 And I'd like to welcome you all to our 2021 Vermont Fellowship Distinguished Visiting Writer event with novelist and short story writer, Adam Hazlett. Before we get started with our program, I'd like everyone to know that we will be recording this session. At the end of the program, please use the Q&A function for questions, which will allow you to remain anonymous if you wish. Before introducing tonight's event, I'd like to read a brief statement that the university has prepared to acknowledge the land on which Roger Williams University resides. Quote, we recognize the unique and enduring relationship that exists between indigenous people and their traditional territories. We acknowledge that Roger Williams University's Bristol and Providence campuses are located within the homelands of both the Poconucket and Narragansett nations. Let this acknowledgement serve as a reminder of our ongoing efforts to reconcile and partner with the Narragansett and Poconucket and all indigenous people whose lands and waters we benefit from today, unquote. Thank you. The event tonight has been made possible by the generosity of the Vermont family, specifically Bradley Vermont and RWU alumnus who endured, who endowed, sorry, an annual fellowship to support an acclaimed writer to teach a masterclass to RWU students. We are also pleased to partner in presenting this program with our neighbors in Bristol at Rogers Free Library. I'd like to introduce Jackie O'Brien, Assistant Director of Rogers Free Library, who had planned to share a few words of welcome, but unfortunately is having technical difficulties with her audio. So I'm very sorry she can't speak, but I would like to introduce her. Can you wave Jackie? Thank you, thank you. And now I'd like to turn it over to our library program director and professor of creative writing at Roger Williams, Adam Braver. And he will introduce Adam. Adam will introduce Adam. Thank you. All right, thank you Betsy. Yesterday we held the seventh annual Vermont workshop led by Adam as our distinguished guest writer. This year there were six student fellows who were chosen through a blind submission process. All six of our student fellows are here on the call, Traylin, Hannah, Jillian, Kiran, Madeline and Meg. As some of you may know from past events, this workshop usually is held at the home of Kathy Quinn in conjunction with the Anthony Quinn Foundation. But as with everything else, adjustments were made and it was held as is this on Zoom. It is a true pleasure to welcome Adam Hazeland. Readers of his will know that he is a master short story writer and novelist, deservedly recognized with numerous awards and distinctions. His keen sense of style and awareness of character shows him as a realist of the first order who plums us deep into the conflicted psyches of people often struggling with or against circumstance, misunderstanding, identity or their own expectations. People who even still at their worst are still wanting and desiring to be their best. But as confident of a realist as Adam is, he quite stealthily is a pretty amazing stylist. Inflections of form can be seen in his stories and certainly in his most recent novel, Imagine Me Gone, where through alternating perspectives, we not only witness the unique world views of each narrator that come through the shifting points of view, but we also come to realize that we are in the hands of a writer who is not afraid to employ variations of structure and prose to reflect those distinctions. Such stylism not only brings to life the distinct sensibilities and confidentialities of each character, but because it is a novel of family, one that replicates the disparate ways that family members negotiate the world from the rhythmic to the observational to the various agendas. In the end, by turning those individual pieces into a single family, Adam Hazelit as stylist becomes Adam Hazelit as realist. I'm really glad that we can have Adam here. I learned so much about writing and literature when I read him and when I talk with him and when I hear him talk and I trust he will do the same for you. So please welcome Adam Hazelit. Thank you and thank you to Adam for that wonderful introduction. It's been a pleasure to get to know Adam in the last five or six years we teach together over the summer. And thank you to Betsy and to Roger Williams and the library, Jackie O'Brien and for everyone who arranged for my visit. I had a great time yesterday in the workshop class that we did and I'm glad to be with you here this evening. So I'm sorry it's not in person. As with all these things we've all been saying this for a year now, but it's still true. And in any case, I will, the way it's set up I think it's pretty informal, but I'm gonna read just a brief short story. Shouldn't take more than about 15 minutes or so. And not from the book actually, but one I wrote a few years ago. And then it's really a conversation. So I'm happy to discuss what's on people's minds. So without more, I will go ahead and read to you this brief short story. It's called the act, the act. This is how it goes. The boy grows up in Toledo in the 1950s where his father works at the tire plant and for the union as a shop steward. He does well in school, studies hard and on the advice of a teacher applies to a bunch of small East Coast schools. His father thinks he should go to the University of Ohio or maybe Michigan. They fight about it, but not much because when it comes down to it, his father is proud of how well his son has done and he trusts his wife who says these other places will give the boy more opportunities. For the first time in his adult life his father skips the Labor Day Parade and spends that weekend driving his son the 11 hours to the campus and helping him move into his dorm room. They don't have much to say to each other on the drive or across the table of the various diners they eat in nor as they arrive at the college. Most of the other kids have come with both their parents and far more belongings. They are polite to the boy and his father in a way neither of them is used to, more like salespeople at a fancy department store than neighbors. Inevitably the boy is eager for his father to leave to get the awkwardness over with and his father feels much the same. They shake hands in the parking lot and the boy