 Hello. Welcome. It's just about 7.30 so we're going to get going. First of all, it is so nice to see people in person, you know, not like 10 feet apart, all spread out. So I know we're not, you know, out of the whole situation yet, but I really, really, we all really appreciate you coming out and supporting local authors and supporting Kickstand and the book rack and Robin's library, so I want to give everybody a hand at the in-person salon. We are going on our next, the next salon, which will be April 13th. We'll start off our ninth year. Can you believe it with me? Nine years. So I'm Anjali Mithurduva and one of the co-organizers of this salon. And today we are going to have, as usual, three authors. We're going to have Rita Zoe Chin, Henriette Lazaridis and Sena Desai Gopal. Three amazing writers, all local, one of them an alumna of this, because Henriette was here, oh yeah, you were one of our first ones eight years ago. And Henriette, although she was one of the early presenters, sent a high bar in the sensory department because she distilled sense and handed out little baggies that we had to open up and sniff during the presentation. And I think it is the, I know it is the only time that the salon ever was involved with the Alembic. She texted me while she was prepping it. She's like, I'm using an Alembic. Today we are going to have an exploration, the theme of exploration, which the authors will all interpret how they want. Although I will say that the stories that they present range in location from the Antarctic to the Arctic to South India. So cold, cold and warm. And that's the order we'll go in as well. Okay, so just a little bit of the usual housekeeping. Like I said, our next salon will be April 13th. We usually do the first Thursday in April, but that will be smack in the middle of Passover. So we moved it over to the 13th. That will be National Poetry Month. So we are likely to focus on poetry. Let's see. The format that many of you are familiar with, but I'll just reiterate it, is that each presenter, each author is going to get 15 minutes. And then we're going to hold all the questions and have them at the end. So if you have a burning question, try to remember it to the end and we'll bring all the authors back up. And you can direct your questions to them. And then you can buy their books. I want to thank Emily, the host of Kickstand. Thank you, Emily. Of course, the library, Robyn's Library and Sarah Wigan, who is here doing the tech and ACMI, Arlington Community Media, who records the event and will be sending out a link that you can watch again to relive the experience. You can forward it to friends, authors that put it on their websites. So that is all great. The program is supported in part by a grant from the Mass Cultural Council and Arlington Cultural Council, which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council. And this program usually takes place in the heart of the Arlington Cultural District, which was designated in 2017 by the Mass Cultural Council. So we are happy to be part of the cultural fabric of Arlington. Like I said, books will be for sale at the end and make sure to have the author sign them. It's super special to have your own copy that is signed by the authors. So unless there are any questions, I'm going to introduce the first author. And also if you can just make sure your phones are on recital or whatnot. If you want to take photos and post them and tag the authors and tell the world how great they are and their books are, please do. All right, so our first presenter will be Rita Zoe Chin, and she is the author of the novel, The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern. Should I say Leah or Leah? Leah Fern, which the Southern Literary Review called a work of literary excellence in which The New York Times said was an imaginative debut. And she's also the author of the widely praised memoir, Let the Tornado Come, which is a fantastic title. A selection of her other ratings can be found in various literary journals, including Tin House, Orion, as well as The Balls to Globe, Mary Claire, Lidhub, and Norton's Anthology, Flash Fiction America. She lives in Massachusetts because we stay local. And where she teaches makes amulets in her metal smithing studio and pets all the dogs. Come on up, please welcome Zoe. Thank you, Manjuli. Thank you, Whitney, for inviting me. This is fabulous. I am still one of the few remaining no-vids, so I apologize that I'm going to be having this mask on. I've never presented with a mask on, so if I could prevent a late, I will take it off, but we'll be okay. Okay, just kidding. Sit up here. Yeah, it's funny about Leah versus Leah. It wasn't until I heard the audio book that I realized that that one question you asked me, the person recording the book did not. Yeah, so Leah Fern it is, if you listen to it on audio, but that's okay. Some kind of special object that you feel is powerful or imbued with something special. Maybe it's like a lucky thing, a lucky object, maybe even a lucky stone, possibly. Yeah, I'll raise my hand. Henry, I was like, I stored a baby there. Well, when I was a kid, and maybe still now, but one of my favorite books was Sylvester and the Magic Hebel. Do you guys all read this? Yeah, I love this book. So, you know, for those of you who haven't read it, basically Sylvester is a young donkey who collects stones and he finds a magic stone as pictured here. And as he can wish upon the stone and the wishes come true, and while he's holding it, he encounters some danger and makes a very unfortunate wish. But it's okay, it's a happy ending. But you know, that book, even though I didn't kind of grow out of it, I never grew out of the idea of magical stones. This idea of a magical object. It's funny, I was sitting here and I noticed the word amulet. Right there, I was like, oh, cool, okay. But when I was 10 years old, a kind of really cool thing happened. A stranger gave me a gift. It was a cedar box, really fragrant. And inside it were these sunny, precious gemstones. And I just thought it was the most incredible thing. I mean, for one, I didn't get gifts a lot as a kid, but a gift from a stranger. And you know, I spent countless hours in my room. I grew up in a very tumultuous home, and so I decided my room a lot. And I would spend hours with these stones, you know, building them up to the light, but also just feeling them. I mean, they all had a different texture, different feelings of smoothness. And excuse me, outside of that, you know, beyond the five senses, I felt that these stones had a kind of energy. And it writes out a little woohoo, but they really brought me a lot of comfort. And then we moved. And when everything in our house didn't fit on the moving truck, my father said, well, we'll leave the kids stuff behind. And so I lost my special stones. And I missed them. And as soon as I was able, I started collecting stones again. And then eventually I learned to metal smiths that I could wear them and keep them with me. So, you know, we're not obviously, we're not alone in our attraction to stones. That's been something that's been going on since antiquity. And here you can see a pendant that a one of the Pharaohs, Osrafan wore. And it's made of gold and lapis, lazuli, which