 Welcome to the library. Okay, are we good to go? So good afternoon everybody welcome to Alden library. I'm Scott Seaman dean of libraries and Welcome to this edition of authors at Alden Robert Guipe lives in Harlan, Kentucky and grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee He received his undergraduate degree from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and his master's in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He was the marketing and educational services director for the Apple shop in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Did I pronounce that right? Thank you for that clarification. An organization using multiple venues and media to document the life, culture and concerns of people living in Appalachia and rural America. Presently, he serves as the director of the Appalachian program at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College in Cumberland, Kentucky. Additionally, he is a faculty coordinator of the Crawdad student art series. Robert is also one of the producers of Hire Ground, a series of community musical dramas based on oral histories and grounded in discussion of local issues. Trampoline, his first novel published by the Ohio University Press won the 2015 Weatherford Award for fiction. One judge called Trampoline an important book for Appalachia for teachers, for writers, for anyone who cares about the region and the problems facing its youth. His fiction has also appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Still, Motif and Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel. Rachel Terman, our interviewer, is an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio University as well as an affiliate faculty member of the Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies program. She specializes in the sociology of Appalachia and the rural United States. Before moving to Ohio, she worked with the Pennsylvania Women's Agricultural Network and is a co-author of the Rise of Women Farmers and Sustainable Agriculture, forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. Please join me in welcoming our speaker in our interview. All right. So hello, Robert Geitz. Thank you so much for being here today and welcome to Athens and our library here. It's a real summer treat for me and I'm sure everyone here to see you in Athens in July and the last time that I saw you was on Skype in my classroom just across the way here and you were in Harlan just finishing eating lunch, I think I believe. That's right. And my sociology of Appalachia class was interviewing you about your book, Trampoline. And so I kind of want to start there today talking about the relationship between art and social issues and I know that you, you know, you kind of combine those two things in Trampoline. It's a work of art, a work of fiction that you, where you talk about some social issues within the story. But you are also involved in some other artistic endeavors that that integrate art and community issues. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how you got involved in community engagement in the first place and and some of those social issues. Okay. I mean, I grew up, I was always very interested in recluses and artists that were treated from society. I was especially interested in that, got into that in grad school and studied Emily Dickinson and Joseph Cornell, and I was very interested in outsider artists, artists who kind of positioned themselves away from everybody thinking that might be a trade I'd be interested in pursuing. And but then a, even in master's thesis, I got interested in the idea of how people outside of whatever was considered the mainstream talked back to it and how that most artists who kind of framed themselves as outsiders were actually deeply in dialogue with the rest of society as outsiders. And so then then when I came to Apple Shop, which is a documentary art center and and actually as I was trying to explain it today that it just seemed like since the 60s it's been a place where people who lived in the coalfields or wanted to live in the coalfields of Appalachia and do what I kind of like the term cultural production, you know, that as an encompassing term for music and story and film and television and making of things that that you could be there and that was grounded in the twin poles of traditional culture and celebrating what had been good and is good about traditional culture in the region and look at social justice and environmental issues and the thing that kind of they helped me think about at Apple Shop was the idea that these were entwined, you know, the idea that that looking at what was noble about our grandparents and great-grandparents way of life was a vital part of a healthy way of approaching the future, whatever the future held, whatever technologies emerged and that that the best things came from looking both forwards and backwards and being critical about being heart-driven. And so that was where I really started to develop a lot more consciousness of how important it still was for people who are commenting culturally to be able to kind of stand a bit apart from the fray for justice and and to where you could comment on that too, you know, on the on the fight, but then also to be clear about, you know, what you thought was important and right and wrong and and pursue justice even as you maintain a position where you could comment on it. And I guess that kind of led, that was how I got really fascinated by the the type of person that that ended up being the narrator of that book over there piled up on that table. That was to be precise, yes. Yeah. And so you you are also involved in the production of higher ground and that's something that integrates these different artistic mediums and some of the issues that community members are want to talk about