's like an umbrella, a lively, big umbrella that's trying to keep rain falling from everybody on the sun. And it doesn't quite hold up. You know, then there is a concept of disability studies, a great contemporary disability scholar, Rosemary Garland-Thompson, say the disabled body should move from the realm of the hospital room into the realm of political minority. And you must go, "Oh great, "very good for disability studies. Hooray!" And then what happens? Pandemic happens. And you are all in that hospital, all of you, but some of you don't have health insurance. And you realize, whoa, that's not just disability study, it is human kind studies. Okay. So there are many, many ways we can approach that.

- Thank you. Perhaps one last question is about, it sort of goes back to the subject matter of your work, at least in these two books. And the question has to do with that they're very personal topics and how do you decide what to talk about and what to keep to yourself? Is it, you know, case by case? Is there a principle or?

- The principle is, is it a good poem? I have a poem in this book about hemorrhoid, my hemorrhoid, I suppose I should own that.

- Are you saying it's not the speaker?

- It's not the speaker of the poem, no. I've written many poems about Ilya in a very, sometimes in very unflattering lights, mostly comically, not actually unflattering as a person, but, and he bless him

- Not the speaker.

- One of the greatest things about being married to another poet is, you know, to show him that work where, you know, it's like you're dancing around naked and all your bits are flopping about and you know, for some people it would be embarrassing and he would be like, "Here is a good poem." You know, that is at least in our house, the most fundamental question is, is it functioning as a piece of art? If it is, then it is welcome to go in. If it is not, no matter how well portrayed any given thing might be, no matter how flattering it is or unflattering whatever, if it's not a poem, then it does not belong, you know. And we don't always agree what is a poem and what is not a poem. Although usually at the end of the day we find a way to concur. So not everything has to pass through filter either. There are poems in his work that I think are terrible and I'm sure vice versa. That's just maybe lines.

- If I may hope into this conversation and I won't speak for myself, I will just bring three quotes from a poet. We actually met once, a lady Anna Mattawa, three quotes, I'm trying to remembers them. One probably most useful for this conversation is poetry should be shameless. Another one that might be useful and also might be useful for some of you. And we talked about that in the classroom yesterday. Anna Mattawa was said, "You have no idea "what kind of trash poetry comes from."

- I have a better translation of that sorry, you have no idea the trash from which poetry is made.

- Yeah, yeah, sure.

- I like that version better.

- That's probably,

- That was mine,

- American idea,

- my translation.

- And then finally, finally she said, and that is not just for poetry, but for life, I find it very useful advice. She said, "I live for two things in life, "gossip and metaphysics."

- That's the perfect way to end.

- Amherst has graduated many wonderful writers and artists over the years, but not very many comedians. And when you narrow the group to comedians who are also actors and also writers of books and also hosts of podcasts and a true plethora of things that Aparna has done, Aparna Nancherla, class of 2005, might be in a class of her own. In fact as I've told some of you, one of my interns upon hearing that Aparna was coming back to campus, said, "She's the only cool alum we've ever had." So, apologies to our president and the rest of us who have graduated from Amherst and done decidedly uncool things with our lives. So now, at last, we finally have somebody cool to help us out. But comparisons aside, my intern was definitely not wrong about Aparna's many cool accomplishments. Voice and live action roles on hit TV shows like "Corporate" and "BoJack Horseman." Half-hour standup specials on Netflix and Comedy Central. She's the host of a limited podcast series called "The Introvert's Survival Guide." And now she's also the author of a funny and probing memoir in essays called "Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Imposter Syndrome." So as an interviewer, unreliable and imposter are two words you generally don't like to see lined up next to each other for your guest. But spending time with Aparna's diverse creative work has convinced me that she is obviously neither. She's a first-rate writer and performer and I can't wait for our conversation, so please welcome Aparna Nancherla.

- Thank you, that was so nice.

- Welcome back to Amherst.

- Thank you. I have to admit, I was terrified to come back.

- Yeah?

- Yeah, I mean I'm anxious by nature, but I feel like even today, I've only been back today and I was too afraid to really go on campus. I was sort of stalking the perimeter like it was "Jurassic Park."

- Did you spot anything interesting?

- I mean a lot of stuff is the same, which is a little bizarre. I don't know. I don't know, maybe nothing has happened in the last 20 years.

- Um.

- I can't think of anything.

