 This program is funded in part by the Arlington Libraries Foundation. The Arlington Libraries Foundation is a primary fundraiser for the Robbins and Fox Branch Library and is dedicated to helping open the doors to all who are curious, creating an inclusive space for the Arlington community, and ensuring the library's future as the cornerstone of the community for generations to come. So we're very grateful to them. We have books for sale from the three authors. The books are in the back of the room. And I am wearing many hats. And I will also be your bookseller tonight. So if you would like to purchase a book, you will need to wait until I am back there at the end of the reading. But I know the authors will be very happy to sign books after they read and it would be wonderful if you could support our local independent bookstore, the book rack, and our author readers. And without further ado, I will get going. So our first reader tonight is Jennifer Haig. And Jennifer is the author of seven books of fiction, which I'm...it's very cool. And most recently, Mercy Street, named a best book of 2022 by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. Published in 18 languages, her books have won the Bridge Prize, the Penn Hemingway Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, the Penn New England Award in Fiction, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short stories have been published in Granta, The Atlantic, the Best American Short Stories, and many other places. A Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Boston University. Let's welcome Jennifer. Thank you. We're in a cafe. Well, I am thrilled to be here tonight to talk about my novel, Mercy Street. The photos behind me will bring back some probably traumatic memories to some of you of the winter of 2015. And that's when this novel is set during the snow apocalypse. And anybody who was in the Boston area at that time remembers it very vividly. It is really central to this novel, the beginning of isolation, of being under siege that we all had in that time. So Mercy Street is the first novel I've ever written that really is out of my own experience. I don't have an autobiographical instinct at all as a writer, so this is all new for me. I spent some years working as a volunteer counselor in a women's clinic that did abortions. And in my time there, I went through a training and then I answered calls on a hotline. So the callers were women who needed to make appointments for a variety of things. They needed contraception. They needed pelvic exams. And about half of them wanted to schedule abortions. If you wanted to terminate a pregnancy, your first step at this clinic was to talk to a volunteer like me. So I would talk about the procedure, answer their questions, and then they could make their appointment. So this novel, Mercy Street, has at its center a counselor named Claudia Birch. She's not a volunteer as I was. She's a natural psychologist who handles all the counseling at this clinic. And she supervises the people who work on the hotline. So I'm going to read to you from a section of Claudia at work at the clinic on a fictional Boston street called Mercy Street. The waiting room was bright and cheerful, painted a sunny yellow. There were comfortable chairs, tables stacked with cooking and decorating magazines, boxes of Kleenex strategically placed. One wall was covered with giant photographs taken by the director's son while he was in the Peace Corps, smiling African women in colorful dresses, carrying bundles on their backs, shoulders and heads. They carried water jugs, bushel baskets of bread or fruit or laundry. They carried all the things you'd expect them to carry, except babies. Claudia crossed the waiting room and continued down a long hallway to a call center. The door was open a crack. A woman was talking on the phone, a voice Claudia recognized. Naomi had worked on the hotline for as long as there had been one, her most dedicated volunteer. What was the first day of your last menstrual period? Naomi asked. This was always the first question. The call center was packed with cubicles. Each held a desktop computer and a standard issue office telephone. At each workstation was posted a printed notice, silent call procedure. In the corner cube Naomi consulted her chart. A cardboard wheel the size of a floppy disk to calculate gestational age. The younger volunteers used the online version, but Naomi was old school. She hunched over her wheel like a medieval soothsayer reading tarot or tea leaves. You are eight weeks and five days pregnant, she said. The volunteers came into varieties, half were gray haired, old enough to remember illegal abortions, some from personal experience, Pam, Naomi, Janet, Karen. The rest were grad students in psychology or social work or public health. Megan, Amanda, Lily, Marisol. They were called counselors but it was a poor description of the work they did. Collars to the hotline needed many things, information, appointments, decent jobs, any sort of health insurance, childcare, affordable housing, antibiotics, antidepressants. Counsel honestly was pretty far down the list. This was especially true for AB calls. By the time a woman googled abortion, Boston, she wasn't looking for advice from a stranger. Her decision was already made. The counselor told her what to expect on the day of the appointment, how long the procedure would take, 10 to 15 minutes, how long she'd spend at the clinic, two hours including recovery, what to eat that morning, nothing, what to bring with her, socks and a sweater, the procedure room could get chilly. Are you diabetic, Naomi asked? Do you take methadone, suboxone or subutex? Claudia slipped on a headset and settled in at her desk. They explained the procedure and answered questions. Will I be awake? Will it hurt? Those were common questions but not the most common. The most common question was how much does it cost? The first set of pills is Miphapris stone said Naomi. You'll take those here in our clinic. The second set is Miphapris stone, you take those later at home. More and more women were choosing the medication AB over the in-clinic procedure. Either method without insurance cost $650. A drop in the ocean compared to the cost of raising a child, but for many of the colors it was an unimaginable sum. Holy shit, Claudia had been told more than once, looks like I'm going to have a kid. Her first call was a pill question. As the callers spoke, Claudia took the following