and are thinking about. Can you maybe tell us a little bit about that too and if you think it's a particularly effective way of talking about those issues in a community? So higher ground that she's that Rachel mentioned is a theater project that we started in our community and I was never really very much interested in theater. I had been forced to play the woodsman and Snow White in an operetta when I was in the sixth grade and had to sing a solo called I'm a terrible man in front of my community particularly my peers and I was not much interested in ever being a part of anything like that again. It's either an audience member or a participant and and so I was a kind of a hard sell but we 2001 some of y'all remember that it was a beginning of the time when Oxycontin and other prescription painkillers were starting to be a national news story that was linked to Appalachia and other places, but you know that it was it was reality in our community wasn't just a story and it was a real change in the nature of substance abuse in our community and We got involved with the rocker for the John D. Rockefeller Foundation and wrote a Grant to them at that time they had a program that thought was a really good program that they don't have anymore It was called the partnerships affirming community transformation or packed and what they did was they supported communities who would use the arts to address a Challenging issue within their community and so we had picked prescription drug abuse and had done a community process to identify Some different art forms and so we did a big community photography project and it's weird now It was like we distributed 600 disposable cameras as before people had smartphones and and so it was interesting I'd like to think about it some more sometime because this idea that you know There were a limited number of images you could produce and you had to select was was a an idea that It's been kind of abandoned, right? We all can just produce as many images We want and distribute them more broadly than we ever distributed anything we ever did back then but anyway So we did a photography project and a public art project and then we did this story-collecting and theater project All with the idea that it wasn't just going to be talking about the problem But also celebrating our strength and just trying to do something that would resonate with people and it would be fun and cheerful enough that they would come out and engage with it with the material and We ended up doing an Oxycontin musical and working with professional theater artists to help us we had 80 people in it and they were all just kind of non theater people telling stories both about our history and about what was going on and Joe Carson who's a playwright that also has done some work with Ohio University Press was our collaborating playwright and We had a lot of people who are dealing with substance abuse in the play both as you know parents or friends or siblings of people who are Having problems people with problems themselves and just you know all of us were having problems with it It was just a it was a dangerous and painful. It's a it is a dangerous and painful thing drug addiction and And you know and we were just telling funny stories and telling sad stories and telling stories to make us help us reflect together on things and people just kept coming more and more to the play it's like People brought people from a rehab to our plays, you know, we'd have 20 or 30 people who were actually in treatment come and Politicians started coming when everybody else started coming and originally we had done You know one of the reasons we were doing an arts-based approach is we thought we could build community around some of these issues without bothering the politicians without having to engage with the power structure we thought we could Build a coalition of people and a response without because we didn't think they would Notice right. We didn't really want to notice. We wanted just to get together and deal with the problem and so but it did start it became a The politicians they they're they come where people are there are a lot of people there They like to be seen particularly if they're laughing they like to be there when the people are happy and Suck their happiness from them or something. I don't know But they anyway, so they became this kind of community phenomenon and I can remember Standing there and listening to them do a part of the play that I had written and You know it was it was helping people think about what was going on in the community and it was like well writing isn't such a self-indulgence that you can do it in a way that has a Public purpose and So that's when I started that summer's when I start going to the Applatch and Writers Week at the Hammond Settlement School and Here we are Perfect transition to my next set of questions to focus on your book trampoline and people say don't judge a book by its cover, but I always do and This one is a good one to judge by its cover because I think the cover is very compelling and then the content inside does not disappoint either so For people who in the audience who maybe haven't read the book yet, can you just tell us a little bit about you know? Very brief summary kind of a little bit about the book the narrator is a young woman who's remembering a story that happened when she was 15 and She's lost her father in the coal mines to an injury and accident a deadly injury and And her mother's in grief over that and his sought solace and drugs and alcohol and her grandmother is an environmental activist among other things who lives in the community and where she grew up is threatened by a Strip mine a mountain top removal mine And so she's involved with the some people in the community to try and slow that down or mediate that mitigate that