- That's right, really, really nothing, actually. Really nothing. Well so when speaking of your time at Amherst, you have written a book about imposter syndrome, and so I wonder if you could tell us, did you learn about imposter syndrome in your Amherst psychology major?

- Hm? Yeah, that's probably where I first learned about it. I never put that together, thank you.

- See what I've done? I've just credited Amherst with your whole book.

- I know. Here I was trying to discredit it. No, yeah, I think that's where I, honestly, I think I wanted to be an English major but I didn't feel seen by the department, so I went with psychology 'cause I feel like it's the only major that sort of condones navel-gazing 'cause everything is kind of directly applicable to your life. It's like a online personality quiz. You're like and that, that's this person I know and that's me and, yeah, this is how I trick people.

- Nice.

- Yeah.

- And so can you tell us a little bit about imposter syndrome, the role that it's played in your personal and professional life and the impetus for the book?

- Yeah I think, I think it's fair to say like self-doubt and I have a long history together. I think from a young age, you know just being kind of a more shy kid, being an introverted kid, being a first-generation immigrant, there were various things that kind of made me feel like a fish out of water and they all kind of compounded each other. So I think I perpetually kind of approached life as sort of an observer on the sidelines, kind of taking everyone else in and seeing what they were doing and then trying to cobble together my own impression of what was normal. So I think frequently imposter syndrome shows up in those ways, in that when I was given an opportunity or neared a goal that I wanted, I was kind of like do I really deserve this? Am I like everyone else here? Why was I given this? I guess some people they get opportunities and their first thing is like, "Finally, you guys took long enough." And I feel like for me it was always like I got something and I'd be like, why? It was like the Groucho Marx, you know why would you invite me in this club?

- Right.

- Yeah.

- [Jennifer] Have you found, I mean did it take you a while to sort of identify that it was imposter syndrome or was that a journey?

- Yeah, I'm trying to think. I think I knew early on that I had this persistent feeling that I didn't fit in, but I think once I learned the term, I think as anyone with imposter syndrome would say, you're like, okay, even if someone else says they have it, you're like, okay, well, you're delusional. You're clearly qualified. I actually am a fraud.

- Right, right.

- [Aparna] So you don't know what you're talking about. It's hard to really embrace it, 'cause you so deeply believe that that's not the case.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- [Jennifer] Yeah, I was gonna ask you if it was a way of bonding with other performers. I imagine, like you said, you're not the only one who thinks this about themselves. But you write, the nature of the syndrome itself is to sort of question other people's right to it, is that?

- Yeah, it's almost like you think you're better at being bad than they are. You're like you're actually really good and it's embarrassing that you think you're bad, but I'm actually bad and I know that in my core, yeah.

- Very good. So you write in your book that you thought that writing about imposter syndrome might might cure you of it, but what did happen along the way as you were writing this story?

- My theory was not salient. Yeah, I mean I think in writing anything personal, you realize you're gonna probably face feelings or come into contact with memories that you're not fully resolved on. And I think I just, it was almost like Pandora's box where if it was like a chest of drawers, I was like, let me just open every door at once and what could go wrong? And, you know, it was a lot of struggling with on a base level, just who am I to write a book about imposter syndrome. Like the most meta, sort of really the book should just be blank and I should turn that in and that would be most authentic. But yeah, so I think it was a lot of sort of coming to terms with, I'm also kind of a lifelong perfectionist and a lot of it was kind of being at peace with the fact that a lot of the essays I wrote didn't have neat tidy endings. Or I started at one point and then I ended another one, but you weren't necessarily getting a sense of closure with all of them. Like there was a journey, but yeah I think the point of the book was also just how we are kind of messy as humans and there isn't always a tidy resolution on things like body image or our relationship to productivity or the Internet. I kind of wanted to really get into those gray areas, which is harder with something like standup where it's like a setup punchline. You're in, you're out, yeah.

- Um-hm, right. Well, one of the things that your book introduced me to is something called a Failure Resume, which I was not familiar with before. Could you say what it is and what it's good for?

- Yeah, I mean I thought I was so brilliant when I thought of it and then I looked it up on the Internet. Of course, it already exists and it was an academic who actually did the first one that I could find where they were like why don't I make a resume of everything I was rejected from or didn't get and then people can see that that's usually a heftier document than the fancy one that everyone sees. So I thought I would do my own for being in entertainment. And really, I mean, you get rejected so often in entertainment that it's like I had to kind of make a joke of it and kind of pull from other life experiences 'cause otherwise it just becomes a little sad . 'Cause I think my editor was even like, I wanna cut this.

