 Well, thanks, folks. Yes, it is a beautiful room. But if you look at the sides, it's kind of like being in a submarine. It's all right, though. Before I begin, I have an announcement. I'm going to marry Oprah. It has nothing to do with the book club, lest you think that I'm venal. I just love her. OK. Now that I've said that, let me tell you a little bit about Rivenrock. Rivenrock is in a big estate about a mile from my house. And the art director couldn't figure out what to do about this. So I found this picture on the wall of the theater house at Rivenrock. And it shows the wedding day of Stanley McCormick and his wife, Katherine Dexter. And this was the match of the year by everyone in the newspapers. This was just amazing, you know? Why would I bother to write this well? Because this, right here, is their last happy moment. That's why I'm telling this story. Stanley, again, you can see Katherine's very self-satisfied. She's got her man. There's her hand, elbow to elbow. But Stanley has that look in his eyes, that retreating look of the maniac, you know? If you've known any people who are really, severely disturbed, they're seeing different things from us. And I'm afraid that Stanley suffered from schizophrenia. However, it didn't manifest itself until after his marriage. This marriage, by the way, was never consummated. And people say, well, how do you know? Well, because I wrote the novel. That's how I know. He had a severe breakdown 18 months after the marriage. He wasn't able to enjoy the cannubial delights of marriage. I want to say the duties of marriage. It's not duties, the delights of marriage. And it made him very angry at himself and by extension at women. I mean, who, after all, wants him to have sexual relations? But a woman, Katherine, by extension then, he became violent towards all women. As a result, for the rest of his life, he was locked up at Rivenrock. He had a fleet of cars. He had, at one point, 80 servants. They built a theater house so he could watch first-run movies. They put sprinklers in the trees so he could hear the illusion of rain to calm him down in the summertime. But still, his room had just a bed bolted to the floor and bars on the windows. And I would like to just read you the prologue of this. This is what got me into the story in the first place. After his breakdown, because women were so disturbing to him, his first psychiatrist, Dr. Gilbert Vantassel Hamilton, and how could a novelist invent a name as ridiculous as that, said to Katherine and the rest of the family, he is not allowed to be in the presence of or see a woman. So for the first 20 years at Rivenrock, there were no women in his presence. And by the way, the book begins with a quote from one of my favorite writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from Of Love and Other Demons. And this is the quote, sex is a talent, and I do not have it. This prologue takes place the year before Stanley is again allowed to see women. It took 20 years. He had every shrink in the world finally after extensive analysis with Dr. Edward Kempf. He was allowed to see women again. Of course, the first woman he would see would be Katherine. But this is set the year before that happens. Prologue, 1927, world without women. For 20 years, 20 long, dull, repetitive years that dripped by with a sleepy, incessant murmur of water dripping from a gutter. Stanley McCormack never laid eyes on a woman. Not his mother, not his sisters, not his wife. No nurse or librarian, no girl in pigtails on her way to school. No spinster sweeping her porch, or housewife haggling with the grocer. No slut, flapper, or suffragette. It wasn't a matter of choice. Stanley loved his mother, his wife, his sisters. He loved other people's mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. But he loved them too much. Loved them with an incendiary passion that was like hate, that was indistinguishable from hate. And it was that loving and hating that fomented all his troubles and thrust him headlong into a world without women. He was 29 when he married Catherine Dexter, a woman of power, beauty, wealth, and prestige. A woman as combative and fierce as his mother, with heartbreaking eyes and a voice so soft and pure it was like a drug. And he was 31 when he first felt the cold wolfspite of the sheet restraints, and entered the solitary world of men. He went blank then. He was blocked. He saw things that weren't there. Desperate, ugly things, creatures of his innermost mind that shone with a life more vivid than any life he'd ever known. And he heard voices speaking without mouths, throats, or tongues. And every time he looked up, it was into the face of masculinity. The years accumulated. Stanley turned 40, then 50. And in all that time, he lived in the company of one sex and one sex only. Men with their hairy wrists and bludgeoning eyes, their nagging, flemy voices and fetid breath and the viscid sweat that glistened in their beards and darken their shirts under the arms. It was like joining a fraternity that never left the house, entering a monastery, marching in step with the French foreign legion over the vast and trackless dunes and not an oasis in sight. And how did Stanley feel about that? No one had bothered to ask. Certainly not Dr. Hamilton or Dr. Hoke or Dr. Brush or Dr. Meyer either. But if he were to think about it, think about the strangeness and deprivation of it, even for a minute. He would feel as if a black and roiling gulf were opening inside him as if he were being split in two like a Siamese twin cut away from its other self. He was a husband without a wife, a son without a mother, a brother without sisters. But why? Why did it have to be like this? Because he was sick. He was very sick. He knew that. And he knew why he was sick. It was because of them, because of the bitches, because of women. They were the ones. And if he ever saw his wife again, if he saw his mother or Anita or Mary Virginia, he knew what he would do as sure as the sun rises and the world spins on its axis. He would go right up to them, Catherine or Mary Virginia or the president's wife or any of them. And he would show them what a real man was for. And he would make them pay for it too. He would. That was how it was. And that was why he'd lived for the past 19 years at Rivenrock, the 87-acre estate his father's money had bought him in his stone mansion with the