 Hello, everyone. I wanted to welcome you all to the comparative media studies writing colloquium. Tonight at our tremendous honor to hear from my colleague with brilliant, Helen Elaine Lee, who will read from her latest novel, Pomegranate, and just a couple of words about CMSW and our colloquium. Universities like MIT are always with their breath, almost impossible to grasp. I think, and it's probably just the fact that I'm a CMS person, that you can get a sense of what a place like MIT does best at a place like CMSW. Our colloquium, in many ways, is where MIT meets itself, where the sciences, the social science, the anatomy, and the arts come together. And Helen is absolutely emblematic of that kind of meeting and that kind of genius. I wanted to bring up my colleague, Fatina Nawaz, who will introduce Helen, novelist, fantastic book. If you haven't read it, go see them really. Just talk about two powerhouses. Fatina, please, thank you so much. Hi, everybody, welcome. It's lovely to be here. My name is Fatina Nawaz. I am a lecturer in fiction writing in CMSW. And it's my honor today to introduce Professor Helen Elaine Lee and her new novel, Pomegranate, which came out in April and has received some brave reviews, which I'll get to in a moment. But before I get to the reviews, I'd like to talk about my experience of the novel. I first heard Helen give a reading from Pomegranate in the spring. And the reading was so beautiful and so moving that I literally had tears in my eyes, which doesn't often happen to me at readings. And I don't think I was the only one in the room in that condition. So I was really looking forward to the book and finally had the pleasure to read it over the summer. And I have to say that Pomegranate lived up to that first deep impression Helen's reading made on me. It's the beautifully told story of Renita Atwater just released from prison after a four years sentence for opiate possession. And it tells of her struggle and fight to reunite with her children, her family, to overcome the temptations and traumas of her past and to build a new future. She also looks back on this transformative experience of love she has in prison with a woman, another fellow inmate. For me as a reader, Pomegranate does what literature and the novel especially do best, which is to take me so deeply and profoundly and poetically into the experience of another person that my own sense of humanity and empathy and compassion is enlarged. And I'm not the only one who is deeply impressed by the book. Pomegranate was selected as one of the top 10 books of the year by Amazon. The Amazon editor who writes about the novel says, this empathy expanding novel is like a Pomegranate. Break it open and you'll find a treasure trove inside. BuzzFeed News states that Lee writes beautifully about the healing power of black kin networks, queer love, community support systems, and literature. It has received starred reviews from publishers weekly and book lists. Publishers weekly writes that with a light poetic touch, Lee balances the painful details of Renita's reality with genuine persistent hope for new beginnings. It's irresistible. And I can go on and on, but I'd also like to mention the acclaimed authors who have also praised the novel, including Tyari Jones, who writes with empathy, insight, and hope, Pomegranate reveals the hidden heartbreak of the women touched by incarceration, prepared to be challenged and changed. And Jacqueline Woodson, who writes that Helen Elaine Lee has brought such a deep and beautiful world of people to the page in their survival, we find ours and are left grateful, different, better. So this is Pomegranate, but before I close, I also want to say a little more about Professor Lee beyond Pomegranate. Professor Lee is, of course, Professor of Comparative Media Studies Writing here at MIT. In addition to this latest novel, Pomegranate, she is also the acclaimed author of the novel's The Serpent's Gift and Watermarked. And her writing has appeared in magazines and anthologies, including plowshares, Kallelu, Prairie Schooner, Hanging Loose, Best African-American Fiction, as well as the New York Times book review amongst other places. Though I haven't been at MIT long, I've been here long enough to know that Helen's contribution to the MIT community has also been profound. To CMSW, to Women's and Gender Studies, to Black Studies, and in creating a space for creative writing here at the university. Outside of the university, Helen has also served on the board of Penn New England for 10 years, during which time she served on its freedom to write committee and volunteered with its prison creative writing program, which she also helped establish. Incarceration as a symptom of trauma, as a condition evoking histories of slavery and oppression, as a space of suffering as well as possibility, are all important themes in Professor Lee's work. And Pomegranate treats these themes beautifully. So again, I congratulate Professor Lee on the novel. And without further ado, I present to you Professor Helen Elaine Lee and Pomegranate. Thank you. I'm going to move the swing. Thank you. Thank you, Fatine, for that introduction. And this is a lovely chance for all of you to meet her, new member of CMSW, wonderful fiction writer, Juno, as Juno mentioned, of the novel Ghost Season, which came out this spring. And I also wanted to mention another new member of my department, Brianna Williams, who writes powerful fiction and nonfiction and teaches both. And it's so exciting to have these two talented sisters join our community. A huge thank you to Ken Manning, my colleague and dear friend, who has supported me in my writing about the lives of imprisoned people from the very first and who arranged and organized this event. And I want to thank Ruth Perry, who's going to lead the Q&A after I read. She's also been there with support and love from the beginning of my 28 years at MIT. Thanks also to LBGTQ Plus Services, Women's and Gender Services, and the Office of Multicultural Engagement for cosponsoring the event. And to my colleague and dear friend, Joaquin Terones, and students, Savannah Lawrence, who helped to get the word out about the event. And finally to, well, not finally, to Belmont Books for coming to sell the books tonight and to all of you for being here. So is this mic on? Because it does. Yeah, connect. I don't think so either because it's for the recording. It's not for the whole. So OK. People in the back theater? So there isn't a mic that helps me be heard or OK. It's hard. I have a software, so I thought we would have that. OK. In any case, so in Pomegranate, Renita Atwater tells her story of getting out of Oak Hills prison after a four-year bid for opiate possession and trying to stay clean, repair her relationships with her kids, own her love for the woman on the inside who's helped to inspire her, and grapple to accept and tell her full and complex story. And Renita's voice is intercut with that of a third-person narrator who brings alive the history, revealing some of the pivotal moments in Renita's life at Oak Hills and during her growing up that inform her present tense journey. So I'm going to read from three parts of the novel tonight an excerpt with a little skipping around from the first chapter and then a chapter from the middle of the book and then the preface. So kind of moving backwards. And I'm going to talk a little bit between and around what I read to give a bit of framework. So here are Renita's opening words. So this is February 2019 when she gets out. I live my life forward and backward. Seems like my body remembers what I can't afford to forget. I'll be carrying on trying to choose right, and then the past comes for me, rumbling from my chest into my shoulders, pushing through my neck and up into my head. I try and answer its call, own where all I've been. Remember, even when forgetting, feels like the only mercy. Four years of captivity, and here I sit on this hard plastic chair surrounded by cinderblock about to leave Oak Hills, waiting to be thrown back to the world, and I cannot get still. My knees jackhammer, my feet tap. They got wills of their own. My interlocking fingers steeple and flatten and steeple. I try and empty my mind, but my Oak Hills life thunders to the surface and flashes before me like those shifting pieces of colored glass in the tin kaleidoscope I had when I was six. Damn, really? On my out day, which is stressful enough. I choose a pomegranate and try to see myself holding it, broken open in my hands. Lathery skin, pointy stock, jeweled seeds. And I can just about feel the shape and weight of it again when I hear the shout, did I say