- [Jennifer] Oh, really?

- Yeah, she was like, this one makes me-

- [Jennifer] Too depressing?

- But she was like, "This one makes me sad." And I was like that's the point.

- [Jennifer] You're like it's failure.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Nobody gets excited about that.

- I know, I'm like that's the point. People don't want to hear about it. But yeah, I don't know. I'm so much more motivated when I hear about when someone didn't get something, 'cause I just feel like as a society we're so addicted to the tragedy to triumph narrative. I feel like life is not always like that tidy. A lot of times you don't get something and then there's no reward for that. You just have to make sense of why you didn't get the thing. Yeah.

- Right, right. One of the stories that you tell in your book is a little bit about how you got your start in comedy, which is through this speech competition. Could you tell us the story about the speech competition or the speech classes that you took and then the competition that followed?

- Yeah, so I was a really shy kid and I think as an immigrant kid too, my mom was very worried I wouldn't be able to hack it in the world. You know she kept giving me these sort of confidence-building exercises. One of them was that I had to, every Sunday night we would have pizza as a family and my exercise was to order the pizza over the phone and I would be so scared and I would have to psych myself up and be like, you got this. Veggie lovers, you know bell pepper and onion, like you're in the zone. And I would be so nervous and so I think she was just always trying to find ways to push me out of my comfort zone. And one of those things was public speaking classes when I was like 11, I think. It was a little unhinged, I would say. It was me and my sibling and a bunch of adults in this very depressing conference center. And then every week we'd be given a topic and it'd be like here are my thoughts on fruit or something. But then you know I kind of learned how to speak in front of a group and some of it felt a little mechanical. I'd be like I'll raise my arm at minute one or, yeah, I'll look across the room you know. But one of the things it led me to was this speech competition that was like a local community thing, I think. And I think the topic was what is one topic affecting the South Asian community today? It was through our local temple and I remember all the other kids kind of went in a more serious direction. They were like racism and being excluded and discrimination and feeling othered. And I decided to go in a humorous direction. I did sort of just like a take down of Bollywood movies, purely out of my resentment of having to watch them, which my parents forced me to do and it was before subtitles, they were all pirated. And so I never knew what was happening and there was a lot of built up anger, apparently. And so I wrote this speech and it was just like a full on roast and people loved it and I won the competition. I think it sort of gave me that inkling of like, oh, humor kind of has this power that is maybe can kind of enrapture people in a way that you don't always know how to get in normal life. At least, I don't. I feel like talking in front of a group of people kind of led me to that in a way that I couldn't do with strangers one-on-one, yeah.

- What did your mom think of the speech?

- I think she was like, I have notes, but fine.

- So like a mom.

- Yeah. Yeah. Even now my mom, she doesn't fully understand my sense of humor, but she'll come to one of my standup shows and she'll be like, "Everyone around me was having a great time." And I'm like I love that. I love that you're an audience monitor. Thank you.

- Sorry, I'm gonna need to take a breath. So you're a self-described introvert and you hosted this podcast series called "The Introvert's Survival Guide". But so could you tell us a little bit about being an introvert and choosing the stage as a performance mode or as a means of expression.

- Yeah. I think I'm someone who generally, in front of other people sometimes, like one-on-one as I was saying, I cannot collect my thoughts. I think I'm so anxious at how I'm presenting or being perceived that it's really hard for me to sometimes feel like I'm present when I'm communicating with people, yeah, in sort of smaller conversations if I don't know them well. So I think what comedy and performing gives me is sort of a medium in which I can come to the stage kind of prepared with what I wanna say and what I wanna communicate. And it feels a lot more of a controlled environment where it's like I have this message I'm gonna tell you guys. I know where you're gonna laugh or where I'm gonna pause. It's just so much more structured and I think that feels weirdly more manageable than yeah, than the sort of like, I'm gonna tell a funny story at a dinner party kind of thing, yeah.

- Is it, it gives you more control?

- Um-hm. Yeah, I love control.

- Classic introvert.

- Yeah.

- Tell us a little bit more about the "Introvert's Survival Guide". What is that project?

- Yeah, it's an Audible series and they sort of came to me, the idea was already fleshed out and formed and it was basically like if you're an introvert, here's a bunch of cheats and life hacks for kind of making it in these different environments, like at work and relationships. Just 'cause it is a more extrovert driven world. So the idea of the podcast was to kind of talk to other introverts and get tips on managing. Which was, yeah as I was telling you before, I was just like why would you, I told you I'm an introvert, why would you ask me to interview a bunch of strangers? But that was their big idea.

