 I want to welcome you all to the first ever virtual Arlington Author Salon. It's a very unusual format for us and we are excited about it and excited that we have so many of you with us. First I want to tell you a little bit about what will happen tonight. I'm your emcee. My name is Andrea Nicolai and I'm also the director of libraries for the town of Arlington. And our theme for tonight is words and music. Now I'm going to bring all of our authors on this virtual stage and tell you a little bit more about the evening, but it's more fun to see their faces as well. All right. We are really so fortunate to have with us Aaron Eileen Almond wave for us. Hi everybody. And Janet Poca Roba. So I just want to say the Arlington Author Salon is a free reading series with a twist. The author's presentation usually includes something special to tickle the senses. We've had music, paintings, photographs, tasty treats, fabrics, even smells. Of course, some of those senses tonight will be limited. We're going to do our best with the senses available to us. The next salon normally takes place quarterly the first weeks of July, the first Thursdays of July, October, January and April with some exceptions. But please note that our next salon will actually take place on August 20th and will be virtual as well. So I want to say right out of the gate that this will be recorded. And I'm very grateful to our authors for agreeing to be recorded for the purpose of sharing this. This webinar more widely the salon more widely. Each other will have 15 minutes to read and then we'll have an open Q&A at the end of the program so please hold up hold your questions until the end well actually no I'm sorry we're in zoom. So you can send your questions all along the way there's a Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen. And you can send questions whenever you wish they will not appear to anyone else in the audience they will only appear to me the host. So, please, when you think of a question go ahead and tap it into us. I will also want to know that the chat feature is disabled and so Q&A is the way to communicate with us. I want to give a nod to our usual hosts, the kickstand cafe Emily and her staff. This is the reminder, imagine kickstand cafe of where we would normally be hosting the salon. There are always such wonderful hosts for us. I also want to thank our co organizers of the salon, Anjali Medardoova, Marjan Kamali, Whitney Sharer and Amy Yellen. I also want to thank my Booglio of the book rack who typically is at the kickstand cafe selling books but you can you can find all of our authors books online. The book rack is selling and delivering books I believe still delivering books and you can also find all of their books online. The book rack is supported in part by grant from the Arlington cultural council which is a local agency supported by the Massachusetts cultural council, a state agency. Usually this program takes place in the heart of the Arlington cultural district, which was designated in 2017 by the mass cultural council. And with all of that said, let's go ahead and get our program started. And the next speaker tonight is Aaron Allman, Aaron Eileen Allman, excuse me, I'm going to. There we go. Okay. I'm going to tell you a little bit about Aaron. Aaron Eileen Allman is originally from East Hartford, Connecticut and attended the Hartford Conservatory. Her short stories essays and reviews have been published in the Boston Globe Colorado review normal school on cognizanty and the rumpus.net. She's a graduate of the UC Irvine MFA program and Wesleyan University, a longtime member of Boston's Grub Street, and a recipient of a St. Boathoff Foundation emerging artists grant. Aaron currently lives in Arlington with her husband Steve and their three children, which is dance is her first novel. Thank you, Aaron. Coming to these readings, I think pretty much since they started and was so excited to have this great reading series right in our backyard here in Arlington. So I'm thrilled to be a part of it. Sad to not be at the wonderful kickstand cafe but the show must go on and I'm like I said very happy to be a part of it. So my first novel which is dance was published this past fall. When we shut down I was lucky enough to be able to go around and read from it quite a bit, but I decided I would do something a little bit different tonight so I'm going to read an essay that is about the inspiration for the novel and it doesn't really need any introduction because it's right there in the title. It's called Nicolo Paganini, how a 19th century violin virtuoso inspired me to write my first novel. My first novel which is dance took over a decade to write, but it's fair to say that I've been thinking about it for much longer than that, maybe even for most of my life. Now that I've finished it. I can see more clearly why I was compelled to keep writing that story, long after a more reasonable person would have moved on. At some level, I was trying to make sense of the fact that despite many years of music lessons, I have not grown up to be a musician. Those lessons included violin studies beginning at age nine, as well as a foray into the dark arts of heavy metal guitar as a team. Which contributed to my interest in the 19th century violin virtuoso and composer Nicolo Paganini, a larger than life figure who influenced both my violin and guitar playing, and who would eventually make his way into my novel too. Which is dance takes its title from a piece composed by Paganini, and is about a violin soloist named Phillip Mans, who believes he is Paganini's reincarnation. Phillip develops a complicated erotically charged relationship with the teenage prodigy named Hilda Greer, and with her ballet dancer mother Claire. The narrative explores the intersection of artistic