 Welcome everyone, hello. Thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute. I'm Laura Shepherd, director of events, and we're very pleased to have you here for our program, Outer Sunset, a novel by Arthur Mark Poivier. Now if you're new to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers here in the heart of the city. We feature our general interest library on the second floor floors, the Continental Chest Club right down the hallway, and of course of our ongoing author events, literary programs, and our cinema film series on Friday night. So please visit our website at milibrary.org to find out about everything we offer to you under one roof. This talk tonight will be followed by a Q&A with you, our audience, and we will also have books for sale and some set in the pre-tech comm before the turn of the century. Outer Sunset is a deeply felt story about family and the places where long lasting growth occurs in our lives, and our families as well, growth not in the spurts of adolescence, but perhaps the spurts that happen at older age, and also the losses and gains and pressures that come with that. Mark's stories have won the Chicago Tribune Nelson Aldrin Award and have been long listed for the Pirates Alley Faulkner-William List of the Prize. Evolved an MMA from San Francisco State, a VA from St. John's College in Annapolis, and lives here in San Francisco with his family. So please welcome Mark from the A&M. So before, I was supposed to do a reading first, and just to bring your hygiene to about four to five minutes. Okay, all right, but I wanted to say first, of course, that I'm really grateful for the chance to do that. I've been hanging out here, I revised the book here, I wrote some of it here, I've been a member since the turn of the century. So it's a real treat to be able to tell how the feeling on the shelf seems to be true. So I would like to read to you the first five or six minutes or so, I don't know, from the very beginning of the book. A few years ago, once it was clear our kids were gone for good, my wife packed the cars and clothes and things, told me she was drawn half the savings, and after farewell, I cannot recall where they had been. She laughed. Since that day, I've spent a good deal of my time reading this back room. I drive along this room, originally the porch, in fact. The house felt smaller when the kids were young, and one day, she said she needed extra storage for earthquake supplies. I'm invasive to speak of that as the entire neighborhood is built on dunes. I was still working then, I used to be a high school English teacher, and so I had some spare time on summer, and we never expected the landlord to do anything. For a few years afterward, Jackie made pickles, and she stored them in the corner where my chair is now. Sometimes that irony amuses me. The room is small, but two windows facing the backyard and the door between them. It turned out it wasn't practical to have two windows and a room that would be used for storing pickles, but you can always pull a shade where a seat outside without a window is an entirely different matter. The room doesn't echo on to you next like most of the others, so I spent my time here comfortably enough. One thing can be said for aging and a certain amount of solitude that helps you accept what you are in one night, and one thing you're not is carpentry. Nor my gardener. When my daughter Dorothy visited so often I was concerned, just after her mother left, she used to try to come to me back inside whenever she caught me sitting here looking out the windows that the flowers and shrubs your mother had planted years ago. Because Dorothy is the most attentive person I know, I believe she worried that even the least reminder of my wife would crush me. I'm not as tender as all that, nor can you uproot my collections of more than 30 years so easily. Weeding through memories is a weed and chaff situation for me, so I try not to pull it by. And besides, I wasn't just sitting here staring at the yard, which is still quite overgrown. I was also reading the pile of books I always said I would be to give them a chance. Even now, when I look up to rest my eyes, I'm pleased to see the border borders, the weeds gain control, and the roses dry to tangles bed loads. The progress marks the passage of time, and it suits me whenever I feel better. The last thing any self-respecting man might issue allows himself to feel after a drink. Another fact that I'm fairly present to is that I'm not and never was much of a writer. This realization was an intricate year then with carpentry and gardening. Jackie might struggle if I were to share the discovery with her now after so many years, but she's gone, and I've learned that the only way to be a good company when alone is to be frank with yourself. It was just after she left and my son Gerald had come back to stay with me for the summer. He'd been attending community college and living with his buddies and their pony-sized dogs and the big house that her in, and he said he needed to pursue some tech training after work down the peninsula, or that he preferred to spend nights at his old bedroom near New Beach rather than commute north through the bar each night. My guess was Dorothy had asked him to spell her for a few weeks and watch it over me. Either way, he was much quieter than I remember. Jackie always said that I was too critical of him, and like so many of her other words, and poured back into her absence, I wondered if she hadn't been right in that too. So that summer, I tried to stay out of his way. And we fell into an easy to team. When he came home from classes, we