 When did it become a show business to be a writer? I don't think I've been videotaped before. I'll try to forget about it. Before I start, I want to thank Paul Signorelli for being my nicest, most fun to talk to presenter. He's been working hard to develop this wonderful series at the library. I have to admit this is my first time inside the big public library. Why do you have to move? It's so great here. Went up the stairs into that old-time hall. It's fabulous. My little book, Surviving a Writer's Life, little physically, not to degrade it, is hard to describe. I thought I'd just read you a tiny paragraph from the introduction from the preface that captures it and then go on to read you something from the middle. I used myself in this book as a laboratory to try to account for the mysterious, absolutely irrepressible urge to tell stories even in the face of an inhospitable environment sometimes. Very explicitly in answer to certain creative urges that were expressing themselves through my children, I saw that they might become artists themselves and I wanted to talk directly about how that happened to me and why. So the book is written to my children and in the middle of the preface which explains that I say, books have nourished me literally as well as figuratively. I have made my living by editing other people's books since I graduated from college in 1965. And at a certain point, dismayingly late, I discovered that all along by reading and editing constantly and by collaborating with life itself, I had become the thing I had hardly dared wished I could be. I had become a writer myself. This book is a description and a grateful celebration of that long, slow process of evolution. So I went on to track back to why this happened and how it happened. And when the book came out, I chose one of the least personal essays to read about my editing mentor and how he taught me the mechanics of book publishing, how that figured into this slow evolution I describe. And to tell you the truth, I read it so many times I bored myself to death. So instead of reading that essay tonight, possibly to the irritation of my editor who's here tonight, I chose a more personal piece and then tried like hell to figure out how to connect it to this theme. Why write? How to become a writer? How to live the creative life? And I realized that it does fit in because really, in my estimation, although I think there are people who would disagree with me, there are things in life that are more important than art and sometimes you have to take care of them before you can make art. So this book is a healing from something horrible that happened to me which I won't describe. It's known as suspense, hopefully. You'll want to know what it is and you'll read the book. It's called a healing. A Turkish vessel, the Iskenderan, made the hippie run from Haifa to Istanbul. Third-class passage was amazingly cheap, six or seven American dollars, I think. By day for the three-day voyage, third-class passengers stayed in a large, comfortable, if crowded salon. I found it rather cozy, a great relief after the hard work of the winter on the kibbutz, to curl up and read for whole days at a stretch. I read books discarded by other volunteers that I'd picked up at the kibbutz with a constant feeling of good luck at having found them. There were long, languid information exchanging conversations with others doing the root and not bad meals. The wooden benches in the salon were shiny and smooth and golden. Intermittently rain spattered the windows that closed off the salon from the third-class deck. And sometimes when the fog lifted, we saw islands furred with evergreen trees. At night, the third-class passengers slept in dorms in the very bowels of the ship next to the engines. We glided through cool gray days on a calm sea, but the nights were a hell of thumping heat and noise. There were six women in my dorms stacked up in three bunk beds. And at night, the crew wandered. I wrote a poem about that first night, wakening in the bowels of the Iskanderan. Midnight shadows, human rats wake with the roll of the waves. One leaves the pack stirred by a dream to a taste for flesh. Bending into a scuttle through the metal corridors he moves, but the scratching of his claws is muffled by the creek and wine of the ship. Three times below deck he pauses, ears twitching at an open door, the horrid sharp nose, lust for moist bodies. The tiny, cruel teeth clench nervously at the sound of a rustling sheet. Six female creatures are stacked in a two-fold row and pressed heavily into sleep by the stifling air. The man rat, hungry night rat, waters with the hunger of unfinished dreams. He darts silently inside and buries his face in flesh. He draws hard and deep at the ancient smell. Hunched on the altar, low in his throat, he makes a growling prayer. I woke up with a yell that was lost in the pounding of the engines and waved my beloved hairbrush, token of home, chased that morbid creature through the narrow corridors of the metal. But he knew the ship and darted aside into some secret passageway, leaving me standing alone under a naked lightbulb trailing a sweaty sheet. It is twenty-two years since that sickening hour rushing through dark waters, and I'm still grateful for the impulse I had to cast it into the words of a poem and fling it back into the universe. And yet I was left with a terrible loneliness, an illness of the soul. This was too much. Traveling the world and soaking up life were innocent efforts, harmless. No poem, no journal, no exercise in point of view, not the most sincere desire to cross the boundaries