and sexual coming of age by focusing on each character's fantasies, fantasies that I believe are as necessary for art as they are for romance. There is no love without fantasy after all. We all daydream about our lovers filling in the gaps in our knowledge with our own vague longings, and the same could be said for art. What is a novel after all, but a dream that's been captured in language, however imperfectly and pinned onto the page. We all have love stories floating around in our heads all the time. Please tell me I'm not the only one. And manifesting them in the world is the ultimate thrill, whether that's through words, music, or some other artistic medium, or in Congress with another human being. What has all this to do with Niccolò Paganini? The 19th century virtuoso was a glamorous figure in his day, with the cadaverous build, long dark hair, and hands that could seemingly do the impossible upon the violin. Contemporary critics, including Goethe, famously speculated that he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his astonishing abilities. Paganini did little to stop those rumors, even dressing in all black, and showing up for some of his concerts in a funeral carriage. Paganini, it's clear, understood the power of fantasy. In fact, Niccolò Paganini was the western world's first rock star. People freaked out when he came to town, printing his likeness on keepsakes and charging twice the usual amount for tickets to his shows. He could make his instruments scream or sing as he pleased, and made audiences swoon by playing intricate passages on a single string. And, like our modern celebrities, he was forgiven many of his personal transgressions because of these virtuosic displays. When he toured, he left a string of broken hearts in his wake. Yet Paganini's art also came from sorrow. Born sickly to impoverished parents, he spent his early life in a fifth floor walk-up located on one of the winding and dangerous streets of Genoa's old town. His father was a dock worker and amateur mandolin player who often gambled away his meager wages. When Paganini's senior recognized his son's talent, he began locking him in his room each morning, refusing to feed him until after he practiced. Despite his humble origins, Paganini, to me, represents the ultimate fantasy, the original devil in a dark suit long before my heavy metal heroes. I'm looking at you, Ozzy Osbourne, capitalized on such occult associations who could also play with the controlled virtuosity of contemporary violin soloists like Hilary Hahn and Joshua Bell. Deep in my secret heart, I believe Paganini was the kind of musician I might have been, had I possessed either the confidence or the talent, but I did have some talent. Was it confidence I was lacking then? Surely my debilitating stage fright, a challenge I also gave my teenage prodigy Hilda, had something to do with it. Maybe it all comes down to those fantasies again. Because if I'm honest, once I hit my teens, I wasn't daydreaming about my own musical life, half as much as I was daydreaming about the boys I had crushes on. Boys who were inevitably musicians, with long hair, nimble fingers, and electric guitars that pulsed against their hips when they strode on stage. Terrified of the spotlight, I longed instead to stand next to some glamorous boy who I mistakenly believed could generate all the light I'd ever need. Maybe I would have felt differently if I'd been raised in another tradition, but my strict Catholic upbringing, not unlike Paganini's, was firmly patriarchal. Men were created in the likeness of God, while women's greatest value lay in their virginity, at least until they got married. In my own household, this translated into traumatic teenage years where I watched my older brother's independence celebrated, while mine was caused for anxiety and accusation. My parents increasingly restricted my musical choices, along with my clothing and friends, and when I broke the rules, I was severely punished. In the right mood, I could turn this into a joke, regaling my friends with the anecdote about my mother smashing my motley crew shout at the devil cassette with a hammer in her backyard. But mostly I just longed to get out. Finally, at 16, I moved into the basement of my friend Tracy, who played drums with me in a band called the Virgin Saints. But even after leaving my parents' house, I couldn't shake off my inhibitions, although I sometimes thought I'd gotten close when I was drunk or high, an illusion that inevitably dissolved when I woke head throbbing the next day. In Witch's Dance, I described Claire's inability to become a professional dancer. Claire had known even then, in some hidden corner of her mind, that she would never escape the curse of her religion. She would never be able to bear her body without shame, and that shame would be her undoing. She would never be as free, as uninhibited, as the greatest dancers must be. Substituted to musician dancers, I'd as well be describing my teenage self, and my inability to be as loose or as free as any rock star must be. But I also understood the power of virtuosity, talent trumps all, if you've got enough of it. That's ultimately what I longed for as a violinist, and later as a heavy metal guitarist. And it's what I gave my fictional prodigy, Hilda. If I was going to saddle her with my terrible stage fright, I'd at least give her talent to spare. I also gave her a dangerous, older man to look up to, one who didn't just play like Paganini, but claimed to actually be him. A fantasy that Hilda is all too willing to immerse herself in, not realizing the danger of that belief, until it's nearly too late. I don't want to confuse novel writing with therapy, but I do believe that we're drawn to certain projects because of how deeply their concerns plug into our