you're free to go? And I'm surprised to find myself standing up. I look the overseer in the eye. Why give him a name when all I am is inmate, and reign in my anger as I sit my ass back down. It's true what they say about time slowing down the shorter you get. These last few days of inch by, me hoping and praying I've got it in me to keep doing right. I wait to get back the belongings I came in with, wondering what my stuff will look like to me now. Clothes that no longer fit. Sheet, pleather purse full of what? Lip gloss, suspended license, empty wallet. Two keys that no longer open anything. Dear God, dear power greater than me, whoever, whatever you are, let me prove I deserve to be a mother to Amara and Theo. Let me handle my business, work my program, stay on track, keep away from temptation, avoid the people who can pull me down. In here, meetings give you the fellowship that gets you through and a place to say, to remember you're a human with a story that's got a next chapter. Even if the confessing is excruciating, I'll find a meeting and go every day if I have to. Own being powerless and powerful, choose right. Behind the walls in this concrete desert, everything's regulated and decided for you. All the everyday stuff, the what's and the when's. Wake up and go to child, get your meds, go outside and come back in, take a shower, go to sleep, line up for this, sit down and wait for that. And all those things that on the outside, you do and pay no attention, behind the walls, they're the high points of your day. Makes me feel like that German Shepherd of Jaspers. He named him King and kept him in a chain link corridor. Nobody ever played with him or loved on him. He lived to eat. Buff that floor, scrape those plates, sew labels into these t-shirts, one after another and then some more. And sew American flags for the folks who hate your kind to jab you with. Improve yourself with classes and groups. All day long you're told what and when and how and the cost of defiance too. And you hear the echoes of ancestors whispering that though the best chance of survival may be submission, that could also be the death of you. And love, affection, touch, the stuff that makes your heart keep beating, contraband. Now who I ask can keep alive that way. Nothing much grows in here unless you go hard against the script. To keep alive you gotta choose what you can, small though it may seem. Imagine yourself past the razor wire. Notice those trees and birds way in the distance. Look at the sky and picture it whole. You gotta see yourself free from the demon that rides you, believing something new, something clean can happen after all. Behind the walls, nothing small. And choosing, it's something precious and it means life just might have some mystery in store for you. I choose you Maxine once told me and you're against the rules. Yesterday at the end of my little leaving party, I stood there as she left the day room before me. All of my well-wishers were there. Gwen and her latest boo, Avis crocheting her endless blanket, El Dora and the family she builds and mothers in here. Even my new Sally Keisha came though she still thinks she can do her time solo. We ate the makeshift treats and canteen snacks. They all chipped in and everyone said what they'd do if it was them getting out. And when it was over, I watched Maxine's proud upright back fade away. Tender, tough Maxine, along with her free world walk and the way she breaks down the politics of just about everything 24 seven, her ink and her no nonsense way and her legal know-how. There's a world of other stuff inside. She can talk up pomegranates and make me taste them. She can conjure grass or clouds or cornfields, tell Chesapeake River banks and make me feel the current and the muddy floor. I wanted to run after her, call out to her, touch her. I love that back. That's what I was thinking. It's moles and scars, it's tats, it's defiant pride no matter what she's been through. Like most of us in here, the only sleep she knows is broken. Last night in my cell with the card everyone signed and the little in spite of gifts from the leaving party, so sweet and painful. I sat in my cell with the card everyone signed and the little in spite of gifts from the leaving party, so sweet and painful and started counting down the last bit of time I owed. And I'm skipping forward just a little bit. I gathered up my worldly possessions, starting a pile on my bunk, laid out my second string beater sneakers, t-shirt socks, two of the unsexiest bras you ever saw and a week's worth of high-waisted gray cotton underwear you can't really call panties. Comb and hair grease, wounded dictionary. I unfolded the loose leaf paper Eldora pushed into my hand today and my eyes teared up as I looked at what she'd shared with me from last summer's garden plot. Though she had so little to spare, pale discs from her bell peppers and zucchini seeds smooth and eye-shaped. I'd already returned everything I'd borrowed from the donated library that made up the one cubic foot of reading and writing material allowed and passed on my flip-top tuna and ramen noodles, traded envelopes and paper for extra socks, put aside my extra toilet paper for Keisha along with the little bars of soap that made me itchy and ashy, tossed my shower flip-flops and that was it, what I had to show for my Oak Hills life. I was already wearing my good sneakers, my thermals and the windbreaker that passes for a winter coat. Looking at my list of Boston area NA meetings before adding them to the pile, I tried not to be cynical about the names, Freedom Express, Clean and Proud, The Solution, South End Miracles. I read through the affirmations I put on index cards remembering how embarrassed I was at first by their corniness, certain that Jasper was having a good laugh at them at me from the afterlife. The cards and letters and artwork from Amara and Theo, the program from Daddy's funeral service and the kites Maxine's left for me over the last two and a half years. I keep that cash inside the Bible a missionary prison volunteer gave me. The little paper messages that gave me and Maxine another way of touching and added some mystery and discovery to a world of regulations and taboos. No sacred space in here except the ones we create, we may do and left them behind the dayroom microwave where even if they were found, they could not be tied to us. Milagros, to be added to the free things list we make out loud and the one I keep on my own. Maxine got me plugged into recognizing and naming the things that cost nothing and don't depend on permission, the things available to everyone, present and past tense, future too, one hopes. The smell of new cut grass, skipping stones, a curl of white birch bark, eyelash kisses, reading, looking, walking, even if it's only round and round the yard. And then this last piece, short piece. Heart sick at losing Maxine as I gained my freedom, I tried to focus on the blessing of having been with her at all. And then I named what I was grateful for, moving from macro to micro. I had someone who'd loved me right, people on the outside who'd never stopped showing up, children I could still earn back, 1,159 clean days, but who's counting? And a novel I'd just finished reading that was echoing through me. Trees that would soon be in reach and the photo of Amara torn down the middle by a shaked down boot heel had survived. I had mended it and here it was on the pile right beside me. Okay, so in this novel, I wanted to examine experience as generational historical contemporary that had been wounding and also to depict forces that had been sustaining and healing. And as the framework for Renita's journey is the emotional and psychological toll of this society's retributive, carceral and criminal legal systems, I wanted to make readers feel the dehumanization and deprivation that Renita and her fellow imprisoned women experience. I wanted to show how addiction and trauma and sexual violence paved the way to imprisonment. And I wanted to connect the trauma of incarceration to this society's history of enslavement, its convict leasing and Jim Crow systems, its racial terrorism, sharecropping and exploitation through forced and unpaid and low wage labor. And also, I wanted to show the spirit of resistance that is healing, empowering and ongoing and that is a fundamental aspect of the story of black survival in this country and throughout the diaspora. The forces of collective action, kinship, imagination, connectedness, nature, creative expression, love have always inspired us to make a way out of no way. For the second excerpt, I'm gonna read a chapter, one that is necessarily painful from