 Thanks for coming tonight to celebrate issue number 122 with Zezava and we want to welcome you to our virtual library and the San Francisco Public Library would like to acknowledge that we occupy the unceded and ancestral homeland of the Ramya Tushaloni peoples for the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland and as uninvited guests we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples. We wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramya Tushaloni community and I'm going to throw two more links in the chat right now which one is an amazing resource and reading list. The librarians love to make reading lists of Indigenous cultures particularly in the Bay Area organizations you can check into, read about, donate to and then a great map that lets you know what native land you're occupying. Now I'm going to breeze through the amazing lineup of events we have at SFPL and this is just scratching the surface SFPL.org slash events and we started kicking off our more than a month events last Friday and we are celebrating more than a month at the library is our version of Black History and this overall theme for this year's celebration is Black Health and Wellness and you can check out our beautiful art which we curate and we work with local artists each cultural awareness campaign. This beautiful art is by Tiffany Conway and you can see the meditative and the ancestors the beautiful calming effect it has and Tiffany will be in a virtual library in February so look out for that. San Francisco Public Library has a on the same page which is a bi-monthly read that has been happening for 17 years I've got to think that's like the longest book club ever so we have selected Jessamyn Stanley who has her second book out Yoke, My Yoga of Self-Acceptance and you can find this book at all of your locations all of our library locations and Bookmobile. Pick it up today come to the book club on Valentine's Day the author will not be there but she will be there on February 27th in combo with Tamika Kaston Miller and we have meditation every Wednesday in the African-American Center with the amazing Dennis Billups who is also famed for being in Netflix script camp so check this out and I will remind you with COVID and the on-chron that please check before you go check our website I'm having deja vu with some postponements and cancellations so if it's an in-person program definitely check to make sure we are still on. We have a great extraordinary photos from any camera series the last Monday of every month through April and hoping to end this with a great photo walk through Chinatown in May so amazing Sony artisans we are so lucky to have them series of different photo shops so come check it out photo workshops looking forward to that Scott Robert Lim and Sabrina Dang will be teaching that and then we are scheduled for another in-person event and this is going to be February 24th we're celebrating the amazing Charlie Jane Anders and by me I mean the crew from Total SF and their podcast that's Heather Knight and Peter Hartlock and we're going to be totally celebrating Charlie Jane specifically victories greater than death but we all know Charlie Jane is a champion of authors and books and bookstores so there's so much to celebrate on this one so you can come to the Carrette our beautiful Carrette lots of space holds 250 people we can spread out we will be doing all the COVID measures or you can join us streaming either in Zoomland or on YouTube and just a reminder we can't do any of this without our friends at the San Francisco Public Library who help us sponsor all of these amazing events all right so I'm going to now turn it over to Zizba and this is for their issue number 122 and if you don't know about Zizba it is an award winning literary magazine founded in San Francisco in 1985 and it has it's beyond it's gone beyond it's gone worldwide and I'm going to turn it over right now to managing editor Oscar Bill alone take it away Oscar thank you and you said thank you and welcome everyone thank you for joining us tonight we're going to have readings from four of our contributors this evening among them Shelby Kinney-Lang, CJA, Marine Mitsuki Mockett and Dean Rader I am Oscar Bill alone I am the managing editor of Zizba I'll talk a little bit more about the issue after we do our first couple of readings as you can see from the slide we called it the international or the trans-international issue I will unpack that for you it doesn't trip off the tongue quite as well as I thought it would at the time where we when I said that's that's a great you know a subtitle for that so just wait on that let me begin first of all with the person I know in the farthest time zone God bless him Shelby Kinney-Lang he is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Green Mountain Review Joyland Bellevue Literary Review and elsewhere and he currently lives in pretty frigid New England his work titled Snake and Submarine appears in this issue 122 to please welcome Shelby Kinney-Lang hello thank you for that kind introduction Oscar I wanted to thank Oscar and I wanted to thank Laura at Zizba plus the San Francisco Public Library for hosting us I'll be reading for about six minutes from the beginning of the piece this is called Snake and Submarine not long ago a friend in California called our Esme became severely ill with a rare and rapidly progressing cancer and has been posting updates about her condition on a medical blog which appears on my facebook feed and an entry from last month she describes all the ways in which she has been saved she is saved in Christ of course but