notes. Started pack three days late, missed two white, took week two, missed one pink. Only green left. She had long since mastered the pill question, having heard every possible variation. Started late, started early, vomited up a white one, took two pink ones by mistake. She could answer a pill question in under a minute in English, Spanish or Haitian Creole. You'll need to use a backup method, she said. Condoms for the rest of your cycle. The caller was unhappy to hear this. No one was ever happy to hear this. It's those white pills I'm worried about. Unless you take them consistently the first week, you are not protected. The moment she disconnected, the line rang again. The second caller gave her name Tara. In the background, a television was playing. Claudia recognized the opening music of Dr. Phil, the Texas twang of the doctor himself, testifying like a revival tent preacher. This is going to be a change in day in your life. What was the day of your last menstrual period? Claudia asked. Tara was nine weeks pregnant, HIV positive and sleeping on a stranger's couch. She took methadone but not regularly, lithium but not recently. She lit cigarettes one after the other, scratch, pause, inhale. At 10 o'clock on a Wednesday morning, she was already high. As she spoke, Claudia thought of the word problems she'd solved in high school algebra, trains traveling at different speeds in opposite directions. How long before their paths intersect? The problem always was knowing which variable to solve for. Tara's life was a burning building with a fire on each floor. Which fire did you put out first? Tara had only one question. $650, Claudia said. You put out the pregnancy first. What would become of Tara? Claudia would never know. The hotline was a portal into a stranger's life, ambient traffic and distant sirens, kids playing in English or Spanish or Portuguese or Hmong. Music playing, a dog barking, a child crying. A video game that must have been popular because she kept hearing it. The catchy electronic jingle, the cartoon gunfire with its plosive reports. A dog crying, a child barking. Running water, dishwashing, ice cubes, tinkling in a glass. Always there was a television. Even in the throes of a personal crisis, it didn't occur to the caller to turn off the TV. Some counselors found this noise distracting. Claudia barely noticed it having grown up in such a household. Her mother, Deb, had been a nurse's aide at the county retirement home. She came from work exhausted and often in physical pain, and the first thing she did always was turn on the TV and light a cigarette. That was her reward for getting through another day. That's what they called it, the county home, which sounded nicer than what it really was. A place for indigent old people to get older and eventually die. A process that sometimes took forever and sometimes only seemed to. For most of Claudia's childhood, they lived in a single wide trailer, not a double wide. If you know anything at all about bubble homes, you know that the difference is profound. A double wide feels like a house because of the way it's constructed in two separate halves that are bolted together on site. A single is all one piece, like a shipping container. And like a shipping container, it gets hot in summer and cold in winter. In a main winter it gets very cold, and a crying child produces a strange echo. It's impossible to forget ever that you're living in a can. On the plus side, a single is cheap and easy to get. Claudia's mother bought theirs in an RV lot, no mortgage, no credit check. She hauled it away herself, hitched to a truck her brother had borrowed from work. When Claudia thinks of the trailer, she remembers the carpet. Wall to wall acrylic shag, the pile so long and dense that it seemed to suck in whatever landed on it. Spilled milk, puzzle pieces, smarties, cat food, thumb tacks, melting popsicles, Lego blocks. The trailer was 50 feet long and 18 across. Claudia has lived in smaller places, but never with so many people or such small windows. There was a kitchen and a living room. A bathroom and two tiny bedrooms opened off a narrow hallway. Later, to accommodate the fosters, her Uncle Ricky built a flimsy addition, two by fours and fiberglass insulation and sloppy drywall with a skin of Tyvek home wrap. In point of fact, her childhood home was half house, half trailer. They were the sort of people who built onto their trailer. Thank you so much, Jennifer. That was fantastic. Our next reader tonight is going to be Josh Barken. Josh won the Light Ship International Short Story Prize and was runner-up for the Grace Paley Prize for short fiction, the Patterson Fiction Prize and the Juniper Prize for fiction. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and his writing has appeared in Esquire. He's taught creative writing at Harvard, NYU, the international writing program at the University of Iowa, Holland's and MIT. His books include the novel Blind Speed and the short story collections Before Hiroshima and Mexico, named one of the five best story collections of 2017 by Library Journal. His newest book, Wonder Travel, came out really recently just a couple weeks ago. Yeah, yeah. Welcome, Josh. Thank you all for coming out tonight. It was really amazing hearing Jennifer read and hearing that description of the sound of the baby crying in the trailer that really gets to me in the mobile home. In any case, I'm going to be reading from my new memoir, Wonder Travels and as Whitney was just saying, this came out about two weeks ago. This is a memoir that is really about healing and overcoming after discovering that my wife of 15 years had had an affair and the end of our marriage. In 2007 to eight, she went on a trip around the world for six months and she went to Syria, to Israel, India, a number of countries and during that trip towards the end of her trip, she met someone named who I call Muhammad in the memoir and she had a relationship with him, came back to New York City where we had been living together and I could tell that something was different, something had changed but I couldn't tell what and certainly didn't expect that she had had an affair. After a couple of months, she decided to go to Spain where she was from originally. She's a Spanish citizen and she said that she was going to go back to Spain where her sister was going to have a baby. This seemed only unusual because she had 16 other nieces and nephews and she had never gone back to see any of them