 All right. Peter Deagle, Dean of the Library, some of you know, asked me to get this started because he's in a meeting right now and is working his way over and rather than make you wait for him to leave a meeting, we'll get started. So, and as we all know, he would welcome all of you and faculty, staff, members of the overall community, alumni as well to our first Talking the Library program for this spring. And this one is presented in collaboration with the Creative Writing Program as well. Before I introduce Maria, I will also take the time to advertise the next two events. The next one is Monday, actually the next two are on Mondays, which is un-customary because typically we do them on Tuesdays. March 23rd will be Johar Ilham, who some of you students have heard the story of the daughter of Ilham Todi, a Chinese scholar who is in prison in China and his daughter, college-aged daughter, your age, has been here in the United States for two years, very accidentally here and has become really someone who's had to make a life for herself and advocate for her father at the same time. A very interesting story and a very interesting person, a very lovely person too, so she'll be here to, she told me she's not going to stand and talk to a bunch of people, but she'll be here to, you know, converse as it were. And then the last Talking Library this season will be on April 13th, which will be a Pulitzer Prize Award winner, Paul Harding, who will be here as part of the Burma Fellowship, and that'll be on April 13th. There's also tomorrow, as long as we're just rattling this stuff off, a panel discussion on Native Sun with Keith Stokes will be here, Dean Isinger, and somebody else from the law school. And there's an exhibition anyway. And then there will be, you'll get information from Professor Soto about the various National Voluntary Month events that'll be happening in April. Okay, and otherwise the general turn off the cell phones kind of stuff and we'll get going, okay. Now, now I need the glasses. There are many possible reasons why you may be here this afternoon to listen to Maria Fluke. Maybe you're here because of Maria's poetry, the art form she started in and brought her earliest accolades, notably the Halton Mifflin New Poetry series. Or perhaps you are here because Maria's nonfiction, remembering, among other works, her fascinating exploration of a murder, a life, and a culture in invisible Eden, love and murder of Cape Cod. Or maybe you have come to Maria through her fiction novels and short stories, such as her recently released novel, Mothers and Lovers, a narrative about an academic named April, so it just sat here in Rhode Island, who in an effort to uncomplicate her life, is pulled by threads of temptation that may become too seductive to resist, of which she risks being undone by. Readers of Mothers and Lovers will recognize Maria's writing the careful choices of a skilled craft's woman in the art of fiction. They will recognize the deep study of the complex push-pull of human instinct versus human consciousness versus human nature. They will recognize humor. They will recognize a level of suspense and tension, and they will recognize a sexiness, both in the writing and in the storyline itself. But, of course, there is another reason why you might be here today to see Maria, and that is that she is an alumna of Roger Williams College. As she told Abby DeVerve in an interview on our library's connection site, quote, I was 18, I never graduated high school, and I didn't have a high school diploma. I was admitted into the creative writing program at RWC as quote a special student. The letter S appeared after every grade I received on my first report cards until I'd earned enough straight A's to be taken off the special student list. I'd been admitted to the course after showing a manuscript to the creative writing instructor Robert McRoberts. He saw that I was doing something interesting with my poetry and he endorsed my application. Throughout that interview, Maria shares many fascinating experiences of her days at Roger Williams, giving a glimpse into what life as a student in the creative arts meant here at the time, something that in a world that forever dismantles tradition in favor of the illusion of innovation we might learn from. I'd encourage you to read the interview when you get the chance. It can be accessed through the library's homepage again to the connections. In the meanwhile, for whatever reason you are here, please join me in welcoming Maria Fluke back to Roger Williams. Thank you, Adam. That was a lovely introduction. I met with some of you earlier for an hour and I really enjoyed meeting you. You seem like really serious, great students and I think Adam is lucky to be working with you. I am very happy to be back here. I've been back here a couple times since I was a student here but this place has really changed and I was even telling Adam I was so surprised to see that there's no toll at the bridge and then he told me it must have been 12 years ago they took the toll away but you still always have to come down and pay a little toll. So a lot of things have changed. Tonight I am going to read some pages from the first chapter of so of this book, Mothers and Lovers, which takes place in Rhode Island. One thing Adam didn't say is that many of my novels take place in Rhode Island. I have