bars and the windows and the bed bolted to the floor. Within sight of the hammered blue shield of the Pacific and the adamantine wall of the Channel Islands in the original paradise, the lonely paradise, the place where no woman walked or breathed. Well, thank you. That was fabulous. So you sat down and you wrote this entire novel. What were you trying to do for yourself? It was no problem, Naomi. I just snapped it right off in my spare time. What was I trying to do? Let's back up for a second. I want to tell the audience one other thing about this. There are monkeys in this book. The first primate lab in history was in 1914 on this estate. Dr. Hamilton convinced Catherine that if she would fund his research into the sexual habits of apes and monkeys, he could apply this to Stanley with a cure in sight. What did I expect to get out of this? Well, I'm not interested in writing a conventional historical novel. That is, it's not the historical impulse that really animates me. It's the aesthetic impulse. I want to make something. I don't know where I'm going to go or what I'm going to say. I just begin the story and find out what happens. In this case, I had a ready-made story. But in many cases, like the tortilla curtain or many of these short stories, I just begin to see where it will go. And I think what attracted me to this story are many of the elements, obviously the monkeys. But it enables me to find out how we got here today. It enables me to talk about the gulf between men and women, beginnings of psychiatry, whether it's valuable or not, beginnings of the women's movement, sexuality, what's normal, what's not, who decides. Well, very current issues. I would like to imagine Catherine today, which she have remained married to Stanley through her whole life, or which she have just gotten a good divorce lawyer and moved on. Well, in fact, she fought leaving Stanley, right? That's part of the book is all about her trying to stay married to him when everyone else wanted to let her out of the marriage. That's quite right. The McCormick family tried to squeeze her out, because obviously a lot of money is involved here. And if she remains married to Stanley, then she is a well-owned part of his fortune. And by the way, in the true story I'm telling, Stanley died in 48. Catherine sold off Ribbon Rock. By the way, all the other McCormicks had died, and she inherited everything. Stanley had then died. She broke up the estate, took the money. And from women's suffrage, she moved into the Planned Parenthood movement, because she felt not in the way of eugenics, as many of her class did, that women should have birth control in order to liberate them, to have careers. So it was her money that directly funded Dr. Pincus, who invented the birth control pill. Catherine died till 72, by the way. And I love the irony here. Here's the most dysfunctional marriage ever, except maybe for a couple of Bluebeard's alliances. And what do we get? We get our short-lived sexual revolution. Now, this is not short-lived. Short-lived? Well, other factors that we hadn't counted on have curtailed some of our great pleasures in the sexual revolution. The first story in here, Modern Love, for instance, which introduces the concept of the full-body condom, is maybe a result of that. Now, this is not the first story that involves monkeys that you've written. Probably my most infamous first line is from the title story of my first collection in 79, which is Descent of Man. And the line is, I was living with a woman who suddenly began to stink. Well, why does she stink? Well, because she has a job at the Yerkes Lab, grooming Conrad, a very, very brilliant ape who is learning sign language and other languages as well. And in fact, what happens in the story is the guy who's telling the story, he's kind of a slump. He's really not doing very well with this woman. And she prefers Conrad to him in every way. And he resents that. Let's talk about opening lines. I actually wrote down some of your great opening lines. And one of my favorites is, in the mail that morning, there were two solicitations for life insurance. A coupon from the local car wash, promising a 100% brushless wash, four bills, three advertising flyers, and a death threat from his ex-son, Anthony. Wow. I love that. Who wrote that? You wrote that. That's from a story called King Bee, which came about in this way. I read a piece in the LA Times about a couple who desperately wanted to have a child and couldn't. And so they went the adoption route. And they adopted a kid who was passed off as being a little younger than he actually was. And none of his mental problems had been divulged to them. And they hired lawyers to annul the adoption when he became a teenager. And he became very violent towards them. I jammed this up into a little story called King Bee. My wife had once taught special education. And one of her students, a very brilliant but very disturbed kid, was obsessed with bees. This is all he thought about was bees. In fact, one day she found a dead yellow jacket and brought it into him. And he threw it away in disgust. He said, that's not a bee, that's a wasp. So this kid was into bees. So I combined that kid and this story of these parents and wound up writing a story that is horrific. Never before in my life had I read anything in public that wasn't funny. Because I feel my theory is that it's impossible to sleep and laugh at the same time. But I was going to Japan on a book tour. And I knew that even though the Japanese might find my funniest stories hilarious, they probably, in a group like this, wouldn't be demonstrative. So it'd be like a comedian telling a joke and no one laughs. So I figured, well, I'll read a story that is not funny. And it is kind of horrific. And it was my first experience of seeing an audience totally riveted and they're not laughing. So it was great because sometimes now I will read non-comic pieces. Which I don't know too many of them that are non-comic. Well, there are, there are some. In fact, the story that I'll read later tonight is, yeah, I mean, it's amusing, but it's essentially a non-comic piece. Now, your stories are often told by craven narrators, propelled by the baser instincts, libido, hunger, self-preservation. What propels you to write about such people in their own voices? It sounds like real life to me. I don't know, the concept of the