born in Spain so something seemed quite different. Soon after she got back to Spain, she told me a couple days later that she was going to go to the island of Ibiza which I don't know if any of you have ever been to Ibiza or know about it but it's an island in the Mediterranean and it's really a place you go if you just want to party, frankly, if you want to just go to clubs, etc. So it seemed very unusual given that she had said she was going back to see her sister have this child and rather than going to Ibiza though, she actually went back to see Muhammad back to be with him, back to continue the relationship in Morocco. All communication was eventually cut off and I became quite concerned and the part I'm going to read to you is after this three week period 12 days of no communication and just being told by a friend of mine that she had been having this relationship with Muhammad. Her few prized possessions from her childhood are in that box. There are boxes of letters in there from the little correspondence she's been able to keep. When she came to the US, she wrote letters regularly to her family back in Spain but they rarely replied and there's some love letters in there. Letters which tell her that I've always been suspicious of romantics who write their names on the beach, who send each other flowers but that this is how I feel about her, that I love her completely and unconditionally. There's another letter from four years before where I tell her I know there are things I would like to keep improving and continue to be a better husband but that I feel this has been the best year of our lives together that she's realizing her dreams of being in the magazine world and that I love her. There are boxes of photos from our trips on the shores of Maine and New Brunswick and Grand Manan where we regularly go camping and from the bottom of the Grand Canyon in the middle of winter from China, Burma, Cambodia, Thailand and Spain and photos of us celebrating an after-marriage party in Spain two years after we eloped in which my two grandmothers and uncles and aunt and parents flew to Spain for the small get-together of 40 just to her immediate family and a few of her friends. What am I supposed to do with these photos? I can't look through them all. It's too unbearable and I put them back. She will return soon if she comes home and I don't feel safe. I gather my financial records together and leave a box with my neighbors. I take my grandfather's old, somewhat broken Rolex and a copy of all the computer files on our desktop and I take all the belongings in our safety deposit box which are mine and I get a new safety deposit box. It's crazy, I know. What could she possibly do to me? But it doesn't feel crazy. It feels prudent, smart. I've been told by two friends to protect myself. I've been lied to and I feel I know nothing about what she values anymore. An affair, the way she is disrespecting us, shatters the myth we share the same values. An affair is something I have told myself in the past I would never do. When she was on her long six-month trip I saw a beautiful woman on the subway platform that was the middle of winter and my wife had been gone on her trip for four months at the time and I was lonely and I thought about that woman on the platform imagining a relationship with her but I knew I would never act on that impulse out of respect for us and when a couple of weeks later I saw her again and felt the same impulse I still didn't act on it even though two strangers rarely meet again in the subway of New York. What do we share anymore after she has lied and gone back to Morocco? Once, meeting him on her trip I can understand a moment of impulse of human frailty even if she was with him for five nights but after she has created a whole complicated lie claiming she is in Ibiza when she has really gone back to see him this is not a moment this is premeditated this is willful this way enamored by him who knows where things are headed the night before she's supposed to come back I meet with her friend downstairs who she's installed in the building who has left her husband after 28 years I tell her I believe Luciana has had an affair in Morocco when she was on her long trip I say nothing about Ibiza and the present I tell her this and I see her begin to tear up I tell her this because I suspect she's in contact with my wife in Morocco and at this point I don't mind if word leaks back to her I know what's up because I just want her to come home so we can talk I tell her I don't know how I'll respond when my wife comes home but that I hope to respond calmly I tell her I've been thinking a lot about Gandhi about how the best way to respond to someone is with non-violence not only they can judge themselves if they are to absorb what they have done she tells me she's seen a pop psychology show on TV in which the host suggests in a time of confrontation one can choose to do nothing not doing anything as a choice she is clearly suggesting I should not act violently when she comes home another friend who I have met for coffee the screenplay writer with the apartment where we had the coming home party for Luciana after a trip asked me if I feel like hitting her when she comes home or acting violently I tell him no I tell him I don't believe in that kind of violence I tell him we've never screamed at each other or fought physically before the day before she comes home I call her mother in Spain to ask if she's returned from Ibiza to Madrid her mother says she thinks she has and that she's staying with one of her siblings I try to contain my emotions over the phone and I tell her I have reason to suspect her daughter has been in a relationship with another man her mother says she doesn't believe this I tell her I have strong reasons to suspect she's been in Morocco instead of Ibiza her mother is confused I tell her if she doesn't believe me she should talk to one of her other daughters who has used her frequent flyer miles to purchase the ticket to Morocco for Luciana instead of to Ibiza I tell her mother I'm only mentioning this because I want her to pass on to her daughter the reassurance that she should just come home that everything will be alright and that she shouldn't be afraid of coming home are you sure you want me to tell her that she says no I say only tell her that if she doesn't get on the plane I just want her to come home so we can lay everything out openly on the table I don't want any violence and if she's afraid