is a stone that they called the Heaven Stone. And they even took it into their tombs with them because they believed it would help the soul reach immortality. And what we have here is we have porous, Osiris and Isis. And Osiris is the God of immortality. You guys probably have all seen this, right? The death mask of Tutankhamun. Again, lapis lazuli. There's also carnelian turquoise and this and you know, so you know, the Egyptians and many other cultures since, you know, didn't really see much of a difference between medicine and magic. And as you'll see in this next slide, I think this is really cool. This is an amulet. It's a medical amulet. It's how they would treat people with stomach ailments. And this is chenubis. It's the lion headed serpent that's supposed to rid you of all of your stomach concerns. So I just thought that that was really cool. And I just really like this. I'm a scarab is another symbol of immortality. This is a turquoise one, the wing scarab at the Met. And there's actually in my book, there is a turquoise scarab. You probably won't be surprised when I tell you that the strange inheritance of leopards is populated by all kinds of magical objects and stones. So I'm gonna actually read a little bit from from this book. And it'll kind of shed a little bit of light on the car. This particular magical object. I come to accept that I need these. Okay, so we'll just set this thing up. Leah Fern was born in a carnival, traveling carnival, kind of like a fair, not a circus, but you know, with like rides and her mother was a magician. And she is an m half. So she can feel what other people are feeling. You know, I think we all have degrees of empathy or somebody walks in the room and you can just see in their eyes, okay, what happened, right? She has it to like the end degree. So she for her sixth birthday, one of her carnival friends, the rubber band man, who's the carnival's contortionist, he gives her a crystal ball and he taps her on her head and declares her the youngest and very best fortune teller in the world. And she's like just thinks the crystal ball is cool. But they set her up a little tent with an elephant poster because she's obsessed with elephants. And he says, you're going to tell people their fortunes. She doesn't really know what that means exactly, but she's going to figure it out. So make sure you read into the mic. And I will read into the microphone. Okay, so, so it starts with the rubber band man, and he's trying to get people to it's love, I tell you, it's all love. He's saying, this child will enlighten you, she will enlighten you, she will resurrect you. And with that, Leah's first client, a soft belly woman in a sharp pattern with peacock feathers entered the tent. Lee impressed the button on the timer, the way the rubber band man showed her. But she had no idea what to do next. So she sat calmly, radiant in her mother's crimson, not the woman. The woman who appeared to be in her sixties stood at a distance, holding up one skeptical eyebrow. Would you like to sit down? Lee asked. The lady smooth the fronts of her slacks and flat measured strokes. I don't really believe in this. She started and look at you. Such a wee thing. You should be off playing hopscotch, not sitting here pretending you know things you don't know. Leah touched the top of the ball nonchalantly with her fingertips. I'm not pretending, she said. I know a lot of things. Like what? Ask the woman. She took a few steps toward the table. What do you know? Leah clasped her hands on the table. I know about elephants. What do you know about elephants? Pretty much everything. I know they're herds or live by females. Leah scratched her forehead. They're called cows. Cows, huh? I didn't know that. The woman took another step toward Leah. What else do you know? I know you didn't tell the truth. I beg your pardon. The woman stuffed her back and folded her arms across a row of peacock feathers. When you said you don't believe, that wasn't true. The woman half exhaled, half left. How do you know that? I don't know. So you don't know. No, I know. I just don't know how I know Leah corrected. You have pretty eyes. Do you know that? Do you want to sit down? Leah asks again, reaching her hand out in a sweeping gesture, the way she's seen her mother do when she invited someone onto the stage before selling them half. All right. The lady approached the chair and lowered herself on to the flimsy seat without taking her eyes off Leah. So what do you know about my future? Leah knew a lot about elephants, about their diet and behavior, about how their bodies worked. She knew a little about magic tricks, mainly that the trick is to make people look where you want them to look, not where they want to look. She knew how to read books meant for older children, including science books. She knew that sprites or patterns of red lightning over thunderheads, and that snowflakes formed from specks of dust. She knew that the that birds evolved from dinosaurs that were made from the explosions of stars, that one can make a smoke bomb for a magic show by combining sugar, baking soda, and potassium nitrate. She knew how to count to 100 in Spanish and she knew her mother was the most beautiful woman in the carnival. But what any of that had to do with her own future, let alone the future of this now eager eyed stranger sitting across from her, she didn't know. So Leah simply asked the woman to put her hands on the crystal wall. Like this, the woman asked tentatively cupping both palms around the sides of the crystal. Leah nodded as if she'd done this 1000 times before. Then she placed her small hands over the woman's hands. But before she could even close her eyes, she felt a weight on her chest that took her breath. Leah drew her hands back and in doing so started the woman. While Leah was used to knowing how people around her were feeling at any given moment, she knew from across the room for instance, when her sweet was sad, even if she was smiling, she knew by the pitch of Hank's voice when he'd be paying a visit to their trailer to see her mother. And she knew from the moment her mother opened her eyes in the morning, whether she dreamed good dreams or bad, an ability that had always been intensified by physical contact. She had never felt an awareness of another person in her own body as powerfully as she did now. Did the crystal ball actually work? Was it her mother's magic cape? The woman looked at Leah anxiously. What is it? What did you see? The rubber band man had told her to say something nice, but he also told her to do it came naturally. So Leah sat frozen, not knowing which to do. Is it bad the woman asked? It's something bad, isn't it? Your heart isn't smooth, Leah confessed. What do you mean? It isn't smooth. It's a little bit bumpy, kind of like the peppermint punch roller coaster. Leah reached out and touched the lady's hand once more, this time for comfort. But it's a good heart. It'll be okay. Are you sure the woman asked tears filling her eyes? That it's a good heart? Leah says something has shifted that now they were having a different conversation. Yes, Leah nodded purposefully. It's a very good part. So it's so impressed by Leah. It turns out there was something going on there and with the trips