anti-hero is very appealing to me because, growing up in the 50s and 60s and seeing what sort of the emblem of heroism was, which was a kind of post-World War II thing with marines and the hero always wins out and everything is perfect in the world, was something that I wanted to subvert because I didn't believe in it. So I'm writing about, I think, more normal and human qualities. And you like getting inside their heads. I do, and I also like, I love to put a kind of a schmuck of a hero up against an unconquerable force, a villain who is just like all the force in the universe crushing him. I've often said that one of the joys of doing a novel or a short story is that you get to create characters and to control their universe. Here we are sitting in here, subject to all sorts of whims of fate and accident and we're nervous about it and we don't like it and we don't like the fact that we have to die. We don't like the fact that there's no God. We don't like any of that. But when you create the universe yourself, you are the God. And so when I do that, I make darn sure my characters are going to suffer. I was just gonna say, there aren't many stories that you write that have happy endings, are there? It's a challenge. And I would like to someday have a happy ending. And don't rule it out. Yeah, you write very convincingly about mad men. Have you ever had any experiences with madness yourself? Well, I'm of course the most perfectly normal man in this auditorium, but human being, I should say. I see there are a lot of women here too. I had two close friends in my life. One when I was a boy and one in my 20s who were schizophrenic. They're very attractive and intelligent people whom I love dearly. And I watched them kind of, what I loved was how bizarre they were and how interesting they were. And yet they kind of drifted away to the point which they had to be hospitalized. So I did have some experience in trying to drum up what it must be like to be Stanley. And of course, I do research and think about things and try to invent a fiction that's convincing. All I have to do is convince you that it's true after all. Let's talk about the research for a second. Here we are in this palace of research. Libraries actually made any difference in your... Yeah, they have. I've done a lot of library benefits. In fact, I just did one again recently at the third time at my alma mater at the University of Iowa where I went to the writer's workshop. And I remember one of my early stories, the one that I included in this book that had never been collected before. It's called The Arctic Explorer because it gives you a kind of a preview of Mungo Park. And I wanted to write about some of the early Arctic exploration. Went into the University of Iowa library, into the stacks, and found an original first edition in bounded leather with the molding pages from Sir John Franklin's expedition to the Arctic in the 1870s. It was just great. Also, I remain a professor at USC because I like to do that, even though I don't really need to anymore. And by the way, I'm negotiating with the dean. So I moved to Santa Barbara now. It's 96.6 miles from USC. And I have to go down there twice a week. So I'm negotiating for him to drive me personally, both ways. I want him to sit in front and I sit in the back and I want him to wear a little cap. And he's balking at that. Anyway, one of the reasons that I love to be a professor aside from the joys of teaching is that I can take out 100 books and keep them for years. I do. I do because I'm doing all sorts of arcane research. In fact, when they went online with their catalog, I don't know, in the mid-80s, a lot of books that no one had ever checked out are in the sub-basement. And I'm the only one who ever takes the books out of the sub-basement and they all have to have the code put in because no one's ever taken them out. Probably no one will ever take them out again. But those are the books I really wanna know about. Now you teach, you say, at USC. You're a tenured professor. Can writing actually be taught? What do you do with these students here? This is the question I get asked in Europe all the time. They're just stunned. How could you have writers in the university? Well, we have always had graphic artists in the university and musicians. You have to think of creative writing as in the same light. It's an art. And no, you can't teach them to write if they don't have a great gift for it. But if they do, you can be their coach. And what percentage of your students actually do have a gift for it? The ones, well, I picked them myself. So they all are brilliant. But how many of them actually go on to become writers? Well, not so many because there are the factors involved. Like you have to have an obsessive compulsive disorder for one thing. You have to have been whipped as a child and wanna prove to the world that you're really all right. And many other factors. So I would say that at least 50% of my students wind up on the street with those little signs and a cup. But they are the ones writing the creative signs. They used to be in a rock and roll band, right? The Terminators, is that what it's called? No, no, no, the Ventilators. The Ventilators. That's not making too much of a difference. That's not making too much of a difference. I was an amateur. What I wanna ask you about is music in the relationship of music to your writing. Well, I have never written without some music playing because there's a beat to it. And I think that's good. You may not be consciously aware of it, but there it is. And to me, the rhythm of the language is very important, which is why I like to read to audiences and why I like to be read too. It's a great experience to hear the beat of the language. Even writers who don't read well and don't like to be on stage, like my friend, the late Ray Carver, for instance, a very shy guy who was thrust into the spotlight and had to give readings. I remember when we were students at Iowa when his first book came out and he had got achieved prominence and he came back and he sat in a lounge, a student lounge, it's all dark, a little light, sat in the corner and kind of whisperingly read this story, nobody said anything, which I love. And it was great just to hear him read it and how he would read it. I was actually listening to Tortilla Curtain on Books on Tape, which is one of my favorite