of personal history or culture would ever protect against the dangers of the real physical world. I was twenty-five and beaten down. My womanhood was greatly at risk. Istanbul, golden apple of the Ottoman Empire was bleak and freezing and clumps of unemployed men, all wearing caps that seemed straight out of the Great Depression, stood on street corners and smoked. We stayed in a hippie hotel that turned out to have no hot water. Typed warnings of long prison terms for drug possession, written by other young travelers, were taped to the walls of the corridors and gloomy rooms. We were dirty and freezing, and I had not bathed in the two days since that terrible night aboard ship. Following directions spelled out in my notebook by Hitchhiker in Uganda, we made our way to Ahamam in the city center. On our way through the city, we passed the Hagia Sophia Mosque, looming in all its complexity against the leaden sky. My companion left to bathe in the men's public baths. I entered the women's section, never suspecting that in crossing the threshold, I was once more stepping far back in time. The reception area was small and nondescript. A woman behind the counter took the fee and handed me a towel and wooden bath sandals. With her chin, she pointed me through a white curtain behind which I found a double door. Pushing through, I entered a corridor of cubicles where I undressed and left my clothes. You can see what I mean about self-revealing, I guess. At the end of the hall was another set of double doors, and behind these I found myself in a gigantic, resounding, domed room filled with clouds of steam. As I stood just inside the door, still braced against the Turkish winter chill, the thick, moist heat swirled around me, licked and coiled me. The heat drew me in and embraced me, and seeing the naked women flashing and shining everywhere, I clutched my towel to myself and stepped into an echoing secret world. Gray sky filtered in through the misted ornamental windows of the dome, and all colors below were muted by steam. The vast circle was banded by two marble steps to be used as benches, and at intervals around the room, steady streams of steaming water fell into marble basins. Gathered around these basins and immersed in the hot waters of a rectangular common pool were naked women of every description, from babies and little girls to old, old, drooping women, from singular beauties to staunch, peasanty bodies in their middle years, all stripped of their clothes. They lacked the markers that would have hinted at who they were, where they fit into the social order, how they spent their time. These women were naked strangers offering no physical clues to their identities other than the signs of age they could not hide. If any drug vision had ever moved and fascinated me, it paled in comparison to this ring of languid women. Self-conscious. I held my towel to my chest and let it drape over my body as I searched for a spot near one of the basins. I found one close by, sat down on my towel, giving myself over to the warm mist and relinquishing my modesty. As my body, which had been shivering for days, in disgust at the shipboard incident as well as from the bitter late winter cold, turned slowly to a soft dough and melted over the shiny marble ledge. In the middle of the room was a huge marble slab and their old naked women, their black hair and long, damp strings. Their mouths open with their efforts, revealing gaps from lost teeth, worked over white rounded figures stretched out full length on the stone platforms. Some of the Crohn's massaged with the full weight of their bodies and the muscles in their arms flashed here and there through veils of swinging flesh. Others rubbed or gently whipped the bodies they worked upon with bundles of black twigs. The old women exchanged occasional remarks over the women beneath their hands and by some acoustical oddity, their words sliced through the ringing noise of running water in sharp streaks of sound. All around me women groomed themselves from the bottles and soaps they had brought with them, never imagining a scene so timeless I had brought nothing. As I began to splash warm water artlessly over my shoulders with a cupped hand, I felt an old woman approach me from the center. She stood before me in her raised wooden sandals. You can see the versions of the same sandals called patents in old engravings of the baths. She was very old, probably in her 70s, if my western standards applied, and the force of gravity was apparent on her thighs, her breasts, her belly in sections, all lined and cross lined with tiny wrinkles. Down her center was an old scar, 12 inches vertical, cutting through the rolls of fat to this shiny hairless mound. The sight of her nudity made me shy. She smiled a creased smile and beckoned to me and then pointed to the marble slab and I followed her like a well mannered child. She spread my towel for me and laid me down, and I rested the pad of my cheek against the towel and allowed her to pull my hands out to my sides while I lay spread eagle on my corner of the slab. I willed myself to receive without flinching the touch of her bony hands on my back, but the hands were those of a nurse or a baker. Strong, young seeming hands, sure and warm, the palms and thumbs together delivering health and deep relaxation in the form of direct perpendicular pressure. The old woman shaped me as if I were a loaf of dough or a long dense log of clay. She worked down my backbone with the heels of her hands, stretching her fingers across the backs of my ribs. She not needed my buttocks with short pinch-like strokes. She