in some way And so I was interested a lot of my students at the community college We're dealing with the former issue the issue of having a parent or a guardian who was having trouble with substance abuse Where they they found themselves? They found themselves more mature than their parent for a variety of reasons and so they were having to navigate that and then I was also very interested in The children of activists, you know that if you're Particularly when they're all in on it and your parents or guardian in this case is trying to save the world and you know You're 15 and just trying to not eat lunch alone or whatever that how do you how do you do? You know, where do you get your raise and where do you get your attention? And so You know I went to a fiction workshop and they said what the way I was taught to think about plot was We have a character that people care about you got to figure that out first and then you Stick them up in a tree so they can't get down and they have a challenge, right? So that's your plot is to get them out of the tree, but then really good plots It's like you set the tree on fire, too So they have to get out of the tree, but the trees on fire and so either having this grandmother would you know You can line it up the way you want So grandmother was the tree and the mother was the fire and that was so that was the plot and then there's other problems with the tree She's got a number of outlaws in her family and Most of her friends are overly aggressive and anyway mayhem ensues So so as you were just saying some of Don's voice comes from some of the young women you were working with at the time or through the through some of the projects you've done and Maybe looking at some of the intergenerational activists and their kids and how they kind of You know take on the issues in their own way Are there any other places that Don's voice comes from are you and Don's voice to or your background or are there other Things that went into creating her character I was kind of interested as we got into doing this work and you know, it's like We would take students every year the Appalachian Regional Commission Which is a federal agency started this program called the Appalachian teaching project and We would there were 13 schools in it from around the region and We would all study a community and think about what to do to help it and enjoy sustainable economic development And we each school and those students would go and present their work in Washington, DC, and we've done that for 16 years now and So every December I was taking my students and then then they were engaged with did you present at that? We yeah, it's like so Appalachian State had their Graduate students and Appalachian studies there and you know, there were lots of students who were very Activists or my you know my students referred to them as their hippie kids or whatever and so watching them care, you know, but without all this Apparatus for talking about it, you know watching them have all the same concerns But none of the summer camps or bumper stickers or you know any of the stuff that went with being a liberal activist and Navigating between that and their co-monitor parents who were in a pretty much voting Republican if they were voting and just trying to figure out all the stuff they were picking up locally about the problems with people on welfare and You know just like watching them come to consciousness through all that you know, it's like That was a lot of I related to that because I didn't I grew up in a conservative community and didn't have a lot of Liberal role models in my life even though, you know, and so it was isolated and that was growing up being pretty sure that I was a liberal is from a from a laugh, you know that I So anyway, so that whole her whole kind of position is both in it and not in it You know and trying to find her own way of thinking about it. It was a little bit out of You know my experience So the back so this is kind of a coming-of-age story, I think it's meant to be that way And the backdrop of it like you say is there's this mountain top removal coal mining That's happening in the community and so that's part of the story and Don's trying to you know figure that out And I know that you were involved in one of the early fights against mountain top removal in Kentucky Can you talk a little bit about that and how it inspired the book? Um So the the story in the book it's called Blue Bear Mountain in the book it Is based on the Episode of trying to protect Black Mountain, which was the highest peak in Kentucky But I remember it was right after I'd come to the community college Some of the local Kentuckians for the Commonwealth's member had talked to Roy Silver He's a colleague of mine at the college and said that that there was a strip job of clover fork they had a clover fork that was So so much explosives were going off That it was knocking some people's houses off their foundation right that they were that this was I mean Oh, this was every day occurrence, right? It's I mean it literally isn't every day occurrence in the coalfields that that blasting around strip jobs Just damages people's homes that are well off the permit, right? It's and so And so they had gone out, you know, we had gone out and looked at it And this is what kftc did then is you know, you would if you had a complaint against a co-company This is one of the few people you could count on or organizations You could count them to take your part in it And so we went out and that's kind of where I learned what a community-based campaign was like I had been around someone I was in Weissburg, but I hadn't really been involved in it But anyway, so then we're looking at my maps and we're looking and it was one of the first Times I had ever been around Mine where they were talking about mountain