own personal psychologies. I accepted that I'll never play violin or guitar on stage in front of an adoring crowd. But I could explore what that might feel like through Philip and Hilda, while still mining the sorrow of having to let some of my artistic dreams go through Claire. That doesn't mean that those characters are me, but that I have a deep and abiding sympathy for them. And maybe even through their stories, a greater understanding of myself, fantasies, and all. So that's a bit of the story behind Witches Dance, the book. And now, as a special treat, we get to hear some of Witches Dance, the Paganini piece played by my friend Yonazer. Positions, the Witches Dance, when it's played in its entirety, great, when it's played in its entirety is a pretty elaborate piece. It's got an extended introduction, and then there's this quite kind of silly-ish theme. Sorry about the backlighting. Try it without. No, better way. So there's this extended introduction, and then there's this kind of skipping, lighthearted theme, and then a series of variations upon that theme that enable the composer to, that he uses to showcase all of the crazy technical challenges that he could do. So I've narrowed it down for the purposes of this evening to just the theme and two variations and a kind of concluding section of finale. And I think you'll still get a sense of the almost circus-actishness of this piece. So much, Yona. That was wonderful. All right. Now, it is my great pleasure to introduce Umaleni, our next author. I'm going to bring her to stage, so to speak. There she is. Okay, a little bit about Umaleni. She is a Zimbabwean American performance artist, singer, poet, storyteller, athlete, and educator. Her work explores the complexity of hyphenated identity. Her debut poetry collection, Soul Psalms, published by She Writes Press, was described by David Updike as written in a fearless female voice. She is featured with Yo-Yo Ma and David Ortiz in Stands with Immigrants, a series of large-scale Boston portraits projected onto Boston's urban landscape and highlighting the critical role that immigrants play. It is now time to hear from Umaleni. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me, and thank you to everyone who's tuned in. I'm going to be sharing some poems and some images of my mom. My mom, Helen Marapa, passed away about a month ago. And so this experience I'm sharing with you is in Memoriam. I want to kick off by sharing one of my favorite images of us together. My mom was my earth, my soil. And the first piece I'm going to share, I wrote this about maybe a month ago, and it's called IF. If she could hear me through the coma that is her prison, I'll tell her I'm sorry. Global pandemic, closed borders, no one, no government, no president can quarantine my love. If I could hold her hand right now, I would sit in solace, sing thou hymns she used to braid in my hair on Sundays. I'll remind her there are still many seeds to sow that I will never forget. I'll remind her there are still many seeds to sow that I will never forget that she is my soil. Even though I have bloomed in other fields, this flower, this flower, this flower is a glory. My mother was among many things, a green thumb, and literally there was nothing that she could touch that wouldn't grow. And so I wrote this next piece called gardening for her. Some mothers carry handbags with endless assortments of lipsticks, perfumes, receipts, swunged up dollar bills, credit cards, a cell phone hidden in between the crevices but mine. Mine carries a small hoe and a small box always in search of plants and flowers that need assignment. And I too, now a mother, mostly carry journal and pen, writing ideas, words, hoping they grow. I want to share this next photo of my mom and I, one of my favorites. I know when I think this was taken, I want to say 2004. And oftentimes people would say I look a lot like my mom, and I was very thrilled about that. This next image I will share with you. My mom was a librarian archivist by trade. She grew up in a library and so this is probably taken in the 70s. She, as you can see, you know, oftentimes at that time she was often the only African and in fact, my mother was one of the first African archivists in then Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. And so I'm incredibly proud of that heritage and so my last poem I will share about my mom is from my book Soul Songs. I dedicated this book to my mother and my grandmother and from today forward any proceeds from this book are going to create a foundation honoring my mother and my grandmother. Helen and Harriet. This last poem really encompasses the profound depth of love I feel from my mom, how much she inspired many people, her family members, and I thank you for your attention. This has been a rather difficult time, but this is a really important way to honor and thank you for listening. This poem I'm sharing is titled Black Woman. Breaking barriers with words and deeds, planting seeds in minds with time, shaking foundations to the core, reaching more and more black souls and as you rise, so rise we people kissed by the sun. We bow and acknowledge ancestors, sweet caresses in the way that you do what you do, we celebrate you. Beautiful black woman, gifted and strong worthy of all praise, wisdom that writes wrongs, you are the anthem to every song. You left generations, steady feeble hands with grace with your head held high facing ignorance with pride, they step aside. Illuminated by your strength, your dignity and your style, your values, you won't bend your talents, a unique blend. Beautiful black woman, gifted and strong worthy of all praise, wisdom that writes wrongs, anthem to every song. I'm going to share another piece that I wrote very short piece. Again, in honor of my mother. This is