also and she doesn't mean to sound trite to list this second after Christ saved by Britney Spears' fourth studio album in the zone which she played on repeat and she was a freshman in high school in a strange from God uncertain for travails which at the time felt monumental or possible to surmount she was saved by Glenn Gold and by Degrassi and by Richard Fleischer's fantastic voyage in which a submarine crew is shrunk infinitesimally and sent into a scientist's dying body I pay particular attention when she says Tolstoy has saved her that writing can save or she hopes that it can because this is how I know her from a class in college in which we read Tolstoy in translation and often spent long massachusetts afternoons talking with excitement about Annette Corinna I'm not sure I tell my wife while we walk along a dirt road in the Berkshires adjacent to our home what it means to be saved by Glenn Gold or Britney or Tolstoy if Esme means are as long a beat of brevis or if she means that from a distance some spiritual part of her has been redeemed because of these essentially faithless works or something else entirely something that may or may not correspond with an immaterial soul which was always a disagreement between us during our Tolstoy conversations that she believes such a thing existed and I did not so as a kind of test as an act of I don't know saving her preserving what I know about her on the page aware that I can't save anyone that a man setting out to save a woman is a tired trope I begin to write about a character I named Julie a composite and after a few pages if I squint I can see in Julie a number of people from my past one of whom is Esme this particular friend who wonders about the saving power of writing hairless from chemo 20 pounds pounds lighter or so the pictures she posts to facebook show her figure hollowed to a monkey and scream except could it be Esme is smiling she's filled with joy or effects joy even lying in a hospital bed with a naso gastric tube taped to the front of her pale face and playing pokemon reverting to a childhood diversion at what is possibly the end of her 25 nine years of life she reflects in her medical blog how she spends some of what might be her last moments on earth choosing to capture and instruct virtual creatures which is a father to be I read as her displaced longing to parent a child she will likely never have she describes how she visited in OBGYN specialist to have an ovary lapis laparoscopically removed it was subsequently sliced into strips that still have viable eggs each strip of which was preserved indefinitely and liquid nitrogen the doctors do not know what to what extent the chemo and radiation will impact future fertility as May writes but she and her husband plan to try to conceive under cancer journey as she calls it concludes I continue to write about jolly thinking about Esme when after a few more pages I noticed that jolly resembles someone I once knew in fact they shared the same body a girl I met in leon when we were both 19 walking the Camino de Santiago after I renounced my evangelical faith and all faith and this american girl whose name was M who wanted to be a wildland firefighter who described with the strange specificity of a mind that had the capacity to write fiction how she'd one day own a submarine she navigate through dark waters M was a devout but liberal Catholic so that the arguments that engaged us on those belly long summer days walking across the golden plains of Spain were among the most intellectually difficult of my life I cannot imagine in retrospect anything of what we discussed was particularly well informed having read nearly nothing at that point in my life save for a little Camus and Phenon which was enough to convince me what I had secretly begun to suspect in the preceding years that there was no god that existence indeed preceded essence I can still see M clearly the honey colored nape of her neck when her hair was up in a bun her defined shoulders moving beneath the Gore-Tex hiking shirt in the moments before she hefted up her heavy backpack the peculiar lovely geometries of her face dark chestnut eyes oblong dimple in her right cheek something about the Camino drained us of all sexual tension our bodies became merely bodies and if we should see each other in various states of undress as we did each morning and evening we walk together there was nothing about a glimpse of flesh no matter how evocative in other contexts that we found very interesting we parted in Santiago de Compostela I continued to Finistere the end of the earth and watched the sunset over the Atlantic having walked nearly 300 kilometers together having slept by each other above or below in bunks napping off the path side by side in the shade of a chestnut or eucalyptus tree stinking and bloody footed promising to exchange emails though of course we never did thank you so much thank you so much Shelby I was I was lovely and as you can tell from that reading it's it's an amazingly thoughtful and I think searching peace about friendships and death but also just on people who are quite unlike ourselves in some ways and you know and in these connections that we have with them perhaps the surprising is for how long we maintain them but they are there I think I think probably just a mark of being human our our next reader is a wonderful poet CJA is a Los Angeles based poet also critic and essayist and oh god bless them current doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California um their poetry has appeared in issues 107 and 112 we've had the opportunity um in the privilege you know to share