- Did you learn anything? Like any tips that were useful for your own life?

- Yeah, I mean I think some of them were just about self-acceptance. Kind of being like it's okay as an introvert that sometimes I only have so much capacity for face time with other people and it's okay to recharge. 'Cause I think growing up there was a lot of shame in not being outward-facing enough. And even being in a career that is so public-facing, I think sometimes there's pressure to always be on. And I think, yeah, just talking to other introverts helped me be like, okay, it's okay to have that side of you, but then another side of you that needs that alone time and need, yeah, kind of to withdraw a bit, yeah.

- So tell me a little bit more about the different kinds of writing that you do and the different processes. So how is it different writing for standup versus writing the memoir?

- Yeah, so standup feels a lot more, I don't know, a little more structured to me. It's kind of like you have your in, which is like the premise or the idea or the setup and then you need to find like sort of a resolution or a punchline or a way out of it or just a sort of navigation through your thoughts on a certain topic. And I think with the book, I kind of wanted to not have a neat resolution with everything and kind of maybe be more in the weeds and be a little messier. And sometimes that was really hard for me 'cause I think I'm used to having that little out or like button at the end and I was very uncomfortable being in those gray areas. But I think in that sense it was sort of a thing to challenge myself and write more long form and a little bit more, yeah, like ambiguously.

- Um-hm and so I think, I mean I don't know that much about this, but when you write for comedy you're writing for a certain length of time.

- Mm.

- Right, like you're writing a five minute set or a 10 minute-

- Yeah, I mean usually as a standup you're writing bits, which are like a bunch of jokes on a topic and usually you'll just kind of write the bits more organically. And then as you see what the different lengths are, you'll kind of put them together into different length sets. But usually, you know if you're headlining you'll try to put together a 45 to an hour set in total. So you're kind of always working towards that longer form.

- I see.

- Yeah.

- [Jennifer] So does that mean you're trying to write a lot of things on the same topic or keep them-

- I think it depends. I think when you start, you're just like can I write a joke period? Like let me just see what works and then I'll just keep doing those until someone tells me to stop or I am sick of telling them. And then once you sort of are more comfortable with yourself on stage and your voice, I think then you kind of are more interested in building longer shows that are maybe exploring some sort of journey or topic or looking at an idea that you're kind of unpacking and maybe you're taking people on a little bit more of an arc. But yeah, I think that comes with a little experience.

- Um-hm, and when you're writing towards it for those longer sets, do you think, oh, this could be an essay too or it's just completely different?

- Hmm, that's a good question. I think, actually, a lot of times I'll be like is this an essay? And then I'll be like, oh, it's one line, it's a joke and I'm like that's all. That's all there is to say about this and, yeah, I need to make peace with that. 'Cause a lot of times when I'm writing an essay, it's just a lot more incoherent at first. And I feel with jokes it feels a little bit more like I immediately know what I'm trying to say or accomplish, yeah.

- And how do you know if your jokes are funny?

- I mean that's the thing with standup it is very trial by fire. You know you have to put stuff on your feet. There are jokes that I have told in front of people that work maybe 30% of the time and I just love them dearly in my heart and believe in them and just keep telling them as an act of rebellion, I guess. But yeah, then there are the jokes that you're like, okay, this works really well and I know I can pull it out in a pinch, yeah.

- And how has the material of your comedy changed over time? Is it like, you know you write your first novel, it's very autobiographical and then you know you wanna change it up and you do something different. Is that true for comedians as well? Or how has your work changed, do you think?

- Yeah, I think it's almost the maybe reverse of novelists maybe. Because I think when you're first writing it you are, or when you're first exploring your voice, you're maybe leaning in to what the audience is responding to a little more. Where you're kind of trying to find that medium between what you think is funny and what they think is funny. And then as you kind of gain confidence in your voice, I think you then are like, okay, this is a topic I'm really interested in, let me dive into it. Let me write some jokes around it. 'Cause then you already have that experience of I know how to write a joke and then you can kind of allow yourself to get more personal or explore topics that might not seem as funny right away. Yeah.

- Do you think that your comedy was then less personal in the beginning of your career?