chatted a bit over cocktail in this back room, and then I cooked. After dinner, he'd go out or watch television in his bedroom. I'd stay out here. One warm evening, the fog didn't begin to roll in until around dusk. Rare for us, out on the coast of San Francisco, and as we sat before dinner, I noticed the rosy glow of the sunset as it reflected off the backs of the Stoko houses behind mine. On a tunnel light, struck a eucalyptus tree outside the dark outline of my house, and the crisp shadows at each leaf distinctly backlit stained glass. I was certain it would last only a moment, and I remember the line of all Stevens' like the first light of the evening, and as it grew darker outside my window, I closed my eyes to recite the entire final soliloquy of the interior paragon. It's one of my favorites, although impossible to teach the high school kids. I'd memorized this poem when I was young, back when I thought it was the real world, and not the magic that held out the delight awaiting in life. The poem itself was new then, and Jackie, to whom I once whispered it for the simple closing sounds alone, had been young then, too. Because out of this same light, out of the central mind, we made a dwelling in the evening air, and which being there together is enough. Oh my. I thought I'd always understood those lines, but sitting there that evening alone from my throat, my life is mostly vast, and I still have yet to say anything so beautifully. Behind me Gerald, at the end of the evening, is the dream. I'm not so careful, I told myself that such a delicate disappointment would make me weep. So by having acknowledged it, I expected the long to go away, but I would not. It was fear, I think. I was instantly and deeply afraid that the solitude I'd garnered all my life would prove to be worth nothing. So when my study turned, I stood to embrace it for the first time in years, thinking, one thing I am, and that I always will be, is father. But at the same time, I thought Jackie would always excuse. We fell away, he handed me my drink, he'd made plans to go out. So before I could ask the questions. Why did you want to write this? You've said that this was going to be your friend, and this is something you could talk with, and this is your communication. But have you always been a writer, or did you just suddenly decide to be one? Oh no, I've been writing for a long time, and I got my MFA 30 years ago. And this grew out, actually, out of a story that came from the program. You're not writing, are you? I'm not what? You remind yourself of mine. Oh no, I'm sorry, maybe. No, so at state, I had a wonderful class with a professor named Michelle Hart. This isn't, this is pretty quick, and one of the exercises was to take a not, like a moment in your life, you know, some twists, and write it from two different ones. And in my case, my father's kind of a cutter, and my father was, he began to be the prototype for this Jim character. That changes over, I'm sorry, but looks like that's how it started. And I had written first, the son's point of view, of a first copy of my dad. And that didn't work so well, you know, and then I wrote for the father's point of view. And then I handed it in, and the professor, and she just said, like, I don't think you saw the copy. So this is your voice here, I said, no, it's not. So, but I didn't keep that up, but that story was completed, and that's the one that she photographed almost 30 years ago. And then I came very close to, I had an agent, I had a really good one. I mean, I had, Annie Crow was probably two of her agents. She brought my work to a couple editors, and for a moment there, I thought, this is great. And then, but I wasn't ready, and the work wasn't good enough. And I have to trust all of that. So I actually just stepped back, and we were starting family, and my wife and I were still each other, and the kids are healthy too, by the way. So, but it was just too much for me, I'm not the kind of person that can easily make a beautiful time job, and write this, you know, I really like to just like zero. So I have one more question. Other people might too, but my other question is, because I am an attempting writer all the time, you know, from age to age and age. And so I would like to, I want permission to steal one of your lines, if I could, and that is to say I'm not much of a writer. I've never really heard that. And I want to write it. Can I do that, or should I change the words? Let's not, you know, it's okay, it's okay, great, thanks. You want to write that, you want to write it. I got all the students' lines. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, no, absolutely. It's a, there are a lot of people like us, you know, I turned 64 before this book, just before the book came out, and it was, I never thought this would happen, ever, honestly. And since it's COVID, I mean, at first you get, it's just because you're trying to sell it during many years, period. But there are many, many, many people, that's one of the best things about having this book out now since the meeting posts are the same. You know, I'm going to say, and you know, the more you go into that story that you want to write, there's a swear, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's strange. Yeah, I love it. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, well, thank you for beginning. Is that a microphone? I'm going to run it over and I'll give you the microphone, so could you hear me? Do you write from a netline or do you just begin and go and not really know where it's going? That's one. Okay. And number two is, did you think a novel was the best format for this, or maybe it should have been a series of short stories? We do the second question first. So I'm a novel reader. I actually have trouble reading collections of stories. There are some stories I've loved very much and I'm usually recommended and, you know, thought that I had a good luck with that one story, but I always, I've written several novels. This is not my first, but so I tend to think and want and my team's getting engaged and I kind of like, but I, I don't have a system. The mind finished prior to this, which I still am working on, wasn't going anywhere. And then I felt a need to to re-engage at a deeper level and the story is always working. The story was, like I said, good luck all along. Ten years ago, there's an editor, David, when he worked for the film, and he was engaged by Amazons. He started Kindle singles. They were trying to do literary fiction. I mean, that's not what it is that happens. It's kind of something else. And so I, he, they put a call out in lots of writers who's got a story that wants to try evil. I've never seen evils like this before, that they seem to work. And he, he picked it up and it tore out. They really, they, they accessed it in like a week and on mental editing, it was just 15,000 people down. So it was a real kick for me. And then I thought, well, that's really engaging, because I didn't think I'd move away from that story much. I should, I would like to explore it more, because I've never retired from the character. The other thing, though, in back to your point, is that I became a spotter, you know, anyway. I mean, there's a lot of these, a lot of these issues and things that I've heard through. They start really purple, really big, just over a mental level. That's me. And then you start to see, and the shape comes from there. That's what the story, so I don't use a lot of mind at all. This thing starts to kind of run forward. Characters come, the decision to, to have the daughter did say was a real surprise when I was not comfortable with the first one. It was the right thing to get this guy out of his head, because he's very self-involved, and he's not in a certain way. I mean, he's seen a lot of movies, and so I wanted to, I wanted to push through that. And a lot of things just kind of grew. And I had time. I was an underemployed, and that was a real good one. Yes. Coming your way. So you mentioned that you had written several novels before this one, and forgive my ignorance, but is this the first that's been published? Yes, it is. Could you tell us a little about your past publication? For this book, or just in? Well, whatever you like. You know, one of those people always wanted to be a writer. I grew up in a small apartment in that case, and my parents were back to the earth. So, but I was first to call her, so I had a really, that was kind of self-directed, and I thought, you know, I want to write a great book, but I could write a great book school, which is where my life is a native of the Bay Area, and then we moved here to North Beach because that's where writers move, you know, and we did that. So, but my work was in any year here, and so it was wonderful to go to a state where you meet a lot of people at various stages. There's some fantastic professors. It's also, it's a DIY place, you really kind of, you have to engage and make it work pretty simple, and it did, ultimately, and I also, there's been a work skill that I've used, so I've done mostly communications for them. I did work for the state courts for several foundations, California Unities, and that also kept me in the loop for the people who were publishing. So I saw the folks, but I didn't have my work to get published, and this was, I tried before, and I had to look at the short story, but that was out of my nails. That was kind of, I was dreaming of this new search phrase scenario where you do the pride, say you get the Asian, and you're here to sell it, but in this case it was, it was much more slow going, but it was also less fraud, until more confident. Actually we're very comfortable. The book turned out, there's probably any development on that, it's just not the other thing, it was a pleasure to have so much control over it. The downside of that is that you have to work out those small breasts. I mean it's just not a good story to write, not many stories, but you can gather some stories. So is that enough? Is that enough? Are you the mechanics of like how to get the Asian? Yeah, how did you come to, to get this one published? When I was done, I started firing Asians. I, my old agent didn't want to, she looked at it for us, and then there were a few times, I had some engagement with a few others, but I went to, I used the products called Query Tracker, which is online. It just tracks all of your communications of Asians, and I started, and that would be five a week. And if there was somebody who wanted to see it, or if you wanted to stop, or wanted to hold it for a while, I would slow down in the process, but you basically wait, and you work on something else. And I did that for over two years. I went through over two hundred years that way. So, and this, my current agent Farley, he rejected me a year prior, and then neither of us knew, and I hadn't lost track of it. So when I did the campaign, he had to start with C. And we didn't, we didn't realize until I went to meet him in New York that he, we were part of the, you know, I don't know if you noticed it, and he said, yeah, I don't know. So, so anyway, he took me on, very last, it was my last try, and then with him, he tried every press during the program, and it took, it took almost two years. And