called, actually it's called for my mother. You always shine brighter than night fires in Chupinge. You who is the epitome of womanhood, let me be a better me, another you. I'm going to end with one last photo. I want to share with you and this is from the archives. I believe this was taken when my mom was being interviewed. As I mentioned, she's a librarian and so I just wanted to share that image with you. Thank you so much for your time and you know I will live on and I will continue my mom's memory in words and in music. Thank you for your attention. Thank you, umalani, that was wonderful. I'm so pleased you could be with us this evening. And please that your mom was a librarian. Yep. My variants rock. Okay. Next and last but not least, we have Janet Pokoroba. She received her MFA in creative writing from Leslie in June 2006 and is now an associate professor of nonfiction in the program and its assistant director. A former writer and contributing editor at Metropolis Magazine in Tokyo, Japan, her memoirs, essays and reviews have appeared in Post Road, River Teeth, The Rumpus, Harvard Review, The Writer, Kyoto Journal and other publications. Her memoir, The Fourth String, a memoir of Sensei and Me, was published by Stonebridge Press in March of 2019. Here is Janet. Thank you so much. Thank you to Andrea and Anjali and the whole committee of this this salon that but he puts this together and especially Amy Yellen, who is a good colleague and friend of mine who who brought me in and thank you to Erin and Umaleni. This is really a pleasure and a privilege and to Yona. To be reading and music-ing with you it's so fun to have music be this this strand that we're all sharing. So I'm beaming in from Vermont where it's 91 degrees or was 91 degrees today. I am going to read to you from this memoir that Andrea mentioned. It's called The Fourth String like she said and so it's it's a memoir about some years that I spent in Japan learning this instrument which is called the shamisen which has three strings. So there's a little like mystery there, The Fourth String. Really the underlying story of this whole book is it's really about the relationship between my teacher and me. So this is the instrument and you will hear it at the end of my reading. Just show that to you. A little teaser. You know it's an instrument as you might guess. It's traditional. It's from the 18th century. A lot of people don't want to play it anymore or hear about it and as a matter of fact I was in Japan teaching ESL English and my Japanese female students would say well that's for wife training you know to learn obedience and loyalty and but for my teacher who was a very unconventional woman this instrument really became a path to her own liberation and freedom and she was very passionate about it. I just want to read like one blurb from the back just so you understand a little bit about who we both were. She my teacher wore a velour Beatles cap and leather jacket and she taught foreigners in English the three-string shamisen. An instrument that fell out of tune as soon as you started to play it. So I want into the Japanese you know beautiful way of being and she's very much a rebel and so I was drawn into her her life and into this music. So I wanted to read two little brief sections to you. I thought I would read one little section that would just give you a little flavour of what it was like to be her student and like who she was as a person and as a teacher. Sensei used an oversized Tokyo gas company calendar on the kitchen wall for her lesson schedule. As you were leaving she stood in front of it and with a pen dangling on the string next to it wrote in your next lesson time. By late January a new batch of foreign names filled the boxes and in the white space all around English words to think to feed her hunger for metaphors. Achilles heel sounding board miles to go before I sleep. Students came from all over Tokyo and its suburbs and from as far away as Sendai and Nagoya to take her up on her offer of free instruction. Her students were actors, art dealers, newscasters, teachers, tourists, didgeridoo players, bankers, missionaries and for a time the great granddaughter of Lillian Gish. Each one was amazing she said at the kitchen table where she liked to dig into their characters. Shami psychology she joked but was serious. Could they correct their mistakes or did they repeat them over and over? Did they get ma? Ma is a kind of space between the sounds that's important in Japanese arts and music. Or did they have to be told to wait again and again? When Sensei arrived home from work she would eat a rice ball at the sink, washing it down with a cup of green tea and then remove her apron, brush her teeth, wash her hands and prepare the instruments. During a lesson would often come a longer time to talk and eat. Eating was for survival not pleasure. Her energy lasted until around nine o'clock when she would stretch her wrist and look at the calendar and ask is next Monday good time for you? Signaling that the student should pack their score and heavy pick the finger sling and the lap pad in their wrapping cloth she had given them. Sensei was excellent at conversation until the last when the student was lacing up their shoes in the Gen Con. One student lesson bled into the next. Without this constant stream of people making her rooms something of a YMCA on the weekends I think she would have slowly unwound like a clock and stopped moving. She seduced students she said. Her lure was access, experience and redemption from the Japanese fantasy that Gaijin foreigners sat around at cafes all day sipping lattes. You have a reason to be here she said. Music was honorable. We were doing something important. I didn't think her seduction applied to me but it did. My schedule revolved