worked down the backs of my thighs with efficiency, never missing an inch. From months of carrying a backpack by the sides of roads, highways, city streets, the red dirt roads of East Africa, the ribbons of shimmering black tops through the negative desert, my shoulders and calves were stubborn knots. She returned to them again and again with tough, insistent fingers. When she had molded my body to the shapes that satisfied her, the old woman took up a bundle of the mysterious black twigs and tapped it over every inch of my skin. Then she made another pass, lightly brushing, yet another, tapping with some somewhat circular motion. Almost gone, my mind nearly merged with the swirling mist rising to the dome above me, I felt the heavy weight of hot wet towels laid end to end along my body. I was clean inside and out. There was little left in me but gratitude to this woman, whose hands had taken their time to stroke and need me. I was clean and warm. A child in the hands of an old knowing woman whose very body spoke survival of her own nameless ordeals. To have come to this place of women and fallen into her hands was a life-saving accident. And though we never spoke, and I never knew her name, and in fact she left me before I aroused myself and I did not see her again. I think that old woman saved me for the rest of my journey. Perhaps it didn't matter that she never could have known and yet perhaps she had known. Perhaps she had for the dangers to women everywhere were then and still are very great that she had helped me step back into myself. My friend and I had already visited many countries and dipped into or skimmed many different cultures, but so rarely had I managed to cross the real borders between the people I met and myself that I had nearly given up. In my profound distress, without my even realizing it, my understanding of others had all but drained away, leaving me bewildered and adrift, even in the closest company. It was not until I walked back out into the city, the cold and noise penetrating the muzzy film the warmth and wet had wrapped around my mind, that I had even the slightest idea that I had been outside my body for a long, long time. My friend and I stopped for orange juice at a stand on the edge of the traffic, and I drank two. Dehydrated and famished, I tapped my finger at the bottom of the paper cup to dislodge the orange pulp. With my tongue I popped the clusters of flavorful morsels against the roof of my mouth, and for me the gray winter world filled with color and all the people in the streets suddenly snapped alive. So I went on tour for this book and went to the Pacific Northwest where a person I referred to in this story in the book as the boyfriend somewhat dismissively lived. And I pondered whether I could pass up the opportunity to satisfy my curiosity and see him and even explain to him why I had tamped down his personality to about this much in writing a book about that was many of the pieces were largely experiences that we shared. It was very interesting. I of course did not resist my curiosity and I saw him and spent an evening with him. And when I came back from my trip there was an invitation on my desk to contribute to an anthology of sex and writing, which if any of you are writers I know there are writers in the audience know writing is sometimes sexier than sex. Seems a little mysterious but it is true, especially in these decades when writing occurs to me far more often than sex. So I accepted this invitation and wrote a short piece and Paul asked me to read from my book and also from Works in Progress. So I have a very short piece, this piece I just described to you and a tiny other piece. I like to let people know what I plan to do because it can get a little uncertain. I called this piece playing for many reasons, probably four or five explicit reasons I chose this title, but the main reason I think was that sitting down and writing a short piece in response to somebody's invitation is my idea of just about the greatest time I could possibly have and it's true playing for me. It's a very perverse piece to have chosen because it doesn't really read out loud very well. You have to understand there are two men involved even though that makes it sound much more exciting than it really is. And also it alternates between a narrative and a journal. So I'm going to have to figure out a signal or tell you when the switches occur so you can follow me. Playing three weeks on the road and you're still up at 11.30. Don't you think you need to turn the light off and get some sleep? She had the same response she always had when he treated her like a child. Half irritated, half amused. They had been married for 20 years and she had been working on him for longer than that to quit that bossy tone. He slid in on his side and set himself up with a New Yorker. She had to wait, her pen poised over her journal until he settled down before she could resume writing. God damn hippy bed she thought as she thought every time he climbed into bed beside her setting her swaying. We deserve a new bed after all this time. We're too old for this by now. You're like a kid with her diary he said. You've got a busy day tomorrow and don't you think you need to get some sleep? She ignored him, let him sink into an article and stared at what she had written, confident that he would show no interest. She wrote every day. She wrote all the time but rarely was she moved to open her journal. She had carried it with her through her extended book tour and hadn't written it at once. Now she couldn't close it. Something was welling up. It switches