of the doctor that she finds out and she comes back a few weeks later and stands on the long line because Leah very quickly becomes quite famous. Everybody wants to get their fortunes told by six year old Oracle. She comes and stands on the line and she gives her a bronze elephant as a token of her appreciation. This elephant is going to become kind of important in the story. Unfortunately for Leah, even though she loved her life in the carnival, it didn't last. Her mother takes her one day on a trip and abandons her with a friend. Leah's never met a little friend of her mother's and drives away. She says she'll be back 15 years later. No sign of her. No clue what happened. Leah's feeling pretty alone on the earth. But turns out there is one person who has a clue what happened to her mother and she has just died. So she's going to come clean to Leah via a series of letters that will reveal how she knew her mother. And these letters are scattered in post offices. And I should say also that these letters contain talismans as well, like objects that have their own to their own light on the story. So she's had them in post offices and if Leah wants to find out what happened, she has to go and get them. And each one is kind of like a treasure hunt told where the next one is. But this is not organized randomly. This is organized according to a Fibonacci spiral, which we're going to see here in a second. I forgot to, I'm sorry, the next one. Thank you. So this is a Fibonacci or a golden spiral. These are, you can see this all throughout the universe from our DNA to flowers to hurricanes to galaxies to the 66 million year old fossil that as you can see here is ovalized over time. It's pretty cool. And that's the path next to you that Leah has to travel all the way up to the Arctic Circle to fetch these letters. What's significant about this is that there was a covenant five witches in 1977 who first plotted the spiral and traveled this path and Leah is following in their footsteps. So how are we doing on time? Roll of keeping track, we're probably about 15 minutes. We're about 15 minutes, okay. So I believe this is in terms of exploration. I'll kind of I'll leave it here. But what I would like to do as I close in the spirit of the woman who gave me a gift when I was 10 years old, which I should say too, I'm not sure that this book would exist. If I hadn't been given that gift, that's how special it was to me. And so what I'd like to do is for anybody who is interested, I have here a bag of seven precious gemstones. Sorry, you probably can't hear me. I'm not good at staying right on my shoulder. And I'd like to pass them around and offer for everyone to take one if they would like. I would encourage you though, for for tactical purposes, you know, for our sensory evening here to choose by feel, not to look and be surprised at what you get. I mean, some people can't resist and they're going to peak. That's totally fine. But let yourself maybe if you want to be surprised. And I hope that the stone brings you on an adventure that maybe will be magical as well. So thank you. So much that was that was that was really great. I love I love that you're handing out stones to that's really nice. And I definitely want one. And now when people ask when when people are asked in the future, if they have a special object, now everybody's gonna have one. And know the story. So I don't hear more about the spiral. So I'm gonna have where there's gonna be questions afterwards. All right, welcome to those who came in a little, you know, a little after the start. How's the sound working for people in the back? Are we good? Okay, cool. All right, great. So now our second presenter is going to be Henriette Lazaridis. Her second novel Terra Nova was published last month by Pegasus Press. And she is the author of the Clover House, which was a Boston Globe bestseller. Her short work has appeared in numerous places, including L New York Times, New England Review, the Millions, Pangerus and others. And she has earned Massachusetts Cultural Council artist's grant. She's a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes scholar, and the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught English at Harvard and now teaches at Rupp Street in Boston. She founded the Drone Literary magazine and currently runs the Cruna, is that my pronouncing area? The Cruna Writing Workshop in Northern Greece. She writes a great substack newsletter called the Entropy Hotel. And she hasn't put this in her bio yet, but I'm going to do it for her. She and I are plotting the launch of a new publishing company publicly announced. All right, so everybody please welcome him yet. This is probably where I should stand, right? So yeah, there's nothing there yet. So as I put this slideshow together, twice, because I did two different ones, I realized that this is sort of a look into perhaps disordered mind of the writer, and then the order that hopefully came out of it. But never in anything that I tried to write have I had specific things. And I was like, Oh, this is influencing me. Oh, this other thing is influencing me. So follow my little path through here is I tell you this sort of story of taranova, but also how I came to write taranova. And so the book is very much about photography, among other things. And so it seemed very on the boat that I would do a slideshow. Because you didn't want me to do scent for an Antarctic journey, because that wouldn't likely smell very good. And you definitely didn't want me to do taste because Antarctic food is my sense is that it is both disgusting and not plentiful enough. So we would have been like starving while also eating horrible tasting food. So slideshow it is. So you can see truly new slideshow. So the writer, age seven, with my golden retriever puppy named after Robert Falcon Scott. Already at seven, I had seen a documentary about Scott with my parents on TV, and I was obsessed with him. I there's a lot about him that I didn't understand at age seven. I don't think I understood that he had died tragically with his other four members of his polar party on the way back from coming to the poll second after World Amundsen. I just knew that this documentary was talking about what a hero he was, which he was and what a sort of noble stoic figure he was. And he was adventuring in the snow with dogs. And this was like my he was living his best life as far as I could say. And so when we got a dog, I said, we're gonna name him Scott after Robert Falcon Scott. And my father put his pie in the cement. And this is on the bookshelf next to my desk, even to this day. So many years later. But yeah, sorry, I'll just do like that same thing. So here's what Scott this is Scott right here. This is weird head here. I'm not sure how that happens. But so this is the one of the things about Antarctic exploration is that the photographs of Antarctic exploration are so impressive, just the fact that they exist at all that people were able sometimes to take pictures in this forbidding place always astonishes me. And over the years from age seven on up as I continue to be obsessed with Antarctica, I did read journals and things here and there, because there's a lot of literature about Antarctica, but mostly it was the pictures