a brand new novel which hasn't been published yet which takes place in Middletown and that one is called Divorce Dog Style. So hopefully that will get published and I'll be able to share that with you. So I'm going to read maybe about 20 minutes or so from this new novel and then afterwards are we going to have a little discussion and so if any of you have any questions about my experience here, I keep still calling it RWC. I can't get used to RWU but I'm going to try to read this without this being in my way. Okay it's right in my way. Anyway let me introduce this novel that I'm going to read to you. I'm going to introduce in the first couple pages the point of view of one of my characters who is a teenage boy. Okay then I'm going to introduce my other main character who is a young 30-something-year-old college professor and these two characters meet one another because the college professor has just moved in next door to the teenage boy so I'll start. He stands beside the highway in a windy bib of waist-high daisies where a sign says, wildflowers do not mow. Last chance bumblebees skim the tossing mop heads and he swats them one by one. A cruiser lounges past him. He dodges the trooper sinking chin deep in the weeds until its wig-wag lights disappear in the distance. Then he's on his feet and pumps his thumb. Cars rip past. Drivers keep moving when they see betwixt in between written all over him. He has the penetrating look of a young man who unfairly suffers the aftermath of something. Pounded by the right lane airway he's thinking of her the way she curled her pinky finger when she wanted him to climb into bed beside her. Another driver peels by checking his rear view without pity. Blaze twirls around, tilts his arms and plays airplane to mock him. In the growing dark they can hardly see him let alone stop in time. Dressed in black jeans and a dark hooded sweatshirt he's almost invisible. His colorless silhouette absorbed by the macadam. Truckers might pull over to save a baby stray breaking when they think it's a teen who took off in a huff. But when he climbs into the cab and extends his long legs he's six feet plus. He wears a halo of blue meanies so they start telling him their own stories to knock him off his high horse. He's heard it all a hundred times. When his last ride dropped him the driver punched his shoulder as he climbed down saying kid go home it's crazy to thumb and funeral clothes that's just asking pancake. The rig had said York Pennsylvania the barbell capital of the world. The driver had explained that his trailer carried lat bars curl bars power lifter bars and crates of dumbbells. Blaze said what's the difference between a dumbbell and a barbell? I guess a dumbbell doesn't know the difference. Blaze looked at the windshield to see a vanity plate preaching T H N K G O D. Think God yeah right. Son that's that tag says thank God where do you come from? After the hearing that afternoon he had left the courthouse in the county van. Heading back to the mini max in Cranston he saw his chance stopped at a no right on red. He crashed through the window of the bubbler GMC after peeling back the rubber gasket. He pried its lip popped it loose and swung his legs out first like a monkey. He was a tall drink of neon in his juvie hall jumpsuit with two officers in pursuit. He lost them behind a strip mall and when he climbed into a stout salvation army bin on chalk blocks he wormed under the heap of tangled clothes waiting for them waiting for them to crawl in after him. They didn't go in. He buried his hot pink pajamas in the giveaway vault and walked away in his second hand jeans. Standing on the rumble strip he pictures her again. Ruby bubbles of foam sputtered on her lips. Wet red paisleys had bloomed on the top sheet. Her body still warm when he left her. Just then a big Kenworth car hauler down shifts and veers into the breakdown lane. The semi doesn't stop. It plows straight into the wildflower patch beheading a section of daisies like a monster weed wacker aiming for the tallest bloom. That would be him. The trucker blasts his direct compressor air horn two shorts and then the long and blurs into the straight away again. Never slowing down. Blaze rolls clear just in time pinging his collar bone. Brushing thistles off his jeans he sees more trouble coming. From out of the twilight about 50 yards away on the apron of the highway it's already gaining on him. A freak creature lobes in wild pounces heading right for him. A big silver dragon. Half animal, half alloy, like an Xbox serpent or something from a Terminator movie. He doesn't wait to see. He sprints down the breakdown lane but the dragon gallops the rest of him hissing and rattling its scales. It's just a loop of flameproof dryer hose. A squirming squirming tube of shiny accordion foil that tumbles with the wind. A cast off just like him. An escapee unattached to any legitimate dwelling or proper situation. In the morning the mountain was higher. New deliveries of sludge arrived after dark. She heard the diesel as it downshifted and turned into her neighbor's lot. When she pulled her curtain to look outside the driver cut his beans. He wasn't fooling anyone. The stuff was supposed to be rich fertilizer for weekend gardeners and gentlemen farmers who puttered in their backyards on Sundays. Hasmat authorities monitored the transfer of cured