to journal now. It is also dry now. But back then, intimately at any rate, it was, I might as well write it outright at the beginning, pulsing and wet, unaccountably. To be honest though, even in those days 26 years ago, the words, the remarks, the observations, in spite of an occasional lush and hanging question from me to him always were often dry. Now just as before, our talk suddenly dead ends and the sentences in our courteous, smiling exchanges lose their rhythm, come to nothing. And with a quick sigh, something like a brief panic, have to be started again. He is leaner, eye fatter, much on both accounts. When I see the creases in his face, the business-like folds of a man of 52, the eyebrows once breathtaking to me, and a blatant, dependable sexual trigger. When I see them grown a little out of control, a little comical, I see that these were our obvious fates, that he would thin out and dry like jerky, tough and clean. That I would spread out and soften like warm, punched dough. Goes back to the narrative. Listen to this, he said to her, and her pen was arrested as he laid his hand on her thigh. She made a sound, and he began to read an anecdote about the president and his wife, fanatical workers who loved what they did. They opened a can of franks and beans on Thanksgiving at the governor's mansion. She breathed out her appreciation. He turned over on his side, his back to her, and settled in again. She waited for the faint rocking of the bed to subside. The journal. So after all these years, we must reacquaint ourselves. And here, no less, in the kitchen of his family home, where every surface has been lovingly laid and smoothed and polished by his hand. And his children come and go, each with their own self-consciousness, at the writer come to visit on her book tour. Come here out of boredom and just a degree more curiosity than idle. The girl is a chatterbox in braces and glasses. She brings up a lump in my throat with the hopefulness of it all. And the boy clearly pricks his parents' disappointment, unfairly I see, with the barbs of his hair and his teenage talk. But he will be through that, all that so soon. His wife is gracious, determined to weather this invasion, but I set about befriending her and she's easy for me. Her mind, quick as a clock, is ready for talk, and as direct as I am, she is more so. I can grab her up with just a question and take her past her reluctance to engage. In this way, oiled by wine, dinner passes. Back to the narrative. It's incredible, he said to the wall. She raised her eyebrows, waiting, but he failed to go on. He pushed his feet backward against her lower leg to say without words, he was glad she was home. The journal. But on impulse, because I am swamped by thick, warm, wet and pulsing memories, I ask about the flute, about the music. And somehow a lost corner of the old mosaic of the past comes into focus. That I played the recorder long, long ago, when we were young together, the wooden flute, not the other kind. That when he went away at the height of my loving him, I sent him a recorder and copies of all the music I had played. That he learned in those long, sticky nights, thick, dark, tropical nights in Mogadishu to play. And perhaps the delicate, minute creations of Telemon, of Lolae, went floating, spinning like intricate, flat-sided bubbles out of the white box of Adobe and across the shadowy rooftops over the surf along the moon path on the warm black sea. And when I traveled there on an impulse that was without my ever knowing it a way of crying out and fleeing, we played together, he and I. At times in Africa, in Israel, for me more wracked by our wordless dissension than by the threat of war. In Turkey, in Iran, in India, all along the hippie trail, we must have played together, resting on those islands of music like grateful swimmers before the next upsurging of natural-born disharmony that was to do us in. So 26 years after all that, the wine drunk and plates cleared, we dared to open the music once more and play. There on the first page of Lolae is a love note I wrote him. It hangs between us now in his kitchen like a mortifying secret. His wife doing dishes and me unable to quit this and offer it to help wash up. It's back to the narrative. His breathing had been steady for some time and minutes ago, the magazine had tipped forward to rest on the frame of his glasses. He roused himself to turn off the light. Turn off the light was his mumble demand. She waited, gifting the journal on the pillow on her lap so that her light fell more directly on the page. The journal. 26 years. And to my shock, my joy, my suddenly childish excitement, I can play. Each line of notes jumps alive under my fingers and brings a thrill of recognition, as bright as a moving row of marquee lights, as electric, and we can play together. Each piece comes alive, assorted squeaks and whispers true, but beautiful, or holding the possibility of beauty and increasingly pulsing. We race through pieces, illuminating them, but reach an andante that has always been pure heart-breaking and is still. Slow, stately, a B-flat like a sorrowful cry, as if all those years ago it was singing to us in our youth, of the pain, the losses, the unfathomable families of love that were to come. In the music I hear a time when my father was able-bodied, alive. Whenever in my wildest dreams could I have conceived of cancer in myself, or of the children I was to bear with a man unmet then, who would in a moment, in the tone of a voice, complete my world. I hear my youth, our youth, and the sex that has begun now to sink away, and in the soft