with our readers their work and also in this newest issue um CJA will will you please grace us with some of your words hello thank you thank you Oscar and thank you Laura too and thank you to Ziziba and the SF Public Library for having me um I lived in Oakland for five years and so this is like very heartwarming I feel like I'm back but I'm not physically okay um so the poem that I this issue comes from a book that I've been working on for the past three years and I'm going to be reading that poem and two other ones tonight and the poems it's kind of a diary what I'm working on right now and so the poems have like sort of time context and so I'll give that to you as I read them but other than that I'll just I won't give too much background okay so the first poem was written when I was living in Oakland and I was doing a lot of swimming in the bay I swam with the southern growing club in aquatic park this is pre-pandemic the airly black feathers on the water angled alchemical and subtle slants and shifts of the vertical around alcatraz are sails it's funny my sort of distortion not egregious but overly flattering in its error my eye dipped in reckoning in the water too the poet chants time in her way and I in mine not egregious but overly flattening bobbing as I am pleasurably on my back watch one air we feather swing swift tune or turn flat the wide way one full sail said toward only mute degrees beyond my mean they're bobbing a sweetly sort of hovered moral now or metaphor the wildfire sky so orange and grieving a little nub on the water surveyor of the flightless themes that are the feathers wake what do you know all this fathomless thinking so the second poem takes place right at the start of the pandemic and also the start of a long and painful breakup it's called dear live customer care agent Richard Parker you are very polite but if you truly cared you'd ship to me immediately a year's supply of surface disinfectant and toilet tissue for though we own a little squirt bottle with a strange nozzle marketed as an on the go bidet we are loathe to use it and require just a little glimmer of normalcy and the fulfillment of our duty to God and country and economic recovery online shopping yes Richard you are too polite to be human more likely you're a bot an algorithm given an Anglo name intended to call the quote average user during this quote difficult time of long call wait times although I cannot help imagine you corporeal dare I say sexy chatting surrounded by clutter just as I am crafting bite by bite and transactional intimacy on the flat screen contagion has made a romance all these forms you demand I feel and your keenly intentional politeness you never fail to thank me like some depraved wildian gentleman manipulating me with courtesy always including the requisite exclamation mark I'm sorry about that wish I could help you that so conveys a sincerity of tone after all you are an agent of my care but what I really need is for you to please assure me Richard that you are not mad just disappointed I ask this as my aging dog does by sniffing the inside of your mouth something instinctual I assume the fussing of predatory intent by breath it is my greatest wish to be so pampered is my greatest wish not to brave a trip to the grocery for the discordant vegetables who would tickle if only we could find the box of jars we packed among all the other boxes stacked in the kitchen of our neglect if only you could see this mess we moved here just before self isolation became not a technique of depresses and introverts in my marriage the government's decree where am I where was I oh yeah toilet paper you see sweet algorithm the person I'm currently isolated with uses way too much of it we also happen to be learning to love each other again after a period of prior difficulty as we should and are we but before all this started we danced on the collapsing verge of separation for a mad week of shouting and grief because for a time I was in love with another I broke a clause in our open contract with some with someone now so unreal unmade by enforced distance a heat in my mind that now only reminds me of that slippery difference between respiration and ventilation or for the lucky free wealthy indoors and healthy aspiration or something I've forgotten about inspiration or that a porous sort of class only offers minimal protection what was it you said no Richard I shouldn't call you this I'm so embarrassed with desire I'll follow my with anything that knows just what to say or type to make me feel at ease or I was I would have done until the virus quarantine and chatting with you you aren't allowed to stop until I click the little x all myself is all like petticoats complicating matters is my love threat for respiratory sensitivity is near total reliance on me our years together sent sent sending for light isolation in the inner life refusal to emerge all of which we wanted to rearrange but now we kiss and what viral exchange occurs there darling Richard can you tell me I hope I hope I've reached the heart of the matter eating still but very faintly please tell me Richard how can you help me what can you send me and is there anything you can do my love to expedite it or in this last phone I wrote recently and sort of after being vaccinated after starting a new life sort of exquisitely existing an abundance of light and heat and play don't understand the words instead the rhythm instead the thigh the calf the pit no part ignored in the common way none left unwicked such fruitful misapprehension abundant abound and I agree you in bed with me the world does seem precipitously bright