- Yeah, I think so. I'm trying to think of what my early sets were about. I mean there was like... I remember like the first joke I wrote, I think it was about public restrooms. So I don't know, some people could think of that as personal. It's a very personal experience for us all.

- I can see that, yes. Yeah, I know some people for whom that is a personal topic.

- It can be a real journey. But yeah, I think it was only like a few years in when I started talking more about mental health and yeah, my own struggles with it and kind of delving more into maybe areas in my life that were a little darker or, yeah. I didn't always know where I was gonna come out at the end of the joke, yeah.

- I wanna ask you more about that, but I also want to remind the audience that you have the opportunity to ask questions through the question cards that are on your seats in the pew backs. So please begin to write down your questions and then in a couple of minutes someone will come around and collect them. Do you remember some of the first times that you began talking about mental health in your comedy acts and both what that felt like and what you wanted to talk about?

- Yeah, I think I mainly struggle with anxiety and depression and I think I first started writing about them because I was struggling pretty acutely with anxiety and also with some depression at the time. And I think I was having trouble really writing about anything else. So I was like might as well, you know you guys do some work for me. Let me like, yeah, try to figure out how to exploit you. So I think that's when I started writing about it. But I had also looked up to comedians who have been openly talking about mental health forever, like Maria Bamford and like Gary Gulman, Marc Maron. So I think I wasn't like, oh, this has never been broached on stage before, but I guess I never thought of myself as someone who like really had something transportive to contribute to the conversation. But then when I started talking about it on stage, I think I noticed a sort of connection with the audience that I wasn't expecting and just a recognition from people that I was very surprised by and I think made me wanna kind of keep exploring that area. And it was like, I think in one of my, I did a half hour special for Comedy Central and I remember I did a joke about anxiety and it was kind of on the heels of like right before the 2016 election. So it was you know before anxiety really broke out, so.

- [Jennifer] Had its moment.

- Had its moment. So I think, yeah, the timing of it was probably grotesque to say, but a little fortuitous, yeah.

- Interesting.

- Yeah.

- And so what kinds of responses did you get from the audience? I mean were they, was it something that you just noticed in the moment while you were performing or people were writing to you or?

- I would say both. Some of it was also just, like I think a lot of, I was very active on Twitter at the time and I think I would also write just like tweets about it and notice they got a lot of circulation or response. So I think, yeah, I was noticing there was sort of a recognition of those experiences. And yeah, I think I mean I talk about this in the book though, where it's sort of at first I felt people were like, "Oh my gosh, you're so brave. You talk about mental health." And it almost felt like it came back around the other way where I started to be am I kind of commodifying this part of myself for attention rather than because I'm actually, oh, I have something deep to say about this. It became a little snake eating its own tail. And I think I did want to use an opportunity of writing the book to explore that.

- Mm.

- Yeah.

- [Jennifer] So yeah, I was gonna ask you how you wrestled with that feeling like, well I'm doing this thing that's getting some nice attention, but feeling a little conflicted about it.

- Yeah, I mean I think that's the interesting thing about being a performer who's, like as a standup most standups are predominantly using their life as the canvas for what they're writing material about. And so it can become a little perverse, where something bad happens to you. You know someone in your family gets sick and you're like, okay, how can I make this into a show? You know it can become a little grim in that sense. So I think you are constantly kind of self-evaluating of am I ready to talk about this on stage? Am I just trying to make the most of this to make it into material? So I think when I was writing the book, took a break from standup, a couple years actually, and I think that kind of gave me a chance to reset with the mental health stuff and be like, okay, let me see what I actually wanna say about this versus just for the sake of attention or clicks or likes or, yeah, it gave me a chance to kind of reflect on that.

- And when you came back to it, how was the material different or did you bring, yeah, different rules for yourself about what you would talk about or?

- Yeah, I think I just got a lot more intentional about writing work that I was excited by rather than leaning so heavily on what was driving the audience's interest. Which is subtle but I think you can get, like when you're doing sets all the time or you're really immersed in the bubble of comedy, you can develop tunnel vision where you're really like every set is sort of determining how you feel about yourself. And I think I needed to get out of that mindset and be like, wait, I'm a person first and then I'm a comedian and, yeah, it doesn't define me.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- [Jennifer] Were you worried that people would expect this material from you and be less happy if you ventured into other topics?

- Yeah, I mean I think that was part of the fear when I stepped away from it was that I was getting so attached to like the audience's expectations or my perceived assumption of what they wanted to hear from me. And I think a lot of that is you know your own manufactured anxieties. So I had to really remove myself for a while to, yeah, I guess recalibrate.