things that libraries have is those fabulous Fat Books on Tape and boy, that's beautiful. Yeah, until the dean starts driving me, I have to drive myself and I survive on Books on Tape, shooting down that coast highway at 112 miles an hour, listening to Jane Eyre. So you grew up in Peaksville, New York. Your parents were both chronic alcoholics. True. You were not a great student. Who gave you the confidence to become the person that you are today? Well, both my parents suffered from alcoholism and a lot of people on both sides of the family did too. It comes with the territory. That's why, by the way, we hate the ethnic stereotypes because they're true. The Irish have a gift for words but they also have a weakness for liquor. Both my parents, even though they weren't educated, they felt that education was important. We also grew up in a neighborhood where we had a great public school and some of the teachers that I had even then, I'm still in contact with. I gave a reading at the 96th Street Y in November and my eighth grade history teacher was there and he'll be visiting me soon, by the way. And the other day I got a letter from an English teacher I'd had in that period who, unbeknownst to me, had been following my work and he was one who was a great reader, he was an actor and he would read to us, you know, every Friday he would read a story to us and demonstratively read it. I realized that he's the one that turned me on to performing and then in college I had several mentors. I had, I began as a music major. I couldn't hack that so I switched to history and I had a history professor who was just meant everything to me. He in fact organized a conference on my work at my alma mater which is SUNY Potsdam in New York in 95 where all the scholars and students and so on came to give papers on my work. He was just great, absolutely great. In that era on the road, you know, on the road is very tough on you. Look how fat I've become from eating this fancy hotel food. You have to get some exercise and I was swimming everywhere. So he arranged, his name is Dr. Vincent Knapp. Dr. Knapp arranged for me to have some time to swim and he cleared out the university swimming pool and everything and one of my other mentors, Vance Borjely was there and Vance and I went swimming. And we're swimming our laps and I looked up and there's Vince standing there poised to dive in lest I should start to drown, you know. So, and he also came to visit us two summers ago. He's my old history professor from a thousand years ago. What am I gonna do with him? He was great. He was just great. I mean, we had a wonderful time. We visited historic sites that I'd never visited like the old mission, you know. We had a great time. Well, what did he actually do for you at the time that you were his student? He listened to me. I broke his heart. I made him cry. I was such a punk. I didn't do what I was supposed to do. He thought I was just gonna become a complete and utter degenerate and I did become a complete and utter degenerate. But I came out of it, came out of it and redeemed myself in his eyes. He would have, I was this callow youth, this angry, you know, twerp and he would have long, serious discussions with me on philosophical questions and he took me seriously and he felt that I could write. I had another mentor. Krishna Vaad was my writing teacher. I was a junior in college and I blended into this creative writing class and he's the one who turned me on. I've told this story before so if you've heard it stuff your ears up. Krishna was, is from India. He's a Hindu. He's a novelist. He went to Harvard. He's an immortal of Joyce and Faulkner, a great and brilliant man. And I come into the class and it was me and 10 poets. And the 10 poets were writing absolutely incomprehensible gibberish. And the form of the class was this. They would stand up and they would read their poems that we were supposed to comment on them. Well, Krishna never really said yes or no or smiled at anything. He was just there, a monument sitting there. So after a couple of weeks, he said, hey, Tom, why don't you write something? So we were studying the absurdist playwrights at the time who really turned me on with their sense of humor. So I wrote a little short play called The Foot and it was about this couple whose son, unfortunately had been devoured the week before by an alligator. All that was left was his foot on a little tennis shoe sitting on the table in their living room. So I read the story out loud and don't forget, there's a lot of competition between writers. The poets hated me. I hated them. No one had ever given anyone any credit for anything. And as I read, Krishna, this monument began to laugh. And by the end, he was pounding on his breastbone and laughing and then he applauded. And so my colleagues, my fellow students, my poets grudgingly had to applaud too. And I said to myself, this is a good gig. So has anyone actually edited your work? I mean, that you actually work with the changes what you're writing? It helped you improve the way you write? Not so much. Each writer works in a different way and some writers do work closely with editors. I never have. I'm a real nutball perfectionist and also the way I write by slow accretion. As I said earlier, I don't know where it's going to go or what it's going to be. So it grows slowly and in that process, the structure comes together so that the rough draft of any book or story that I've done is almost exactly what the finished version will be. And I hand in something that is totally clean and done. That said, there have been some instances. For instance, in this book is a new story called Mexico. And the book came out just before the version appeared in The New Yorker. And Bill Buford had never edited any of my stories before, made some editorial suggestions on this one. Some small cuts and one small change in the end. And he suggested them to me and I liked them. And I like that version even better than the one that's in this book. That's rare though. It's almost exactly what I give them is what comes out. So are you tweaking as you go along? Oh, sure, yeah, yeah. I'm rewriting constantly as I go along. And how much of Tom Boyle actually shows up in the story? Well, as I think most of you know, for me, I'm not circumscribed by my own pathetic autobiography, you know? I don't believe in the maximum of write what