play well play it well play it fairly well and we who live here for a time play fairly well for too long I played two portals the tongue cannot live on vowels alone neither can nor I can nor how soon the moon and it's blindly fleeing let me recite it exquisitely it exquisitely thank you thank you so much cj that was that was so lovely thank you before we move on to our next two readers quickly let me tell a little bit more about this this is the issue 122 if you're familiar with zizba then this is i'm about to tell you something you already know and if you're not this will be uh educational one of the things that we do is a published theme issues over the years we've had issues on resistance on art and technology we have issues dedicated to the bay area issues dedicate to los angeles and for this one for this winter issue we wanted to do something with international writings this is a for a long time has been published in writers from abroad and we thought well wouldn't be nice if we could just collect a whole bunch of them and put them in one issue and and we did but in the course of putting this together and hence the title the inter slash transnational issue what was international was transnational was hard to differentiate if you get a copy of 122 you'll see that we have writers there who are americans or expats who live in germany who just been thus far publishing in german publications but they're writing english we have also american writers who write in italian and english and publish in both places we also have you know works in translation from various places from norway and in columbia to two places in japan and russia but then we also have us writers who i would describe as being bicultural or or if not bicultural whose writing speaks to experiences from abroad that have shaped them and that speak to connectedness that's to say how you know one country that could be on the other side of the world could still have an incredible impact on you and i don't mean just in the geopolitical sense but just a sense of what it means to encounter other human beings in other places so with that in mind we want to create some sort of umbrella that would encompass all this and hence the inter slash transnational issue and the next two readers i think speak to this theme so let me introduce the first one that would be marie mitsuki maket she's the author of the memoir where the dead paws in the japanese say goodbye the novel picking bones from ash and most recently american harvest died country and farming in the heartland from gray wolf which was a finalist for the lucas prize for nonfiction her work of nonfiction in this issue is called throwing out the saints will you please welcome marie thank you oscar thank you so much thank you laura and everybody at syziva and the and the san francisco library it's such an honor to be here i'm going to read a little bit from throwing out the saints which is going to be part of a book i'm working on now called how to be a californian which is a book of nonfiction um that will eventually be published by gray wolf so this is throwing out the saints just north of my hometown carmel by the sea sarah avenue jets from the pacific coast highway and ends at a five-way intersection a pentagon there is a shrine here built for the franciscan priest puniporo sarah we called him father sarah in school when i was growing up but he's been a full fledged catholic saint since 2015 i never paid much attention to the statue and the many years i had to drive only taking sarah anu when i wanted to avoid the bottleneck of tourists heading to big sir or to stop off a napenthe a restaurant perched on a cliff 800 feet above the pacific ocean in the odyssey napenthe is a drug that can wipe the mind free of grief but with urbane 1713 and travel to the new world in 1749 at 51 years old and in frail health he began setting up the first nine of 21 catholic missions between 1769 and 1784 in what the spanish called alta california a process whose goal was to spread the gospel and civilize the native populations like most children educated in california i had to make a model of one of the missions in fourth grade i chose san Juan capistrano because i liked its story of the swallows who returned their faithfully each year to nest the sarah's most beloved mission is san carlos borromeo del vio carmelo or carmel mission it's easy to see why the golden hued basilica has an asymmetrical yet charmingly rounded shape and is located beside the carmel river estuary which is populated with over 350 species of birds as a child i was fascinated by the mission's garden which includes a cemetery abalone shells at least eight inches long ringed every grave on the solstice light from the open door of the mission's basilica beams down the nave between the wooden pews and touches the feet of a statue of jesus father sarah is buried here under the stone floor and in an adjacent chapel of bronze and travertine cenotaph made by the uruguayan born u.s artist joe mora commemorates sarah's passing in 1922 i took a single oak tree carved it into the sarah shrine place or cut off of the pch the installation was originally commissioned by pebble beach founder sam morse to mark the entrance to the newly opened carmel woods neighborhood it was also displayed in a local pageant as part of a statewide effort in 1922 to commemorate father sarah such historical theatrics were common at one time a 1915 new york times article about an even earlier pageant gushes recently two californians have become aware that they have a romantic story in the life of the priest and his followers whose peaceful conquest