that that drew me. And I haven't even included some of the gorgeous photography by Herbert Ponting, and Shackleton's photographer whose name is escaping me right now. But they took gorgeous images that you can find online. But here's an image of his sort of not the final group, but the next final group. But what struck me as I got older, especially, I kept thinking about, what must it have been like for Scott to go all that way and get to the pole and find this. This is Ronald Amundsen's flag. So you're coming along. There's nothing else around you except white ice. And the thing that you can see on the horizon is some other bastard's flag who got there ahead of you. And when you see it, you know that you've lost and you have to get there and then turn around and go home. So I was always struck by what that must have felt like. And if we go to the next one, there's two pictures here that are almost the same. It's the five of the five members of the polar party. And in the next one, if we can just like just go back and forth a little bit, if you will, know the forward and back. Yeah, like it's the same. I'm going to step away from the mic here, but it's the same five people, two of them don't move and three do. I don't know why. Like Bertie Bowers is taking the picture. He's got the cord for the he's doing a remote cable release. But what I think is happening is that you can see it if you go to the other one, the first one. This is Titus Oates and my character Lawrence Type is sort of is it Lawrence Type? No, his name is his first name is not Lawrence. My character type is sort of an homage to Titus Oates, but this is Titus Oates. He's not looking very happy. And then go to the next one. And here he's like, they've all kind of given up any pretence of even smiling the camera. And Oates, in fact, was soon to die because they all were but he has the famous line he stepped out of the tent in the middle of a blizzard and he said, I am just going outside. I may be some time. He has not been found since I know we say this in my house when we're going around errands, we say, I'm just going outside. I may be some time. We've been saying that in my household for years. So these but these will go back one. Sorry, don't look don't look. But like, as I look at pictures like this, I'm thinking, what are they thinking? What are they thinking? Because in the written record, it's all very sportsman like and gentlemanly. But what are they really thinking? Scott wasn't gonna help me. I wasn't gonna be able to write a novel about Scott because he did the right thing. So I have to invent characters who might not have done the right thing. And I won't say anything about that except that I was thinking about what's going on in their heads. Um, then you're asking yourselves, why is there a picture of Victor Frankenstein and his monster on the screen? Here's when we get into the disordered mind of the author. Because as a but there's a logic to it. You think about two people in Antarctica, depending on each other, my characters are the expedition leader Edward Haywood and his expedition photographer James Watts. And they each need each other. And in my mind, it felt very much like Frankenstein and his monster. They are each creatures of the other and they are each kind of creators of the other. They can't live without each other. They can't live with each other. And wonderfully, in Frankenstein, the monster and Frankenstein kind of pursue each other in the Arctic and in Montblanc on the on the nevertheless. So like these same landscapes as what I was imagining for my characters. And now we have Penelope. Because if you have men away in Antarctica, and that's a pairing, it needs a third. It needs a third element to make it a little more unstable. So there's the woman they love who's at home in London. And I thought of her as sort of like Penelope, who is waiting for Odysseus to come back. And as this, I don't know which paragraph feel like painter this is, because I was in a hurry. But the suitors are like climbing in the window to offer her marriage. And she's saying, I'll consider your offers, because she still is hoping Odysseus will return, I'll consider your offers when my tapestry is done. So all day long, she leaves the tapestry. And at night, when the Swedish are looking, she takes it apart. And so that got me thinking about how a woman who is waiting in the way that history would have prevented her from doing much else. She can't be heroic the way they can be, the men can be. She's waiting. So can she be using her art in some way, that's inventive and assertive and powerful, that sort of makes use of the time when she's waiting. So I invented this character Viola, who is a photographer, who takes her name from the character of Viola in 12th night. And this is Emily Watson in a production that was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which I actually happened to see. And it was amazing. She was ridiculously good. And she was Viola. And Viola, if you know your 12th night, it's a complicated part. But the important part is that Viola presents herself as a man in order to get certain things done. And also Emily Watson is wearing an awesome outfit. I want that coat. So you can skip this one, because it's too complicated. Photography, in my mind when you're thinking photography, you're thinking Antonioni's blow up from 1968, I think. Has anyone seen blow up? And you know, Jeff Beckham just died, he is in blow up. So it's all coming together, which is very sad for Jeff Beck. But in, sorry, now I'm going to start laughing. But in blow up, the salient point here is this is a fashion photographer who has been doing a photo shoot in a park in London and inadvertently he has caught in his camera, in on film, some kind of tryst, maybe altercation, some kind of mysteriously potentially violent event. And he goes back to his dark room and he's printing the images and enlarging them bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And as he enlarges them, he sees this, he actually has caught the moment that the man in the couple was shot. And so he has he has the proof in his in his in his photo. So all of this is kind of in Terra Nova in, hopefully interesting and complicated ways. Then I started writing the book, and had to think about what Viola would be doing when she was in London. So she's involved in the suffrage movement. And here's where I had to do a bunch of research, because I knew about the suffrage movement, Christabel Pankhurst and Melanne Pankhurst. I didn't know about. So there they are marching protesting. This is Lady Constance Lytton. But also, when they would protest in March, they were arrested. And they were put in hallway prisons, the uniform of hallway prison with that upset arrow thing. And the this is interesting stuff about the suffrage movement. I don't know, you'll tell me afterwards if you know this, but the women who were arrested would be arrested as criminals. And they protested to be considered political prisoners. And they staged these protests by going on hunger strike. And when they were near death or serious illness, the authorities in the prison would force feed them, which would also cause them serious harm, really serious harm. And then they would release the women