to come home I want her to know everything will be okay for a second the thought crosses my mind that perhaps she'll tell her family she's flying back to America and then catch another plane to Morocco except for one of her sisters she's lied to her whole family about going to Ibiza these fears are unfounded after 12 days of complete silence Luciana calls from the airport in Madrid to say she's flying back home we speak for all of 5 seconds when she has the will she can contact me at any moment in little more than 8 hours her plane will touch down I've protected myself and now I try to distract myself the medicine cabinet has arrived and in an effort to prove I've made good progress on the renovation of the apartment I spend most of the afternoon drilling holes through tiles and installing the cabinet single-handedly I also install it because I don't want a big mirrored piece of glass lying on the floor at such a delicate and potentially violent moment when she returns I want the apartment to be clean I want it to be nice and calm I want to look good to impress her it's a hot, humid day in New York, July 22nd and once the medicine cabinet is up I see I'm sweating hard from the work and in anticipation of her arrival as it has come out by now she's probably arrived at the airport I don't know how she'll be coming from JFK whether she'll take the train as usual or take a cab so I have no way of knowing exactly when she'll get home her plane has arrived because I've looked up the landing online I don't want to miss her when she comes in the door but I need to do something about this zit so I run up the street to a pharmacy to buy some Neutrogena pore cleanser the turquoise cleanser looks beautiful in the new cabinet which we will not share together with mirrors reflecting the liquid from all sides I clean my face I put on an iron button-down shirt and I know she'll like with my best pair of fashionable jeans I take a perfume candle which she's bought and that I know she likes and I light it and put it on the coffee table the smell of sweet incense burns slowly into the night air as the sun goes down I leave off the lights in the small dining room so the mood is calm and not too bright I leave on only a lamp and the candle in the living room by the couch where I wait for her I sit with my legs up on the table I've turned up the stereo loud and I play a CD by Goldfrapp over and over the driving beat of electronic sound the high yet calm voice the underlying powerful bass the melancholy twinge to the entire album sedates numbs, mirrors my mood and comforts me I'm here but I am in space I'm present and waiting in this apartment over the trajectory of our past I am thinking about us in Spain and trips far away and then I notice the bumpy metal texture of the coffee table top and the flicker of the flame and the glass candle holder I fixate on these textures these smells of incense, these surfaces the nothingness of a moment the feeling of emptiness of our expected arrival what more is there to say except to play the funeral dirge the end of our marriage she comes in later than I expect her plane has arrived more than two hours ago and even with immigration she should have already been here the music is loud I don't move from my position I stare forward blankly lost in the music and in my thoughts and in the texture of the furniture I hear the metal front door faintly as it falls shut I hear her put her bag down I hear her move around she doesn't say hello the music is loud and she doesn't turn it down she traipses around the corner from the dining room into the living room and she catches a glimpse of me and she turns around and goes to the bathroom she must have jet lag she goes to the refrigerator and pulls out a picture of cold water and has a drink she's sizing up the situation developing her strategy figuring out her first move I've said nothing so far nothing negative nothing welcoming nothing at all when I'm angriest I'm silent she knows I'm opaque waiting watching her without any movement my eyes cast forward looking into the candle she says hello and decides to try to act normally as if she's just come home from a normal quick trip abroad I don't respond she sits down on the couch at the far end for me she leans her body away from me she's tanned from being on the beach in Morocco she wears a white cotton shirt similar to the one she wore when she first seduced me years before what has she worn for him she leans back and begins to say something trivial and normal and I interrupt and say I want you to tell me the truth I just want you to tell me the truth she pulls her jaw up sharply shutting her mouth as if thinking of protesting and then thinks better of it and realizes she's caught so you already know she says that was such a mix of like pain and anger and tenderness you know it was an incredible reading thank you our final reader is Helen Elaine Lee Helen is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School her first novel, The Serpent's Gift was published by Athenaeum and her second Watermarked was published by Scribner her short stories have appeared in Plowshares, Prairie Schooner Callaloo, Best African American Fiction 2009 and Solstice Literary Magazine her novel, Pomegranate was published in April by Simon and Schuster's Atria Books Helen is a professor of comparative media studies and writing at MIT welcome Helen thanks to Anjali everyone hear me Anjali and Whitney and the Arlington Author's Salon the Kickstand Cafe and all of you for being here so in Pomegranate Renita Atwater tells her story of getting out of Oak Hills prison after a four-year bid for opiate possession and of trying to stay clean repair her relationships with her kids own her love for the woman on the inside who has 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 just begin with the end of the preface which provides the lens through which to read Renita's journey of healing and here's the Pomegranate connection or one of them in the book so as Renita grieves the death of the mother who has pained her her father brings home a Pomegranate telling her that it has some surprising and wonderful news buried just inside she holds it as her father eats dinner and talks to her aunt waiting to open it studying its scratched and ordinary skin 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 in our hearts alongside the losses our abundance and possibility and sometimes our hands are filled with what we need and that might be something