 Hi, thanks everyone for coming out this evening to honor Richard Reinhart. My name is Taryn Edwards, and I am one of the librarians here at the San Francisco Mechanics Institute. My work here involves coordinating our writers' activities, something which Mr. Reinhart has been very supportive of during his tenure as a trustee. Currently, we have 13 writers' groups meeting virtually, free talks on the writing business twice a month, and several writers' classes planned for the fall. So if that floats your boat, I encourage you to check out our website to see what is coming up. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mechanics Institute, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library, the oldest in fact designed to serve the public in California, a world-renowned chess club, and a very rich calendar of cultural events. Right now, due to the shelter in place, all of our activities are virtual, but I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It's only $120 a year, and support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. This evening's conversation will include our board president, Lindsay Crittenden, and another stalwart board member, Mark Pinto. We also have with us our executive director, Kimberly Scrafano. So questions will be taken at the end of the talk, so please post them in the chat space, and my colleague Pam Troy and I will try and answer as many as we can. Thank you for coming tonight, and thank you, Richard, for your 22 years of service for the Mechanics Institute. Now, let me hand over the mic to Lindsay Crittenden. And Mark Pinto. Thanks so much, Taryn. I'm really delighted to be here and to welcome all of you tonight to this conversation with local writer and long-term friend and trustee of the Mechanics Institute, Richard Reinhart. Mark Pinto, another long-term trustee, will join me, and the three of us are going to have what promises to be, an interesting and wide-ranging conversation about writing and about the writing process and Dick's life as a writer. So I'm just gonna give a little bit of brief biography. I know that many of you are familiar with Dick, know his work, know him personally. Dick was born in Oakland and educated at Stanford. He's traveled overseas as a traveling scholar with Columbia University and as a recipient of a Ford Fellowship for Near East Studies. He's the author of several books, both historical fiction and nonfiction, including The Ashes of Smyrna, Out West on the Overland Train, Treasure Island, San Francisco's Exposition Years, and four books, $300 and a Dream, about our own Mechanics Institute. A reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle for several years, a lecturer at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and director of nonfiction writing at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Dick has an avid interest in historical preservation and travel and has been an active member of San Francisco's literary world, not to mention Mechanics Institute for more than a half a century. So I'd like to start, Dick, by asking you as someone growing up in the first half of the 20th century, a time of great change, like now, in two different ways, what propelled you to start writing? When did writing become for you an interest and then a real career vocation? That's an easy question because I started wanting to be a writer from the time I mastered the alphabet and began writing in little books. My first published book, which is because the teacher took it upon her to take down my notes, was an autobiographical treatment of my childhood, starting at about two and getting through about seven at that point. So I've always considered myself from the very beginning a writer and that meant trying to find in education the route where one could get to be a writer and still stay alive. Yes. Do you still have that little book, that little autobiography you did? I never threw anything away in my life. Yes. Even the most awful first drafts. Well, and I think that says so much about the writing impulse, doesn't it? That at that young age, you would feel the need, you would feel the real desire to record. I think writers are born observing and noticing the world around them and even at that young age, you felt that need so strongly that you needed to record it down and your teacher saw something there. So that's really wonderful. Did you study writing at school? Did you start writing after college? When did you start writing for a paycheck, so to speak? The paycheck came with a few freelance articles when I was in the Graduate School of Journalism in Columbia, pardon me. And that of course gave me a little sense of what it might be like to be a freelance writer because one is paid very, very little. This is one reason why so many writers in fact are also teachers or lucky enough spouses of someone who will support them or have some other means of paying the bills. It's very, very difficult. And I think there are many of the people who are very fine professional writers teaching at San Francisco State, for example, teaching at Squaw Valley, teaching at UC Berkeley who must supplement their living with teaching or something of that kind. Teaching is wonderful for the teacher but it sort of saps the energies of the writer in many ways because you have to try not to become an editor of your students, it's not gonna do them any good if you move in on them and try to crush their writing impulse with your own. That's interesting that you use the word crush for editing because I am also a writer and a teacher as many of you may know and I had a conversation with a student just the other day and I was suggesting a revision to him and he said, is that editing? And it really did make me stop and think there's a tremendous difference between revision and editing and how did you come to do that? How as a teacher did you come to restrain that hand that not necessarily wanted to impose your own style? I don't think a good teacher would ever want to do that but to perhaps make a suggestion or how did you learn to really help them find their own voice? Well, I taught in two different forms I taught journalism at University of California, Berkeley and enjoyed this immensely because students at that