around our lessons and I shuttled often down the big road in the wintry air. Music bundle hugged to my chest where she was waiting in her rooms. Her hair a smooth curtain her inky eyes warm with humor and the space heaters pulsing at our feet. It was no different from any number of times when I'd been taken with a new romance. In fact it all had a slightly erotic charge to it. He talked about a student dumping her or having a crush on a piece of music. Once when a student overslept and missed a lesson she said he slept over and when was told the real meaning laughed and repeated the joke often. Sometimes sensei would call me and say can you come Saturday for a group lesson? You inspire them to learn harder. I became their rival. Rival my students told me were necessary for them to advance in their studies and in life. Rather than an obstacle a rival showed them the way. The Japanese didn't demolish their competition. They used it. But in group lessons which happened on the weekends when sensei's floors would be covered with cushions, finger slings, scores and tea trays full of empty sweets wrappers. I often found myself staring off into the colorful stacks of music on her shelf or eyeing the hard square lines of written kanji among the loopy script of foreign names on the gas calendar. I learned the characters for shamisen literally three taste string. Sometimes I just excused myself and went to the toilet lingering there to stare at her map of Edo, old Tokyo. It was curling at the edges. As the music grew livelier that spring sensei emerged into her own power and was less the solitary monk of my first impressions and more a woman of calculated effect. It was due to the men I think. She doted on the male students who hovered awkwardly over the shamisen. Their large hands gripping the pick like footballs fingers getting tangled in the strings. They looked less like they were playing the shamisen and throttling it. They required L size knit finger slings and extra large kimono, which were hard to find and were never long enough. They high fived each other level up. The men teased out of sensei a love for Pat Boone, her hiking expeditions into the mountains as a girl, her love of taking photographs. Where the girls brought her votive candles and pretty paper, the men brought her jazz CDs and bottles of Johnny Walker Red. So that's a little bit of a portrait of her and hopefully you can see some of the sort of juxtapositions there. And I just wanted to share another little piece of writing, which I thought I would give you a little bit of an impression of what it was like to have music be my entree into the culture. I knew nothing about Japan before I went and met my teacher very early and soon became very involved in the music. And so my ear was really the way that I learned the whole culture. So I just want to read a little bit about what that was like. It might seem from what I've written that I was obsessed with sensei and not taken with other things. This was not wholly true. I like Tokyo and spent days wandering through its streets, swooning at the simplest things. A master sandal maker in his shop, watching him carve and sand a perfect wooden soul. A housewife on her bicycle at dusk, her dark hair coiled on her head, her white blouse crisply ironed. Atuned as I was to the shamisen, its tilting rhythms and silent spaces, it influenced everything I experienced. The ma space in conversations, the love of puns and imagery. I hedged said maybe I started holding on to my questions. It's not that I chose to pursue only Japanese ways, but since first hearing the shamisen, they adhered. Packed onto the trains in the mornings to go to the English school where I worked in Shinjuku, I wondered if anyone could hear sensei's music through my headphones. The halted, the halting pain bleeding, the tense buzzing sadness, sounds that I tapped into like a mainline into some collective experience. Sound was king. The ear was how I took everything in. Not only music, but all of Tokyo. The train chimes. A million pairs of shoes on the station steps. Vendors hawking their wares. Tokyo was a carnival, a free for all bazaar. Glass and concrete towers dwarfed kimono makers. Video towers stood next to 300 year old incense shops. The contrast was itchy like the shamisen's restless tuning. I was moved by everything. The kazoo of the tofu seller as he passed sensei's house in the afternoon and the jingle of house keys and the aprons of housewives who went out to buy loaves from the wooden box lashed to his bicycle. The song of the sweet potato vendor and the laundry pole seller pricked me on some primitive level where the shamisen was like a strong perfume. The scent of blood I was on the trail of heartbeat quickening. It's hard to describe how I absorbed everything. Nuance, texture, mood, indecision. Attunement wasn't something I could turn off after a lesson. Learning required an openness at all times. A lesson could appear anywhere on the train over sushi. Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, you had to be there to catch it. And if I felt lonely at times for conversations of the deep exploring variety or for human contact, as I did sometimes on the crowded trains, it soon turned to loneliness, a state of being that everyone shared. Sadness was prized in Japan and to be courted. Perhaps it is romantic to elevate loneliness to this degree to say that sadness was welcome. And this is not exactly what I'm saying. What was new was the possibility that these things were not to be avoided or cured. Melancholy was useful. All I had to do was go back to my six mat room, slide open the fissuma and pad silently across the mats to my shamisen. I slid it out from where it stood in its ancient wooden holder. The sound of the silk bag rustling as its paleness came into view. The soft click as the three strings popped into their slots on the bridge. I did not devise my own way to prepare the instrument. Did not vary the procedure an inch from what Sensei had instructed me that first day. It never occurred to me to try. Part of playing the shamisen was about this very fact. I need do nothing else. There was no new thing to add. A procedure had been laid in place for hundreds of years. Playing the shamisen was like stepping into a stream with its own currents and ancient pathways. And all you had to do was be absorbed into its gentle curling flow. Music before had been something I had tried to master. Entering a tradition inexorable and true. About like letting something master me. Thank you so much, Janet. Thank you so much for that wonderful music piece. I'm now going to bring all of our authors back on stage. And now is the moment when, but typically we would be all together in kickstand. And I would say thank you so much for being with us. Erin, Eileen, Almond, Umaleni, and Janet Pokoroba. And you would all thunderously applause. So I'm going to be your stand in. I'm going to applause for you. Thank you so much. That was that was a roar from the crowd. We have a lot of very I'm sure pleased attendees out there. Okay, before we move into the Q&A, I would be remiss if I did not also mention and I apologize to Yona, but I do want to mention that and bring him back on stage if that's okay. I want to mention that he has performed throughout Israel, the US and Europe. He's had so low appearances with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the Israel the Israel contemporary players, and the Israel Camarada Jerusalem, and has recently appeared as a guest with the Boston Chamber Music Society. So you know, we've got some pretty amazing talent with us this evening. Now I do want to move into the Q&A. We did get some some questions that some of our panelists already answered, but I'm going to go ahead and reread them because I think the rest of the audience would be interested in in hearing the answers. So one question was a question from, I believe, a family member of Umelene's. And the question was, she knows that you are an amazing mother. How did your mom inspire or influence how you are raising your son? That's a great question. So I guess I'll first say my mom really taught me the art of self sufficiency, being very independent. That was something she was drummed into me very young, being able to work really hard, focus on your goals, work towards them. And particularly, I think culturally speaking, you know, not not waiting to quote, be married so that you can be complete, like you be complete on your own. And so she really drummed that into me in terms of just ways of being and being self sufficient ultimately. And so as a mom now of a son, I'm asked my son is nine year old. I really, my husband and I both have been raising him with with that mind sense, the idea of being able to know how to do things on your own, also to really have a strong sense of culture, which my mom also ingrained in me understanding who you are. I'm bicultural, so I'm Zulu and owl. And so those two cultures are very important and really making sure that I understand sort of the culture and the history and that's wrapped into who I am. And so those are the lessons that I pass on to, to my son. And I mean, not everything that, you know, my mom shared with me something that I wanted to share. But I would say fundamentally, those were the things that we did share for my son. So that's a great question. Thank you. Question for for Janet, do you by any chance have a picture of your teacher? I have many of them, but not on me. There are no, there are no photos. And I actually called her sensei in the throughout the whole book, I don't use her real name or even a stand in name, I just chose to call her sensei. So I don't have there might be some on some of my social media, you know, if you wanted to see what she was like. But she was very tiny. She is she's still alive. And this I forgot to tell you the stuff that I read. This was 1997 that I was there. So I related when Aaron said her book took like 10 years, because that's exactly what this memory is not longer. But when I went to Tokyo 1996. And I started this music and this relationship and it really kind of kept going. I mean, I came back after several years, but it still continued to influence me. So I yeah, but I don't I don't have her photo. Thank you. Aaron, tell us a little bit more about your inspiration. Well, I think, like I said, in the essay, the book for me really began, I think, because I had wanted to be a violinist. And as you mentioned, in my bio, I had attended the Hartford Conservatory, and I had actually worked for almost the entire 90s at my hometown music store in East Hartford, Connecticut. So I was constantly around musicians. And it was something that I really wanted for myself. But at a certain point, had to let go. And I think out of that, I suddenly violinist began showing up in my fiction all the time, like, clearly, I wasn't letting it go. And it was my way of kind of being able to enjoy the music, I guess, in a different way, like I spent a lot of time really listening to all of the pieces that I write about in the book. In fact, at the end of the book, there's actually a list of my recommended recordings for some of the pieces, because I'm assuming that probably many people who read it might not know them or might only know a handful of them. And they're really these great, wonderful pieces. So I got the music for the pieces I attempted to learn how to play some of the pieces, just to, in my rudimentary way, know what it felt like to try to tackle some of the material. So I think it was a way for me to channel my love of music. And as I wrote