every day or seemingly small or ordinary on the outside and wondrous within through which to see the painful territory of imprisonment of the book and of our lives and one experience to tie to the theme of tonight one experience out of which I wrote was my effort to earn Renita's story by volunteering for 15 years at several Massachusetts prisons and houses of correction leading creative writing and storytelling workshops so here are the first few pages of chapter three so after Renita gets out this third person narrator and this flashes back to back four years to the beginning of her bid at Oak Hills prison and I'm trying to keep to the 15 minutes alright so this is Oak Hills 2015 when morning broke Renita heard fitful stirring from the floor below along with all the women down the tear she roused beneath the scratchy wool blanket that had covered countless other bodies and faced the real another day of human debt still mornings were beginnings weren't they the nights began with limbo as darkness briefly tempered and then amplified the sounds of grief and fear and rage and before things quieted to a level of pain she and everyone else at Oak Hills tried to refuse the noise and imagine a way out of no way just before sleep most everything they depended on outside and in was burned away their threads and bling and cribs and rides their weaves and manicures their thick hips and cleavage and supple skin their reputations and posturing and excuses their legal analyses the stories they spun and told about themselves their charms in bed and service as adornments on someone's arm their game their talents for conversating and living large and staying alpha or beta the jobs and comfort and respectability they might have known the kids and kin who carried on a world apart gone and it was down to their gods and what was buried in their hearts to see them through to morning all day they hungered and prayed the night would bring them peace but for most safety was a mere concept and the night offered neither asylum nor forgiveness in the dark lured those who'd stolen innocence and trust in the dark past became present some things they tried to remember the sudden light of fireflies day lilies hopscotch trees and the things that remembered them uncoiled like ferns elbowing out of winter mounds to unfurl their serrated blades they went over there if only if only I'd been born on a different block if only I'd said no or yes if only I'd never met him if only I'd been stronger braver, better, cleaner if only I'd stayed home if only home had been different than it was if only, if only if only I'd been more and less for some sleep finally came and for those who were nightmare free there was temporary freedom either way morning followed and they woke to find that they were still captive the first thing Renita thought on waking was that she'd been inside for over three months spring was lost to her March, April and May in one way it seemed like each empty and lonely minute had passed at a slow crawl and at the same time she'd been through enough for a lifetime before taking on the fluorescent light of day she spent a moment picturing herself up high in the spokes of the pine tree back home that she'd named Avery opening her eyes she could tell by the striated light that it was nearly six and she could feel it coming morning count when her body would stand and present itself the heart keeps beating that's what her father had always said she thought how they ought to give out chips for surviving prison for 90 days in N.A. you got a green one and she tried to imagine how it would feel to collect little bits of color just for keeping alive at Oak Hills where everything except their skins was gray on the van trip there she'd squinted through window grading to see dormant orchards and pondside cabins and rolling hills slide by pastel ranch houses and colonials with gazebos and jungle gyms red white and blue on porch front flag poles children playing in the snow and running free the van drove past all of that to where people either couldn't fight living with a prison or needed the jobs it would bring until the houses got smaller and smaller and the cars older and older and everything man made was rusted and weathered against a backdrop of majestic hills and woods until it reached Oak Hills far away from family in the midst of all those evergreens they couldn't touch the van had made its way through concentric walls and fences taught with coiled razor wire and she'd stumbled off in ankle chains surrounded by CO's who couldn't have been less interested in her struggle to write herself as winter blew through her orange jumpsuit and a cluster of geese looked on in wary curiosity on floor buffing detail in an office three stories up Naomi had chuckled as she watched her stumble though she'd nearly fallen herself stepping from the van a year before she watched the door swallow Renita a young poet coming in to lead a workshop saw the empty van drive away another sister down the chaplain saw her coming in as he was going out another soul in need of sustenance and CO Stewart pointed the way into reception and departure another offender to be corrected welcome to Oak Hills your home away from home Renita heard the unspoken bitch in his tone for the pride that had been sown into her or for contempt as big as his but dignity was hard to come by when you shuffled forward in chains she held her head up and tried to look straight ahead but on the inside she was starting to unravel riding the tail end of the high she'd managed to score before leaving the downtown jail she knew she'd either have to find a source and fix or surrender to the agonies like others before her she tried to leave behind her body as she parted and lifted and bent and spread and squatted and opened herself she tried to disappear as her skin burned from the delousing soap and she shivered from the icy shower by the time her name was replaced with a number and she was dressed down in photograph she had started shaking and then she was marched to the holding cell where the fresh catch waited to join the general population back at the jail she'd known some faces from around the way but here she was on her own some in the tank look menacing, some look scared some look too stoned or strung out to be threats and she knew she was headed in one of those two directions what they say you did one asked with a smile that might be sisterly or not Renita was inside the walls where the future had been settled and