after that, though, he, he rented a sales rep, or here's the Chicago district, and that's the way you go through it. And he said, you know, I want to try this guy and I want, he's really, he's something that will keep me interested in, and he really loved it. And he wanted to talk to me first for about an hour, and I just, he got it, and I felt like, so if I'm not going to get too rich, he's going to get too published, and they're very respectable, and he had treated my slaves, so it was good. So it was slow, it was definitely, and you're saying there wasn't many changes, right? No, no, I mean, copy of it. And most of those were things I've not used to, sensitivity of it, I've never heard of this before, but they're actually Google tools that you put a manuscript through, and they're like, this word chubby, like I call it the dollar chubby, because you're chubby, she's a little girl. And, you know, some people would be offended at that, and so I switched because I couldn't come up with a better word, but deaf, you, a couple other things that are very functioning words, that are, I use them in full, I hope, deaf, I was called out for, so that was the walkover process, but that, those are the only times the changes we did. And this impact had an release, you know, to a stop. How did you decide when to end the story? That was the one of the best learning things that this, that I really, that's maybe the one that I wasn't sure about, because there's always something you can see that needs to be changed until there's, it's just like, just keep going, going, going, going. I don't mean in the edits, in the story. I knew it was going to, it was coming to that meal, and then the meal, I had to get it so many times, because everybody's doing this, you know, you start to imagine it more than you feel it, and the answer to the question is it's a feel, but you have to just keep doing it, and then you have to keep throwing away everything, and that's the whole feel, and plausible. It's mostly true though, I mean, I had to go, you constantly go back into the characters, you know, I would have trouble especially with what's Jackie all about in this last, that's the mother in this last scene, and I had, I had to just keep, it's almost like trying on the air anyway. There was a book, this came up in the last screen, by George Saunders called, I think it's Swing and the Pond of the Rain. Oh yeah. Is that the name of it? Yeah, Swing and the Pond of the Rain. I think that's perfect description of the writing process that I use at least, where you, you know, and that's how the shape comes out, you just, you might have a pile of stuff. I mean, I write longhand and it was this big and half of it was this big, because you can tell it's just too much, it's just purple, not real, but this, it clicked, and there are things that are just, you know, there are gifts too, like doing that movie at the end, I just, I never knew that was going to be that, but that's absolute, that's the cross-sword that has to happen for you, and that's just something else. So, Mark, can you talk about your prior novels and about the themes or what influenced this particular novel or the genre or the style of what you were doing prior to today? With this, I can say with this story, in terms of influence, I was very moved by under the abuse father's story, a father's story, I don't know if anyone knows, and it's a really, really fine short story, I highly recommend it. It's, you know, it was anthology, this is the best thing, and I read that a lot on the state. That opened up for me, and I think it was a feeling that you can inhabit these spaces, because I haven't heard anything like that before, which says I would have liked to. My other two novels, you know, one that I'm most pleased with and one where I kind of more is this setback more, and it's a rural setting back, he said it's more of a daughter, actually, kind of trying to find a lost mother in the midst of kind of a, you know, kind of a leftover kind of environment in the north country, which is where I still set the way up on the same one, so it's really cool. And that was, I couldn't tell you where that came from, except that I know that place, I know those characters, and there's some people in there. It's almost always a character, a person that you want to unwind and help yourself at times. So the first one was- What was the name of that last one you mentioned? The short story? A father's story, and then the next one, about the girl. Oh, that's mine, that's what I'm working on. What was the name of the writer? The writer of the father's story, I'm sorry, reviews. I'm great reviews. I'm great reviews. Thank you. He's a great guy, a great writer, I don't think he's a great guy. Okay, so yeah, I mean, I think that my first novel was more enforced, like kind of a young man coming of age, one of those, it was the 80s, who, you know, I was in school with Pearl Brompton and some other guys like that. We're all doing those things, and I was not successful with they were. And I think the best place I'll go in the future, either after you land or I kind of know really well, you know, one story. I was wondering if you considered self-publishing. I was wondering if you considered self-publishing since you had a hard time. Yeah, so my question was, I was wondering if you considered self-publishing and if you, why did you reject that option and continue looking for an agent? Because some people just, now that you've got Amazon and you can sort of market everything yourself and find your audience, why did you reject that option? Tell me if I go too much into words on that one, because