- Um-hm.

- Yeah.

- [Jennifer] Yeah. Are there any questions that have been collected that anyone wants to bring up? Great, thank you. Do you have any, yeah, any rules for yourself and we've just been talking about this, so maybe you've already answered it about what you would consider too personal to share on stage or in the book?

- Yeah, I think for me the lines are a lot about involving other people in my life. 'cause I feel I have decided I wanna be a performer and put my life in a more public way, but I feel other people in my life never agreed to that. So I think I always wanna be sensitive about what I'm saying about people I know or anonymizing to the best of my ability when it feels like someone doesn't want their business on, yeah.

- And do you ask people is it okay if I use this bit about your life or you just try to work it in a way that people are not identifiable or?

- Yeah, I will ask people if I'm being pretty candid about something where it feels they're going to feel a way about it. Yeah, I think I err on the side of over caution just 'cause I, yeah, I'm pretty sensitive myself, yeah.

- Right. So you are also an actor with a number of really wonderful roles. How does that fit into the rest of your creative life? Is there a particular itch that acting scratches that writing doesn't?

- Yeah, I guess acting is its own thing and the weird thing about being a comedian is sometimes you enter, like I entered Hollywood as a standup primarily, and then people'd be like, oh, I like your sort of, because standup is so self presentational, people'd be like, "Oh, I like kind of what you're doing or your voice and I could see you acting in this role that kind of fits that." But yeah, I would say acting is kind of its whole own thing. And the nice thing about being a comedian is sort of like I can play parts that are sort of just one step over from who I am naturally and it isn't like I'm not like Kate Blanchett where I'm like a true chameleon. But I'm like this Aparna with a higher voice, you know. I feel I'm cheating the system a little sometimes.

- Um-hm, so, thank you. So here is a question about art versus commerce. How does the work of comedy, which is creative butt up against the capitalist forces of Hollywood?

- Oh, my god, I would love to know.

- [Jennifer] Please tell us everything that you know on this topic.

- Yeah, I mean I think it feels like a constant just, mm, thing you have to take stock of in your own life of what your values are versus the values of the system, which I feel are inherently corrupt in so many ways or exploitative. And especially I think as a minority in Hollywood, it's like sometimes you gain power and then you're like, okay, now am I just repeating the pattern of doing what the system did to me before. I think you're just constantly sort of having to wrestle with these battles and kind of take stock of the battles you can fight and the ones you have to maybe put aside sometimes in favor of a longer term goal. 'Cause I think I've gotten opportunities where it feels like should I say yes to this? It feels like maybe this isn't fully in line with my values, but could it help me get to a place where I can then change the system? I think you're constantly kind of trying to navigate that line and it's, yeah, you're not always maybe making the right decision, but I think that's also just being a human, yeah.

- Um-hm. This is a little bit in line with others, a student who is seeking to work in entertainment who says, how do you manage comparing yourself to other people who work in traditional industries like finance?

- Oh, I think I mean I remember when I graduated so many people were going into like iBanking and I didn't even know what the I stood for. I just felt so, I felt so outside that world that I think I just was like, there's no way I would survive one day in that. So I think I just, I know a lot of people have outward pressure, familial pressure to do something traditional, but I guess I just knew I wasn't gonna make it in those worlds. So I was sort of like I'm gonna go my own way. But yeah, it's not easy. I think pursuing a career in the arts, you are frequently maybe trying to justify yourself to people who become a doctor or a lawyer or whatever it is. But yeah, I think a lot of it is kind of surrounding yourself with people who kind of support your vision or at least are maybe on a similar path where you guys can kind of be buddies and championing each other. 'Cause in those early years it's really hard already and if people are like you know you need to pursue a serious, actual job, it is hard to sometimes explain yourself to people when you're starting. 'Cause it is like you're like, well I'm doing this show for three people in a basement and you'll see.

- I promise this is part of a grand plan.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Yeah. I wonder if you could say a little bit about developing a comedy community. Have you been able to find that? Is that something that's important to you?