she'd be getting retribution help where everyone was in the process of surrender to someone or something that night she gripped the tiny bar of soap and the stunted flaccid toothbrush she'd been given hurtful reminders of the daily and mourned the sweet release of dope lying curled and fetal above Naomi she surrendered to darkness and memory and began to kick jerking like a tangled marionette no methadone, no suboxone to be had, she gave into the vomiting, the shitting, the hot and cold flashes, the shaking and cursing and begging for deliverance she kept picturing the busted Budweiser King of Beer sign at Mario's Paradise Lounge just like that strung together with neon tubing sections blown and sputtering she flashed the news help me, I am broke way down she survived the bone deep ache crawling skin, the incandescent pain from just brushing her hair the bottomless misery as the beast crawled out of her and she came around the turn and when the haze began to lift she felt each aching muscle, each joint and each remembered sin coming out of the blind stumbling fog to the truth of where she'd been, of what she'd done and not done, she saw herself and tried to bear the shame she worked on shrinking her yearning and containing the cry that rose each time the cell door locked she tried to choose sight when the reel came back with a focus so clear and sharp that even the beautiful things hurt she saw a red-tailed hawk from the window and had to close her eyes, eyes open or shut, she could smell the burn and feel the lift off as the dope entered her bloodstream could imagine her joints loosening and the rhythm of her body slowing, smoothing out as she slid into the warm mind-body-soul womb hug from the universe that she'd never be able to forget God how she wanted relief and she knew where to get it she'd seen the packets kicked under cell doors and she knew which ones, the imprisoned and their guards, had access to the greatest escape of all still here she was a 90-day double survivor and that was something and there it was, the loudspeaker command she stood and stepped forward saying, here present 51673 Atwater counted, checked, verified afterward, all down the tier, women dressed while waiting for their cellist to finish up at the contraption that was toilet on the bottom sink on top and all one piece was silent arrangement while one relieved herself, the other turned to face the wall then came the order for movement and they went to chow 8 hours later after breakfast and work detail in another standing count and lunch it was recreation time and following the order to relax and socialize they filed into the day room and tried to make this hour matter or at least to help it pass under the steady gaze of others some what laps around the yard and some drifted like flotsam disconnected unclaimed, some waited to use the phone that cost so much at blood their families even poorer trying to unsee how the one at the head of the line looked even more heart sick when she hung up than before she dialed folks were gathered by the TV tuning into the young and the restless or days of our lives and she yelled at the top of her voice about who was honest who was faithful who was about to get betrayed now and again war broke out over what story to follow whether some character or another was dead for real or someone argued for a switch up to the drama of an up close at a distance talk show feast of lives turned inside out but today things were placid in TV land someone was writing a letter someone was drawing a picture someone was writing a poem thank you we're going to do a little we're going to bring three chairs up here and then we're going to bring the authors up for a Q&A and I hope everybody has questions you can ask questions to a specific author or all three whatever you want so just give us just one second to just get that set so if the audience will indulge me I'm actually going to kick it off with a question of my own because I was having many questions as we were listening to the reading and my question is about is about the theme writing from experience and I would love to hear all three of you talk about the experience of writing from experience and how that might differ from what you often do all of you have written fiction Jennifer you said your work tends to not be autobiographical but this time it was it does is it more accessible to find that work from a personal place is it more challenging what has that experience been like for all of you I'm not sure who would like to begin so because I was the framework anyway for Anita's story is imprisonment you know and I had not been locked up I thought it was important to me to do justice to that story although that's there's not a monolithic story there and also to not tell it in an appropriative way but to sort of honor what I learned from the people I volunteered with so that was different I think the other way I had worked on a novel Anita's story was part of a novel I wrote years ago that I couldn't get into the world so I had been working on that sort of issue for a long time so that was unique I think and I don't know I think what writers do is struggle with something over and over again and revise and go back so that was unique but in another sense I think we are always bringing our lives to what we write there's always a bridge to the character and your own experiences always informing it informing what you write in some way even if it's about people the facts of their lives are different than ours so I don't know that's not I like a lot of fiction writers I think I have a kind of a blinkered relationship with the truth when I'm writing I've been writing novels long enough that I feel like it all happened I'm not aware of having invented anything in the seven books I've written at the time I'm doing it yes of course I'm not psychotic so I do know this didn't really happen but a strange thing happens when you spend five years writing a novel and living with these characters it is as real to me as anything I have ever lived and the characters I'm writing are as real to me as my own family and I do not feel like I invented anything and it really it makes me not trust myself in a way I realize how memory is such a subjective process and wow you really learn that lesson over and over again if you write fiction because you're borrowing from your own life you're distorting it you're borrowing from other people's lives it all kind of ends up in a soup and you spend so much time so