about halfway through the novel. And this now is in the third person narrator's voice and it flashes back to a visit Renita's father makes with her children to Oak Hills when she has been locked up for a year. Okay, so this is 2016 at Oak Hills. They listened for their names, visualized their people coming through the trap, bargained with their higher powers. Today, God willing, they would get a visit. If they heard their names, they answered with relief and often tears. If they didn't, there was another absence to add to all the others as they receded further and further from the free world. Renita felt blessed, her family was coming. She focused on her little bit of forward motion and even with what would follow, she couldn't wait to be with them a year in and clean. Back at the jail, post arrest, her father had been two feet away and unreachable on the other side of the glass that was magnifier and mirror. She'd watched him mouthing words she couldn't hear until she pointed to the phone she was holding and the one beside him. Before he left like everyone else, she had pressed her hand to the glass and he'd done the same. How well she knew that palm that was nearly twice the size of hers and oil stained. When she moved hers away, obeying the order to return to herself and his lingered on the glass, she had choked back sobs. At Oak Hills, the glass partition was gone, but she knew the passage through the trap was still a trial. If he made it there after the hour and a half drive, he'd be sitting with Amara and Theo along with all the other expectant families waiting to be called. Marooned on the waiting room pews, worn out elders tried to keep control of the kids they had in tow. Dressed in matching outfits, boys and navy and girls in pink, hair freshly done and skin lotion, they chased each other round and round until a frown from a guard or a warning from a grandma brought them in line. Want me to tell your mama how you're acting? Why couldn't they just sit quietly? The elders shook their heads and tried to get ready for the metal detector and the stamp, the heartbreak and the inexplicable situation in which they found themselves. The making do and acting happy and all the questions they were so unequipped to answer. Too much to manage and not enough help or time or money or energy or thanks. Kids who would not obey, pressing with their whys and them, aunties, grandmas left to deal with it. No good explanation for why mama had been taking way up here, why she was gone again. No good explanation for any of it. When would they get there and why did the bus ride take so long? Why did the bathroom smell that way and have no toilet paper? Why were there no toys to play with? Why did they search the youngest one's diaper? Why didn't the man in blue ever speak to them even to answer their highs? Why was mama living so far away? Why did they have to wait so long? How could they explain any of it and how could they unravel why sometimes, even though you came all the way up there on the bus because the car needed fixing or was taking someone else to work and you'd done each and everything correctly, abiding by the rules for dressing and touching and talking and being. They called a code 99 and locked the place down and you turn around and went home without any good explanation of why they couldn't see mama that month because they answered, just because. Matter of fact, they had questions of their own. They'd like to ask why anyone thought it was a good idea to degrade and shame parents in front of their children, to separate them and punish them and why their children's glistening and newly braided hair was seen only as a way to smuggle contraband. They'd like to ask who after all would wanna keep people locked up for a living? I'd rather be on unemployment, they thought. I'd rather be on welfare for the rest of my goddamn life. Look at that one over there behind the plexiglass and the counter now, thinking he's something other than a slave. They might have had no choice about doing as they'd been ordered, but they could decide to never ever give the guards the satisfaction of looking them in the eye. After Lennox had surrendered his driver license and produced the kid's birth certificates and proof of guardianship, he put their outer layers of clothing along with his watch, wallet, eyeglasses, and a phone in a locker and deposited a quarter in exchange for a little orange key. Wait, he said, gently pulling Amara back to remove her barrettes and then opening the locker to add them and get another coin. Jesse was still talking about the blow of having to surrender her gold chain with the praying hands pendant to a CO's custody after she'd made it into the trap. They found seats beside another family while a drug detection dog walked past, sniffing at their legs. Most of those who sat waiting knew the dog would not stop at them. There was nothing to detect. Still, they couldn't help tumbling back to the lurking ambush of the countryside and the stop and frisk terror of the city, and it never ceased to unnerve the knowledge that they could suddenly, disastrously run afoul of the law, which had never meant to serve or protect them. At last month's visit when five-year-old Theo had reached out to pet the dog, the guard had cut him off with a cold knife edge, no touching, he's working, and Theo had cried. He hadn't stopped mentioning their abuque and today he clung to Lennox's arm as man and dog walked by. All around them restless and nervous kids goofed, argued, wove in and out of the benches, but instead of pinging around with the restless energy, Amara and Theo sat motionless and deflated. When Lennox smiled at the three stair step kids beside him, the toddler hit her face in her grandma's sleeve. The middle one smiled and pointed to her, missing front teeth, and the eldest said, hi, mister, their mama locked up too. Grandma apologized, pulling him closer and launched into what she told them on the bus about how to act. And then they were called and she was getting to her feet, pulling her string of little ones along. Why can't they call us Amara ass with sudden sullen sadness? Again and again, Lennox looked at his wrist, though the only thing to see was a pale band of freckled brown skin. He pulled the lacquer key from his pocket and put it back three times. The slacks and buttoned down he wore whenever he was not at work, were well within the rules. But he looked at the dress code, posted on the wall in English and Spanish, for men. No blue denim pants, no cargo pants, no double layered clothing, no sweatsuits, no hooded sweatshirts or jackets, no t-shirts, no pockets with holes. It was more challenging for women, as Jessie had found. She'd been turned away once for excessive pockets. No skirts with slits, no skirts more than three inches above the knee, no shorts, no skirts. What in God's name was a sport, he'd asked her. No tank tops, no halter tops, no scarves, no low cut tops, no form fitting stretch pants, no bathing suits. Another question for his sister, who would wear a bathing suit to the penitentiary? No sheer clothing with or without a bra. At her first visit, Jessie's underwire bra had set off the metal detector and she'd been taken to a little room for a pat down search at the hands of a stone face stranger. After standing with her arms outstretched, pulling the wire away from her rib cage and her waistband from her belly, lifting the bottoms of her feet while trying to balance on one leg, like a ridiculous flamingo, stuck in the least exotic of places, she had come braless in a pullover that was roomy enough to hide the evidence of her drooping middle-aged breasts, but not too baggy to prevent entry. When their turn finally came, the heavy metal door rattled open and shot behind Lennox and the kids, and they were taking off their shoes and putting them in a bin, turning out their pockets, getting the blacklight stamps on their wrists, and walking through the metal detector archway. Through it all, Lennox stood tall and looked past the cold dismissive glances of the guards who puffed out their chests with self-importance and shook their heads at the failure of his family, his people. He answered the question on the clipboard he was handed, have you ever been convicted of a crime? Writing a big, bold, uppercase no. Coming through the buzzing gates with a child by each hand, he moved toward visitation, looking down at their feet and their three gleaming shadows on the buffed linoleum floor, 14, 15, 16 steps and 23 to go until the next door, a right turn and then 12 more. Now sitting for the final wait, he watched the door. As soon as she entered the room, Renita heard the voices