waste coming from sewage treatment plants in Boston and Providence. But there was something sinister about the substance. It sifted, steamed and bubbled as if it were alive. April had already called Town Hall to complain. She was new in town and she was shuffled from one phone number to the next. She had recently moved from Providence to East Westerly, a little backwoods hamlet once known for its productive granite quarries. Its comic oppositional name East Westerly was its most famous distinction and a statewide joke. If someone went off his rocker or had lost his marbles, Rhode Islanders would often say he s gone East Westerly. She wore a raincoat over her clingy nightgown and stepped into her furry boots. She walked outside into the cold pewter half light near dawn but the dump truck was gone. Watching where she placed each step, she circled the apron of the newly replenished heap. It was starting to drift and topple into her drive. She was surprised to see she wasn t alone. A figure stood in the doorway of the place next door. Her neighbor s teenage son had been sent home from reform school and was living with his father under house arrest to await his next scheduled family court date later that spring. Weekdays, the local school bus rolled past at 6.30 but didn t stop for him. He was tall and slender, only a shadow in the poor light. She couldn t see his face behind a long curtain of dark hair. Even in his hiding spot, the kid oozed a lot of attitude. He stamped his boot heel several times as if to kill a spider. He was nearly snuffing a cigarette. He smoked menthols. She had noticed some of these white white cool butts sprinkled along the worn path that made a desire line between their properties. The kid prowled the path and flicked his burning stubs willy nilly. Mentholated brands were popular in prison. The minty rush of flavoring adds an extra jolt. She imagined that in the monotony of the day by day lock up inmates seek every extra jolt they can get. The boy turned to look in her direction. He was giving her the up and down. He didn t have a greeting. This is what she had to deal with. Not so much as a hello how are you. She looked at the hill of bio fertilizer, tiny funnels of mist erupted over its bulk like wriggling ghost worms. Back in her kitchen, she started her coffee machine and washed last night s dinner plate at her double sink. She dried her silverware and put it away. She was finicky and kept her teaspoons and tablespoons separated in parallel bins with the teaspoons facing the opposite way of the tablespoons bowl to stem. When she opened the silverware drawer, she d never reach for the wrong one. If only she could use the same precaution as she sorted her personal affairs and her contracts with people could be managed and monitored, held at bay, bowl to stem. She had moved to the country trying to extract herself from an affair with a married man. He was the provost at Sinclair College where she was a faculty member. But it disturbed her that they had shared the same embarrassing email address because she and her lover both worked at Sinclair College. Their emailed love notes, notes, works, changed to and from sin.edu. The email address sin.edu seemed to mock their illicit relationship. She decided to leave town in order to distance herself from him. She couldn't stay in the city and be single again. She told her friends, I refuse to become a crone in a condo. Not yet 40. April was a long way off from that. But she was alarmed to come across the C word in the dictionary and to find out that the derivation for the word crumb was carrion. April opened her freezer door and took out two previously steep tea bags from the ice cube bin, little pillows of green slush. She walked into the parlor and collapsed on her sofa. She was hatching a headache. She closed her eyes and placed the frozen tea bags on her eyelids. She was certain that the increase in her morning headaches must be caused by this toxic sludge pot. The tea bag trick sometimes worked wonders. She tried to rest but someone was tapping the brass door knocker in flurries of clinks and clanks. She put the soggy tea bags in a saucer and went to see who it was. The unexpected visitor kept banging on the door. She had thought it might be the provost arriving for one of his rare small and early surprise visits. But it was a newcomer. He had one foot already wedged on the threshold as she pulled the front door open. Halfway inside already he stood there uninvited. Shoulder length hair framed a very pretty yet solidly square jawed face. His skin so white he looked pale as a geisha. It was the boy from next door. Oh it's you she said in her neutral and tolerant school teachers voice. She didn't invite him to come in. I'm testing my cuff he said as he brushed past her and walked into the foyer. You're doing what? Testing the hardware. Your cuff. My virtual arrest solution. You know it's got a stamp of approval from the American Civil Liberties Union. You have to wear that electronic device she said. He showed her a rubberized cinch snapped onto his ankle. It's a wireless tramp tamper proof transmitter he said. It shoots to the outer space satellite back to the cell tower and then to the monitoring center. Shoots what? Every move you make. He said I can't leave the property without sending an alarm to big brother. I'm surrounded by an invisible