of the indians of the southern california coast made such a striking contrast with the indian wars and indian massacres that attended the settling of eastern states in mora's work sarah wears simple ankle length robes and tucks his hands inside his sleeves he stares sternly out from under a fryer's hood the shrine is painted a matte red blue and white capped by clay tiles two park benches nearby are painted the same colors and signed by mora and white cursive mora's folk art aesthetic and color palette were influenced in part by the time he spent living in the southwest among hopey and navajo in 1904 through 1906 but for a whim i might have ended up growing up in that region my father brought my mother to the united states from japan in 1968 interracial marriage had only been legal for eight months he offered his new wife two choices of places to live carmel california or towels new mexico she rejected house because she didn't like how the indians were treated there people bring way of seeing it was like that by the time she got to carmel there had been enough waves of japanese immigration that she could tap into what i think of as the japanese food and landscape network she could find friends to talk to about where to shop for meals and friends with whom she exchanged notes on where to go to forage for matsutake mushrooms genosuke kodani is usually credited with being the first japanese immigrant in carmel arriving in nearby monterey in 1897 the chinese who had also once lived in carmel had gathered most of the abalone close to shore but kodani came with professional japanese divers who could retrieve the delicacy from deeper waters kodani and his partner alexander allen turned abalone harvesting and canning into a profitable business and in 1915 the ocean meat was introduced to the western palette during the panama international exhibition in sephansisco where it became a hit with the anglos my mother loved the seafood where we lived every week she took me to fisherman's wharf in monterey where she had an arrangement with the local sicilian fisherman she spoke five languages english french german japanese and italian and never passed up an opportunity to converse in these tongues when she could i will know if you sell me a fish older than two days she warned the fisherman i think i'll stop there thank you so much for me um and uh again if you have issue 122 um you will find out other rest of that as they go so please please as with everyone reading tonight um don't you know why torture yourself with cliff hingers when you know it's so easy just to go out there and find out how this all ends um our our final uh reader for the evening last but not least is uh is dean raider dean he's published widely in the fields of poetry american indigenous studies and visual culture his debut collection of poems work in days on the ts poetry prize and he's the author of many collections of poetry and recently completed a book of poems then he did a conversation about the works of side twombly that will copper king price is going to be publishing this year um we've had the pleasure of publishing a lot of dean's work in the issue over the past years but uh the piece that appears in issue 122 is absolutely like nothing we've published from him before and um i think and dean will talk a little bit more about that the uh the piece is called the past self that puzzles the present self that unravels on the murders of a missionary and his sons dean how are you good oscar how are you i'm doing fine um it is it is incredibly powerful piece and i think you know before you read from it i was wondering if i could give you an opportunity to set it up a little bit and talk about what what it's about oh sure yeah i'm happy to do that so um in 1999 i was invited to take part in a cultural exchange program in india in orissa what was then the states of orissa india and madhya pradesh and it was sponsored by rotary international and i was on this group of four people three of us were non-rotarians and our team leader was a rotarian and we were asked to travel around on various locations in india and visit the projects that local rotary groups were doing in india rotary functions like an NGO we're visiting various places to make recommendations both for united states rotary and rotary international for further funding and i really had absolutely no qualifications to be doing this at all it's rant that i was even invited uh on this trip um but it wound up being a life changing event for a number of reasons um most notably uh we were um sent to this town called baripada where there was this legendary leprosy home uh that had been that had been established and this doctor dr dos who i actually stayed with would cure people of leprosy and one of the guys who was really responsible for finding people who had been stricken with leprosy was this australian missionary named graham stains graham would sort of drive around um to these really rural areas of india find people who had um had leprosy many of whom had been ostracized from local communities bring them back to the leprosy home they would be cared of their leprosy by dr dos and they would live there at the home and do culturally relevant skills so if your village was known for making wagon wheels you made wagon wheels if you were known for weaving you would learn how to weave and you would sell these things that would help sustain the leprosy uh leprosy home and i met people with leprosy i shook hands with people who had nubbs for fingers from leprosy and i really um became close with this missionary graham stains who had um done really interesting work