- Yeah, I mean I think that is the nice thing about comedy and maybe I'm not sure about other art forms, but I think standup is so trial by fire and you kind of have such highs and lows that I feel like the community is pretty strong. 'Cause everyone knows what it's like to bomb. Everyone knows what it's like to have a better set. And so I think people are generally looking out for each other or just not out to, like it's not cutthroat in my experience. I find that people are just trying to kind of support each other as well as they can. And the nice thing is once you are in that world, you know you can go to another city and you'll be like, hey, I'm a standup. Do you know of any shows to a standup that you maybe know off the Internet and they can like help you. It's sort of this little world that everyone is if you're in it, they kind of trust you and accept you on some level implicitly, yeah.

- Um-hm. Here's an Amherst question. Can you speak to how your Amherst experience informed your comedy? And did you know you were funny in college?

- Hm-hm, I know I think I first did standup when I was at Amherst, but it wasn't here. It was when I was home for the summer. So I think I maybe did it one or two times like maybe. I don't know if this still exists, but at Marsh Coffeehouse, is that still a thing? Okay, great. But yeah, I think it was very much still a pipe dream when I was here. I was too scared to audition for the improv group. I think I was just felt like an imposter in terms of wanting to be a performer or wanting to be a writer. Yeah, I remember I ran track and cross country for a little bit when I was here and one of the other freshmen who went out for the teams, she went on one run and she was like, "I hate this." And then she went into theater and comedy and I remember my whole four years I was just like she's doing what I wanna do. So, you know you can use longing or spite to propel a career.

- Perhaps speaking of spite, is there a style of comedy that you don't enjoy, that you steer clear of and say either that's not for me or just nobody should be doing that?

- Yeah, I mean I think comedy is like accessible enough to people now that I think everyone's aware there's different genres of comedy. It's not just like this is standup, everyone should find it funny. I think there's comedy that's more irreverent or edgy or more experimental. There's just different types, so I don't think everyone has to like every type of comedy. It's like music in that sense. But there is comedy that I feel is sort of the anti-woke thing that's been happening in a sort of polarizing way where some comedians are moving more towards the alt-right, for a lack of a better way to put it and then others are kind of reacting to that and being like, why did you feel the need to go in that direction? And I guess for me it is kind of like if you are taking shots at underrepresented groups or persecuted groups, what are you really gaining? Or how brave are you really being if you're just on this platform of bullying? I think I just don't find that interesting or, yeah, like rebellious in the spirit that I think they think it is.

- Yeah.

- Yeah. Are you always on the lookout for funny situations in everyday life?

- Hm-hm? I think I do as a performer have the type of brain where as soon as something happens to me or is happening to me, I'm already like, okay, how can I make this a bit? Sometimes it's a little annoying where I'm just like, okay, just live your life. You don't have to be like how can I monetize this? Yeah.

- I mean do you carry a notebook or how do you keep track of your ideas?

- I'll put notes down in just the notes app on my phone. It'll just be like a word or two and later I might be like, oh my God, it was such a good idea. Or I'll look at it and I'll be like that is so, no. Yeah.

- So you, yeah, you can edit them, let's say.

- Yes, yes.

- As they come along. Someone asks if there were any particular books or writers that you were reading when you were writing your book?

- Hmm? what did I read when I was writing my book? I think I was reading a lot of like personal essays, but actually a little removed from what I was writing. I wasn't reading other essay books by comedians. It was more, I don't know, this was a little I think self loathing of me, but I would read books by like Jia Tolentino or something where I was like this is a real writer and what are you doing? Get back to work you garbage hag.

- That sounds very noble.

- Yeah. Yeah, it was-

- Buy very motivational.

- It was so motivational, yeah.

- Are there, yeah, are there any comedy books that you would recommend or books by comedy writers?

- I mean I've always gravitated towards, like I love absurdist writers. These are like more, I guess, for young adults or younger readers. But I loved "The Phantom Tollbooth" or the "Wayside School" stories. I think those are the first books that kind of taught me to think a little bit more in weird ways. So I think those are the books that really interest me or something, honestly, when you're in comedy, I think you're so saturated in it that, usually, the book I wanna pick up when I'm reading is very removed. It'll be like "The Girl in the Window of the Train" or whatever, where it's like something that's very outside my own genre.

- This is a question, I don't know if this is something that you practice necessarily, but the question is how do you do standup about politically incorrect topics?

- Hmm, for me, I think when I'm writing about a topic that maybe is a little bit divisive, I usually try to find a way in that's like more personal or more like my experience of the topic or my understanding of it, where I don't feel like I'm trying to make some grand statement about it for a bunch of people. But it's more like this is my in to this topic and this is sort of how I'm making sense of it for myself, but I'm not trying to make any grand, yeah, statements on it or be like this is the right way, end of statement. Yeah, where I try to kind of pay attention to that, the fact that people are kind of all over the map on it and sometimes it works and sometimes it's like, okay, I can't find that line for myself, yeah.