topper move was I think it was probably the first time I ever heard the term and so We got to looking around about what to do and it turns out that there's a I mean all this is in the book and That there's a within the federal Protection the law that protects people against strip mining around their houses There's a thing called lands unsuitable for mining and certain lands that are special Don't They don't just get to be stripped mind even if you own the mineral rights on them And so we made the and so one of the key things that keeps a place from getting stripped mind under the lands unsuitable for mining Rule is it has a federally endangered species on it? And so black mountain had Indiana bats on it, which is a federally endangered species and so I Mean, you know This is the way it goes or our diggo. It's like I mean we all love the Indiana bat I don't think you'd find anybody that doesn't love the Indiana bat even people from Ohio love the Indiana bat and But you know, we had tried to put it we were trying to protect somebody's house we were trying to protect the community's water and and that's just becomes one of the tools and The other thing that was going on is that was where the highest peak in Kentucky was and that meant a lot to some people And So anyway so that and a lot of high school kids got involved in that campaign or not a lot a few got involved It's an elementary school kids got involved. And so that's when you know, and so that episode it always struck me was a You know, it was a story worth telling and so And like you say Dawn's character She's kind of caught up in the middle, right? And she doesn't you know, I think the mountaintop removal issue gets discussed in this two-sided way There's the environmentalists hippie tree hugger people against the coal industry and you know It's one or the other which side are you on type of thing? But Don doesn't fit neatly into either of those categories completely And you say that some of you was in that can you talk a little bit more about why you decided to kind of leave Leave her in that space in the book or how you decided to orient her I Think it's more realistic and I think it's more dramatic. I mean, you know, I think that complicated motives are more Interesting dramatically and literally than simple motives are right. I think that very few of us Have simple decisions. I mean there are simple decisions, but you know most of the Decisions that we have to make or we have to balance several different decision-making factors and I think that that's something I mean on that's very easily dramatized Around environmental issues for people who live in coal mining areas, you know that That You know, nobody I don't think There are very few people who are just pro-destruction Right, I mean even people who destroy for a living most if you gave them a choice Between destroying something and not destroying something they get paid the same and have the same outcome they I think most people would say I'd rather not destroy things and You know that that base, you know, it's like that gets forgotten Right that it's like people act like people enjoy doing this and that just seems obvious But it's it our our willingness to demonize people. I think that They're people who manipulate people by appealing to their worst selves and and their fear and then you know and then Help them to behave poorly by appealing to their fear or other insecurities and But most people given of an even choice are not going to choose that and I think that that's In our country right now, that's that's really good work for fiction writers to undertake is to help people understand each other So that was I forgot is that anywhere near the answer to the question? I love that answer. I really love that answer And I particularly love that part of the book So this next question I have for you I have to preface it by saying that I think it would be great if we lived in a society where this question was super boring and that I wouldn't even ask it because it's a boring question, but I'm curious as to why you chose a young woman to be the protagonist and in particular, you know, she's She's 15 years old and she's not, you know, conventionally feminine really but she has a a distinct kind of female voice too. How did you think about developing that and You know, can you just comment on that? I think one thing was that I mean, and I'm not pandering I hope I probably am pandering but I thought that was the most interesting character in the mix, you know that that the the young women I would see at our school were just a fascinating mix of toughness and vulnerability, you know that they were and that just trying to navigate You know going back to this idea of navigating Looking back and looking forward trying to figure out what was good from the past and what's good in the future It's like, you know, one of the most hamstringing things for people regardless of gender identity is These rigid gender roles, right? I mean, I think that a lot of people are coming to understand that that it in in the same way that that I mean, I can I remember the first time I heard Martin Luther King Jr. speech about how You know civil rights would be as much of a benefit to white people as it is the black people because it that we all need to be Free of both being oppressor and oppressing and I think the same is true Around gender right is that these kind of Rigid definitions of what Gender is art have been crippling and That You know just watching I mean one of the things in our community is is that because Co-mining work had been so male dominant and then that work had been dominant in the economy men didn't evolve a lot of different ways to be in the cold field and so then women became primary breadwinners and a lot of families But they still had this old role that had to do with