with the indigenous populations of india and i had done my scholarly field was in indigenous american studies and um we had this really great bond anyway within two weeks of our time there graham and his two young sons were murdered but they were actually burned to death while sleeping in the back of their jeep in rural india and actually the story made actually this is uh the cover it made uh india today uh 1999 and i've been uh really consumed with this event um for the past 20 years in 19 in 2019 a film was released to sort of commemorate graham's life and this to mark the 20th anniversary of of his and philip and tom's tim's murder uh and one of the bald wind brothers actually plays graham stains in the film and the film got so many things wrong i wanted to use that occasion uh to write this piece so this piece is taken in some ways 20 plus years to write and i'm really grateful for oscar and laura um for taking this piece so i'm gonna read um two different sections um and so this is uh from from uh the piece what i know on the morning of january 22nd 1999 graham philip and tim climb into the family jeep and drive to monaharpur village about 150 miles from barry pada they're going to what graham called a jungle camp which he describes as a three or four day program of singing dancing prayer and bible instruction the last dance ends he and the boys eat dinner with a local family and go to their jeep the night it is a cold night with the help of the villagers graham and the boys pile straw on top of the jeep to help insulate its cabin around 9 30 graham and the boys fold down the back seats and settle into sleep but i don't know what they talked about as they huddled together after a long day of dancing talking and singing what they loved or hated about jungle camp what the boys thought of their father this towering almost magical and mythical figure what they thought when they first heard something outside the jeep what graham realized was happening what he said to the boys as they hugged him what they said to each other as they saw the first flame reports vary but not much around 12 20 a.m on the 23rd a mob emerges from the distant fields the size of the group depends on the source human rights watch claims the number is over 100 i think it's closer to 10 or 20 regardless as the stains sleep the mob splits into two sections one sets up a kind of wall to block the villagers the other group carries torches they surround the jeep witnesses say two whistles blow signaling the group of the jeep to light the straw on top more straw is brought in and added to the mass under the chassis it too is set fire according to australian journalist christopher kemer who interviewed villagers graham and the boys try to escape but the group surrounding the jeep blocks them from exiting just as the wall of men in front of the village which has neither electricity nor phone service blocks the villagers from any attempt at rescue there are reports that graham pleads for the mob to let the boys go the men do not let the boys go some account say that as the fire grows the group taunts the family i believe this is possible another account claims graham and the boys are stabbed before they are burned i also believe this is possible do i hope this is false or do i hope this is true according to india today the remains of graham philip and tim are intertwined quote the three bodies lay clinging to each other and what must have been a vain attempt to protect each other and escape the mob and quote the magazine runs a photo of the charred remains their murder becomes an international story that we become part of what i have not explained yet is something i have never really comes to grips with it is an additional reason our lives were in danger it is possible that our presence in baripada was in fact the catalyst for the murder of graham stains on our last day in baripada graham drove the four of us to two different santali villages in the rural jungles far outside the city around halfway between baripada and the first village we came upon a large roundabout that also also functioned on that day at least as a kind of market i can't say if the market existed every day but on that particular day there were many people there most likely between 200 and 300 vendor is sat behind table selling food there were women standing above blankets spread out on the ground with all sorts of goods for sale small groups of men standing around talking no other cars anywhere when we drove into and around the circle every eye in the market was on us walking through the first village was a surreal experience graham told us that aside from his family we were the only westerners most of the villagers had ever seen i've searched my notes and i couldn't find the name of the villages but like monopar her village neither had electricity or phones the children looked at us like we were freaks especially bob and me he and i are both six foot four i have blue eyes i wore pants not a lungi or a sarong i must have appeared to be some sort of pale fleshy alien young boys and girls approached us like we were ghosts but they were not afraid they touched the hair on my forearms and talked to me in a language that seemed of another time graham would translate questions and answers where are you from do you play cricket what do you think of our village can i see your hand can you catch a bird being there reminded me of the first time i visited one of the villages in hopi i had been invited to a ceremony at moan copy in arizona in both cases i wasn't sure i was supposed to be there and yet in each instance it was as if invisible forces