so they could recover. And then they would we arrest them when they were recovered. And then the women would complete their sentence or resume their sentence. This is a horrible thing. It's really pretty brutal. Which to me is also very interesting, because the women in London who are at home are putting their bodies at risk and in peril in a way that's very different from what the men in Antarctica are doing or men who were exploring in mountains and all over the place. So it makes me think about like what different kinds of heroism can women do at this time in this historical period, and what kinds of heroism do men do and what kind of overlap is there, what kinds of contrasts are there, but that's the suffrage movement and hunger striking. And this is this is a kind of thing that my character Viola is trying to fight against. This is a woman named Olive Warrie, who she's just been released. And so she's swimming in her clothes, because she's she's lost so much weight, but she's also been force fed. So this is like, she's not happy. This is not a good thing. And she looks like someone you you're not you're not going to be if you're the authorities, you're not going to be scared of this woman. But so Viola wants the authorities to be intimidated by what that came out of, intimidated by by the women of the suffrage movement. So I'll leave you with these few images in sort of quick succession. These are pictures that like Viola is saying, like, this is how we see women in the museums, you just go through quickly. Like these are female news like other least by Niagara. That was a tissue before next one. This is manne, then the last one is Botticelli's Venus. And so she's sort of saying, hey, these are images that we can do something with. They don't have I'm going to do something with this kind of presentation of women and see if I can find a way to make it more powerful. The last slide because we have to do one more is this is a place that I have never seen. But it seems fascinating to me as anybody been to this place, the broomway in Essex in England, it's a title flat. And this, like from pictures, other pictures I've seen, I couldn't find one, but like this is actually kind of clear for the broomway. It's not very deep, but people can be trapped in quicksand there. And they can be they can almost drown because the path is not clear. And it gives it's I borrowed a description of it for the epigraph of the book, because it's I don't know, it's interesting to me as a sort of way to think about exploration if you're going along a place where you don't know where you're going. So if I have time, I'll read a little bit, but I don't know I timed it, but you never know. Yeah, that's exactly what I've got. Okay, so just a little bit that involves Yeah, I'm gonna do this. Okay. So this is James Watts, the photographer of the expedition is very early on the book, as you can see. And he's taking a picture. Make sure I'm starting the right place. Who she's the disgusting food that I spared you. So the who she's quickly gone and the animals quickly fed with chunks of meat, tight throws for each dog separately, so that they will not make each other in the eating. Watts returns to the tent and emerges with his camera. He unfolds a tripod and stands the camera on the ice. The other three men glance up and look away. They do not like the camera. Lawrence complains about the weight of its glass plates as much as seven stone. And even Heywood has begun to worry that the record of their journey will never be seen if they cannot survive the hauling of it. Watts does not let them and see that he too has begun to find the burden heavy. He masks his grimace of effort as he eaves a box of plates and positions the camera on the hard packed surface. The men need no excuse from him to toss the plates into the snow like so many shards of ice. I'm skipping. He's taken a photograph of the group. The photograph he frames for its documentary qualities. January 1910. Captain Heywood and two of his men at breakfast 100 miles from the pole. When the newspapers published this one, they will place the word breakfast and quotation marks, reassuring wives and husbands at their morning meals that Antarctic exploration preserves all the rituals of English life that even here in this extremity of land, Englishmen are civilized. In a photograph taken in September at Shore Camp, they had to toasted blood pudding on long forks over a fire. Heywood brandishing the package for the public. Harrods. Send to Lilton in New Zealand with the return depot ship. That glass plate has by now found its way into newsprint. The jovial scene so many months gone, now gracing households across the empire. What's there's a bug here. It's really weird. What squeezes the shutter bulb. The men's movements are so small, spoon to mouth, spoon to bowl, but they will never blur the image. The masses of their bodies and the sledges and the smaller masses of the now dozing dogs scattered around the men in a beautiful asymmetry will be reproduced in sharp focus. At least there is that here with the camera's eye closed so tight against the sun. The focus is pin sharp. In London's gray, the shutter's little curtain moved with deliberation as if it had all the time in the world. Here it draws forward and back with the lack of a train porter closing a carriage door. In the Antarctic summer, time is frozen. There nothing seems to move, not sun, not ice. Though at Shore Camp, they woke nightly to loud cracks and groans as the ice shudder and swell against the shifting of the sea. Probably presented at about over 100 authors at the Salon and never tire of hearing the stories of what inspired the the writing of the book. So thank you for that. Our last presenter is there is a bug here. Why is it just right here? Our last presenter is Sena Desai Gopal. And she has samosas. How do you want to, you can, when you come up here, you can decide how you want to people come up afterwards to take one? Or what the, yeah, anytime. Okay, okay. So don't leave without taking a samosa. She does have a bio in addition to samosas. She is a journalist, specializing in science and medicine and food and travel. She was born and raised in India and now lives in Boston with her husband and two children, one of whom is here. Her work has been published in the Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Modern Farmer, The Times of India, among others. She is from a small village in southern India, doomed, unfortunately, to submerge in the backwaters of one of India's biggest dam projects, the Upper Krishna Project. Her family has lived in that village for 18 generations, and she grew up on stories of its residents and a fair dose of dam politics, which you can interpret as with or without the N at the end. This is her debut novel. Come up please. Welcome Sena. Thank you for coming. And thank you especially to Anjini and Whitney and Sarah for making this possible in the library. So the A6 village, my debut novel, is about a village that's going to drown in the backwaters of a huge mismanaged corrupt dam project in India. The setting of my novel is in reality, I grew up in a village in India where my family has lived for like 300 years, 18 generations, and it's going to drown very soon. We just don't know when because of the mismanagement with the government. The dam was sanctioned in 1956 and it's still not complete. 