about, I started with classical music. I moved to heavy metal. I realized that a lot of heavy metal is in fact based in classical music, especially artists like Paganini, and then I did a full circle and came back to classical music. And I think through the process of writing the book, I got to sort of relive some of that, and take that deep dive, but also create these people who weren't me and allow them to have experiences that I couldn't have. So it just kind of began for my own love of music, and sort of follow that, you know, as far as I could. Thank you. Yeah. Question for Umaleni. What language were you singing in? And what's your relationship to language? How does bilingualism affect your writing as well? Great question. So I was singing in my native tongue Shauna from Zimbabwe. And specifically that song is a, I guess it's a hymn, Negro spiritual hymn. And in terms of bilingual, it's interesting because I mostly write in English. When I was little, I learned English in my native tongue at the same time. And it's only, I would say, in the recent, I mean, I've, I've I've written a couple of things in my native tongue. But most recently, I've been toying with translating either my own work or some of my favorite poets into my native tongue to see how it might live and breathe. And frankly, I found that to be rather interesting. And so I think I'm at a point where creatively speaking, I'm wanting to expand my sort of my performance and written repertoire by bending my native tongue in different ways. I think initially, I had a lot of hesitation because of the structures are very different in English. And I also was nervous about not doing it right. I've lived here for many years. And so when I go home back and forth, oftentimes, I feel like my the way in which I'm speaking my native tongue seems a little foreign, mostly from the people who hear me speak not necessarily how I feel. And so there's that interesting discourse that happens when you go in between two worlds, the two continents in my case. So I'm definitely working on exploring that. But I love that I'm able to dance in different languages and speak in different languages. And I certainly have used my voice in terms of singing in my native tongue a lot in my performance as opposed to my poems. So that's a really great question. Thank you for for asking it. Thank you to the audience member who asked it. I have a question for Janet. How, how were you received as a white woman studying this traditional Japanese art, both by the Japanese and by fellow Americans? Good question. So in Tokyo, or in Japan, I was often viewed. You know, if I told if I told a Japanese person I was studying shamisen, they would say, and I, and I, meaning you're so dutiful as a good thing to do. And they thought, you know, and then they would say, well, you know, who are you studying with? And then I would start telling them about my teacher and how different she was. And they'd be like, Oh, okay, like this is not exactly the traditional way. But I think over there, being white and playing that music and being a white woman like wearing a kimono was very I mean, white Western culture is very looked up to. And so it was sort of like, probably exotic to them are like, Oh, look, you know, she's embracing our culture. But I was never treated badly for it. I remember when I went to Japan, I had the Lonely Planet guidebook, you know, and they said, you know, just don't ever dress like the Japanese like so bad, like they're gonna think you're such a weirdo like you can't do that like, and, you know, but then I got involved with all these musicians who, you know, to perform, you had to work him on when I had to sort of do these things that were very, very traditional. So, you know, it was always surprising. It was like, Oh, my God, and then I would be playing on stage and doing all this great stuff. And then they would ask me like, you know, can you use chopsticks? You know, so it was just this, I, you know, I always felt with it with the Japanese and with my own self, there's there was a real push and pull of how involved was I going to be, you know, they I felt often sort of kept at a distance. And as long as I was sort of there, that was okay. So it was complicated, though. And then coming back, it was really complicated. It was all complicated because I just felt like a part of me was so resonating with this culture and with some of these values and this music. And yet it was deep in a culture that, you know, I didn't look like them. I mean, this was not mine. And I never wanted to, you know, take any of it and use it for myself. It was all about my love of my teacher. So, but in America, I think, I think people are just always curious, because the instrument is so kind of rarely heard. And it's, it's usually just pretty much an exotic experience. But yeah, it's tricky. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Quick question for Umaleni. Tell us more about your t shirt. Someone wants to know about your shirt. Yay. So this is the name of my company, my performance and consulting company, Maoko Project. And so Maoko is is a Shawna word, and it means hands. And so I my mom has a, and my grandmother would always have a, what do you call it, a proverb or a sort of idiom, something that they would always say how mama, how mama is a phrase, it means essentially it's self determination. So, you know, and I've talked about that before. And that's essentially the theme of my life, if you will. And so Maoko project is is a formal name of my company in honor of the lessons I learned from my mother and my grandmother. So that's that's that's what it is. And this is the first time I've ever rocked it. So yeah, thank you. Well, we are honored. Thank you for that, that explanation. One last question for all of our