age, college age someone were working on the publications at UC Berkeley and it was thrilling to work with them as journalists. I didn't attempt very much to impose style upon anybody or say, I wish you could sound a little different than you do because they had the journalist as his own or her own voice frequently is suppressed unless it becomes a kind of a journalistic memoir which is something more like I'm not going to try to name names because it would be majority but many journalists get their reputation but really by intervening which is just as well I think when I came to begin to write fiction I probably made the mistake of going into writing historical fiction because it meant I had to try to move myself into the minds of people long dead and fortunately I decided to take a course where I was going to be really doing an awful lot of research before I wrote so that I would be, it made me feel safe about what I was writing that I would not be making terrible mistakes that's probably not the best way to write fiction either I don't know what do you think I know you write fiction as well Well I've never written historical fiction so I mean my fiction is placed in this world you know I don't write science fiction or fantasy but I've never written about real life figures so when you say you wrote about people who had long since died in Ashes of Smyrna were those characters actual living people? I mean certainly the politicians you wrote about were I would imagine but were your characters actual people that you did research on or had you or did you make them up? Well the characters were all creations Yeah I did have the good fortune of being able to interview both Turks and Greeks who had lived through the experience I was writing about for many of them it was very difficult that they felt I was perhaps touching areas that were almost too difficult to recall for example one man who had been a colonel in the Greek army and was trying to remember for me what it was like to be virtually imprisoned in a winter siege where the Turkish army had surrounded abortion of the Greek army and for him to be able to talk about it was perhaps more helpful to me than it was for him to me than it was for him but he did recall in great retail forms of suffering and forms of fear and so forth that I then knew I was on the right ground if the characters that I had manufactured which included Greek and Turkish people were within the scope of my own imagination to imagine Yeah, well I think all fiction writers draw on we draw on our own experience we draw on people we've known we draw on conversations we've had observations we've made whether we directly are putting Aunt Martha on the page or not where we're maybe taking a bit of Aunt Martha and a bit of Cousin Phoebe as well as making a great deal up for me I think the challenge with historical fiction I've always written first and then done the research for example if I have a character who is a archeologist and I know very little about archeology I will get about as far as I can get and I'll realize I need to do some research I need to know what this person who's sent to Nevada for example what tools she would have with her what her assignment she'd be looking for and that kind of research or if I'm writing a scene that takes place in a garden in the spring I wanna make sure I have the right thing in bloom something like that but I would imagine you're living in the Near East I mean I'm assuming you lived in the Near East you know with the Ford Fellowship and at that point that's when you must have done a lot of the on the ground research for the ashes of Smyrna, correct? Yeah, which is about for those who haven't read it it's a wonderful historical novel about the would you say the Greek occupation of Turkey after Greek joined the Allies in the First World War so it takes place? Very close to it it was not the way it was described it was close to a mandate that the Peace Conference in 1919 had given to the Greeks because of the extreme friendship that the British people felt especially for the head of the Greek government I love to read it, Venizelos if Venizelos had not been so strong a man I think caution would have prevailed and the Greeks would not have sent an armed force into what that part of the Ottoman Empire where the Turks ruled the other Empire was very large there were places where the Greeks numbered any other race but where they landed was not one of those places and that meant that they put the other Greeks who were living there that the Greek government put them into danger and ultimately resulted in the Greeks being expelled from that part of Anatolia Ottoman Empire and it was and is still regarded by most Greek people as a tragedy the Asia Minor catastrophe they had hoped instead to produce a new empire, Greek speaking and so forth and so what I was interested in for the subject was the contrast between winners and losers in a war apparent winners and apparent losers I think really both sides in that particular war both Greeks and Turks lost a great deal they had lived together rather comfortably for 500 years and when you see one side or another reasserting themselves this is kind of getting a little off the subject but in the papers in the last few days you may have seen that the church of Iosofia in Istanbul yes, has been made a mosque again to be a mosque well it was a mosque for many, many years but for many, many years before that it was a Christian church so this is really a bad sign in what was the Ottoman Empire in modern Turkey that they are returning themselves to be a strongly Islamic state and asserting what had been a triumph of modern Turkey with it to become a secular state right, yeah citizenship respect for everybody that was about the best outcome you could have had from that war well one thing that struck me in reading the book too was how much nostalgia, if that's the right word, pride I mean the Greeks have, you know the ancient Greece is the, you know seed of culture, right the seed of democracy so they have this enormous pride in their culture but of course the Turks had enormous pride in the Ottoman Empire and in 1919, you know empires were, empires were quickly becoming a thing of the past so that's interesting