you know. I believe in write what you don't know and find something out. So anything can be a story for me. Anything that I'm told or that I discover. It could be a joke. It could be an anecdote. It could be something from history. It could be something I read in the newspaper. Anything can be a story. That said, there are some stories that do have autobiographical content. I think many of you will know Greasy Lake. Now, it is fiction, but it has a lot of autobiographical elements. If the river was whiskey is another example. And the little story that I'd like to read you tonight called Back in the Eocene falls into this pattern. This is a story about a father taking his fifth grade daughter to the dare program and his feelings about that. This happened to me, but it might be interesting to point out after I read the story how the fiction differs from the fact. So I guess I'll read this story if I can find it in here. By the way, I'm building up massive biceps just from holding this book. Actually, it's just giving me back strain. OK, this is called Back in the Eocene, abscissa, ordinate, isosceles, carboniferous, mesozoic, holothurian. The terms come to him in a rush of disinterred syllables, a forgotten language conjured by the sudden sharp smell of chalk dust and blackboards. It happens every time. All he has to do is glance at the bicycle rack out front with a flag snapping crisply atop the gleaming aluminum pole and the memories begin to wash over him, a typhoon of faces and places and names, Ilona Sharrow and Richie Davidson manifest destiny, head he grieves, the sea of tranquility and the three longest rivers in Russia. He takes his daughter's hand and shuffles toward the glowing auditorium, already choked up. Inside, it's worse. There, under the pale yellow gaze of the overhead lights, recognition cuts at him like a knife. It's invested in the feel of the hard steel frames and cushionless planks of the seats, in the crackling PA system and the sad array of frosted cupcakes and chocolate chip cookies presided over by a puffy matron from the PTA. And the smells, pine soul, floor wax, west festering underarms and erupting feet, a faint lingering whiff of meatloaf and wax beans. Wax beans. He hasn't had a wax bean, hasn't inserted a wax bean in his mouth in what, 20 years? The thought overwhelms him and he stands there awkwardly a moment just inside the door. And then there's a tug at his hand and his daughter slips away, flitting through the crowd like a bird to chase after her friends. He finds a seat in back. The big stark institutional clock shows five minutes of eight. Settling into the unforgiving grip of the chair, he concentrates on the faces of his fellow parents, vaguely familiar from previous incarnations, as they trudge up and down the aisles like automatons. Voices buzz round him in an expectant drone. High heels click on the linoleum. Chairs scrape. He's dreaming a scene from another auditorium an ice age ago. Detention hall, the soporific text, shouts from beyond the window in a sharp, sweet taste of spring on the air when Officer Rudman steps up to the microphone. A hush falls over the auditorium, the gale of chatter dropping off to a breeze, a stir in the rafters. Nothing. His daughter, 10 years old and beautiful, her feet too big and her shoulders slumped, strides up the aisle and drops into the chair beside him as if her legs had been shot out from under her. Dad, she whispers, that's Officer Rudman. He nods. Who else would it be up there in his spit and polish, his close cropped hair and custom fit uniform? Who else with his sunny smile and weight lifters torso? Who else but Officer Rudman, coordinator of the school's anti-drug program and heartthrob of all the fifth grade girls? A woman with frosted hair and remodeled hips, ducks in late and settles noiselessly into the chair in front of him. Good evening, Officer Rudman says. I'm Officer Rudman. Someone coughs, feedback, hisses through the speakers. In the next moment, they're rising clumsily in a cacophony of rustling, stamping, and nose blowing as Officer Rudman leads them in the pledge of allegiance. Hands over hearts, a murmur of half remembered words. He's conscious of his daughter's voice beside him and of his own, and he shifts his eyes to steal a glimpse of her. Her face is serene, shining, hopeful, a recapitulation and refinement of her mother's, and suddenly it's too much for him, and he has to look down at his feet. With liberty and justice for all, more coughing, the seats creak. They sit. Officer Rudman gives the crowd a good long look, and then he begins. Drugs are dangerous, he says. We all know that. And he pauses while the principal, a thick-ankled woman with feathered hair and a dogged expression translates in her halting Spanish. Las drogas son peligrosas. The man sits there and back, his daughter at his side, tasting wax beans, rushing with weltschmerz and nostalgia. Iocine, designating or of the earliest epic of the tertiary period in the Senozoic era, during which mammals became the dominant animals. Girompe, turrompe, irrompe, nirompe, vous rompez, il rompe. They didn't have drugs when he was in elementary school, didn't have crack and crank, didn't have ice and heroin and AIDS to go with it. Not in elementary school, not in the 50s. They didn't even have pot. Mary Jane, that's what they called it in the high school health films, but no one ever called it that, not in this planet anyway. It was pot, pure and simple, and he smoked it like anybody else. He's remembering his first joint, age 17, a walk up on Broom Street, holes in the walls, bottles, rats, padlocks on the doors, one puff on your hook, when Officer Rudman beckons a skinny, dark-haired kid to the microphone. Big adult hands choke the neck of the stand and the mic drops a foot. Stretching till his ankles rise up out of his high tops, the kid clutches at the microphone and recites his pledge to stay off drugs in a piping, timbre-less voice. My name is Steven Taylor, and I have good feelings of self-esteem about myself, he says. His super-amplified breathing whistling through the interstices, and I pledge never to take drugs and put anything bad in my body. If somebody asked me if I want drugs, I would just say no, turn my back, change the subject, walk away, or just say no. Brainwashing, that's what Linda called it when he phoned to break their date for