the fact that men hadn't necessarily found a new role and so You know, I just and that's I mean 70% of the students at our community college were women And so that was so I was hearing a lot of those stories. They were the ones stepping up to kind of They were getting how important it was to tell stories a lot of them were becoming addicts, you know, and it's just out of different reasons and they'd been traumatized in lots of different ways and so I think the thing was I never like wanted to Pass myself off as that person as this person, but this was the person I had heard many times and Knew how the story went, you know just from and so the whole I I mean the other thing I was interested in is that I'm just taking this I'm taking in taking the story also fits But you know taking in the story that somebody is telling me And I don't know. I mean I was writing for those students. They were my They were the audience. I didn't want to let down the most, you know what I mean that if it resonated for them That I mean I just I just wanted to have something that was realistic enough that that they could enjoy it but not be realistic as their lives You know that there there was a hopeful story or at least You know kind of hopeful and so You say you were writing keeping in mind your students as potential readers But you also created a fictional county for the book Hennard County and did so Were you thinking that you wanted to make it sort of a generic County in Eastern Kentucky? Or were you thinking that you wanted to protect some of the identities of people that maybe were inspiring some of the characters? Or did you think about how the community might react to your? book after it was published Well, I'd written a bunch of stuff that was basically Describing Cumberland But I put it in downtown Harlan, so it didn't make any sense if it was real And so then I just had to and then I had some other things that happened in Weisberg in it And I didn't you know if I made it real then I'd have to throw out some of that stuff and I'm Too old to make up new stuff. I had to use that stuff and so It was it literally it was kind of and also I just I Like that I just I had thought of this name canard a long time ago Which of course is the French word for duck, right? And it's also Kind of a joke or a trick or a lie and I just thought that'd be a great name for an Eastern Kentucky County And it also I had this big vision that canard with some Lame French general that's in the American Revolution that they somehow came to name the county Yeah, you know, I had there's this historical novel back there somewhere about Lieutenant Colonel canard that did something so I don't know I Also thought it was hilarious Joe I mean Don gets all pissed off that the knit their school Nick that they're the canard County Eagles when there's They should be the ducks or whatever You know, I thought that was hilarious So have you had have you gotten any feedback from your community on the book? I Mean my favorite story about that is I had a work study student and she's kind of she's She she's a dawn she was one of the people that took me so long to finish it And I'd have these different students come through and so this one would be dawn for a while And that one would be dawn for a while to where she just became her own woman, but She came in there one day and I the first six chapters had been serialized on a website and so she came in there and said When you gonna do another chapter and I said what are you talking about because I hadn't told anybody I was doing this, right? I in fact, I was Didn't think anybody would ever read it and I'd be dead if they did right as I would just be gone and they'd find it and And so this was you know, and she was like where's what happens next and That was so you know and she would her mom Odeid and died and you know this story was very important to her and I mean some of y'all have heard the story for but she's the one that in the book Don dies her hair green and she's blackheaded and so I asked Lauren I said how do you die your hair green if you're blackheaded and she said well go home and do it because her hair had been 50 million colors already and so she So she went home and died her hair green came back in the next day and I came in there and told me Lined it out for me right and so You got a bleach so that whole scene in there where don't get your hair died green comes straight out of her testimony And so that was important. That was that was important, you know that then So yeah, so that and you know people They don't like things. They don't say too much around. They just don't look at you anymore and But I'd see you know people like it I guess I Don't ask them very much at home. I just kind of people come up and say they read it It's good. Well, my students got a picture from a tattooed on her arm. That was also a big that was a big moment That was a commitment so To the to the work But so, you know, so that's good Okay, so I have a few more questions more about The process of writing similar to what you were kind of just talking about and some of the research that you did for the book Like you mentioned you spent many years working on this book. Can you go back to kind of the early days and and How the project kind of was started and then developed So it started with the plays and seeing work on Writing on stage and then I started going to the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hama, Kentucky, which is a good Community for writers right really writers anywhere writing about the region or not But most of the people there have some connection to the Appalachian region and a Lot of Made a lot of friends who were writers some of whom didn't have books and now do and that's a really fun part of that experience, you know when your People that you came up through the