how did you find a living over there? What was it like to live overseas as a young man? Did you have a family at that point? Yes, when we, I had been to Turkey and the Greece before I was married but when we had little children then they were, it was wonderful to be with them because they were in preschool or kindergarten with local children and those became our entree to meeting other parents and both of, both in Athens and in Istanbul we made many friends not nearly Americans but many Greeks in Istanbul in the Athens and many Turks in Istanbul so I came to realize that my feelings about them which were fond in both cases were justified and that it was indeed a great sadness that those people who had lived together their predecessors had lived together for 500 years had been torn apart again as the war did and now things had been healed after the war of 1919 and now it was back again to a position where fundamentalist Islamists were asserting their rights to that church which is an international shrine it was built by the Greeks filled with beautiful mosaics the mosaics were painted over by the sensible Turkish government that followed the war that came out of Turk nothing was ruined the mosques which were offensive the pictures were offensive to the mosques they were pictures of well they were representations instead of destroying them the very sensible Turkish government pasted them over they were entirely removable entirely savable and that was the right church right a judgment to make that church not a mosque but a museum which is what it was for many, many years not many successful years it's a very to me it's very sad thing to make it a mosque again not because I have anything against mosa worship but I have a great deal of feelings about how Christians will feel about mosa worship going on and what they regarded as one of their great churches well these layers you know like when you go to Rome and you see these churches in Rome that are on top of pagan temples have you been to Istanbul, Mark? have you been to Santa Sofia? I'm sorry I didn't follow that I was asking Mark if he had been to Hagia Sophia if he had seen it I'd been to Saudi but I wasn't able to go to Mecca because I'm not of that faith but I got a good sense of what it's like so I appreciate what Richard's saying I wanted to ask Richard about his time at Columbia you know when he was there New York as we know has a very rich literary culture were you able to socialize with some of the prominent writers at the time? In the McKenna tour New York City at Columbia New York well you were at Columbia uh yeah yes although I was in I was in a journalism school so I was very pleased when some of my my fellow students there wound up in the newspaper business or on television uh I don't think there were many writers of fiction there if they were I apologize to them for going in that direction they went to the New York Post art dealer I kind of think this is where journalism school trades you for other things what was this sort of Pete Hamel well this would have been before Pete Hamel and and reporters like that right? uh yes it was a long time ago yeah it was before the only person that I later knew was Jim McClunchie of the McClunchie newspaper part it was in the class ahead of me at Columbia so they Columbia Journalism School was also producing publishers advertising people and I'm happy to say some very great reporters I never felt that it was essential that anybody had had to go to a J School I thought the J School as we always called it was wonderful for me because I hadn't ever had any newspaper training except you know writing for the Highlander at Piedmont High School that kind of thing so I still feel that writing can be studied and should be studied and worked at by potential writers but that it's not something that really could be implanted into somebody by a school much as I have I think the writing classes that we're having now at the Mechanics Institute are in the right direction they put people together with other people who care about the writing and that's that's something that because it's essentially a lonely profession I think that there's one of this is one of the really good things that the Mechanics Institute is doing nowadays and was doing when you and I were on the board together Mark many years ago we were always interested in writing but we're doing a lot more at the Mechanics Institute now many many little sort of self mode self-driven classes and certainly constant visits by writers and authors and even agents and so forth for people coming to the Mechanics Institute to meet yeah I think that's a credit to you because you were part of that initiative to to expand in that direction so the Institute owes you a lot of gratitude in that respect and we're appreciative of what we've done over the years I wanted to ask you a little bit about your your time in Egypt it was it was pre-Nassar the British at occupant were still occupying the canal zone if I remember my history correctly what was that like because it was still coming out of the colonial age and and after right after World War II you know recent you know it was very recent and the British and French had a big presence in the Middle East so what was that like we were not greatly affected by it living in Istanbul or in Athens except in so far as there was a almost continuous friction in Cyprus the island that was part of the British Empire at one time and then was occupied in different regions of the island by Turks and Greeks unfortunately particularly in Greece sort of iridentism that involves we would like to have Cyprus all our own for example with an art with one Archbishop Makarios pushing that to the point that it was very close to having a war between the Turks and the Greeks over Cyprus and this was done essentially by the moving of ambitious politicians against their nearest neighbor because basically the Turks and the Greeks have a great deal in common common history and their their cultures their agricultural and business cultures fit together very very well they should be the best of allies always and so it's it's sorrow to me to see a sort of a Muslim revivalist now in Turkey and that's found that's about to affect the feeling that