tonight. Easy for her to say, but then she didn't have a daughter, didn't know. Couldn't imagine what it was like to feel the net expand beneath you, high over that chasm of crashing rock. What good did it do you, she said, or me? She had a point. Hash, Keith, LSD, cocaine, heroin. He'd heard all the warnings, watched all the movies. But how could you take anyone's word for it? Was it possible, even? He'd sat through driver's ed, sobering statistics, scare films, and all, and then taken his mother's Ford out on the highway and burned the tires off it. Scotch, gin, whiskey, Boone's farm, night train, cold 45, second all, two and all, quailude. He'd heard all the warnings, yes. But when the time came, he stuck the needle in his arm and drew back the plunger to watch the clear solution flush with his own smoldering blood. You remember to take your vitamins today? My name is Lucy Fidel, and I pledge never to abuse drugs, alcohol, or tobacco, because I like myself and the world in my school, and I can get high from just life. My name is Roberto Campos, and I don't want to die from drugs. So peer pressure is what makes kids to use drugs, and I will just say, no, I will walk away, and I will change the subject. Boy, I desir no. Officer Rudman adjusts the microphone, clasps his hands in front of him. The parents lean forward. He holds their eyes. You've all just heard the fifth graders' pledges, he says, and these kids mean it. I'm proud of them. Let's have a big hand for these kids. And there it is, thunderous. All those parents in their suits, and sport coats, and skirts, wearing sober, earnest, angry looks, pounding their hands together in relief, as if that could do it, as if the force of their acclamation could drive the gangs from the streets, or nullify that infinitely seductive question to which, no, is never the answer. He claps along with them, not daring to glance down at his daughter, picturing the first boy, the skinny dark one, up against the wall with the handcuffs on him, dead in the street, wasting away in some charity ward. And the girl, mother of four, twice divorced, strung out on martinis and diet pills and wielding the Jeep Cherokee like a weapon. That's what it came down to. That's what the warnings meant. Agon, Agape, Ulysses S. Grant, Parthenogenesis, the monitor, and the Merrimack. Yand Cassius has a lean and hungry look. His daughter takes his hand. Now there's a movie, she whispers. What happened to finger painting? Hearts for Valentine's Day and bunnies for Easter. Fifth grade for Christ's sake. Where was Treasure Island? Little women. Lassie, come home. What had happened? Who was responsible? Where did it go wrong? He's on the verge of raising his hand and demanding an answer of Officer Rudman, the nostalgia gone sour in his throat now. But the light's dim and the film begins. A flicker of movement on the screen, bars, a jail cell. He watches a junkie writhe and scream, a demonic, sunken-eyed man beating his head against the wall, someone somewhere, lights flashing, police, handcuffs, more screams. Smoke a joint and you're hooked. How they'd laughed over that one, he and Tony Gaetti, and laughed again to realize it was true, cooking the dope in a bottle cap, stealing disposable syringes, getting off in the restroom on the train and feeling they'd snowed the world. Things were different then. That was a long time ago. Pro Magnum, Neanderthal, Homo erectus. His daughter's hand is crushing him, prim and cool, lying across his palm like a demolished building, a cement truck, glacial moraine. Up on the screen, the junkies are gone, replaced by a sunny schoolyard and a clone of Officer Rudman. Statistics now, grim but hopeful, inspiring music, smiling faces, kids who just say no. When it's over, he feels dazed. The lights flashing back on to transfix him like some animals startled along a darkened highway. All he wants is to be out of here. No more questions, no more tricks of memory, no more Officer Rudman or the vapid stares of his fellow parents. Honey, he whispers, bringing his face down close to his daughter's, we got to go. Officer Rudman's chin is cocked back, his arms folded across his chest. Any questions, he asks. But dad, the cake sale. The cake sale. We'll have to miss it this time, he whispers, and suddenly he's on his feet, slumping his shoulders in the way people do when they duck out of meetings early or come late to the concert or theater, a gesture of submission and apology. His daughter hangs back. She wants to stay, wants cake, wants to see her friends. But he tugs at her hand and then they're fighting their way through the gauntlet of concerned parents at the door and out into the night. Dad, she cries, tugging back at him. And only then does he realize he's hurting her, clutching her hand like a lifeline in a swirl of darkening waters. I mean, have a cow, why don't you? She says. And he drops her hand. Sorry, I wasn't thinking. The flag is motionless, hanging limp now against the pole. He gazes up at the stars fixed in their tracks, cold and distant. And then the gravel crunches underfoot and they're in the parking lot. I just wanted a piece of cake, his daughter says. In the car, on the way home to her mother's house, she stares moodily out the window to let him feel the weight of her disappointment. But she can't sustain it. Before long, she's chattering away about Officer Rudman and Officer Torres, who sometimes helps with the program, telling him how nice they are and how corrupt the world is. We have gangs here, she says. Did you know that? Right here in our neighborhood. He gazes out on half million dollar homes, stone and stucco, mailboxes out front, basketball hoops over garage doors. The streets are deserted. He sees no gangs. Here? Uh-huh, Chrissy Mueller saw two guys in Raiders hats at the 7-Eleven the other day. Maybe they were buying Ho-Hos. Maybe they just wanted a piece of cake. Come on, Dad, she says. But her tone tells him all is forgiven. Her mother's house is lighted like an arena, porch lights, security lights, even the windows poking bright gleaming holes in the fabric of the night. He leans over to kiss his daughter goodnight, the car vibrating beneath him. Dad? Yeah? I just wanted to, you know, ask you, did you ever use drugs or mom? The question catches him by surprise. He looks beyond her, looks at that glowing bright house a moment. Curtains open wide, the