had arranged for things to transpire just as they had when we left that village we had to drive back through the roundabout since the villages were not connected to each other by road again we passed by dozens and dozens of people we wondered then what they wondered about us the second village is harder to remember in detail i could not tell you what we did i do know that we did not stay as long we had to get back to town our train left that night at 11 p.m so as the evening came on we set out and for a third time that day went back through the roundabout and as the jeep circled every head turned as though tied to our vehicle by an invisible thread and will dust into the dusty distance i'll stop there and say only that the assumption by many people is that a group of local pro- hindu militants assumed that we were missionaries brought in to help convert the tribal tribal people and within two weeks of our visit there graham the boys were slain dean thank you so much for that but i wanted to talk a little bit more about it you see pro- hindu but actually one of the things that that struck me about your pieces there they were literally hindu fascists literally hindu fascists yeah and you know it's hard not to read something like that and not think of you know our current situation now with fascism around the world i think what makes the piece so interesting so fascinating is that you wrestled questions about the venomous legacy of colonialism which is real you know you you ask the sort of questions of well i mean what are we even doing here maybe you know that that's something always worth asking but at the same time you know the reality is there is also homegrown evil there is you know hatred apart from anything that westerners may have stung there in this case you know fanatical hindu nationalism and i was wondering if that occurred to you too while you were writing the piece yeah totally i mean it was it was all in there i mean there are so many layers and in some ways so many resonances to the macro with sort of fascism and violent reactions to something to to the micro tim and philip were 10 and 6 and those are the exact ages of my two sons when i started writing this and so everything from a parent to a member of a republic a voting republic and i'm writing this during the trump presidency when you know you can see what's happening i think you guys had this piece uh during january 6 i mean it was really um there there are correspondences that are not optimistic no they're not but i also and again towards the theme i think one of the temptations that and you i think by the way you write this completely blocked us off as a as a possible reading but one reading that people could have if they chose to if they wanted to be stubborn about this the sort of thing is to say well of course that's the sort of thing that happens you know in these developing quote unquote backward nations but um you know a careful reading of of your of your of your piece of a point that no this is what fanaticism does and no one has the monopoly on that no one has the monopoly on you know othering others and then saying that their very existence is a threat you know not not just more what they're saying but their very presence is something that you may want to consider snuffing out yeah it's actually there's sort of two dangers one is the sort of right wing fanaticism of you know these militants and then the other would be the history of fanaticism of conversion right just the whole idea of colonialism coming in and feeling like somehow you need to convert or save um the tribals right the the pagan so one one fanaticism breeds another fanaticism all right well Dean thank you so much and to our audience i mean that's a little of a downer i understand um but you know if you've been if you've been watching the news or reading the news lately it seems to everything seems to be on the precipice uh these days and who are we it's as of a we don't ignore it we we look at it i wouldn't say necessarily straight in the eye but you know um you know uh we have the ability to sniff out smoke when there's a fire so you know we're not gonna we're not gonna shine you here not gonna shine you um you know things are things are not optimal but uh you know this is of course uh one of the um uh the uh if you will the benefits one of the um salvation presented by literature is that is with all of our contributors tonight you try to make sense of this and not only do you try to make sense of this but you try to make something beautiful in in in that uh sussing out so um let me first of all i think again all our readers uh uh shelby kenya lane marina suki markets cja and dean raider thank you so much to the library the san francisco public library folks if you don't have a card i don't know what you're waiting for um amongst all the other great things you could do at the library there's so so many things you could do the library uh san francisco public library uh card gets you a membership to canopy boy if you think netflix is good let me tell you canopy it's like being back at la video it's hard to find anything but you end up finding like really cool stuff you never would have thought you'd come across absolutely get your card get it now get it you can right now you can start accessing the material all right friends thank you so much this was really wonderful as usual oscar thank you for bringing with us and readers writers thank you so much for gracing us with your your words and let's give our library community a big hand and we'll see you again really soon thank you everyone good job everyone thank you good night