of children and saw the mothers, grandmas, aunties and sisters who sat with them and the few men who stood out like trees on the prairie. There was daddy sitting with her babies who were almost too beautiful to bear. Kids chattered and jumped around, trying hard to entertain themselves with out-of-date highlights magazines and a few worn or disabled toys, a truck with three wheels, a doll with matted blonde hair and sightless blue eyes. They argued and complained, this one hit me, that one teased me, this one took my seat. A boy stood apart, arms folded and tucked to his body, silent and wary of his disappearing, reappearing mom. A toddler dressed in the denim and timberlands of a miniature man, stiffened in his mother's insistent hug. A family played gin rummy with a deck of limp cards. The Oak Hills women ached for these visits, proof that life and love go on. And once they came, there weren't sure they could endure the stilted positivity. The walls with their fake wood paneling seemed to close in and the cheerful posters of panda bears and smarmy memes mocked. The lit up soda and junk food machines enticed only to overcharge and disappoint. And the overseers looked on with pity and indifference. Still, there were miracles, the hugs for bodies craving touch, the loving faces returned to them briefly, smiling in spite of the mournful mood. A mother played peek-a-boo over and over, glowing at how she could make her baby smile. A couple stared with hope and longing into each other's eyes as they claimed this now. Trying to refuse the blank, surveillance eyes of holstered guards that ravaged every intimacy, Renita made her way to the children who sat eerily quiet and the father who was still showing up for her, nodding and saying afternoon to those she passed as she heard Lenitz's voice inside her head. We speak to each other wherever we are. It binds us. It says we're people, whatever they think or say or do. She gave her father a quick squeeze and a kiss and then squatted down to Theo's height and tried to put her arms around both kids. Amara's arms hung limp and Theo reached for her, then pulled away. As soon as they sat down, the visit started slipping through her fingers. They just arrived and her first thought was how long until they had to go. How you doing, Renita, Lenitz asked and she answered, fine, I'm doing fine. They'd always been good at talking without going anywhere painful. How have you been keeping busy, Lenitz asked? Hmm, I've been reading again. It seems to help and crocheting. She asked about school and after school and the neighborhood kids, but every try at conversation, light-hearted or probing, fizzled. She sent them to the vending machine she wasn't allowed to use, hoping her father would say something real about how they were doing, but he just sat between the chairs they had vacated, looking morose. She knew his credo, keep on providing, keep on loving. How did you talk about a thing like prison without making things worse? You feeling good, mama, Amara asked, seeming older than her 10 years when the kids were back at the table and digging into the snacks. Resisting the urge to promise that this time she'd conquer it, this time her recovery would take, she said she was working hard at being well. Looking over at the photographer who was setting up, Renita asked cheerfully, wanna take a photo, the four of us? No one spoke or moved. She saw her father look over at the backdrop of turquoise water and palm trees, and then at the door. Renita had seen other mothers showing their photos around and she wanted one too. Notting at the family, getting a picture taken, she said, look at them. Seems like it's a good thing, doesn't it? We can both have a copy and that way we'll be able to see us all together anytime we want. We'll be seeing the same thing, maybe even at the same time. Amara and Thea looked at each other. Lennox said, you all go on then, let it be the three of you. And when Renita stood the kids did, the kids did too, walking with her to wait their turn. Renita paid for two copies, or her father did, since it was his money on her books. And when their turn came, they arranged themselves in front of the 2D beach. Her on one knee, with her right arm around Theo, and Amara on her left, almost touching her. When she held one of the copies out to her father, he shook his head and said, I'd prefer a different reference point. She put it on the table in front of him, hoping he changes mind and sat back down to look at herself with her children frozen now in time. The air felt thick and heavy, and they tried for goodwill, but it was a carcass pick clean. They'd gotten Doritos and candy and soda from the vending machine, taken a photo, exhausted their news and their pretenses. And Renita wished she had things to share, but she was on pause from life. What could she tell them? She stood for count at six o'clock, 11 to 15, 430 and 930. She'd gone to Chow, watched a spades game, and listened to stories about plants with tap roots, and watched women sneak affection in the day room. Buff the floor, gone to Chow twice more, cried herself to sleep with regret and loneliness. She was story poor. They sat silently across from each other, running out the clock. And then leaning across the table to take their hands, Renita went somewhere she knew wasn't missed as she opened her mouth. I hate to see you leave when you're gone. I miss you so bad. Amara, she saw Amara's face hardening, but she couldn't seem to stop talking. I picture you at the house or at school or playing out back. She saw Amara balling up her fist but kept going. And it's so tough being away from you. Sometimes I feel like my heart's breaking. And that was it. Amara blew. What about us, mama? Renita felt the faint spray of her daughter's spit on her face as she shouted. It's like we're locked up too. Her cries shook her skinny 10 year old body. And Renita looked over at the CO standing on the wall and was flooded with shame. He watched but registered no compassion, no mercy, no regard at all. As Renita got up and went to her daughter and took her in her arms. And Theo buried his face in his grandpa's side, asking granddaddy, why can't mom come home with us? When the tears subsided and Renita went back to her chair, Amara slid the photo closer and stared at it before saying, you'll get better, mama. I know you will. Renita felt the last minutes of what she'd prayed for expire with mourning and relief. And just before the time was up, she couldn't help asking when you think you'll come again. She watched them disappear from view and now it was time to pay for her good fortune and prove the body's innocence. Herded into a private room, those lucky enough to have had a visit, faced three COs, one a female who'd been detailed there for the protection of the women inside. You know the routine she said with icy detachment, making clear in case they missed it that the whole thing meant less than nothing to her. They did know the routine. They learned it after every visit in the search for serious contraband, returning from the funeral, the hospital, a trip to court, and whenever some CO felt like it. With no choice but survival, they stripped like they had so many times, looking straight ahead and looking back to all the other takings embedded in their cells. Human cargo passages and auction block appraisals, escapes and captures, rapes and other unrecorded conquests, lynching to entertain others and warn their kind, chain gangs and coffin cells, fire hoses and dog whistles and flaming crosses, police on the other side of the gun and on their necks. They handed their clothes over for inspection, burying the bodies that had kept track of their mishaps and hurtings, of the accidents and want and illness and aggression that had left their marks, along with the things they chose to say in dark blue ballpoint ink. Their flesh said, here's where I fell off my bike, where I scraped myself climbing that fence, where my adolescent back knee bloomed. This is from my C-section with my firstborn, and here's the mark from fighting off that Klansman CO. Here's the cigarette burn my ex gave me to remember him when I tried to get free. Here are the traces of the tracks I used to hide, and this is my first boyfriend's name, inked half my life ago. The fat around my middle is the story of canteen chips and empty calories of salt and starch and sugar that have passed for nourishment inside the walls. And this is where I muscled up, lifting and planking to defend myself and fill the time. Here's what my bodies got to say about the days and months and years spent where doctors and dentists and fresh air and sunlight have been in