fence just like a dog pen. She wondered what drug he was taking. Maybe Ritalin that made him such a motormouth. She had learned that students who spent a lot of energy explaining themselves are not to be trusted. He said if I'm not where I'm supposed to be it pops onto a screen and those Betsy's alert my P.L. Then he calls my dad or he calls the state police. Those fucks. How long do you have to wear it? She said. I'm short time now. If I get any add-on time at the training school these dog pen months count against my sentence. Well you're not very locked up now she said. That's the beauty part. You're inside the radius. It's good here he said. And here he inched into her parlor. He walked in tiny bride steps until he was all the way into the room. April followed on his heels. Then he turned around. He grinned. Oh he said I should introduce myself. I'm Blaze. He extended his hand. When she reached out to shake hands with him he licked his palm grabbed her hand and pumped it up and now. She was surprised by the flash of his pink tongue followed by his cool wet tongue. He had tricked her. He was making a crude joke at her expense. But her wave of repulsion felt more like a thrill. He plopped down on her sofa brushing her saucer of wet teabags onto the floor. What's with the teabags? He said. I thought I smelled coffee. She didn't offer him a cup of coffee. He put his arms behind his head. We're golden he said. Golden. You mean that sofa is within the confinement map? It's safe. You tell me. Is it safe? She looked at him in awe. He was acting like a precocious Casanova and he seemed as confident as his elder the sludge tycoon next door. She wondered if the kid had learned it from his father. Other men might talk to her like this but they were usually had acts all talk and no real threat. He leaned back on the sofa resting his long arms against its sulking back. Is this a fainting couch? He said. It's so antiques roadshow. Not a fainting couch. No. It's French empire. She said. She understood his confusion because the antique French sati had a sculpted back that was higher on one side before it dipped gracefully to the lower end like the matronly curve of a hip. The sati was very feminine. Teen boys and grown men looked almost silly sinking into the cushions. She could have told them that real fainting couches were popular when ladies were tight corsets and they often collapsed from poor circulation. She said antiques roadshow you say? Did you really watch PBS in jail? No. We liked the map channel he said. Oh you mean National Geographic. I like that too. No. M-A-P. Mature amateur porn. My favorite. I guess that's why you look familiar. He said. She felt a queasy pleasure tug in her stomach. It was a silly insult or perhaps it was a backhanded compliment. She tried to ignore it. This is nice. I like it. He said. Patting the sofa cushion. It's comfy. So in the olden days why did women faint so much? Like I said it's not a fainting couch. But go ahead. Be my guest. Feel free if you want to faint. He reached out and grabbed her wrist. No. You will. You're going to faint all you want. He smiled staring into her face. She tugged her hand away watching him more closely. His eyes were colder when his mouth was shut. She sensed a raw fear under his silence. His chiseled expression looked older than 15 or 16. He was a hardened animal right out of a jungle of small cons and headaches that she didn't want to imagine. But he jabbered like a sugar jazz kindergartner. He had plopped down on her couch like a kid ready to watch Saturday cartoons. Men are happy to kick off their shoes, wingtips or nikes. Once shoeless when they are in their rumpled socks. They are like innocence. Men often sleep where they finish in bed on the settee. Her fantasies were fiction but felt good swarming through her mind. She'd savor them later when writing in her bedside journal with its velvet board covers. She had learned that velvet covers kept her journal from sliding off the bed. These unwholesome thoughts were in direct response to her current dead end affair with the provost. But she didn't know what to do with the teenager. If he was really under house arrest she wasn't supposed to babysit him. She said, so what's the story with the bracelet? He locked eyes with her. You really want to know? Okay, I'll tell you. It's called aggravated assault. She didn't exactly know what characterized an aggravated attack. Boys always fought about girls. She didn't want to imagine drugs, armed robbery or something worse. He said, I see that Camry has a moonroof. That's a nice feature. She realized that his unauthorized plot down might be because he wanted her wheels. She warned him, that car is a lemon. Every time I park the thing its tail lights won't turn off. So I have to remove a fuse from underneath the dash with the needle nose pliers to shut the lights off. The mechanic had told her it would be $1,500 to replace a circuit panel. So for the time being she would have to drive the beater. She said, sometimes I drop the fuse behind the dash and I can't find it. They're tiny. I could find your fuse, he said. She recognized his sexual antagonism. It was a turn off or a turn on. She didn't want to decide. She said, do you know when your dad is planning to move that sludge pile? It's like that B movie, the blob. He told her, you're right. That mound is like an X