I learned a lot from the Kindle Singles. That experience, in theory, you're self-publishing, but it was chosen by Amazon, and I think it's mandatory to singles. And then they do the cover, they do, you know, the flat comping session. And then one of the reasons it did so well is that they wanted to establish these Kindle Singles, and so I was right across the end of the course of the line. So you're right there, and there's no way people are not going to see anything that they're in Kindle, which is brand new for Christmas. So that experience was, you know, it was very easy. I mean, I almost felt too easy. I never felt comfortable that this was too literary, but it was, you know, sort of story stands. I have another one now, too, that's still on there. But, so I thought, well, if I can, you know, I'm getting too old to publish, like, I really want to do some books, and I want, you know, you can just dump them all at once, you want to have a couple of things to allow for a career, have careers. And I have considered self-publishing, but there are some reasons I would not want to. One is that I really do value presses, and I value editors, I value input, I value teamwork, and I really am not that vain that I think I could have done it all by myself. I did try a couple of bookstarts on my arm that became Kindle Singles, but I initiated that, and then I think that one of them, at least when I'm too early, so it's that you really want, you know, there's a reason, there's a real good, I mean, editors I have a really good respect for, so. And then you don't get that you do if you have a book or a publisher, and it's also an ecosystem I didn't understand. Like at that point of view, I think some people have seen it. That was an amazing nosey gift. I don't know how to think about it, but I really want to do something like that. You're not going to get that in self-publishing. So self-publishing, and I do know some people have done wonderful things, and particularly if you're not necessarily like the fiction idiot doing like a genre, or it's more for a really specific audience that you know, that people are very well served there, of all interests. So I have to sort of, I really wanted to make sure I had exhausted everything, and I almost did. Wait, excuse me, I'm going to take a question in the back first, and then we'll come back. Here's one. Here we go to the story. How did you pick a location that starts a neighborhood to help the story take place? There's a lot of options you have, and what was it about the neighborhood that motivated you to write about that take place from the novel? I grabbed the short story, first of all, the short story, that plays there because it's just the perfect stage for them. It's so, in some ways, particularly when I started it, because the climate has changed, and I'm there. It was so gray, and cold, and gloomy, and moody, and low rents at that point still, and this guy on the porch, you know, I just thought I'd go, you know, and even the porch itself is like a microcosm of even the house of the neighborhood, it's just like, you know, you're in there, and all just, but with the windows in the door, you know, you have some control in your privacy, and people actually live their lives. I couldn't think of it any other place, and then this is poeticly perfect. It's just on all these battle levels. I also like it being the outer edge of the United States, just the outer edge of our American dream, and this guy's life, and so on. There are too many things. It just kept unfolding every time I moved to it, so it's a great place. We live in the outer division, not the outer sunset, but the outer sunset is changing a lot, but it still works out. It's great now. Question over here. How did you choose your readers, and who were they before, you know, when you're going through your editing? In addition to that artificial intelligence one that said, don't use coffee. Cheetah, what was it called? Chubby? Chubby, chubby, yeah. I don't think they're anything that's here with the AI in the middle of the river, but everyone helps me. My wife is my first year of being a snap tree, you know, each other for 35 years this September, and she's always giving them the truth. So does that. I have another friend who's far away, so we only couldn't get your email yet, but I'm east dribble. If you can't really pull on over text or email, you know, so. And then after that, I feel pretty confident after that, honestly. My agent and I have, I think, slightly different approaches to it, and that's a good thing. So he'll read it on my end, and I'll get either a peripheral answer from him, or else I'll know, you know, something's wrong. I need to work on it as well. So I keep it, I don't have a lot of readers, because I've been in groups, and when I was a young writer, it was really, really helpful, because there were a lot of things I needed to go on. And now I think I needed more to really focus on, you know, you know, when you're writing, you just have to listen to yourself. And I'm one of those people that just thinks that happens. Thank you. Could you say something about your writing schedule, you know, when your daily writing happens? Because even daily? I wish I had one now. We love her, but it's just a little disruption, because she has her life now. It's ours. And when I was writing this, things were much more, because I had a bar of office space, you know, I had barred some communications where I just had the key to, actually, so it's an old convent on Geary in 23rd. They hold, I see Monica's, and when I was in it during the day, I could go to the top office. So I go out