the Greeks have one it's too bad was living as a writer overseas I mean living overseas is different no matter what you do but but how did you find the life of a right I mean I think a lot of us have a very romantic notion of living as a writer overseas you know I mean there's the Paris stereotype right that's a hundred years old by now but but did you find that life as a writer was uh was different and in just sort of a day-to-day way overseas from from here at home of course you weren't a fellowship so that probably helped but and I didn't have to go to work every day except for my desk no did you find that I don't Mark will understand this and sympathize with this too is that most practicing writers unless you're working for a publication have they have a great need for space and this was always one of a long time ambition for several other people on the board at the mechanics Institute along with me to carve out some workspace within the building on post street where writers could work that should have some space now I know Leslie that that you Lizzie that you are working sometimes at the grotto which is you know an effort to produce some workspace for writers I spent much of my time here in San Francisco the three kids in the house in the back room of a real estate office or in the in the dining room with some friends I was in a church for a while and I was in someone's mountain cabin for a while because one simply has to have a little little place to be quiet to work put your typewriter or now your computer and that's one of the other things of course that the mechanics Institute now can offer isn't I wish we had more space of that kind of the mechanics for people could leave their things behind and have them say a locker even even better a room in which they could have a desk we tried to do this the space is usually has been taken down there but particularly with the late Rosemary Patton as a member of the board we had campaigned constantly for a writer's center there are such centers in many other cities and frequently the writer gets a fellowship to be there for six months or pays for this space so that's still and that and that's still a possibility for you know for something something we can do I know I have many colleagues at the grotto actually who are also very active members at MI and who work both places you know of course these days we're all we're working we're work we can't go work at MI or at or at the grotto we're all we all have I don't know about it well I don't have small children I suppose if I had kids at home it would be different but it's there's sometimes it feels like there's a little too much space I'm particularly oh I'm sorry no go ahead go ahead I'm just going to ask mark the question and I know that because you were on the board most of the time that Rosemary and I and some others were pushing for that writing center the inhibition seemed to me usually just that we needed the space for revenue wasn't that really the big there's always a conflict and anytime we dedicate a specific space it's it takes away revenue but I was I was alone lines of what you wanted to accomplish I was all for it but the economic situation at the time didn't permit it and now things are a little bit different I think you know I foresee something that when we could have the space and maybe raise money for an annual grant within the EMI community to sponsor particular writer and that's a goal and it's something I would love to see happen a writer-in-residence yeah writer-in-residence just in the current circumstances it's very hard to predict anytime going forward until for the notice so that's something that I would like to accomplish for it's all said and done it's just a question of getting the the space and the money to supply the grant for the fellowship but it's something we should work on definitely yeah so Dick you always worked it sounds like you always found a place away from home to work and I think that's it was that to have that physical division you know to be able to sort of have your workspace that was where you could just dedicate to whatever project you were immersed in and to be able at the end of the day to close the door and leave it yeah because I think I was over a pizzeria on Clement Street for a while I was in the back office of a realtor's office on Noriega Street the truck with a realtor he was out of the office all the time but he'd come in about five and want to talk and then I was just beginning to get up ahead of steam and get my writing done for the day right along those lines what do you find your most productive as far as writing goes that you're both writers when is there a certain time of day that works better or is it just kind of random that you get you get the inspiration that you start writing whatever or is there a certain time of day that you're at your best as far as writing goes well if you wait for inspiration I was just going to quickly say if you wait for inspiration you'll be waiting a long time you got it you got to get your butt in the chair every day I work in the morning that's my best time but what about you, Dick what's your best time to write, Dick I think I think it was a French fighter who said the best place to write is to place your backside in in front of your desk and and then write what I find best for me to do is to have broken off writing with something still to say and perhaps even make a note to yourself to kick you over the next day yes I even do that about what I'm going to cook the next day now so I I wake up without any ideas so something from yesterday which is very good that was Hemingway's trick I remember reading somewhere that he would he would leave with the sentence unfinished so that the next morning he just had to he had to finish the sentence and then he was on a roll and I think there's a I think there's a lot to that I think leaving you know Amy, when it's going well you want to stay and keep it going well but but you if you're in a regular practice I've found if you're writing in a regular regular basis in a serious way maybe it's not every day but you know four or five days a week you you get into that that groove I mean certainly there are some days where it's more difficult Annie Dillard you know