176 villages expected to drown. Another 20, we don't know what happened to them. So far, 123,000 families have been relocated but not resettled because the government does not have a plan. I was so bothered by this growing up that I had decided a few years ago that I would do an investigative journalism piece or a book about it. But as I began researching, I realized that I was very biased. There's no way I could be a journalist in this scenario. So I took all the information I had and used it as a backdrop to write a novel. So the 86 village backdrop is nonfiction. It is based in science. It is based in politics. It's based in environment and climate change. But the story is fiction. It is a love story. It's a crime thriller. It's a political thriller. It basically brings to you everything that's happening in India with these projects, not just India, but around the world. You know, you have people being displaced because of many different things. And most of the time it's man-made disasters. So it did take a lot of soul searching to write the book because I knew that part of it would be really hard to write. I was basically writing about my entire childhood, which was now underwater. So here we go. Slide show. So yeah, this is the front gate of my family house, which is about 300 years old. And the 86 villages starts actually in this house. You know, there's a whole number of characters complete in this house. And that's how the story starts. This is the front door. This is what I call the summer tower. When I was growing up, we would spend most of our time in the summer tower during the summer because temperatures went up to like 42 degrees centigrade at times. And there's no easy. And the way this is built, the ventilation and the trees around it was extraordinary. And you could just be like cool over there. You see some black patches. Do you see those black patches? That's the moment. And that's the rising water table because of the dam and the backwaters. And it leaves mounds everywhere. So even if our house is just jammed, we have to leave because of the mold and, you know, other related problems. Next one. This is a quality. I just took a picture because I liked it. It's just different parts of my house. And you can just go to the next slide. Yeah, that's the house I love. All right, the next one. So I put this in because we still use kerosene lanterns. And the reason for that is there is power outages for days on end. And that is because the government is not investing in a doomed village. They know this village is going to die. So they and they have been investing in like 50 60 years. So this is what happens and we use kerosene lanterns most of the time. I call this family arms. About 100 years ago, the my village and other villages in the area will attack by deployments. And everyone had arms and everyone had guns, but they were not using them the way we use it here. Next. This is a Shiva temple outside our property. Next one please. This is a cobra shrine in the village. Historically, human beings have always worshiped things that they fear. And here they fear the cobra. So the village will gather here to worship at the shrine. Next one. Random picture, bullock cart race. It really painted very well. They look beautiful. And then they race. Next one please. Okay, that's my husband who's sitting right there, playing chess with one of the village kids. I never found out to one. That's my daughter who's sitting right there playing with her friends. So my children have been going back to Yerahuli, which is my village since they were four months old. So the first time I took them, they were four months old and then they've been going maybe twice a year. And their roots are like go really deep. They have this whole population of friends that they can play with. That's Anya petting a newborn water buffalo, which was in my parents cattle shed. This is a village festival. I do not know what they were celebrating, but it was really colorful and was really fun. So just take a picture. That's my children going into the forests around the village to study plants. They did this project where they learned about different edible plants in the product in the forest, medicinal plants. For me, this was really important because I wanted them to be really rooted in in this region of India. Next one. A farmer taking photo home to his cabin. These are tailor birds or by and they're very typical to this area. You can find trees with several dozen nests that look like that. And they breed, they start their families, and then they leave. So you have entire trees filled with nests that you can take into whatever you want and imagine what a child can do with this. And that was my childhood. I harvested those nests. Marigold fields. Next one. Sunflower around my parents house. Next one. This is a very fun slide. It is a traveling sorry saleswoman who stops by all the houses in the village selling saris. And she showed up at my parents house this August with this whole stack of saris. And within 15 to 20 minutes, a whole bunch of my aunts had complicated and they had the sorry party and they had chai and they had samosas. And it was really fun. And they, you know, they didn't buy too many saris, but it was more like a sorry tupperware party. Next one. These are my childhood photos. That's the group of cousins and friends that I hung out with. At any single time, there would be like 15 to 20 kids in the house. And they were all fed if they were there for lunch, they were given lunch. They were there for dinner, they were given dinner. Next one, please. That's me harvesting eggplants. So the eggplants in this part of the world are revered. We love them. I don't think there's any eggplant like this. It grows on volcanic soil. And it is fed by water from the Krishna River, which we think is like the best row of water in the world. And so you have these egg plants with like really thin skin and probably in tears and you can eat them raw. Next one. That's me. So that's me with a binocular and stick with which I was going to take care of leopards, elephants, bison. They were all around me. I didn't know I could, but I thought I could. And my dad was a wildlife photographer. Just let me live this falsehood. Next one. Yeah, that is me with my cousins building a fire. That is the dam. That is going to take away all of this. And just drown it. It's going to eat up this entire life whole. Next one. That is how my village looks when the waters are not rising. So this is sometime in the summer. Next one. And then you can see the waters coming closer and closer to the village. Right. Next one, please. And then it's right at a doorstep. So the tower I showed you, that's the roof of the tower. And it's right at in our backyard. And that that's how it stays for six, seven months. It is going to ultimately drown our house, but we just don't know when because the government doesn't know. Next one, please. Yeah, this is a view of the back orders from our house. Next one. This is my family graveyard. 