with us, our son was out, and then right in the morning, just really focused, and not, there was no, there was a track, which I love, and then long hand, just a big drive, and then I'd go home in the afternoon, usually type it over, and then whatever I'm going to do, and that's, it took about two or three years to do that, after a while. And other stuff is always taking much, much longer. And like I said, I used to work here, too. I would come on a, you could call it Ryder's, and I would, I would come down after work, and just go into a carol on the second floor, and it's just, I would feel really lonely, and I'm isolated and quiet to do this sort of thing. Everybody's different, at least that's what I'm getting. Thanks. I want to ask, if you know what I'm going to ask about the section of the book, that I'm going to be a master piece of, stunning piece of writing, so if I could ask about that a little bit, it had to do with the section where Jim distraught, completely distraught by his daughter's situation, to walk down this of where he was, and wandered over to a religious institution, and his experience there was something to read. And the reason I asked that question is because I'm, my personal circumstances, non-religious atheist person, and it moved me to tears, so that takes a lot, but you don't believe in the power of what a religious institution might be able to bring you, and it did, it actually did that. So there was something about the way you wrote that, it came from somewhere with you, and I'm wondering what that is, where that is, working from, to show the very best side of what a religious institution or a place can offer someone, and he clearly did that to him, and then to you as well, and said to the office. It's a big one. Sorry. Well, it was unique, and I'm glad, thank you very much, it's very, very glad, and I'm nice to hear. Let me go at it this way. First of all, it was always, it was unique, and then I, and through the process of writing that I told you earlier, that it took a lot of writing to get that one out of there, and I, because there's so much that you can lie about, or death and God, and religion, and where you are in your consciousness, and how you feel about things, and I also had to be true to him, and I don't see him still as a 100% believer, but he is, and that, I think we draw too many minds around what's religious and what's not. The foremost question took, in my last reading, was what role did you play in the book? But that's because it's kind of everywhere. It's like, we can't draw these lines. I believe in this continuum between the material and the divine, since I don't think there's a break, where this post-enlightenment phase is going to end, physics says things about personality, but I'm going to go at something good and going on. What happens to Jim in that moment is that he is spiraling into himself. He had his first beer that he had all after. His dog was just very billowy, he left after his chemo, and uncharacteristically down. And then he's clearly on the outside of Carol and his dog, and so he leaves his house, and he's running out, and he goes to the school, where his kids used to go to school, and he's on the fence looking and clearly seeing as an odd man who shouldn't be in the fence. And then he goes to the church, which had been brought to, this is the cathedral on Geary, it's in the big beautiful one, that his son's broken and brought him to the church, and he's very good at it. And he's very drawn by saying it, that's her name, and she's so integrated into the family, and her faith, and her politics, and everything. She's just there. She's present. She's like, you know, and there's no, there's no, if there isn't vision in her, it's not time to be seen as much trouble. So when he comes face to face with this, the improv remains of St. John of Shanghai, who's a Russian saint in the cathedral, I believe he has a moment of serious grace, and he falls through every line he's telling himself. This is where he finally, finally lets go. This is the thing that happens before you cross it over to into accepting the gift of God that his daughter is, into accepting his talent, the voices of his whole life. This happens right after that. And that's what, that's, you know, that's not a miraculous act in some ways. I myself have, that became an Orthodox Christian through, during COVID, I was always tending to it. I was interested in this of some of the, a couple of people here from Slaviamka chorus, of some of the Russian chorus for a while, and I was raised Catholic and lapsed and all that stuff. But through, I wasn't Orthodox, but I wrote the book. And so I was probably struggling, also myself, and some of us were asking, how much do you believe this, or how much do people believe this of it? They say you can come and just say prayer. It's going to work for you. It's like, I'm not going to believe things of that simple. So, and I didn't, I couldn't let it be simple here. Otherwise, there'd be trouble. I mean, it's, it's a lot of, that's why I was so hard to write, because it's, everything goes to this moment for him. And I thought, you know, I would love to retry. But does that answer it? Yes. By the way, when I say I have finally got Orthodox Church America, I want to clarify that, that's the, the Russian Orthodox Church sub-Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church, but it is Orthodox, so we're all still sisters in these very complex political structures, but there's a lot of variety of companions who come here to outside. I'm wondering if you have a favorite section of the book that you truly enjoy writing and, and