ranks with gets get their publishing careers going and then just a lot of good writers who Wanted other people to be good writers and for their work to be read and so that community built and then in 2009 or 10 Went to a workshop. It was a poetry workshop with Darnell Arnault who teaches at Lincoln Memorial University And she's a brilliant writing teacher probably the best writing teacher. I've ever been around and she was doing a thing Where She would if you wanted to write a novel and I had some money to spend She she did this thing called the extended novel workshop and you would go and spend a weekend with her And they're like 20 of us in a cohort and or 15 of us in a cohort and you You pay her price for a weekend and then every three months you'd go Back for another weekend and she'd give you assignments in between and so over 18 months went there six times and That was how you would get the first draft of your novel. That was her process and Y'all heard some y'all heard the story ten times, but she I Assumed that as soon as I got my first draft done that its brilliance would be inevitable and she would take me to her agent and I would go to New York and That would be that right because She's a great teacher and you know That was all I just put it clay in her hand So I got the first draft done and the trip to New York did not come off She was like you got a little more work to do and so I So at that point I started doing the drawings and putting them in little chat books. I'm like well I'm just gonna have have fun With this because obviously it's never gonna come to anything and I've just squandered a lot of money and So I started I Started Publishing it a chapter at a time and making my own little zines because you know I was a punk rock boy and read that's what you do and I started selling them at Hyman and I sold them at Hyman at the Appalachian Writers Workshop for four dollars a piece and five dollars autographed and so I Did the first three chapters that way and then they got Some friends of mine were doing a literary website and they said well we want to start serializing it Can you keep up? We put a chapter up every month and I thought I could so then They started posting them online and the first six chapters got published online that way and then and then the press saw how University Press saw it online there and contacted me about it and that's How we got together And so you bring up one of the unique aspects of this book the illustrations in it and it's kind of Hybrid Regular novel and graphic novel sort of Can you talk a little so the illustrations weren't at the beginning of the process? They came in later Can you talk a little bit about how that developed? Yeah? What they kind of I mean the the bottom line is is that I I thought they were worth Including because they kind of underlined this idea that someone else is speaking, you know I I always love comics and cartoons and stuff and I Always liked the way you could kind of like, you know it's a big mad magazine guy back in the day and I don't know what the equivalent of that is now, but it was that you know in a comic The character can be saying something and something else is going on in the background or there's something on the character's t-shirt They kind of subverts the message, you know or adds an additional message and the comics have this unique ability To kind of have a couple things going on at once in a really simple space and that I thought suited Her character and I think she kind of draws. I can't ever remember if I've she can draw or not. I think she can and But it also just kind of fit the look I was going for but really was that thing of Somebody's looking at you and talking to you, you know, it's really to re-em Reinforce the first person nature of this narration. I think it's inspired a lot by documentary film you know you hear a voice and then you see a person speaking and So it's some weird level. I thought the comics helped reinforce the documentary kind of influence on the book Did when you were drawing Don did that influence her character at all or has her character already fully formed by that point? She was pretty fully formed moment. I mean One of the things I can't draw the things looking the same twice Which is a problem I saw a documentary with Charles Schultz It was kind of my cartoon hero and he could just draw that Charlie Brown hit over and over and it was always just perfect And I you know, I can't get her to even look like a sling person Twice in a row and so but I kind of could I got it close enough to where you might could recognize her and So I just was trying to hang on to that You know like trying not to make her neck too fat from the last one I drew and stuff like that. And so Mm-hmm, and she's really the only Character that's that's really drawn out and her grandma I think her face is kind of shown in there, too Was that intentional or you just didn't want to create too many It couldn't draw anybody else Yeah, I got one person I could kind of make resemble themselves at them Yeah, you'll notice that grandma appears early and then she never appears again. I'm like I finally figured out I'm not going back and draw a bunch of people. That's Okay so I also wanted to ask a little bit about Your thought process in depicting Appalachia and the region and there's this kind of You know history of stereotypical depictions of Appalachia and writing and all and all kinds of medium I guess and I wonder if you you know had conversations about that maybe at Hyman or with other Writers writing about Appalachia was that on your mind or were you kind of fully confident and going forward and Portraying the region in a you know, I think it's portrayed very, you know, realistically in In a not romanticize and not you know stereotypical way either I Mean, you know, I think the thing