file. It's like Stephen King compost. He was mocking her. Sweared, he said, smearing the words. Yeah, I keep an eye out. Things can happen like house drops on a witch, he said. The boy had stretched out on her sofa. He was reclaiming his space. He said, my mom ditched me to run off with a contractor who builds strip malls, whore, he said, imitating the cold jargon he must have heard on TV shows or maybe at the kitty prison. You don't get along with your mom, she said. Bitch doesn't pass the food bowl test. April had met his mother a few times, but she didn't recognize the reference he was making. He said, you know how the ASPCA evaluates shelter dogs? The trainer reaches for the food bowl with a plastic arm. If the dog bites the arm, end of story. His icy summary of his mother's vicious streak was disturbing, but his absurd invention of the food bowl metaphor seemed shockingly authentic. He shifted on the sofa stretching his legs out. She rescued a hand embroidered pillow from under his dirty shoes. Hey, are you going to be sociable? He patted the velvet sea cushion. As a college professor, her male students sometimes tried to find a chink in her armor. They watched her closely as she walked between the tight tables in the classroom, trying not to bump her hips against the crowded chairs. She just looked too curvy. On the website, ratemyprofessors.com, where students critique teachers, she'd often been awarded a little red icon beside her name, a hot pepper. But Blaze was way ahead of her. His silly insults have confused her, first with his wet handshake, and next with comments she might have heard before, but always from a seasoned player, not from a kid. He didn't want to seem to leave. April finally told him, you have to go. I've got to meet my class. You work at Sin, he asked. Yeah, I heard. She hated it when people lopped off the second syllable of Sinclair College. The slang nickname had special meaning to her because of her illicit connection to the provost. Okay, I'm going, Blaze said. He rolled slowly off the sofa in one languorous collapse to her carpet. Seduced by his dreaminess, artificial or not, she walked into the kitchen door with added formality. She tried to regain control by relying on her ladylike decorum. It was very nice to meet you, Blaze, she said. Thanks for stopping by. She watched him walk down the path to the driveway where her car was parked. He stopped to peer into his driver's side window, steepling his hands as he pressed his nose to the glass. Her camry looked a little shabby. It had doilies of rust on its front fender, and of course, she had to remove the fuse each time she parked it. Blaze turned and smiled at her. He was twirling something on his pointer finger. She recognized the little flat, black plastic cue of her lock beeper. He had pocketed her car keys. She always left her car keys on the kitchen counter. Despite her description of its electrical problems, she had left her oh, what a feeling, Toyota right there on a silver platter. Blaze had already climbed into the camry. He had found the needle nose pliers in the cup holder and replaced the fuse. Sinking into the driver's seat with a comfortable grin, he cranked the ignition. It purred. He towed the gas and rolled the car in a half circle around April, avoiding the empty flower beds, steering clear of their borders. The camry peeled down the country lane, its gears shifting smoothly, responding to its young driver like an all too willing cohort. The car smelled of honey or vanilla. April had dropped her grocery bag and her herbal shampoo had spilled on the car floor, soaking the rug. The sugary pastel was intoxicating, and he imagined his new neighbor. He saw her body. She's wearing nothing but a crimson thong. He saw her face. He followed it onto the highway. Thanks. Do you want to run this discussion? Okay. Anybody have anything to talk about or any questions? Yeah. Well, I'm a Rhode Island native as well from Providence, and I noticed in your reading that you kind of went around Rhode Island. During your writing process, do you feel like you have to go back and kind of back travel to just kind of remember where the journey that you're writing about? Oh, you mean to actually go we visit places? Yeah. Austin's is where we visit places. And I wrote my novel Open Water, which takes place in Newport, where I lived for many years. I did have to go back and check a couple things. I had to go back to a cemetery in Middletown that had this strangest little area of places where they buried babies. And they had this wonderful plaque with like the title of the baby cemetery. And I can't remember exactly the wording, but I needed to go back to that cemetery to actually find the right wording. And I went back to the baby cemetery and it was sort of changed. And there was somebody working there and I said, where's the baby cemetery? And they said, well, we're not advertising it anymore. They're still on the ground, but we don't want to advertise it's full of babies. And then he showed me the plaque that used to be there because they had it in the back. They had taken it off and moved it around. And so that's an instance where I did go back to make sure I knew what I was talking about. But this new novel that I just wrote about, that takes place in Middletown, I didn't really need to go back because I wrote it and it takes place in sort