bump of shoulders and the accidental touch of a knee to knee, I feel it, first hints only, then yes, a pulsing, thrilling up from the deepest place, up through the music, up through the breath that travels through the flutes to become those sweet-rocking sounds, and holds the melody of the treble wrapped around and answered by his flute. Love, the glue of the world, the narrative. She paused and stared without seeing at her image in the mirror above the bureau, across the room. His breathing was regular and sweet, not the shuttering snores of a man his age, but boyish and somehow kindly. His weight on his side of the bed drew at her like gravity. Back to the journal. All the love, such as it was, struggled for and forced, and all the friendship too, rises up in the music and fills us, fills the kitchen, throbs into the house, liberated, how his wife must be suffering, how steady the stone-blue eyes of this man remain, so that I can see the soft, beautiful boy there, the curved cheeks and the warm mouth that was candy to me for seven years, the narrative. His breathing didn't change, but somehow she knew he was awake, barely. She fell to pull in her foot to touch his leg, but resisted. She would touch him soon enough to the journal now. The music turns the air between us heavy and rich, dark with blood. There is a moment as we play when I think I will weep for my days of desire. There is even later a kiss that could open like a peony in the sun, the outer ball of tight petals holding something light and surprising within. But on, no, there are lives like buildings all around us and true love, not the faint odors of old dreams in a closet, cementing them together so they will not fall. She let her foot drop toward him and his body answered immediately by inching near. All day and evening I have been humming or hearing soundlessly within my mind the beautiful Lolae Andante. In the final bars at the bottom of the page, it cries by itself, through whatever gives it voice, calling out its longing. She laid the pen in the book and put the pillow aside. She turned off the light and felt him hold his breath, but an inspiration hit her and before sleeping down to fill the curves of his body, she grabbed the journal again and wrote a coda in the dark. I am rich with desire and rich with love, she wrote, the words rising up like water, like dreams. I am filled, she wrote, before turning to him, filled with living music. I just have another little two page piece that comes from the novel in progress I'm working on. It's dangerous to read a piece from a work that's vulnerable and new and yet, and especially to read the end note of it. But I thought it was interesting to read it because I realized as I thought about this book, the tiny piece that I'm going to read you was the vision that began this book, although I didn't know it at the time. And the place I was writing to and finally arrived at, I did finish it, now I'm revising it. Very, very, very briefly, its title is Captivity, and it's about a large cetacean type mermaid who's pulled up from the sea. This is the end of the book. What am I doing? Oh well. She is drifting with Han along the inner surface of the farthest circle. Her baby is secure deep in the core of the herd within the loosely linked embrace of her mother and grandmother's arms. After love that took them down to the darkness where flashes of luminescence gleamed instantaneously out of the mystery, she is resting her open eyes in the cloudy nothingness of green waters. And suddenly in a waking dream in which inner and outer vision come together, she sees everything. There is a view of the deepest ocean, but also a long familiarity with the sky, its own flashes of light only fading with the transparency of dawn. There is a sense of far-reaching herds of swimmers like those of her own people, but there are walkers in dizzying numbers of swelling crowds, the countless individuals each thinking, willing, feeling, hurting, soothing, aching, making, building, drawing, sculpting, birthing, dying, suffering, laughing, crying, singing, swooning, moving or still, young or old, hoping or giving up hope, all caring, caring acutely, and tied together by threads of language like the songs of her own people. She sees the swaying plants that sustain her herd, the succulent blends and swimming leaves, but also trees of an unimaginable height, bushes darted with color, swooping ferns of the luscious aspect and intricate decorative flowers. She sees caves full of wonders encrusted with the shells of every unimaginable pastel, bat rays winging and schools of silver fish like thoughts and ideas darting through the ocean mind. But she sees huge floating caves full of walkers, their passage mirrored silently by the ribony tentacles of squids and sky-piercing constructions created from terrifying angles sharp as spears. And she sees the fish of the air diving into the sky and away, looping deep or swimming through and drawing the mind to the boundlessness spreading out behind them. She hears the song of her people woven into a mat of sound, but she hears the babble of a million voices swelling outward toward the moon, whose silence sinks back smoothly through the sky. Hopes and dreams, thoughts and wishes, loves and hatreds of her people and those upon the land wind together into a lacy vapor just above the surface. The world, a ball of danger. The world, a sea of safety. At rest next to her lover, the father of her child, tweezes the wholeness of the world. End of book. I forgot to say what I usually say at the beginning of my readings, which is treat me if you are a