- Um-hm, right. And how much do you think about audience before a given set? Like if you're going to be in a different location or you know the demographics of the audience is gonna skew in a certain way, does that change your material?

- Yeah, I mean I think to a certain degree you can kind of cater your set to like you know it'll be a certain age group or a certain group of people. Sometimes it'll be an event that's for a tech magazine or something and then you might do your jokes about your experiences with the Internet or technology. So I think to some degree I cater, but then I'm usually not writing new jokes for just because I'm performing for a certain audience. 'Cause a lot of times, you don't have time to do that. But if I can I'll slip one line in. Of course, that'll be the one that does the best, yeah.

- Something very local.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just name a restaurant and they're like .

- Works like a charm.

- Yeah, you're like, hm, great. I only spent 10 years on this other joke. Right, right. What is the vein that you're currently mining in your comedy work?

- Hm-hm, I mean I guess just kind of a snapshot of where I am in life. You know I hit my 40s, so I think just exploring like, yeah, kind of getting to that stage and being a little bit more settled than I was in my 20s and 30s and just sort of, yeah, looking at aging and, yeah, still some mental health stuff. But a lot of just personal day-to-day life stuff, yeah.

- Are you working on another book or is that something that sits in the back of your mind?

- I think I don't have any plans to do another book as of now. But yeah, I think if the idea really gripped me, I'm not averse to it. But I think it would be very, I guess, what's the opposite of personal? Impersonal, right, a very impersonal book.

- [Jennifer] What would that look like?

- I don't know, a novel in the third-person and, yeah, about the sky.

- So I just wanna see if there are any last questions to collect and also, I want to remind people that Aparna's book is for sale. Her wonderful and funny and very fascinating book is for sale at the back and she will be signing in just a couple of minutes. So if there's any last minute cards, bring them up. Do you wanna say anything about the Substack that you're writing? The newsletter and sort of how you think about that and what goes into it?

- Yeah, I mean I think I started the Substack because I felt like over the years just increasingly disenchanted by kind of some of the other social media platforms, Instagram, Twitter. I don't know what Twitter is now X, Facebook. I think I just, I found them very, yeah, like diminishing returns and definitely pretty bad for my mental health the more I engaged with them. So I think the Substack was kind of just a way to kind of interface with an audience that's a little bit more slow, intentional content. And I know it feels like every tech platform is like as soon as I join it's like, "Oh, by the way they love Nazis."

- Yeah.

- Like you know there's no, it is like that art and commerce question, you are like I am, like I should leave. So I'm like maybe MailChimp next for me. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know it is weird as an artist you are kind of playing this weird game with technology these days where you're sort of do I really wanna have a lifespan on this platform? I haven't even, yeah, tried TikTok.

- Right.

- And who's to say there could be an alternate universe where I'm just really killing it on there.

- You'll have to go analog and write people postcards or chain letters or something.

- I know. That's what I was telling someone. I'm like I'm just gonna eventually be physically mailing things to two people and that'll be my audience.

- Well, I'm sure there are many people in this room who would love to receive your postcards, your letters and yeah, just anything. So the Substack is where we can find you. We can sign up.

- Yeah, that's just a weekly, like little, very casual bloggy sort of thing, yeah.

- But it sounds like it's important to you to have some kind of regular contact with readers or some kind of audience. Does it help you work through some material?

- Yeah, I think some of it is just discipline. It gives me like something to write to or I think it helps me kind of gather my thoughts if I'm like, okay, this is gonna go out to people, they're gonna see it. But yeah, I think part of it was also just as an artist you're kind of like let me try something new or something I haven't explored before and see if that kind of opens up any interesting, yeah, things for me.

- Um-hm.

- Yeah.

- [Jennifer] And you're back to performing?

- Um-hm, yeah, I think I'll be touring more in the spring, but yeah, as of now just kind of working on an hour, yeah.

- Will that be your first hour long?

- I think that I've done in-

- Yeah?

- Yeah, I mean I guess since before I took the break it'll be the newest hour, yeah.

- Okay, well we have that to look forward to. I wanna thank you so much for joining us today. This has been wonderful.

- Oh, thank you.

- So everyone, big round of applause for Aparna.