short supply. They spread their feet apart, lifted each one to show the soul, wiggled their toes, leaned forward and shook out their hair, folded each ear forward, tilted their heads back to expose the nostrils, opened their mouths wide, lifted their tongues, rolled their top and bottom lips, raised both arms, lifted their breasts and their fat rolls, pulled their any belly buttons open, rang their fingers through their pubes and spread their pussies, squatted, coughed three times, turned around, bent over, spread their ass cheeks, coughed again three times. They tried to go elsewhere, concentrated on the doorway, bit their cheeks, but they could feel the inside wounds, the tally kept from the punishments, the things they had been named and deemed, the ways they had tried and fallen short, from the poisons in their blood and lungs that had seemed like liberation, from the ones who broke and entered using kinship and prayer as passwords, from the daily wound of being reckoned less than human, the toll of being thrown away like trash. Silently they chanted, this is my body, it is still here and it is still mine and it is known worse than this along with its portion of pleasure and kindness and love. It was mine, it is mine, it will be mine, but it is also just a body and I can leave it and go past hurt, past feeling, past anything you can do to be in here today. Okay, I know that was a lot. So, you know, in that chapter, we feel the pain of historical, generational and interpersonal violence, echoing in the bodies and the souls of the characters. And we also feel this struggle to be human and complex and defiant and hopeful and loving within the context of oppressive state authority. I'm not gonna leave you there though. With the last short excerpt, I'm gonna give you some of the hope and the possibility that are threaded through Renita's journey of healing and self-acceptance and autonomy. So, in forming Renita's addiction are the ravages of her experience and her cultural inheritance and yet the generative resources around and within her can be discovered and retrieved. So, here I'm gonna read the preface which gives you the framework for the novel. This is just two pages. Mama was gone and not gone. She had disappeared into the hospital while Renita was at school getting tamed and stuffed with facts and equations. And there she lay immobilized by tubes and wires. Renita had stood beside her hospital bed watching the blue ventilator bag fill in empty trying to understand how Geneva Atwater had been felled by something as tiny as a blood clot. She had seen her dying. And after the mourners filed past Renita at the weight grateful for the phrase that helped them navigate the sudden woe, sorry, so sorry, so sorry for your loss. She had stood beside the coffin and stared at her mother lying in its white satin folds like a parody of a fancy gift box display. The shiny wig Daddy knew she would have wanted low on her forehead like a helmet, skin waxy and mouth pressed shut, eyes closed to her for good now. She had seen her dead but she heard her mother's voice in the back door alcove at the table in the basement. And now she would never please her never tell her what she was keeping inside. Never love her more than she feared her. A month after the funeral, she sat across from Aunty Jessie picking at one of the casseroles the church ladies kept bringing. She'd brought a book to the table which had never been allowed but there were fewer shouts and shout knots now that Jessie had joined Daddy at the house until things eased up. He stretched out work as long as possible and escaped to go fishing on the weekends and both he and Jessie tried to stave off the bloated gloom with food, encyclopedia facts, artificial cheer. Neither one talked about Geneva, neither one asked Renita about her sadness and what hurt kept haunting. This was the family way, sorry, and what hurt kept haunting like a hungry ghost. She heard the front door open and close and there was Daddy in the archway smiling like a moonlighting jester. Chuckling from his belly like he was launching a magic trick, he pulled the dennored orb from a brown paper bag and Renita told herself to smile. She'd seen photos and drawings of pomegranates but not a real one. Where'd you get that, she asked, more edgy than she intended and his smile wobbled. She'd seen photos and drawings of pomegranates but not a real one. Ah, sorry, this is my place. Your birthday getting lost in the shuffle and whatnot I thought he began. She looked away, eclipsed was more like it. He put the fruit in her hands. There's no making up for what's past but this here it's got some surprising and wonderful news buried just inside. Expecting a whole lot of nothing, her fingers studied the scratched and ordinary skin. He said they should wait to open it. Sometimes waiting made things better. You hungry lunatics, Aunty Jessie asked, getting him a plate and listening as he told about the engine repairs and paint restorations that had filled his day. She kept him chattering while Renita muted their voices in her head, turning the pomegranate to take in its flat and faded spots, pressing on the sharp crown at the top. And when she was about to get up and wait on something else, he said, let's open it. Renita peeled back the rind and pried the bloodshot gems from the spongy membrane that held the whole thing together. She was struck silent, awed by the wild design of it and by the little bursts of sour sweet juice from the seeds that turned her fingers red. There was a whole world, strange and crazy beautiful underneath the skin, layer on crooked layer of ruby crystals and chambers like inside a heart. So, to wrap up, so we are all left to grapple with the echoing losses of our lives, but our bodies and our vision and our voices can be reclaimed in our hearts, alongside the losses, our abundance and possibility and the beauty around and within and between us, the gifts we've been given, the free things all belong to us. And we may find our hands filled, perhaps through memory and imagination with what we need. And it may be something every day or seemingly small or ordinary on the outside and wondrous within. Thank you. I guess we... I'm trying to find some support. I can hold it, you can hold it, that's great. All right, so I guess Ruth is gonna leave us in some questions, in the questions and answers. That was wonderful. I wanna say that I read this maybe a year ago. Yeah, the galley. And I really, hearing it read, I remembered the detail, the exquisite detail and the way every sentence weighs a lot, every sentence matters. And now I have to read it again. Oh, thank you. It's really beautiful. Thank you. It's true. I'm supposed to do, ask you to put your questions to this wonderful woman and she will answer them, probably. I will try. She will try. I just learned, or I just remembered really, with the Rosh Hashanah celebrations that you're supposed to eat pomegranates at Jewish New Year, that it's a symbol of the New Year, which makes it another layer of meaning to this title. It's lovely. Yeah. Do you want me to talk about that a little? Sure. Okay. About the pomegranates. Well, because people, that's often a question I get why pomegranates are. And I guess that, so I began with pomegranates because a friend of mine who was incarcerated told me that she thought of a pomegranate as representing the rare and precious act of choosing when you're incarcerated. And so that was, this story has had different iterations. It was originally part of a longer novel, about 10 people who are incarcerated. And then I gave up on that and pulled Renita's story. She was one of those characters out of that and developed her own novel from that. But so that's what I started with. But then I think as writers we have seeds that we begin with and then we work and revise and certain things gather meaning and become thematic concerns in ways that we didn't necessarily anticipate. So it came to suggest this idea of the heart and holding in it all the things that you are, all the things you've been and done, all the things that have been done to and for you. And that as Renita moves toward accepting her full story, the losses, the missteps along with everything else, she comes to see her experience that way and her heart that way. And that you need everything you have been and done for your full story. So and then it's all of the mythic significance it has cross-culturally, symbol of prosperity and fertility. And so it has- And beginnings. And beginnings. And beginnings, yeah, with the New Year. So those are some of the things that it came to represent over the course of the book. So it became to