wash of light on the lawn. Absturtion, E-pop, Ellucinian, the shortest distance between two lights is a straight line. No, he says finally. No. And I just want to ask a question, Tom. Do you ever write any of your stories on drugs? No, no, no. Writing is my life and I don't subscribe to the Jack Kerouac School. In fact, I made fun of poor Jack in my story beat in this collection. No, no, I think if you want to dedicate yourself to an art, you need to preserve what's left of your dwindling mind. Absolutely. Let's just talk before we open it up to questions about where the truth is and where the non-truth is in the story. I didn't lie to her. That's where the truth is. Yeah, it's a great story to provoke discussion. I dedicated the story to her and I read it to her class when she got into high school and it was great because it brings up questions of how much do you dissolution your children if you do lie to them? Are you a hypocrite? Do you lie to them to protect them? I mean, where does it end? I mean, it's much more interesting. The fiction is much more interesting than the fact. So even though this is closely based on something that happened to me, I'm still fudging it to make it into a fiction. Let's open the questions up to the floor. What do you guys think? Do you ever get inspired by your students and how they see the world? Yes, I'm always inspired by my students. That's one of the reasons I continue to teach is I'm amazed at how great a pool of talent there is and how brilliant they are. I love them. Of course, I pick them myself, but I do, I'm just totally turned on by being in that class. And again, I mean, if the Dean will cooperate, I'll continue to teach there, no problem. Yeah, I mean, I'm always flippant about everything I can't help it, but yeah, for instance, I had a student last year who came over from the cinema department. I love to steal them from cinema so I can ruin their lives. You know, they could be rich if they were in cinema. Now they make no money. And he wrote the best story I've seen in 20 years there. And one of the best stories I've ever read by anybody. You know, he's like 22 years old. He's just astonishing. He just wrote me recently. He's gonna go to Iowa next year. And that's thrilling. I have another student. I was just, you know, on this endless book tour that I seem to, that seems to be my life now. By the way, my life is so pathetic. When I reminisce now, I only reminisce about book tours. It's all I know. I was in Iowa City in the fall and one of my students from last year is there now and just doing great. And you know, that's good too. It's sort of like passing the baton on. We were talking about my mentors. Well, I want to be their mentor as well. You spoke of horrific stories that you've written. You wrote one about a blood rain. I can't remember the title of it, but it affected me very deeply and haunted me, still does. And I wonder if you could talk about how you wrote that very frightening. Wow, that's great that you should mention that and coincidental too, because someone mentioned that two nights ago in Seattle, that very story. It's one of my earliest stories. I wrote before I went to Iowa when I was living in the gatehouse to the castle in Garrison, New York with my dear friend Rob Jordan, who may be in the audience tonight. I just, only two stories that I've ever written out of, by the way, you've cheated me out of many stories. I've written it well over like 120 stories. There are 30 or so that are published that I don't want to collect. Only two stories out of all of that have occurred to me as a dream. And that was one of them. I just had an image of blood in the snow. As it turned out, there was no snow in the story, but the story evolved into this kind of allegorical nightmare. And maybe it affects you and affects other people because it's so raw and so inexplicable. It's not a logical story. What else can I tell you about it? It's not true. It didn't really happen. Blood did not rain out of the sky. But I think, as an allegory, it was written in 1972 or 1971. So you can imagine what events were occurring in society at that time and perhaps make some connections with it. Other questions? Yes. This woman here? Yeah, there's someone there and then you get it. Can you hear me? Ah, yeah, excellent. I'm a big fan of your short stories. There's a particular image which appears in at least two of them. It's this moment of awful recognition or perhaps a wonderful ma recognition of one's mother. Yes. And I think it's in the champ and in the miracle at Bowen's Biddle. Yes. And I was just wondering if there was a story behind that image. Okay, another great question. A close reader of the work. Yeah, you're right. There is a recognition of ma in those two stories, but I think it's just the fact that we're all babies at heart and we really do need our mothers in times of the rest. And the champ is my favorite example of that. This is a story about an eating contest and it's set up as almost like a prize fight and the champ is losing. And in a parody of that kind of film and literature, he looks up and there's his mother and he says ma. And of course, then he names his final dish. You can name your dish in this contest and the challenger is a much bigger and younger man who's got him on the mat with all these flaming dishes, shrimp, jambalaya. And he names Gruul as his final dish and he wins. And it's all due to his mother. By the way, we talk about if you could go back in time, what would be your ideal age? For me, it's three months. I was very close to my mother then. Yes. Any plans to publish the foot or anything else you may have written for the theater? No, it's the only thing I ever wrote for the theater. I'm very single-minded and I did not want to publish the foot or go into write any plays. I'm just pursuing one thing. It's why I don't work for films and I don't very rarely write book reviews or write, and I never will write any biographies or autobiographies or histories or anything like that. Not to mention, no vampire novels, no romances, no thrillers. I'm just kind of bearing on this one course and it's just fascinating for me to find out what comes next. So no, I don't think I'll do any work for the theater. And by the way, to anticipate the next question, what comes next is I'm halfway through a novel which I hope to finish by the fall of this year. For 