focused on it kind of with the concentration required to pray is kind of what fiction writing takes that I I feel that I've lived it it becomes lived experience so I published three books of fiction before writing wonder travels is the first memoir and I think one of the things that many fiction writers feel when they're writing fiction is that they follow their characters they allow them to be free and they there are a lot of surprises that come to you as you give your characters life and as you give them the life they have to have that kind of freedom of choice so a lot of surprise comes in that John Cheever kind of famously never knew where his stories were going to go and how they were going to end and so I think a very big difference with writing memoir then is that of course you do know where things are going there isn't that kind of surprise but the surprises then come from trying to go as deeply as you can into your own lived experience and as you go into that own lived experience and as you try and the surprises begin to be what your memory can recall the power of the subconscious the power of recreating moments that you've already lived but maybe you didn't know everything or see the significance of patterns or how things actually happened and so for example I mean in the section that I read I never would have thought about the textures of the tables and those kinds of things at that very powerful moment that I was experiencing but later those come back as part of the subconscious and then by the time you get towards the end I mean this memoir is called Wonder Travels and the section I read you is kind of that immediate shock of discovering the affair but then as the memoir goes on it becomes also very much a personal journey a journey to El Paso, Texas and then into the Apache Kid Wilderness down to Mexico back to Spain seeing some of my family and on to Morocco where I eventually go to meet Muhammad and so in those kinds of scenes then you're dealing with what you discover you can't make up and intensify things the way that you can in fiction part of the power of art is the intensification of experience so we can't do that in memoir in terms of making things up but what we can do is as we recreate the experience we're using those novelistic and fictional techniques to create that sense of emotion and experience we're trying to make you the reader feel what we either have imagined with our characters when we're writing fiction or what we've actually lived and in a sense the choosing and the cropping of experience that becomes what's so different in memoir is that we must absolutely remain faithful to the truth no matter how difficult and but in the once we choose what to go into and become to some extent selecting just as a novelist would or a fiction writer I guess I thought myself wondering to what degree it was healing for you as the author to have that such into the piece of your life being so able to face it yeah so this question about whether it's healing to actually write something that in a way is so personal for me the healing came as I was living the experiences of the book itself as I was traveling I began writing this memoir only kind of unusually for memoir only nine months into the experiences that I write about which take place over two years so I'd already gone through kind of the shock of discovering the affair and my own flailing in New York City which was quite significant and as and in many ways was not my best side just trying to connect with other people and put one step literally in front of the other and as time goes on they're actually kind of truly healing experiences where I really start to get so much more into the powerful experiences that I was taking in for example in Mexico where I met the cousin of someone that I was in a relationship with there and he had gone through his own very difficult period and what I found from him was the way I was hiking in the mountains of Oaxaca with him and he was pointing out things like the snakes the mushrooms we were walking with his dog these kinds of moments vary in the present or even a little bit after that going to Oaxaca to the beach in San Agustinillo seeing this young boy who trying to make a living but then boogie boarding in the water there and seeing that kind of trying to imitate that to learn from him and being much more in the present then that's what was healing so it's not the revealing of the self at least for me I'm not trying to expose myself I'm just trying to write honestly first of the pain and then the process of which I set for myself of going forward and having some amazing experiences I like to say never stab anybody in the back it's immoral it's unethical stab them in the front so they know we get it and when I say that if you're writing a memoir you're necessarily writing about other people and what do you feel are sort of the guidelines I mean if you're writing something do you tell somebody in advance of publication do you feel like it can you make this sort of feel like I have a person in something you give me of that same courtesy maybe I won't anyway broad outlines sort of deal with it you may be saying that they need to write to you and set yeah thank you for the question and then I'll make sure that we have questions next questions I think the responsibility that you have as a memoirist is to write as fairly and accurately as you can we all have subjective experiences we're all limited of course by our own point of view but what I mean is that even if someone has hurt you in some way your great responsibility I think is to try and see things from their point of view as well to recognize for example in this memoir that any breakdown say of a marriage is caused by two people it's not as if there's one person alone who causes that end and during the memoir I try to enter in the point of view also of the person who had been my wife who I call Luciana and the memoir where I literally in third person trying to imagine her own during a walk in Central Park that we had trying to imagine what are her own dissatisfactions say with me as her husband trying to imagine some of the things that she felt that she was not fulfilled by say so I think we have that absolute requirement to be as honest and to the extent that we can as much looking into you know fairly into the perspectives of all the people who are in a book I'm not so interested in you know we each have our own lived experience and I think the boundaries are I would