be the central sort of symbol. I want to just say a word about one of the characters in this book because I've read all of Ellen's work and she always does, she always has one of these characters. It's Maxine in this book. A wise person who knows how to cut through the dehumanization of the modern corporate world basically. And to remind herself and to remind the ones that she loves about what matters and where meaning in here is in life. And Helen always manages to create such a character. And those are my favorite characters. And Maxine is the one in this one. She's wonderful. Yeah, I'm gonna read Maxine especially. Yeah, she is powerful. Yeah, she's an instrumental in Rene's healing. It's unusual to have a novel that's focused on incarcerated women. Yes. And so I guess my low-hanging group question is what made you decide to bring some humanity to this population? Did you hear it? Yeah, we're supposed to say. Yeah, why do I write about incarceration again? Yeah, why write about incarcerated women? Yeah, well, my father planted the seed, I think for this book and me in my growing up, he was a criminal defense lawyer his whole professional life. And he imparted certain understandings to me. I mean, some of them were that everybody's life is complicated and worth seeing and hearing about. And not a lot of us grow up without full opportunities and choices and justice is a fiction for some of us. And I think those sort of politics were what drove him to do the work he did. So he gave me those understandings, but also because the people that he represented were not invisible or other to me, they were part of our community. That was the understanding I got. And he also gave me a sense, both my parents did, that I had a responsibility to use the access and the privilege that I had to speak about what mattered. So I guess I'd always wanted to write something about incarceration. And so I started volunteering first at a county house of correction for a year on an experimental therapeutic unit. And that tended to be, that was man, they'd been in and out. So this was South Bay where you serve up to two and a half years. So there'd been a revolving door, addiction at the root of a lot of people's lives. And they'd been in and out and in and out. And the idea was what could we create, what kind of unit could we create that would interrupt that cycle. And so I volunteered along with a lot of other people. There was someone who taught Shakespeare. They did the family. And there were people who taught meditation and life skills. And I did a little storytelling. I'm not sure you could really call it writing exactly because the literacy levels really varied. And they were not all English speakers. But they were workshops to get people thinking about what had mattered in their lives and to try to begin to tell stories about that. And then I got into, I was able, it was hard to find places that would let me volunteer because prisons don't want writers to come in and then write an expose. So it was a little bit challenging to get in. But then I spent many, many years, 50, 17 years going to Bay State. And that was a medium security prison for men. And then after some years of going and doing, it was a little bit more writing oriented but still storytelling really. And I was one of many volunteers who went to do whatever it is they did in their life to bring that, come and teach philosophy or talk about science or whatever. And then I was with Penn New England, I helped start a more formal organized creative writing program. And that ran for eight years at that prison in it. Middlesex, which was a pre-release facility related to Framingham, the women's prison. So those are some of the, I've taught in some other contexts too but those were the experiences that really, I drew on and that really formed me. And when I started going, I wasn't really sure what shape it would take or what would it be, stories or a novel or what I really didn't know but I just listened for a couple of years. And then the characters began to take shape and that first novel that was called Life Without, that was five women and five men. So I was actually interested in both. And then I wasn't able to get that book into the world and then I pulled from it and decided that Renata had a fuller story. So I had like the armature for the story from the way she was one of these characters threaded through that earlier book. But fleshed it out, it changed a lot over the five years of writing it again. And you really do get a sense from reading the book of what it's like to be in jail. I mean, I thought it was very, I mean, it was very interesting because daily life came alive. Yeah, and just, and disturbing. I know that sometimes just reading that, writing it was hard and reading it was the chapter that I just read. But I guess, I mean to disturb you. I mean, if over two million people live like that and we could hear about it and imagine it. But it is difficult territory, I will say that. That's the hardest chapter I've ever read, which is, yeah. Yes. I wonder if you would say a little bit about the, I write, sometimes I write about the sad things, I find any kind of writing agonizing that I've been thinking about writing dessert. So it's a devastating scene to write. I just can't imagine what you would do with it. How do you try to get yourself in there if you associate entirely with it? Is it more smart or is it like what you're most like? I don't know how I could get myself to be enough to like, do a couple hours of writing. Yeah. I'm wondering, it's really hard stuff. Yeah. How do you get it out? So the question is, how do you prepare yourself to write? How do you get into the mood? How do you, is that right? For the hardest parts. For the hard parts. How do you write the difficult parts? Right. But this is hard for me to imagine how I would, how I would do that. Yeah. When I first started like working on that earlier novel, Life Without My Sound was really little and I did find, I found it hard because I wanted to, you know, be this positive force for him. And so I think that, I struggled with it in those early days a little bit, but you know, he's grown now. I don't know, it's, I mean, writing is, I think if it's what you do, then you commit to it and you have it. And part of what allows you to go the difficult places and also deal with just the uncertainty and doubt of writing, which is horrible. You know, it's pretty horrible to fathom. It's by having a practice, you know. So I think I have a, I have a, and it's not a, it has evolved into something not too complicated. I sit down and I work, you know. And I do that before I do anything else. You know, in the day, and I try to do that every day, if I'm teaching it, it becomes more difficult. And in terms of emotional difficulty, I think you draw on what you know about those pain, about pain and difficulty, about, you know, I haven't been through this experience, but I know some things about violation, you know. And being wounded and the difficulty of coming to terms with that and facing that. So, you know, it's tough, but you pull on your own experience. I don't know, I put my head down on the table and cried sometimes when I was ready. You know, that's the, that section. And I think, I don't know, there's a lot of things that Renita goes through. You know, the childhood experiences are some of her, her trauma too that she's coming to terms with and some of the love relationships she's had, you know. And some, I realized as I was writing her, her relationship with Jasper, you know, I used what I knew of that too. And those were probably, maybe because the parallels were so direct because I do know something about settling or letting oneself be mistreated or, you know, remaining silent or, you know, not standing up for yourself or wanting so, you know, to be loved that you give yourself away. So, you know, I was pulling on all of those things and that was, those were really painful. But I don't know, it was probably therapeutic too. It was hard. It was hard. I don't think there's any. Writing is really hard, you know, every time you do it and if you're going somewhere difficult it's easy. But, you know, like Dorothy Allison says, if you aren't terrified, then you're not doing anything on the page, you know. So, I don't know. It's, I think you commit for me anyway. I commit to it. I have a practice and I just understand that being rocked by is going to be part of the territory. Yes. You kind of talked a little bit already about the trauma and the kind of embodied trauma that Maria has to go through. I'm curious how you differentiate in your writing the external reality and the