of one house on the Sakanet River. And I knew it so well, I really didn't feel I needed to go back. But I know things are always changing. And for writers, you should always return if you have questions or if you want to be re-inspired, you know, it's good to turn back. Anybody else have a question? I noticed when you were writing you talked a lot about very specific things about Rhode Island, like specific things to like people who are from here. So I was wondering if you write about another place, how do you research that and try to find things that make it as real as you can make Rhode Island? Well, I mean, it's the same thing. I mean, I've written about other places as well by a novel. Lux is a Cape Cod novel, is the first Cape Cod novel I ever wrote. And what was interesting about that was I had written the novel Lux. I had completed it right before I was assigned my non-fiction book about a murder in Turo. And in that book, I had to describe the Cape Cod landscape because, you know, out where that is, everything is controlled by the sea. The sea is basically the whole setting. And I was sort of upset because I had written this whole novel Lux that took place on Cape Cod and I really described Cape Cod. Then I had to write another book about Cape Cod and I had to describe Cape Cod again, but I couldn't describe it with the same descriptions I had described the first time. So I had to, I mean, if you put the two books together, I never repeated myself. I described Cape Cod afresh the second time around. But I mean, being a writer, you just have to be observant. You have to see what a setting presents to you and it doesn't just present what it appears to present. It doesn't just present its physical wonder, but it goes inside you and it becomes an interior kind of presence, you know, a setting, right? And that's why when I come back to Rhode Island, it's very interior to me to be back in these places that I know so well and that have sort of a psychic or emotional component to me. Yes? How does that come about? Well, there were editors at Random House who thought I would be somebody who would be able to tackle that project. So they called me up and asked me if I wanted to write a book about the murder and I said, let me think about it. But it was a story that was fascinating to me and I knew several of the people involved personally and it sort of was like a story with my name on it. So I took the project on. Right? Yeah. How did you avoid becoming part of the story when you were doing the book, especially in the small community? Well, actually, when I was writing the book, I was a little part of the story, but I didn't speak to the press. I had a wonderful, my editors and the press people at Random House said, don't talk to the press before the publication of the book. So anytime anybody tried to talk to me about it, I just wasn't talking. But amongst the community, I was known for somebody who had the gall to write a book about the tragic murder. So I did get a lot of flak from it. Yeah. I actually was writing for a new edition of that book all about Christopher Cowan and Random House decided not to do it because of legal issues. Because of legal issues, yeah. But I had actually done a lot of research with Chris and I knew Chris pretty well. He called me from the prison all the time. He told me his story and everything. So I was writing about it. I was going to write about him. But Random House got wind of some legal problems so they didn't want to do it. Yes, I know he did it. I have no question. And I'll tell you why because this is a lot of facts a lot of you people don't know. This man prior to the murder had five separate restraining orders from women who he had previously beaten. He was a violent man. He beat all of his girlfriends to a pulp, though he didn't kill them. And then he killed Christa. This was a violent man who was out of control. And I don't believe that the decision to convict him was incorrect because those things are actually sealed and they were not even able to use them in the court case. Believe me. Isn't that crazy? Nobody, I mean they couldn't even use his restraining orders in the court case even though they were on the books of the courts because this murder, you cannot accuse somebody of murder because of his past restraining orders. It's nutty. And again, I'm no expert in criminal law but I did learn a lot about it going over this. I went to the trial. I went to every day of the trial. And I did come to my, and I had my curiosity about who had killed Christa Worthing and who could it have been. There were so many different suspects. But the more I learned and the more I found out about it, I believe it was pretty clear that Christopher McCowen probably killed her. And the reason he probably killed her was he knocked her out in a fight. And because he was on parole, if she woke up and called the cops and reported him, he'd be back in jail. So he murdered her so she couldn't really tell on him. What a downer. Well, it's wonderful to see you all here and to meet you all. I wish you great, great success with all your writing and I wish that you would figure out a way to bring spring. Somebody told me that the daylight savings is in just two weeks. Is that right? Well, that's helpful anyway. Is that it? Is everybody okay? Anybody have anything else to say? Okay. Thank you, everybody.