presenters. What is the role of music in your writing, your topics, your choice of words, etc. And we'll start with Aaron. I realized I had to call on someone. Sorry. I think for for me for this particular story, it was the way in kind of the the instruments that the characters would play and the music and the particular songs like there's no piece in this book by accident, they're all very carefully chosen for particular moments or for particular characters because I felt like they were it was expressing something important. So I think for me, it was that way in it was a way to create mood. It was a way to explore the personalities of the characters and also the pieces are actually part of the plot and which is dance. Of course, it's the title. So it's the main piece. One of my main characters is sort of learning the piece as the novel proceeds. So I felt like it really kind of, you know, as I had talked earlier, it came out of this sort of sorrow of letting something go, but then it became kind of this, you know, thing that I could follow throughout the book and sort of, you know, haven't it basically in probably a respect of the book. Thank you. Over to you, Janet. So I think in general, I think maybe just being musical, you know, sound is very important, I think when I write, I think, I think I'm just beginning to learn to trust that more and more. Like I think it's, I just have an ear. So the rhythm, if something isn't right, I hear it, and I'm very like connected into like the sounds of language. And I too had a lot of struggle with like, how am I going to put this music on paper? Like how do you write what something sounds like, you know, and then so it was sort of like, trying maybe in sentences to imitate, you know, a certain rhythm, or giving the emotion of it. But it was a real like in my earlier drafts of this book, I remember I just kept explaining it, you know, or just like giving a little treatise on like the historical like part of this. And then I was like, how to get inside it, you know? And mostly that came, I think, by just letting the story take over and all the emotion. But I think music is is just so although I don't listen to music when I write, I can't, I can't. But I think, I think it's very important to my process, and hearing stuff in my head first and stuff. Thank you. Umaleni. So I think for me, music is is everything. I am a singer to and I write songs and play guitar. And so I think for me, because I'm mostly a poet, although I write other stuff too, I, you know, it's very sort of short bursts of feeling. And oftentimes for me, the entry point sometimes is through a song or a piece of a song or some kind of rhythm. And sometimes I hear the rhythms first, and then the words come after. So it's it's almost as if it is it to me they are inextricable writing and music, at least for me in terms of both my process and just sort of how I move is very much in harmony with that. I think that they are particular rhythms and sounds that I'm drawn to. Mostly, I would say, I mean, I like a lot of different kinds of music, but I do notice that I'm particularly drawn drawn to the drums a lot in different capacities in different ways. And then also because mostly I when I think about sort of growing up and when I hear a lot of music, there was a lot of harmony, there's a lot of acapella singing that happened growing up in the fires in the farms, you know, at night. And so a lot of that sort of is that syncopation is sort of in tune with me. And so it's extremely, extremely important. I do sometimes write when there's music. There are other times where I don't want to hear anything at all, I just need some quiet. But I can also write in a subway with these lots of noise where people are blasting because oftentimes you can snatch poems, you know, pieces of different conversations or even song lyrics. So it's definitely incredibly important, at least for me. Thank you. I have a question for the violinist actually. Yona, how, how does performing this way affect your performance? I mean, what is it like for you to play to an invisible audience? Is it like you're practicing? Or is it, is it something different? It's something I'm, I'm a you mean on zoom? On zoom, yes. Yes, it's very strange. But it's not like practicing, I'm aware that there's an audience and I'm aware that I'm at least, you know, the sense of, of a performance is there. And of course, that that sense is a sense that I have a memory of so I can carry it even into my, into my room. But you know, it's very strange. It's very strange. And, and I'm very grateful for the opportunity because it's been a while since I've played for people, not for students. Well, the pleasure and privilege was was ours. Thank you so much. And I want to thank all of you. This was an extraordinary salon in every way. And I also want to quickly mention that our next salon, you can mark your calendars, save the date, going to be Thursday, August 20. And we'll feature, appreciate you ready. And Jennifer DeLeon, and we are still finalizing that lineup. Anyway, thank you all so much for being here. Thank you, audience members for being here. This was wonderful. And I, I am just so grateful. Thank you for sharing your time and your talent with us this evening for this really interesting virtual experience. We did have another comment from an audience member who said that they'd never seen a, a music as part of a Zoom webinar of any kind and that it was totally delightful. And awesome. Yeah, the comment from the audience was of the audience member was that all of your words, music, poetry that you shared tonight was a true gift. I could not agree more. So thank you again. And thank you audience. And we hope to see you next time. Yeah, thank you everyone. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.