external struggles like incarceration and social injustice and then things that are generational and embodied and felt and kind of persistent just through her lived experience. Yeah. I guess it's all connected. I mean, I think we live it in that connected way and for her it's, you know, it's all connected. I mean, it's some, you know, the mother trauma being emotionally invalidated by her mother sort of, there's a kind of erasure that goes on, you know. That is, and then she, well, I don't want to give up a story away but other, you know, child of trauma she experiences that can, the addiction is about, is a sane response, right? In fact, you know, to that, to those experiences and so the need for oblivion or to be, you know, soothed. So, and then, you know, it's the addiction that leads her to incarceration. So it's all, you know, it's all connected like in her story, plot-wise or emotionally and psychologically but it's connected for all of us I think, you know. And that's, I think that's the other idea about the pomegranate heart, you know, is that it's all, it's all in there. It's all part of, part of, you know, who you are. When she, she has to go to psychotherapy because that's mandated for family reunification. So, and then she makes this journey as she becomes to trust this psych, black gay psychotherapist and there's a bond between them and she says to him once she's finally been able to speak some of the things she's never told that have happened to her, you know. It's never gonna go away and he's like, no, no, that's, it's not, it's part of you, part of you, but you can live out, you know, differently with respect to it or it can play a different role, you know, in the way that you live. And so, you know, I guess talking circularly a bit but I think it's, it's all connected, all the different things that happen all in the heart, all part of you. And if interrogated and examined and, you know, worked through, you can, those things can play a different role, you know, but they're there, part of your story always. There's a lot of seeds in that pomegranate. Yeah, yeah, there are, there are. Yeah. Hey, I'm Stephen, Stephen. This is a joyous question because I wanted to give you the occasion to go there. Okay, thank you. But you can, you can dodge the question if you want to, but this book is so much about containment. I mean, the joy of the inside of the pomegranate is contained in the crusty outside, which is contained in the occasion of this appearance. And Renita's problems is what's going on inside her body but then her body is, then that's contained within her body, but her body is being in the family and a prison and then the prison is contained in that structure of laws and then it turns into a story about stories within stories. So all these containments and incarceration becomes a really complicated metaphor. I guess my question is you've worked with so many people for whom incarceration is not a metaphor, but a fact. Yeah, yeah. Do you ask their permission? How do you? Yeah, well, when I started with the people I volunteered with, I was honest that I was going to write, but I was writing something and they read some of the stories, some of the stories that were part of life without were published and they read some of those and I, yes, I did, I was honest about it. I didn't want it, you know, I wanted to earn the story as because I hadn't had those direct experiences and did not feel appropriative or. Show them pieces? Yeah, I showed them some pieces, yeah. So I'm not sure in terms of a containment though. I'm not sure, that's an interesting idea of like sort of concentric circles or something and that's what our lives are like, like a widening out and I would say intersecting, I guess, all of it connecting up as well. I don't know, did I answer your question? Yeah, I didn't mean to pry. Yeah, no, no, that's fine. There are people for whom it's not a metaphor. Yeah. It's such a beautiful metaphor in the book, but. Well, I hope it doesn't feel like a metaphor when you read it. I mean, I think that's the power of fiction is that it opens up the emotional and live experience of the character. So I mean, I think there's so much powerful work, social science work and, you know, I don't know, anthropological work and data about incarceration, but what gets you to experience the realness is fiction and so that's what I thought my contribution could be. So I certainly hope it doesn't feel like a metaphor is one of the tools a writer has to make that lived experience hit home, you know, but I hope it doesn't feel like that when you're reading. That one there's praise. What? I meant it as praise. Oh, yeah, okay, well, you know, poet, so. Yeah, but you know what I mean, the metaphor is in service to, you know. Live reality. Yeah, to the way that you receive, you know, the story and the way that you're hopefully and expanded by the story. Michelle. Thank you, Alan. I just want to ask where do you meet so many times before the pitch that I hear you read I get a different view on that amazing story. And that question that you think that was asked is because on the flip side of that, there's this sort of hope. Yeah. And from the inside, we get from reading the guest story, you know, because it's a story about hope. Yeah. I can imagine, you know, it's really incarcerated. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have repeated. Very critical. Thanks, sorry. Alan asked you, you know, have you had a chance to know how they might feel now about how you get out and how they really meet? Yeah. Like your book club on the inside. Yeah. You're putting your book in and probably it's been hopefully better. I have had some people who've been incarcerated at readings and come up to me and say, I don't know, it resonated or it captured, you know, their experience. I was just in Atlanta doing a fundraiser for an organization called, I was there to talk at Emory, but also ended up doing this thing for Mother's Beyond Bars as that organization. And it helps women who actually give birth in prison and then their kids are taken, you know, from them and try to keep the connection between these kids and their mothers going. And they, I was, my publisher donated 50 books in there, giving most of those books to women on the inside. So I mean, hopefully it'll be a way to hear, you know, some feedback. That's neat. Yeah. Yes. Take things in a way that you may not, as you know it's not fictional, but the framing of the book and I mean, even in reading about your experience with incarcerated people does not give a reality that in some way doesn't make it seem fictional. And so how do you, how do you offer your interactions as a source of your inspiration? But how do you kind of allow people to feel that fictional intimacy? You know what I mean? Yeah. Distance themselves. How do you manipulate that? How do you do that? How do you manage to make it real? Yeah. Yeah. But they're not that appropriate. Yeah. I mean, you're sort of like asking, like the core question is, how do you write a story or how do you, how do you, I mean, I think fiction uses, you know, the facts of experience as a jumping off point, you know, and then your job is to imagine, you know, and the writer's job is to imagine lives different than her own, you know, always, I think, and to draw on her own experience and understanding and research, you know, I did the volunteering, I also read a lot and watched films, you know, and there's things like The Marshall Project, which is the biggest clearing house about the criminal legal system and incarceration as it has a website and they have a column life inside where people who are incarcerated write, you know, and you get details and you get, so I guess the goal was, what are the details that are gonna make it ring true, that are gonna make it, you know, and so some of that's having enough details about what daily life is like or there's that kind of thing, there's that kind of, it's like the Flannery O'Connor thing, fiction requires the strictest attention to the real, right, to the concrete, so you have those concrete details, you've done enough research and talked to enough people and, you know, absorbed enough to figure out which things, which details are gonna communicate a sense of realness, right, and then I guess the rest of it though is the emotional psychological realness, so you build characters, you know, and you do that bit by bit, I went through revision and revision and revision and figuring out how somebody is gonna talk and making, I guess, giving the characters complexity and depth, you know, and Renita, for her, you know, she had to have the certain wounds and part