was I just was like I want to write it to where my friends and my students and I mean my students are my friends those people that I see every day and that are depicted You know, I just I just wanted them to enjoy the book I didn't want them to feel like it was representing them one way or the other But I wanted it to be a story about them and I wanted them to enjoy reading it or feel sad reading it I wanted them to have a connection and an emotional response To it and I don't I didn't care about anything else I mean, I tried really to stay focused on that and like let the chips fall where they may with that other stuff the only time The only punch I ever pulled that I can think of is dawn has bad teeth And I never said anything about that because I never heard anybody mention anybody's teeth in the community You know, it's like it doesn't matter how jacked up your teeth are nobody says anything to you about it You know, it's just like what do you think I need to be told I don't have any teeth It's like Why would I say that to you, right? It's so So anyway, so there are things like that, you know, it's like I that was kind of the litmus if if I wouldn't hear a student Say it to another student I wasn't gonna say in the book and and there's that kind of baseline risk even though people are just Giving people hell all the time. There there are still there are still rule. I mean, you know, there are still things that you don't I Think that was one of the things that's fascinated me about the culture That's way more complicated than than any most things you see is that how people Get mad at each other and fight with each other But when you know you're gonna be around people forever and you want to be around them forever It's sorry as they are that you you hold back something, you know, you don't You don't just tear each other to pieces every day you wear each other down Like the cat that ate the grindstone So when can we expect the movie version of trampoline to hit theaters, well, I don't know That's not my apartment Nothing's in the offing and well, I know that it's available Currently available, I think you'll make a good movie. I do too But I do know that you are working on a follow-up book. Can you talk a little bit about that? It's a sequel. It's five years later. Everything's worse. I Don't know who's read what so I don't want to give anything away that's going on now But don does survive this book and she comes back It's got two narrators, I think and it will be illustrated playing on illustrating it The first chapter of it's coming out in a journal called Southern cultures that comes from North Carolina somewhere I think you and see And and it'll be out I think in the fall So you can kind of see how it starts anyway And is it Tentatively titled weed eater. It's called weed eater. Yeah, can you talk about that the titles? Why you chose trampoline and there's a you know scene with the trampoline in the book, but yeah Not to give too much way, but I always wanted to write a novel where the trampoline was a murder weapon And so that's what's going on. That was how that got started And But in that class with Darnell we had to imagine our entire career and so And I just wanted to have three novels and then an HBO show and Then a big red car and But anyway, so the three novels that Named that I was gonna write we're gonna be trampoline weed eater and pop And so then I've tried so that's it. I'm just like why not I want to Make Darnell happy. You know, she was a great teacher. She's a great teacher. So I'm trying to cleave to that Well, I think those are all my questions, I don't know are we taking questions from the audience Something amazing So, let me just repeat the question so we have a microphone so Kelly's asking Don starts out and the book kind of she doesn't seem like she's real confident She doesn't have a lot of things that she thinks she's good at You know, she's a little bit of a misfit I guess sort of but then she there's the scene where she Makes this kind of speech at a meeting and she discovers she has this Capacity to be a good order and can you talk about that? Well, I think the whole issue of private talent and public talent is It's something that that happens a lot with People who for whatever reason don't feel good about themselves or their talents or are scared to step out and And You know make their talents public and of course dawn throughout the novel has a great talent for yelling at people and Which basically it's nice to call it oratory But you know, she basically gets mad enough that she forgets she's in public and and Defends her grandmother. I mean, that's her impetus, which is the kind of thing that would would Bring a person would cause a person to take the bushel basket off of their light, you know, she She was doing it for her not for herself. And so that's That was basically how that was thought through and then she's kind of like what have I done? Yeah, I I had many of the same questions that Rachel had That I was interested in learning your answers to she asked them already Accidentally about a week and a half ago, I saw October sky again And when Rachel characterized trampoline as a female coming of age story in Appalachia Listening to you speak I realized the dialect coach for that film was spot on because As But also the gender issues that come up in that film Have you ever thought of doing a Novel in which both a male and female character Yeah, in the second novel. There's a guy narrator He's weed eater. He's a guy that mows the yard and is in love with dawns Aunt and so he he gets a little narrative and it's been interesting I've been thinking about it because he's kind of the Kind of a marginal guy and and you know, and he's a guy that mows the yard is in love with one of his clients and You know, it's the whole issue around, you know