2000, it's called A Friend of the Earth and it deals with the environmental movement from 1950 to 2025 and it's set in 2025. The weather's real bad, really bad in 2025. You said that you aren't gonna do anything for the theater but don't you have a TV series coming up? Yeah, Book Magazine kind of jumped the gun on this and said that it was a fact. It's not a fact but it seems likely that I will have a show on HBO, 13 episodes, half-hour dramatizations of these stories, some of these stories. I don't have to write or do anything other than be the host of this show. So I would like to do that because get a bigger audience, I don't have to slog around to the cities I don't want to go to. This city I want to come to. But I don't want to insult anybody. There are certain cities around the country that I don't ever want to go to again. I'm sorry and I'm not going. So between marrying Oprah and getting my own TV show, I figure enough already. I've been to Albuquerque. I'm not going back. Tom, aren't you already married? It's a small problem. We can punch that. I mean, you know. Okay, I had a more general question. You mentioned that you were always on book tours and being a type of aspiring writer myself. I was wondering when you first started, did you have a fear that nobody would like what you wrote and also how did it feel when you found out a lot of people did? You know, I don't want to sound complacent because you can't be complacent. You have to be self-judgmental all the time. But you also have to have a giant chip on your shoulder and it didn't really feel that nobody would like my work. I felt everyone will love me and love my work and I'm going to give it to them and what a great gift. I mean, you have, no, truly. Truly, you have to have that attitude, I think. Because otherwise, I know many writers, people I went to the workshop with, for instance, who are brilliant, but they're so afraid that no one's going to publish it or no one's going to like them. They never send their work out and they're not productive. I figure, get it out and go on to the next thing. My question is just whether you are really serious that you don't actually revise or if you could talk a little bit about your revision process. Oh, no, I revise constantly. I rewrite every day, what I've written before, to get into the mood and get into the unconscious mood where you're not aware that you're working and hopefully then you can leap ahead. I revise constantly. In fact, especially with a longer work, even the smallest problem behind me I worry about. So I have to resolve all the problems and feel that everything behind me is great and really in good shape before I can go ahead. I won't, even if I have to look something up and research something, I can't skip over it. I have to get it right first so that when I finally get to the end of that draft, that's it, pretty much, aside from small tinkerings here and there. But no, no, no, I rewrite obsessively, constantly as I go along. Because as you can tell from just a little bit you've heard tonight, the way it sounds and the images and the language itself are the most important thing to me. So I want to get that just right. And do you read your workout loud as you're going along? Yes, I do. I read it to my long-suffering wife. As the microphone goes over to the next person, let's hear about this long-suffering wife of yours. 25 years, you've been married, three kids. What does she contribute to your life as a writer? Shopping. That's it. What can I say? What do I contribute to her life, though? I am her pan-servant and sexual slave. And proud of it, I might add. Do we have, yes? I'm just wondering as a writer, what you prefer to read if you find yourself drawn to reading material that reminds you of your own books or maybe you're a secret Stephen King fan or... Well, it's a good question because I always leave out who I love, but I've never read any genre writing of any kind. It just doesn't interest me because of the quality of the writing. I do love comic novelists, but I read all sorts of things. I mean, Richard Ford, I love Richard Ford short stories and he's writing a very straightforward, realistic story. Ray Carver is one of my heroes and the monuments of our literature. John Chiever, who I also studied with, I love his work and all those writers are very different from me. Louise Erdrich, Dennis Johnson, Ellen Gilchrist, they're just many great writers of my contemporaries whom I love. I read widely. I also read a lot of non-fiction, a lot that pertains to a given project. For instance, For A Friend of the Earth, since January of last year, I've been reading all these environmental books like joyful books like The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett and The End of Nature by Bill McKibben. You know, joyful little tomes like that. By the way, there is an array of hope for us, for our species. Nothing, it's over. So I've been depressed all year. But that's what my reading consists of lately is a lot of nature stuff. Should we do one last question and then we'll sign some books? I don't know if this is a good last question, but as someone who's published many books, do you have any comments on the publishing industry? Do I have comments on the publishing industry? I have been fortunate to be with the same publisher. A lot of writers jump around and they might get a big advance here but then the books go out of print. All my books have always been in print. So I'm very pleased about that. I think, you know, with the conglomerates taking over, I think it may be more difficult for unusual work to break in. Or if it does, they might take a chance on the first novelist. I like the record companies. We'll take, you know, 10 bands and sort them out. One will make the money and they dump the rest. And I'm afraid that might happen to beginning novelists in the future. I don't know. I hope that the publishers will, like Viking Penguin, cultivate writers over a career so they have a backlist. You know, that's what they want is to have a backlist on the shelf in every bookstore. They don't have to promote it and people buy it and it's part of the canon. I hope that publishers will continue to go for that and not just go for the quick buck. Well, let's give Tom some of our money and send the library some of our money by buying books in the back of the room. Thank you all for being here.