of the reasons, you know, that she had to be, had to have experienced some of the trauma she had is because of the data we have about incarceration, so for example, a 2016 Vera Institute of Justice study found that 86% of women incarcerated had experienced sexual violence in their lives and 82% has struggled with addiction with substance use disorder and also almost 80% of incarcerated women or mothers, many of them raising, you know, children on their own, so, you know, I wanted to be true to those realities and so some of the things I, you know, made happen to her were important in that sense, right, and then, you know, just asking, so what are the kind of, you know, what makes a person, you know, make the, I don't wanna say choice exactly, but what drives somebody like Renita toward, you know, addiction and toward, it starts out with Vicodin and pills like that and then in the last experience, it's heroin and that's largely because of the man she gets involved with, you know, what is the psychological, what's the background, what's the make up, what's the life history, you know, that would make her, you know, that would drive her or land her, you know, where she ends up at Oak Hills and then so there's all of that part, but then to make her complex and a real person on the page, she also has to have resources to work with because I want her to have, I believe she will get out and make it, right, I believe she has what it takes, you know, to get her kids back and own her love for Maxine and accept herself and maybe we all will continue to screw up, right, that's what life's like, but that she will continue on her journey of autonomy and healing and self acceptance so, you know, I decided she would be a reader, you know, because books can save us, right, they've been the saving thing in my life, you know, my mother, as my dad gave me those things I mentioned, my mom gave me books to see by, she was a literature professor so I, you know, I'm drawing on my own experience but I also met a lot of incarcerated people for, you know, who kept alive, kept, you know, that way through reading and through knowledge and so then, you know, I asked, well, how does she come to reading and I come up with, for example, that her father gives her encyclopedias and encourages her to be interested in the world and intellectually interested and curious in the world, you know, so those are some resources I give her, she sings, she has stopped singing because of the trauma that has happened to her and so then, you know, but music is a thing and dancing is, I give her enough, you know, things to draw on and pull on that she has a chance and that she's got a family, you know, that stands by her and, you know, has sometimes drawn a line though and that's, you know, something about what it is to love someone who struggles with addiction, you know, so I have some things to draw in, loved ones and family members who struggle with that issue, you know, so I try to do justice to that with the detail, so I could go on and on but I guess I'm trying to illustrate, like you ask yourself as a writer what could have, you have to be curious, I think, about what makes people do what they do, you know, so what could it be that has happened to her that would make her, you know, behave this way and then we're all complicated, you know, not, none of us are whole and undivided so she would, I wanted her to have the complexity of both the, the things that, the things that lead her, Oak Hills but also the things that will help her to survive and then sometimes it's the intervention of somebody like Maxine, you know, and Maxine is, you know, she's wounded but she's fierce and she's also political and she gets, she's able to give Renata a piece, a couple of pieces that she needs for that puzzle to move forward as well, you know, a sort of, they have a kind of, they share kind of black, laboratory politics, right, so she's able to develop that in her and she has a kind of, define, she calls it constructive defiance, you know, way of being in the world like that and so, and an imagination, she says there's an imagination deficit in here, what can we do about that, right, so she kind of awakens or develops that resource in her and then the father, you know, along with the encyclopedias, you know, they grew a garden when she was little and I guess, I think maybe I would say that books and nature, connectedness to nature and its healing properties are the two biggest things she has to draw on so, I don't know, that's, I'm babbling, but you know, I think that's how fiction writers work, you know. I would say that writing the reader, even with your book jacket, more information about your process than maybe we usually have so, the research that you've done, you make that, you know, explicit in some ways through your acknowledgments of the people who have inspired you, so we know you can draw from that and I don't think that's always an explanation that we have, so we just assume perhaps that it's imaginary as opposed to maybe having some roots in the real. Yeah, that's interesting, but yeah, and you know, but I think ultimately, like I was saying about the amount of four, you know, that's in service to making it live, like there, you could do, you could read everything there is about it, about a topic and you could watch every movie and interview people, but you still have to breathe life into the characters on the page and you still have to create a sense of place, you know, and I don't know, some of that's from teaching fiction writing for these 28 years at MIT, you know, but your plot character setting, those are the elements of a story and you know, you have to make that live and you do that in lots of ways, in all those ways, I guess I was describing, so. Yeah, yeah. So I have to say, again, that's absolutely beautiful. I have not read a novel straight through like this, you know, really, really well in time, but one of the things I wanted to ask you about because I felt it as I was invited into the story to read this life, there were moments when I'm like, she's never gonna make, damn, how is this story going, I'm just not making myself from going to the end and reading it, to see it, I can calm my nerves, like she doesn't know me again. So how would you handle those moments when you were telling, in it, how would you hold on to the hope that she then has to find a way to hold on to and get us to the end and I didn't cheat, I swear to God, I didn't cheat. I let myself go all the way to the end. No, that's beautiful. And the anxious moments of thinking it wasn't over yet. That's great, because what you said means the most to me because that means that you cared about her, that I made her a person and you cared, right, and that's the, I've done my job, you know, but I knew she, I wanted, I knew, so it wasn't a mystery to me, but I had to, I knew how I wanted, was gonna end up, you know, but I think what, so suspense is, you create suspense with holding of information, right? So I think there's, I mean, I had to have her make some stumbles, right? She has a couple of stumbles and is always within herself in this sort of, you know, war dilemma or, you know, struggling to be her best self, like we all are. But the world doesn't make it easy for her. Yeah, well, and I, so that was important to show how hard it was, you know, to show all the different stumbles. But then, one of my students said that it was a lot of, it was very painful, all the, you know, back, the historical stuff that, you know, the third person narrator delivers, but that she always felt hope. And so, you know, I guess I tried to have, even when she's in the struggles, you know, about whether to use or, you know, encountering the man she had, who had gotten her using heroin and then how to, you know, keeping him at bay or dealing with all the pitfalls and maybe forgiving herself and opening up to the therapist. There are all these challenges, you know, that she, I wanted, so I guess I tried to show her struggling with them and the emotional complex, the psychological complexity of that. And then in terms of plotting, I think, you know, you keep the reader hooked by withholding some of the information. So you try to, you know, that's about plotting and I think you'd get that right just with a lot of revision. Because I think there was, I think there was an earlier version that was a little bit too linear for, you know, her recovery or her healing was a little too linear. So I tried to complicate it and, yeah. Okay. Would you sign book signing? Yes, I'd love to. That's right, we've got book signing. Yes. Excellent. Thank you so much everybody for coming. Thank you.