predatory man and I Just saw I saw that it's on downtown if anything else in that movie Swiss army man that's on right now Amazing movie about point of view and helping you know Leaning you to identify with the character and then at the end you're like and so Anyway, so yeah, definitely thinking about it thinking it's a lot harder I was I kind of remember I haven't read the second novel, but I really liked that novel Push that turned into the movie precious and then about a young woman that had been raped and was a literate and her kind of journey to identity but she was having a baby and Sapphire wrote the novel and so the second novel was this first person Narration from the point of view of the baby grown up and the baby just grows up to be a psychopath, you know that the Trauma and tragedy that had given birth to the baby. She just played it out You know this baby did it was not a happy ending which was really brave as a novel But everybody every review I've read hated that novel and I need to kind of read it because you know this whole issue of sympathetic characters is kind of internet, you know that that we were talking about it today that it was a pretty conscious decision to kind of Have a young woman who was heroic and kind of stood up to her challenges and found a way through them Is a good place to start when you're trying to establish yourself, but you know, it's interesting I mean readers not a bad guy I think he's a pretty good guy, but I was very interested in that because it's a it's a thing that happened, you know, we've gotten There's so much going on. There's so many ways to feel about people. We're just kind of looking at things from different ways It's interesting, you know, it's like how do you maintain people's sympathy and identification I mean, I think you want to you want to have your cake needed to you know, you want it to be authentic and resonate with the people in the community But you'd like to think that everybody would read it, right? You know, like you'd like to think that it would be helpful in People other places understanding part of what it's like where I am, you know what I mean? But at the end of the day, I think that it did become I mean, I think the freeing thing was You know, I started doing the little indie things of my own and just like Do the thing that made me the happiest for me It was like every all the good things flowed out of that, you know that when I When I had it where I just enjoyed it way more and I wasn't trying to figure out what anybody else wanted It was like suddenly other people were more interested in it Which may not be true of everybody Some people's own instincts aren't always as good as they could be But anyway, I think that for your own happiness you got to do that though You know, you got to make the book you want to see in the world or the whatever you want to see in the world Yeah, I mean the I Always felt like the thing with Black Mountain was significant You know that that it was a real story and then the other thing was that I Thought it was important to kind of catch How many things you have to deal with it once in life, you know so many things in books One crazy thing happens and you have to you know, it's like I've heard it writing class Teachers say well, you know a story comes about when on the day that something different happened You know what I mean that it's not the same old day, but the thing is like most of the students I know they're dealing with like five calamities at once and And all of them are bookworthy calamities, you know, that's like My child just cut his fingers off and my grandmother just shot my grandfather You know that there's just two or three things that would have destroyed me for about five years They that happen and they're dealing with three or four of them at once and so just to kind of catch how Strong you have to be to come out functional from all that was really I'm like well that deserves, you know that deserves Capturing and presenting in a way that people can take in That's funny in my hometown is Kingsport, which is like not where I'm at now, but it's kind of connected and My mother She sold the crap out of that book at home to like all her Presbyterian Bridge Club junior league France and it was like just you know, just don't even look at the bad words just read over the bad words and then Then where I live now it's been pretty good I mean like a lot of a lot of young people have told me they liked it, which is a Thing and then within my Appalachia studies community. There's a lot of teachers have used it and so I Did a couple book clubs in Harlan that was interesting But you know, I'll tell you what's funny is some people said just don't worry about your hometown because nobody in your hometown Never read it. It's like that is not true. That was that was not the case in my case It's like tons they sold it in a drug store one of my friends is a pharmacist and it's like oh my god You know people come up. They're like I read your book and then You're afraid of what's gonna come next but It's been alright. I think I Don't know it's been okay. Thanks for asking Well, please join me in thanking Robert guy Just a couple of quick things we do still have some refreshments So please partake. We also have while they last free t-shirts Advertising your library your library. So please take one also on September 27th authors at Alden will Present political analyst and Ohio alum Clyle Kondike who will talk about his book the bell weather why Ohio picks the president and Our interviewer will be Ohio professor Tom suits from the Scripps School of Communication. So thank you No, there isn't authors at Alden website where we archive all the video from these Usually takes two or three days for them to come up But you're more than welcome to log in at any point. So Thanks, everyone