if we could hear that, like, what really made your heart sing when you were writing it? I love the Paul story. The kid in the school that I've learned this English class, and I would read that to you, but it was a little lengthy, I would play about 10 of this. I love, I, I knew that I was a substitute teacher briefly, and as a university, just for some experience, it's not going to have to have to have such an UTA for everything you ever did to a substitute teacher. I mean, I got really excited to from the kids, but I, I knew a little boy you could call on a field trip that I went on, when my son was a first grader, he's the kind of kid who kind of, as the time along when you sit next to him and builds to the alphabet, as far as he's very interested. He could just, um, my dad forgot, and he was really energetic, and so I had an option to end this for the younger person or the little kid. So I'll, I'll read that, and then maybe just put it on our, it's too much. No, because it's like, at times, I thought she asked. Mark, if you'd like to read, read on, and then we'll have this book signing and sailing and the way we go. All right, so Jessica said this, this occurs all in the first third of the book, and Jen's son and girlfriend come over for dinner, and they've had a pretty big night, and he's, like, sending a girlfriend reminds them of something that he had forgotten. He's always going back into his memories. He just can't help but fall back, and so in this case, he's remembering at the dinner table with his son and girlfriend what it was like teaching, and I will, I don't know how to do this, I'm going to start to say, right here, okay, all this is to say that my final year of teaching was no longer for anyone. He started teaching, this is his last year, and he's after his wife. I have a request, not to read too fast. Okay, okay, but if I go too slow also. Oh, not too slow, not too fast, not too slow. I do go fast, so all this to say that my final year of teaching was no longer for anyone. I don't recall much of it. I've let down all illusions knowing we were all at the end of our respective school careers, and I saw every day the finish line of the race in which I'd already not come in first. I even indulged in some role-finding, wearing a sports jacket each day, using a fountain pen, lecturing gravely from my desk over folded hands. I'd also managed to assume a personal computer that some corporation had been trying to insinuate into a classroom, and instead I hauled an old book stand for the corner of my desk, where I placed the same moldy, unabridged dictionary I'd used my entire career. I raffled it off for free on my last day, and even then I was left behind in someone's locker. The book stand spun like a lazy Susan, and the dictionary was usually open to my students, who were forced to use it almost as a pen. I would require this student to pronounce their word aloud, tell the class how it functioned as part of speech, explain set of etymology, and use it in a sentence. A few students loved being called to use the dictionary, but my abiding memory is that most kids shouted it, and instead only asked the sorts of questions that led to discussion of our feelings. Anyway, there was a new house down across the tracks where a colleague and I would repair on Fridays for lunch and a quick beer during our prep hour. Thus fortified, I'd teach my honors class the last period of the afternoon. For teens, this is the longest hour of the week, a time of torpor, a torture to us all, and even though I never got much love from that late Friday class, I expected even less, and the best I could hope was to keep most of them entertained. A few stoners were willing to keep join my name, addressing me as captain, because we watched that poet society together in class over two Fridays, and during their best, often successful, that they would do their test, often successfully, to launch me off on some subject on which they knew I'd all too now will be sale, clever, lazy, buzzed kids. Once I got them wagering on who could get me talking the longest, that stopped one day when I confused them by thrifting the place of that myself. This was just over three years ago in 1996, just before Hong Kong's return to China and after the USSR's post-glass-nose collapse, and because San Francisco is such a small city and so densely packed, our public schools instantly felt like they'd been flooded with the fresh influx of Russians and Chinese. Of the former, Pavel was my sharpest and best love student. He loudly and repeatedly announced that he had descended from Vladimir the Great. None of us knew what such a 1,000-plus-year million meant, nor how to prove it, but looking at him, it was possible for the lead. He was tall and narrow, with hair like rough-cut hay, and a grey gentle glint in his over-activized. His constant smile gave him a bold-climbed look, and he sometimes grew so animated that he seemed to be speaking of Thomas and putting on characters and entertaining his classmates nonstop in the back of the room, where he sat with his buddies to click. His family had been in the States less than three years, and although his spoken English was quite good, that had taken some very aggressive bullying on his father's part for him to get a slot in the honors class because, along with being one of my brightest kids, he was one of my worst students. His handwriting was as graphic art as anything else, and he rarely completed the test before the bell because he could not stop talking, even if only to himself. At first, I moved him to a desk up front and center, and yet, before I even noticed it happening, he