18 generations have been buried there. And there is a temple on each grave. This was in middle monsoon. And by the end of monsoon, they'll all be completely submerged. Next one. Yeah, so these are the guys that are really happy with this rising water. They're the water buffer. So when the water rises, they are in their element, they'll go out every morning, walk through the water, find a place to eat and then come back in the evening. So yeah, they come back like that. They're really happy. And they with them they bring like the thickest, creamiest, most yummy milk. Next one. That is a village in our sorry, that is a well in our house. And it is fed by it used to be fed by natural springs and I learned to swim there. But now it's unusable. It is flooded by the muddy backwaters of the project. Next one. I just love this picture, because it's a man in our village looking at the rising waters. And he's trying to get how long he has for he may have to move and relocate his family. But that's going to happen for a few months, because they don't have the money to completely move. Next one. Yeah, these are just pictures of sir, I can just scroll through the next two or three pictures of the village in ruins. That's the road that's in ruins because most of the villages, most of the villages abandoned by now just few houses left. Next one. So this is the street. I played it growing up. It was bustling with, you know, women children, men, like women gossiping and men smoking. And, you know, it was really loud and was really fun. But it's completely deserted now. There's nobody. Yeah, okay. So this is one of the families that still continues to live in the village for reasons unknown, just like my family continues to live. But you know, they maintain their house. But this must be like one of 12 families, maybe, at best. Next one. I just love this picture. The entire village is abandoned. But then there is this pink tricycle belonging to her child. And I just thought it represents the future, like the children, there are still children, and there's still hope. And there's still a place to move forward. Next one. Oh, yeah, this is the aerial view of the back orders. And in there, you probably you can't see it, but there may be 100 religious underwater over there. All right, the next one. This is a village close to ours called Chodapur. It's 300 people. It's a very poor village. And this road is the only access. So if this road floods, people have nowhere to go. Next one. And yeah, I was doing a piece with the Boston Globe this summer. And I visited there and I talked to the people. This is a grandmother of the child, the grandchild. She doesn't know how old she is. And they haven't been compensated. So they're still stuck over there. Next one. This was a village elder who came out. He thought I was a government official, and he yelled and yelled at me. And then I told him, I'm a journalist and I'm actually doing an expose. And then he was really repentant and sweet. But this is how they see anyone for them. They think it's a government official or someone who's trying to like get more out of there. Next one, please. This is the woman in red who talked about the alcoholism in the village and apparently it's rampant. So women do have to go out on and take care of their families because the men are busy drinking. And part of that is because they're in a situation which is so stressful. And they don't know what to do. Yeah, this is going to be one of my last pictures. It's a bunch of kids over there. And I want to point out to the boy in yellow, whose name was Shalila and why I ended up talking to a lot. He has juvenile diabetes, pretty severe. And his mother needs $3 a month to give him his insulin shot. And she can't afford it. So the women in the village gather together and come up with the money to give the child his shot. This is a local tribe. They will also be doomed. I don't know how the government is going to rehabilitate them. It's going to be tough because they live off the land. They don't have land. And it's just like if you are going to reset a population of people, if there is a village blacksmith, you need to create a village where he has work as a blacksmith. You can't just give them money and think it's going to work. All right, the next one. I'm just giving you a link to this story that I did for the globe where you can get into more details. And yeah, then we can go to the next one, Sarah. Okay, that is the 86 village. 86 villages based on this life and what happens to these people. So every single person that you've seen on the screen today, you will meet in the book. Next one. So I want to end with a positive note. There are some good things and one of the good things is the wildlife in this area has really bloomed because there's no not much human intervention. And my dad is a wildlife photographer and he's taking these pictures from our backyard because our backyard now is like this haven of water birds and animals. Flamingos, I've seen about 200 of them in our backyard. In one time. Yeah. Next one. The peacock, of course. Next one. The monkey. They're not as sweet. They can attack you and do all kinds of things. But this one was hanging out outside my bedroom in there. Next one. And the lab world. Maybe two miles from where we live. So thank you all for listening to a presentation about your home village. I hope people will read the book and remember this and enjoy the story but also think more globally about what we are doing to the world. So we have our three authors. We're going to have them up. I'm going to ask all of them to come up and join me up here at the same time. I'm sure you have questions. So this is an opportunity to to ask questions, feel free. Well, let's do questions and then as people are milling around buying books and then you can eat samosas and yeah, we need to eat the samosas. I will do my job. And yeah, so basically raise your hand if you have a question, I'm going to get out of the way. You can direct it to one in particular of the authors or all of them. And if you're answering the question, either step up to the mic or project. Yeah. This is for you, Santa. Yeah. In terms of your research, I mean, this is really fascinating when you are the content that you're putting into the village. But this is home for you. Can you tell us a little bit about your research process and how it affects you personally? Uh, so you mean the research process in terms of how the flooding is happening? It affects me a lot. They were so researched it as a science radio join us because that's my background and began it as a nonfiction journalistic piece, right? So it's it's very hard. Because when you are researching and you know, you're talking about something like this of this magnitude. And you know that almost every person that you have met in your life until then is going to be affected by it. It's hard. And it's also hard because as I said, my entire childhood is under order. And you know, to resurrect that and to come to terms with that. And doing it as a scientist helped me a little bit because it became a bunch of statistics at some point. It became statistics from people, you know, what would happen. But to convert that into fiction was harder than I thought it would ever be. Because I had to convert it and I had to put a face to every statistics that I found. Like, you know, the