writer aspiring to publish like a resource and ask me your most horrible, embarrassing writing or publishing questions because I am not a literary star as I don't need to tell you or myself. Do you have questions? Usually 30 seconds go by, at least. No, I can't possibly ask it. Hi, Terry. Malcolm Mugridge in one of his essays said that the worst thing that he had to face every day when he wrote was the fact that he had rolled a piece of paper, blank paper into his typewriter, and there it was, and he had to fill it up. And in your book, In Surviving a Writer's Life, you say that if you, something like if you think that writing a bad book is any easier than writing a good book, just go ahead and try. And I wonder if you'd comment on how is it for you in those moments of dismay when there are such things as writer's block or difficulty of writing and so on? The underside of not ever having enough time to write is just loving it so much when you do. It's a cure for writer's block not to have enough time to strive for your aspirations. But I think an even more effective cure is not to sit down until you have something ready to go and ripe to pick. Like Hemingway said, he made it a rule. I think it was in The Moveable Feast, never to finish. Wait, how did it work? Always get up before you're finished so you have something to say in the next morning when you sit down. I guess by accident and temperament, a person who loves to write, I adore it. And I consider myself lucky, but I do think that many, many people who suffer through writer's block are pushing too fast and haven't got the thing thought out well enough to feel the urgency of coming out. And you get to wait. You get to count all the thinking and all the walking and all the musing and the if, ands and buts that go through your head, you get to count that as work. Or if you do count it as work, then I think the pressure's off. Asking that question was Terry Clark, a wonderful novelist from San Francisco with a new book out called I don't remember the title, The King About Borneo. Ask me something else. No more questions? Very, very much. You certainly were a pin drop type of audience. Thank you very much for having me and thank you, Paul, for organizing the wonderful series. Did you comment on the relationship between your fiction writing and your journal writing? Well, haha, I don't write a journal. It was all made up. I stumbled upon the form of personal essay in this book and I adore it. First of all, I found out you don't have to make anything up. You can kind of cull from what you know and that is a lot easier than making something up and hoping to hell that it takes on life and flies. So I thought, well, this is nice. This might be what I do for the rest of my life since it's so much easier. But I've gotten back into my novel now and I would like to say, though, that one thing that I'm learning and something that I'm teaching, and this is one of my students from my class, Corey, is that whether or not you are writing fiction and making things up, the power of story invests both fiction and nonfiction. And I think really every form of myth that we tell ourselves, screenplays, essays, biographies, even books of ideas can benefit from an understanding of the shape of human story and the power inside it and the craft that unleashes it. Answer? Anyway, thank you again. One more question from my own child. I was wondering, when you do names in books, if you do names, which most people do, do you use people's names that you know or do you make up names? It's very mysterious. It's very, very difficult. And I go through practically the hardest part. It's like naming a child. Exactly. I mean, you have to live with it. And finding a name for a character, I try out a lot and sometimes I'm practically all the way through a book and I think, you know, this just isn't her name. And I have to go back. But even harder is finding the right title. And a case in point was my last novel called Remember Me. Alas, not the Remember Me that is shooting like a rocket up the cellar list by Mary Higgins-Clark. When I wrote that book, I searched high and low for a title. And I finally landed Remember Me. And lo and behold, this was 1991. Turns out there was another Remember Me by an author, about quilts this was, by an author named Linda Lipset. My sister's name. But, you know, my book was Remember Me. It was the poifect name. I couldn't give it up. And as it turned out, the timing was such that I couldn't, there was no way to give it up. But I'm very glad that it's named Remember Me. It evokes, my belief is that titles are sorely underrated and that they're very important as a means of capturing the meaning not only for the reader but for the writer. And once you got one, it's real hard to give it up. The questioner was my son Evan, 11 years old. Almost 12. A fabulous poet whose feedback I treasure, both of my son's feedback I treasure, his particular kind, it comes with a visual. He did it to me the other day. It went, mommy be thy name. And my older son also has feedback for me when I, he hasn't read this book yet. But he likes it when I do events like this. And he has said more than once, it has to be said as you're walking out the room, mom, dude, you're an animal. I think that is my final word. Weeks on the road and you're still up at 11.30. Don't you think you need to turn the light off and get some sleep? She had the same response she always had when he treated her like a child. Half irritated, half amused. They had been married for 20 years. And she had been working on him for longer than that to quit that bossy tone.