who writes wonderful books about natural history and about the Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and books like that Annie Dillard said what if the muse showed up and I wasn't there you know in terms of you know keeping yourself in your seat every day Dick, one question I wanted to ask you is you know writing I don't think writing has changed of course not but I think the writing life has changed a lot in the last over the last decades you know you mentioned earlier the idea that writing can be taught or writing at schools and there's a much bigger emphasis now there are many more MFA programs many more graduate programs in creative writing and there were you know 20 30 years ago how in your life as a writer what do you see is sort of the biggest changes in in the life of the writer or the world around the writer I mean I think I think as you say it's all about sitting in the chair and writing but in terms of in terms of the things we have to be aware of the things we have to be cognizant of the challenges well I think the screen the screen the screen you know it it first began to change writing with the with the growth of movies with plots in the 1920s or earlier that became the most desirable medium for a writer was to be in movies and if he could get there only by writing a book and adapting it to be the way I think they were very very different and it's odd to think that Heming that Faulkner for example was the author of of an Egyptian thriller about the building of the pyramids you know at with screen credits now you expect certain writers very much had a screen in mind and you know I think that anybody writing about detectives in Hollywood Chandler for example he came again they had and I think screen is in mind and still is now even more for television and it's being affected very very much my sort of reality TV where you expect the drama to develop out of living people before your very eyes this has got to be some of the influences on a writer's life he's not going to be writing dialogue every word of dialogue for people anymore it's more likely that it may spring from them wonderfully I can't do that are you reading now who's your favorite author I'm just out of curiosity if you have one favorite author or is there a genre that you really like to read yeah well this actually my two favorite authors are very are very demanding one is Joseph Conrad Conrad is hard to read I think Conrad's book Nostromo is one of the best novels ever written but it's a dynamite book to read it's tough Graham Greene like tremendously and then of all Isaac Bobble Russian writer who you know he's a guy who like Chekhov I think was Chekhov who said a really good writer can break your heart with a period with a you know with a period at the end of of a sentence and that meant restraint that meant and Bobble is fantastic about this this is really a brilliant writer I wish I could read Russian so I could read him in Russian yes and his story is so and my other one of my favorites currently well I guess I mentioned Craig Greene but currently I think that some of the people breaking away from entirely from Hemingway once I liked it I think that Hemingway was up to a point a very very great writer but like Faulkner he really not imitated very well or imitated too much and certainly imitating Faulkner's a dreadful way to go I don't think that it's hard not to pick a favorite writer and I think it's a it's a great question what's your favorite writer Mark? Well I mentioned Raymond Chandler I love his stuff but unfortunately there's not that much material that he wrote he only had like six novels couple short stories but I love his stuff and I love that genre and I I'm a big science fiction fan as well but that's you know Phil K. Dick I like a lot but he was you know half crazy but that's kind of what the appeal is yeah now the other one that I read almost almost incessantly I have one of his books going all the time with George Siminole out of Infector My Gray and his novels which are I have a particular reason because with my family I lived in Switzerland in a little town and George Siminole was our neighbor and my wife lovingly said well go go say hello to Mr. Siminole Dick you're a writer he'd love you to come over and say I'm a writer Mr. Siminole I said Mr. Siminole would write up very likely have me shot as I was fleeing up and Siminole's house had had a wall around it like this and no underpinning or anything it was a terror house and I was not about to go and see Siminole but I read him I you know I've always got one Infector My Gray book they usually take about half a day to read but I love them Dick can you talk a little about some of the books that you've written and particularly one that interests me about the rail the railroads and name your some of the travels they've had on the rails that inspired you to write that you know what motivated you to write some of the books that you did write go down the list but the one about the rails what what what got you started on that well I was handed a book by a friend of mine and he suggested a book that we call out west on the old one train which we had a lot of pictures that were done by Frank in fact Frank Leslie's magazine in the 1870s itself about a trip across the country and so I made the same trip and intervarded my impressionist with each chapter but doing that I began to read a lot about railroads so that so then I began to gather a lot of stories by people involved in the railroad and that came into a book that was called working on the rail it's the only book I've written that's actually in print and I buy it from Amazon they don't have it on the table but they do sell it I know we have a bunch of questions people want to ask but before we open it up wider I want to ask you Dick what do you what book have you most enjoyed working on and why a book called treasure island which is a memoir of what it was like to be a kid in the Bay Area at the age of 11 when the whole Bay Area was just enchanted with the idea that we were going to have a fair here and it was a wonderful fair and but the book is about in a sense it is it's almost like a memoir because the what happened at the fair was what happens at all expositions it opened it