little boy who means his incident chart. There were statistics, she showed that there were there were children who were going through that. So, you know, it's hard. But but you know what, I did it. Yeah, so the question is, how was it different going from writing a memoir to a novel for me? Well, one thing is that I didn't need therapy after the novel. Interestingly, they were there were a lot of similarities because I think I think I think very narratively. And so my memoir was was very narrative driven. And I it's about the storytelling for me. Interestingly, though, what my memoir is true in the sense of the events all happened. My novel feels truer to my essence, if that makes sense. So my memoir was the stories that I crafted out of my life, you know, it's about my being a child runaway and ultimately, suddenly becoming debilitated in my mid 30s with panic attacks, and then trying every therapy I could try and failing miserably and then getting on top of a giant horse for the first time in my life. That helped me as I formed this relationship with the horse. So that's what that book is about. So, you know, whereas with my novel, I got to really, there were no limitations on what I could do. I did have to stay true to the events. I kind of let the events take shape as I wrote it. So I much preferred that was a lot less flexible. That seems to take Zoe about the truth of it because I think for me, my first novel was inspired by family stories, although nothing that I almost nothing in the Clover House actually was true because my family stories weren't kind of they're too happy for my parents. Family stories were too happy for me to include in the novel work. But, but weirdly, I think that Taranova is kind of truer to me in some strange way, like, because maybe because I've been thinking about these things for so much of my life. So it really feels like a more organic outpouring for me. But also, I, you know, to say, how do you make the transition from the first novel to the second one, let go of the first novel. One way is to write another novel in between that doesn't sell. So that's one way you fill the nine years between the two books. So I mean, really, and the second that thing that I wrote was also set in Greece. So I was kind of was the Clover House is said in Greece. And so I was staying consistent. And then after after some time, I finally had to give voice to this story that had been kicking around in my head for such a long time. So that's, that's one way to do this. It's not strong. Yeah. And I wonder, does that have a root somewhere in nonfiction in your own life experience? Or, I mean, is the fiction all together fiction, or is there some nonfiction background to that as well? Well, the background of the book is definitely nonfiction. You know, I haven't just like pulled this out of my head. When I talk about joining and writing, in other words, I have statistics. I have studied this for a very long time to even bring it to the state. But do you mean like the characters, they Yeah, the story and the characters, they're fictitious. They, they're, they are fiction. But I have to say that in many of my characters, I have brought together different qualities of different people that have seen. So, you know, there's a politician, and as politicians go, he is a jail. So that is what he is in India. He is a corrupt politician. But I don't, if you, I don't think there is any one character that completely represents anyone that I know in my life. Is that answer your question? Or was it different? Yeah, I mean, the story. Oh, the story, you know, making up the story actually was very easy, because I'm a journalist and I write nonfiction, I have to be very careful about what I say. So suddenly, I had all this leeway and this license to hook up things. And I could say what I wanted, I could create what I wanted, and no one would help me hold me accountable, because it was fiction. It was a lot of fun in that sense. I have a question for all three of you, that you can, if you have an answer that you feel like giving, you can give it. And if you don't, you don't have to feel like you're going to feel like that. But I, everybody has done research, even if it's into their own lives, to write these books. And I was wondering if you guys have little nuggets, little anecdotes, that you were just kind of dying to put into your books that didn't make it in from that research that you did. And again, if you don't, you know. I think 90% of mine didn't make it. 90%? Yeah. And not made it? They did? Oh, wow. And not made it, right? I guess I'll say that the slide that I skipped was if, well, it was a song by Bastille, The Way of Living, part one. And because when I was thinking about this book, I was listening to that song a lot because my daughter was playing it in the car. And I was convinced I was going to write a book that took place on a ship. I really wanted to write a book that was somehow going to deal with the Antarctica thing, but it was going to be like, no, no, they're not going to be actually there. It's going to be the whole story. It's going to take place on the ship. And this was going to be important to me because I'm terrified of wide oceanic spaces. And so I was going to go there. And I did do some research, but it never, never even happened. There's one tiny paragraph when they're on a ship. And that's it. Something that didn't make it in. It's more, for me, it was actually the opposite where I wrote the book and didn't include one whole storyline. And then went back and that's why it took me eight years between books. And I went back and edited it. So it's like, you know, with all of the details of the book, like the weather and all the point, everything is very, very accurate. So the Fibonacci spiral that she travels is plotted precisely, mathematically. So there's a lot of research I did in terms of symbolic images and geometry and things like that. And I had to choose one shape because there were a lot of different shapes I was interested in. So I guess I narrowed it down a little. I'll have good reasons for why there's eight years between our books. Different reasons. Anyway, before you get up and move around and warm up, I want to reiterate that we have books for sale. So please buy books and on the way to the books are the samosas, which are free. So is there a question? Yes. Oh, oh, right. Zoe had talked about annulets and stones in her presentation. And so then she, because we like to have a sensory element to our presentation, she passed around a bag. And if there are any left, you're welcome to take one. Oh, OK. So everybody, please round of applause for these amazing writers that came up today. In the context of these three presentations, we would all have. We all have a ton to think about and sort of horizons that have been expanded. So thank you all three for this. And now I will get off the mic here. The last thing is just that there's a sign up sheet by the exit in case you are not already on our mailing list. We run these salons quarterly and would love to have you attend more and spread the word. And again, books from the book rack with Mike here and Salosa's over there. And thank you so much all for coming. And the authors will be happy to sign the book screen.