slowly receded back, on desk every few weeks, bartering with cajoling classmates until, lo and behold, there he was again, back into his former quarter of power, where he'd started. Perhaps, I unconsciously displaced him with new offenders up front, based on the book, and I'd lost track over time of where Paul was from week to week, or perhaps unwillingly let him get away with these shenanigans out of respect for his dogginess, or because I'd grown fond of him on the diversion he created for himself, or because he, for some reason, had grown fond of me. It had never been my intention to impress my students in any way by wearing a sports coat and carrying a leather book bag that year. It was just a costume, and probably the nothingness I felt, a mask of faux pride in my work, and I think Pavel, somehow ingeniously, understood and responded to that by the neck. My classroom was a gray, sea of faces in that year, and Pavel's was a white cap amidst small waves. By mid-April, he'd just before fall, I'd come to look far to see him shoot up from the back of my last class each Friday, to the labored sum absurd point that would still manage to touch upon the entire recent session. My cap didn't be crying out one such day. Today I read that a great poet Wallace Stevens was a lush. His eyes popped with false indignation. Some kids laughed of his look altogether baffled. You were reading, Mr. Pavel. I'm impressed, playing our game, but what was a lush? Where did you see this? In Florida, he was drunk. You were in Florida? He was. I was here in class. He was drunk. Wallace Stevens was a high-level insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut, I said. He smiled to give me capitalized on the teaching moment he created. But it is true, I said, that he'd vacationed in Key West, so perhaps he read about what he did while he was on his spring break. He was very good at his day job. He was known as the Dean of Schwerthy. But captain, he tried to fight with Hemingway. He was 50. He was an old man, and Hemingway, he was young and strong. He would beat him. He must be super strong. Everyone relaxed into the game. Pavel stood tall with his wet, wild smile, and I myself just had enjoyed the sea towel with lunch. It became the most humbling. A cool, briny fog spipped through the shattered panes of our windows, ruffling the remaining window shades, with the sound of distant sails taking wind. Ah, several days. Captain, would you, he said, if you got drunk, would you put up your fist to fight this strong young man, even if you were famous, Pavel? Who's drunk, I said? The young man or me? The Dean of Schwerthy. I bet you were more drunk, he said. There was more good natured children around the room, but also all eyes were on us. Well, tell me first, Mr. Pavel, what does Schwerthy mean? Hmm, you know this chin for a fact. Schwerthy means to be sure. The dramatic lift of his voice and eyebrows at his own cost, and also showed me that he was now engaged. You want to bet on what I said? Are you sure enough to bet me? And while I said that, and just as I had so many times during the year, I leaned forward from my desk and wrapped my forefinger on the great dictionary that lay open on the front of the desk, screwing up my eyes like a bony old schoolmaster, jutting at my chin with just enough challenge to get a few hoops. And daring Pavel to take it to the book, and he loved this. Without hesitation, he strode up and down before the dictionary. Whenever Pavel went forward, he looked as if he were hinged at the waist. Next grade. Perhaps he really did have some noble and red blood. The class watched him breathlessly, his fingers rippling through the big pages like a sprinter kicking on the dust, until he stopped and slid his finger back down the page, very closer. S-U-R-E-T-Y, yes? You tell us, I said. Yes, this is how to spell the word, non-correct again. It needs to be sure, guaranteed. There are other readings, too, yes. He slammed the book shut. It's surprising, this is what he said. Yes, but this is all the meaning I want now. Okay, I said. So if you, just now, were a leader in the field of surety, because that's what they meant by calling him the Dean, you would have known whether or not you were right about the definition of Kennedy. And you would, that and one, right? Because I was the leader, he said, you just risen from underwater. Da, captain, he said. And if I were a surety expert, and the question you just asked me, I, too, would be surety honest for whether or not I could have beat the young man, and I could think it safe, but on that basis, too, right? It had become too complex a question for anyone to laugh in class. And they should slash across all the states as he became aware that he might be losing the floor, as he is knocked back and forth. He was drunk on spring break, he learned it out. The Dean of surety was like he did for a work, and when he did work, he was drunk. He stared at me, he looked for, he's not like a beer captain, he said. I was in shock by this, but it seemed to have silenced the entire room, but you, Pavel, will see me after class. I waved him away, even as he began his unsteady, slow job, returned back to the seat, slapping high fives down the long rows of desks. And I will stop there, and I was hidden long. But he goes to Pavel's house after we're done, and this is seen as also a favorite of mine, too. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm really, really grateful that you showed up, and it's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure for us. Thank you, Mark, and everyone who come back by a book, and Mark, so she comes from to study.