ran along and then it closed that's sort of why going to the legislature and reporting that the legislature did that whereas what impression that it made upon us in our naive ways and with the war breaking out in Europe was it was such a juxtaposition of emotions there that by the time the fair closed people were beginning to look over their shoulder and it wasn't very long actually the war had broken out in Europe before the fair was over so it was in that sense it was sort of a heartbreaking last look at what what we'd been before that time yeah that's interesting to hear you say that because my mother remembered Goh and she went when she was about nine and she talked about it in much the same terms so was was that the book let's see you wrote that in 1973 was that what kind of got you interested in historical preservation or had you been had you had that already been an interest because I know that's a great interest of yours now yes but I have to say that it was local issues of planning and preservation that I covered when I was a reporter on The Chronicle that really got me interested in the idea of historic preservation because it was involved in issues like redevelopment and so forth if the first significant work I did for The Chronicle was about the impact that the use of the redevelopment law was having upon the black people of Richmond, California who had come in as people to work in war industries there and were being systematically driven out of the city by the old white leadership it was a very, very disturbing thing and many, many goodwill people Catholic missionaries and Quakers and so forth were the ones who blew the whistle on this and I went over as a reporter on The Chronicle and it was true the city government was using redevelopment to drive black people out of the town and it was it was shocking and horrible and illuminating but also that's when I became interested in issues of that kind that involved land use as it affected people and housing as it affected people things of that kind underneath, leg underneath that kind of reporting that one would essentially running to a fire that we call it was newspaper reporting it was deeper we had to look at trends and we had to look at the dangers to our society that were constantly there and I think are constantly with us now I think reporting is really much harder for anybody to do now because you have the instant instant competition of the net we couldn't have worked that fast I could never have as a reporter during those times you were going against the grain of the politicians did you ever feel that that you were ever threatened or endangered by reporting the truth no I didn't because I felt I was working for a good paper the chronicle at that time was it was very conservative politically but they also if you wrote something and someone argued as I did once I wrote I wrote something and attributed it to the governor Goodman J Knight and it was said but another reporter who had been at a meeting had already left and Mr Knight the next day said he said I didn't say that but my editor in the chronicle said no that's the right I said you didn't say so they stood up for me so I felt you know that if I once got it past the editor that I could count on the paper supporting me and I think I think you'll find that still exists now that that some of the reporters that are really sticking their necks out yeah need the support of their editor or their publisher yeah good good good editor is very important well we need to I think we need to open up to our to our audience but before we do I want to just take a minute first of all to thank you so much for this the great conversation and you know keep talking for hours um but I also want to express on the behalf of Mechanics Institute and and the board of trustees are deep gratitude to you as trustee and not everybody may know that you retired in May from 22 years I can't give this to you personally but I'm going to read it to you and we will send it to you Mechanics Institute since 1954 in commemoration of his years of steadfast support and dedicated leadership as a trustee we recognize and thank Richard Reinhardt for his service, commitment, friendship, and scholarship as the author of our sesquicentennial history Dick's contributions and passion for the mission of our cultural and literary institution have shaped us all for the better thank you Dick thank you I this this is an expression thank you you're very welcome and we'll be sending it to you in the mail so you can hang it on your wall oh gosh I since I there's no library for me to come into these days I see some space I see some space right behind you where you could put it so okay Pam you want to you want to do the questions yes I just um everybody should if you have a question please um go into the chat and type it there and I will read I will read out some of the questions first one is from George Hammond uh it's a question for Mr Reinhardt do you enjoy writing books or um is writing journalism more enjoyable for you oh thank you George for the question and and uh books books because they're somehow more lasting and and I'm a book lover I have three unfinished or need to revise novels in my office with me right now and I go to them with pleasure so um the next question is from Patrick Wolf he's asking um what you if there anything about in your books that you might change um could you talk quickly about some of the books you wrote and what inspired why you wrote each one and what you thought went well what's what are you proud of about them it's ringing even I how can I continue to read when I took it apart it's okay we can it's it's not that loud not intrusive sorry about that uh yes I would I would I do a whole lot fewer words in writing the Ashes of Sverna it was it was a long long manuscript I became enchanted with my research this is somebody asking me to contribute something to something they don't know how stingy I am they call stop this over the day but uh no the question is I really feel until I wrote that thing Ned later my cousin so so uh I would use I would have probably cut a certain amount of detail because I was you know I was enchanted with the results of my very heavy research and four languages I mean