never write about something that didn't involve me I would never go write about someone else simply to write anything critical of them in which it had no relationship to my own experience that would start entering something outside of what I would feel I had license to write so now I'm going to announce this to Jennifer this question is for Helen on third person when she's out of present she's first person so Helen I wanted to ask you why you do that yeah well I hit upon that way to tell the story with the help of the editor who bought my book and the challenge was to so originally it was all in the first person it was Renita telling her voice her story of getting out and healing and getting herself together and yet you know the first person limits you to the in a lot of ways it limits you to the awareness and understanding and veracity and insight of the character and I needed to get beyond that to tell a fuller story because it was just coming to awareness and so it didn't work for her to be experiencing this struggle to heal and get back on her feet and just coming to awareness about those things she wouldn't be able to she wouldn't have the capacity to tell the story in its fullness so the third person narrator gives us a wider deeper view and is able to narrate her into things that Renita doesn't yet understand or doesn't yet have the language for so it turned out that I wouldn't have thought of telling a story in this way actually when I began but it turned out that you got a more complete fuller deeper story with both her voice and her insight and awareness and then this omniscient you know God like narrator everything and who's able to say well here I say to the reader here are the moments that formed her you know that informed this journey this struggle with addiction and trauma and incarceration so yeah many so I'm just curious about how do you approach if you wrote the job of writing in a grammar sense are there certain habits customs rituals that you find have been indispensable in helping you whether it's okay I never write after one o'clock at night I have to have a full glass of water when I start writing I mean even those many kinds of things that just whatever gets you whatever place you need to be so I'm just curious about your tasks I guess I could start I just I have a practice I think you have to have a practice which allows you to deal with the uncertainty and writing's hard it's the hardest thing you've ever done every time you do it and so I think have it so my practice is not super complicated though I have a place that feels open and good and I first I do the New York Times spelling bee in the way just to get things going and I do it in the morning I do anything else because otherwise I go way astray and never you know and I just sit down I sit down and I whatever happens like sometimes you don't get brilliant insight and I sit you know so that's my but I also want to say one of the things I admire about Jennifer is that I just think she embodies like what the true you know writer's spirit because she works in a discipline and regular way and you know she just had this book come out she already has another book that was just sold and now she's working on another book and I'm also writing another so like I think I have such admiration for the discipline the commitment because that's what it is you know you sit down and you work and you find a way to do the next thing so I absolutely believe in showing up every day so I grew up in coal mining country in pencil techie and my grandfathers were coal miners and all the men in my town were coal miners and so when I started out as a writer I had a really hard time talking about it as work because if any of the people I grew up with could see a webcam trained on me while I'm working it would be completely laughable to them so it was it was hard for me as a young writer to talk about writing as work and to think about writing as work it absolutely is work the hardest thing about it from my perspective is no one in the whole world cares if you do it nobody your own mother doesn't care if you do it she'll pretend to because she loves you she wants you to be happy she doesn't care nobody cares you're writing about made up stuff as a fiction writer nobody's waiting for your book ever and so that is the hard part of it it has to entirely come from you there is no waiting public ever so you really do have to show up every day I would work every day of the week if I could I often do I work first thing in the morning for as long as I can stand it and you know some days that's not very long but I work as long as I can stand it and you know I crucially for me I have to be unreachable so I can't have wifi I can't have a phone I can't be reachable by anybody I have to be somewhere where the world can't get me so I actually rent a space to go do this so I cannot be reached and something about that has been very powerful to me to realize that I can you know erect this firewall around the work I do and that kind of makes it possible I only have so much interesting add to this so maybe we should go to the next question and yeah sure these are all very you know hard questions to answer I only write one thing at a time I am constitutionally monogamous in my writing I can't even read two books at once so I am absolutely faithful to what I am writing sometimes to a fault I once spent a solid year working on a novel every single day it was year in rich I didn't write a book review I didn't write a short story I didn't teach a class I did nothing but write this novel which was terrible and I threw it away so these are the dangers of monogamy right so I write one thing at a time sometimes they go down in flames but mercifully so far that's only happened once and how do you know when you're done how do you know when you're in love you know it's you know I feel that I reach a point of satisfaction with the story that I have told the story I wanted to tell even if I didn't know that's what it was I have landed upon it and it's a kind of an emotional response knowing when you're done the hardest thing for me is finishing really because this chasm opens up in my life when I'm writing my life makes perfect sense and when I'm not writing it makes no sense it's completely binary in that way so the loss of finishing a book is that's always psychically difficult territory for me I always feel much better if I'm fighting with a novel even if it's going badly I prefer that to not having one