four languages because I use French and Italian and English and Greek and Turkish and sources it's very hard to give that up and that's one thing I would certainly change is I cut it down a whole lot another that I need let me just ask them a quick follow-up question did your editor try to get you to cut some and you didn't want to or was that not even up for discussion I I had a wonderful editor who was willing for me to do a major revise unfortunately that editor who had been with Harper moved over to another publisher and I had a literary agent then who said don't move with the editor which was fortunate because he died so I got a new editor he was very kind and who guided me in getting rid of a superfluous character and he was a superfluous character because I had killed him off rather early in the book what the editor said is Tolstoy could do that Reinhardt cat as you may remember in War and Peace one of the main characters is killed rather early in War and Peace in that great long book so he said Tolstoy yes Reinhardt no you already get to do that so I had I had revisions of that kind so Gene Blaney is asking what can we do to support budding writers in the current environment I want to say hi Gene former a former member of the board and the mechanics what was your question Gene I'm sorry it's what can we do to support budding writers in the current environment have a have a good writing room for them and some scholarships to the mechanics institute okay and I would add to that support local bookstores support independent bookstores go to readings I have a lot of colleagues who have books coming out right now and you know right in the middle of a pandemic who's going to go to a bookstore but it's amazing what a lot of the stores and what we at MI are doing to to promote and you know new books coming out so I definitely agree with Dick about the scholarships for a writer's room at the MI but but just by by supporting and reading reading new writers Pam you're muted it looks as though that's pretty much all of the questions unless somebody has something else they would like to ask I will I do have a question are there books about writing Dick that you would that you would recommend to writers oh yes and I think every every writer will know this book which is Strunk and White he'd be white and Will Strunk a famous book that White revised when he was a brilliant writer and editor for the New Yorker and I think most most people who have had who have had any kind of an English course in a higher institution probably even in high school would read Strunk and White there it is for those who the elements of style right other than that I read an absolute charming book by Eudora Welty Southern writer and I think her biography and other biographies of that kind that are really full of a certain tenderness about their subject matter Eudora Welty wrote very tenderly about her subjects and it's something to read and not to side you're going to be such a smartass that you're going to introduce people to nasty people or get nasty things off your own chest that you might think this is a humane art writing should be it could be a terrible weapon as we know but I think if you want to if you want to be a humanitarian yourself you don't have to be religious about it but you have to have some sympathy for other human beings before you start writing about it and one more question question from George Hammond you have three incomplete novels in your office which one do you intend to finish first and what is it about oh that's a hard one well the the first one is about it's about a gold rush in southern southwestern Nevada in 1907 and it fascinated me because it was a scene of a terribly corrupt but famous boxing match between a black man and white man and it was also where everybody who had made money in the Klondike came and gambled and gambled away the money they had the Klondike and it was visited by one of the most interesting literary women I've ever encountered which was named was Eleanor Glenn and she was the author of the sexiest novel published in her time which was called Three Weeks and it was about a middle-aged woman of a younger man oh boy did they gobble it up anyway Eleanor was there for the fight and I thought she was just a great character and that book is really finished I wrote it from the point of view of three different characters and I never could get anybody interested in buying it and publishing it so I abandoned it the other one is about to answer Georgia's question is about a couple of men in the Bay Area who throughout their lives have been very good friends and one of the men has had a little black spot in his life which he has concealed he can't he's a guy who can't tell a lie and the story is really about the persistence and ultimately kind of the breakup of their lifelong friendship over the secret that one of them will not share with the other and that's uh that's the one that gets good that gets done next what did I say the one three I guess that's are you still working actively there must be another one around are you still working actively on on any of them yes yes in fact I've changed the name of one of them already that's how active it is you know I am working on them and uh that's very you know would you ever consider self-publishing since an old guy now I lack I lack a lot of energy so I after after I've been writing for a while I think she it's time for me to have a drink or go to bed that's very common in the writing life regardless of age I think you all know that all of you well if that seems to wrap up the questions unless anybody has anything else they'd like to ask I think this has been just a fascinating conversation Dick and and thank you so much did you did you tape it or something so I can my son who's in in England and didn't want to be up in the middle of the night can see it yes I think we it has been recorded and I think we'll also have a link to it somewhere on the website so people can find it there as well yes they really need something else to do I think it is being recorded and it the video will be available on our youtube channel which is accessible from our home page there's a little icon of youtube or you can search youtube for mechanics institute and it'll pop up but all of you folks but and particularly mark who thought of doing this and kind of drove us all together to have this conversation even though we couldn't get together in person that's right we were we talked about meeting in mountain lake park didn't we and then we decided that wouldn't be very practical yes exactly thank you mark because what was it maybe two months ago you called and you said what if we did this and yeah great idea it's been it's been really wonderful and thank you all for coming and for the good questions and you can I have the I have the copy of the ashes of smirna that belongs to the mechanics but as soon as I return it whoever wants to read it next can I was going to comment on your most recent a recent writing that I wrote which was about you you labeled it as non-fiction and it and sold it to a literary magazine called simmer on which I guess is what is it in New New Mexico or actually they're based in Oklahoma and they're part of Oklahoma state yeah simmer on it's a great novel of Edna Ferber it's a good name anyway uh I liked it a whole lot but I thought it was really very close to fiction although you decided to label it non-fiction oh it's 100 true I'm afraid I mean I say I'm afraid because it's um um it was a very difficult piece to write it's a piece of memoir and it's a piece about the uncle I never knew I had an uncle who was a family secret who was a taboo who was never discussed because of mental illness and I grew up with this fascination with this uncle but I knew I could not ask my father about it my father was a very gentle man but he was also a could be volatile not not violent but I just knew it was a taboo topic and I wrote about it and um it was a difficult piece to read for for reasons you you understand Dick if you read it but no it's it's not fiction I'm glad my family was not so reticent about gossiping with what about although we did I did have a grandmother who uh she and my grandfather were very strict total very strict uh T told words and I there was a there was a brother who had died an alcoholic and it was something that I think there was alcoholism has has always been regarded as uh sort of a of a curse I think for a lot of people because either it involves illness or addiction or or a weakness that you don't want to admit uh and and I think that haunted my family a little bit having that sort of family secret but that's the only one I can think of that we had that was where some members of the family were trying to keep keep the family skeletons out of the out of the minds of their children well of course kids are very perceptive right so even if I mean even if it's meant to be kept away and not mentioned kids pick up on stuff kids kids hear things or they just pick up on a certain energy when you know whenever anybody mentioned my father's brother it was sort of like what who you know so you just kids pick up on that and and being a writer like you you know you said you wrote your autobiography at seven I wrote my first autobiography at 10 so we do these things and and we observe you know and and when things haunt us for lack of a better term I don't think it's too strong to say this haunted this really well haunted might be too strong but this really made an impact on me and I and I needed to write about it as well as some other family family stuff so memoir writing is very different as you know from your treasure island book memoir writing is very different from fiction writing for me I I feel my voice is different in the two I have a different voice so I'll have to send you a so I'll have to send you a short story so you can read some fiction how about that yes okay well thank you again and everyone stay safe have a good evening I wish we could all be in that balloon behind mark that looks so this so beautiful in the sunset but Pam do you want to or Taryn are you still there do you want to sign us off um I Taryn are you are you the you were the host so well hey thanks everyone for coming out to honor dick Reinhart and thanks mark and Lindsay for your fascinating commentary and questions there are a couple of people who raised their hands if you had a last minute question that you could quickly type in the chat box that would be fantastic um otherwise I think I think we're ready to sign off and send Richard off to uh bed or drinky poo whichever yes please if you have a question I want to ask Taryn to Taryn you were working at one time on a biography of one of the most important founders of the mechanics institute yes you are you're poking along on that one oh so many things get in the way but I'm clicking along well this is really one of our most interesting citizens in a way that he he's he's known to us mostly is having supplied the ropes on which the cable cars run whereas he had so many other wonderful involvements in San Francisco is one of our one of our great citizens including kicking off the mechanics institute so I hope that will I hope that one will appear one of the good guys it will at some point you know he didn't exactly make it easy so all right oh here's one question I see because it just popped up can you see it yes Libby taller asks what have you learned dick between then and now which then is she talking about uh you know to have some poetic license you can decide which then and which now but the uh well the then uh I was asked to do an alumni evening speech for a Stanford group and I called it if I knew then what I know now or the other way around if I knew now what I knew then I thought I knew a hell of a lot when I was about a sophomore or so in college and what I what I learned was that I was not going to change the world that the ideas that I had were mostly extraordinarily naive I really believe that the United Nations is going to put an end to war I believe that it's sort of a quicker morality was going to put an end to military involvement in everything and I thought that love and kindness we're going to we're going to prevail and I'm sorry to say I have been somewhat disappointed well I know now let's all try to keep that innocent spark because that's what keeps things bearable yeah absolutely absolutely that's a great note to end on all right thank you everyone um and thank you