promises to phone his mother on Sundays. As he's unpacking in his room the boy hears a knock at the door and looks up to see his dad. There's something I meant to say to you he says his arms crossed over his barrel chest before I head off. I'm not leaning on you to study any one thing or another you can do whatever draws you I'll be fine at it it doesn't matter if I don't understand it but one thing whatever this place gives you he said indicating with a slow knot on the head the room, the view out the window the campus beyond wherever you end up don't work for the ball busters. There's decent management you'd probably be good at it you're smart I'm not saying don't go into an office I'm just saying remember what brought you here. Okay the boy says amazed to hear his father speak at such a length. All right then his father says good luck. So the boy excels at the college studies philosophy and literature and is told by a professor he should go to graduate school. He's tempted the play of concepts gives him pleasure. His parents don't object they just don't say much about it when he floats the idea as if he's announcing that he's moving to another continent when they're unlikely to visit. He ponders the possibility for a long time despite the enjoyment they give there is something about the immateriality of ideas and novels that seems too abstract to him too impractical. They seem to lack consequence. In the end he decides to go to law school instead where he figures writing and thinking could be turned into more useful things. When he tells his mother she is delighted as he knew she would be. His father he doesn't speak too much anymore other than the brief hallows and how are you when he happens to answer the phone. After graduating he's offered a position at a firm in Philadelphia and a few years later he marries a young woman who works in one of the curatorial departments of the museum. They buy a small house near the train station in Bryn Mawr and wait several years before having their first child, a boy whom they named Gabriel. As a senior associate the man now in his 30s works on mergers and acquisitions. This is in the mid-1980s when hostile takeovers are becoming more frequent. Often the client's goal is to acquire a struggling company and sell its parts for a profit to solving it in the process. One of the things that complicates the deals are labor contracts that the target company may have with unionized employees. The man's under no illusion about what's happened. He's participating more or less directly in the one thing his father asked him not to do. His parents have moved out of the city of Toledo by now to a suburb and he takes his family to visit them twice a year once in the summer and once at Christmas. His wife is the one who knows the position he's in and whenever they discuss it, which is not often, they decide that all in all, the best course is not to say anything to his parents about it. What would be the point? What he does does not has no immediate bearing on his father who's now retired and his pension and benefits are secure. Nonetheless, it eats at him and one Christmas when his own son is already tan the man tells his mother about the nature of his work. The two of them are standing in the kitchen at the end of the night after his father has already gone upstairs to bed. She is silent for a time as she wipes down the counters. She hangs the dishcloth on the door of the oven to dry and without raising her eyes from the stove sop says, for his sake, I'm asking you, don't ever tell him that. He's proud of you, even if he doesn't say it. You should hear him talk to his friends, never tell him this, you understand? And so he doesn't. His son Gabriel decides to go to the same East Coast college that the man did and on the Labor Day weekend of his first semester, the man drives him to his dorm and helps him move his belongings in. Though the campus is much the same, everything else is different. There's no silence in the car. He and Gabriel, both Democrats are political junkies and it's a presidential campaign year. They devour and dissect poll numbers like box scores. His son wants to study political science to run campaigns. And when they're not talking about politics, his son tells him other things about girls, about insecurities, he harbors about his looks, intrigues with high school friends going off to other schools. And the man describes to him what his first year in college was like and what his son has to look forward to. When the time comes to leave, he gives no speech and they don't shake hands. They just hug for a good long time. In less than half an hour after he's back on the road, Gabriel is already texting him to report the latest numbers from Iowa. A few months later, the man gets a call from his mother saying that his father, who already has emphysema and heart condition, has gone into the hospital with severe pneumonia. He flies from Philadelphia to Toledo the next day and is at his father's bedside by late afternoon. His father lies by the window separated by a nylon curtain with a softly groaning man well into his, from a softly groaning man well into senility. Clear plastic tubes run from his nostrils and his mouth and nose are covered by an oxygen mask. He hasn't been shaved in several days and because the man has never seen his father with a beard, that his gray hair on his face, more than the medical devices that make him appear weakened and forlorn. The room smells of bleach and urine and the half-eaten cheese sandwich on the tray suspended over the bed. His father pulls his mask aside to grunt hello, but immediately begins to cough and the man tells him to replace it. On the muted television mounted at the ceiling, a fake judge presides over two hapless litigants. The man knows that this will be his last visit home to see his father. He takes the food tray out into the hall to get rid of the odor and at the nurses station finds a copy of the local paper. The fortunes of the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Indians have for years been the stuff of his brief exchanges with his father at the holidays or before the phone has passed off to his mother. He suspects that these days his father, like himself, pays only enough attention to the team's progress to allow for these fleeting conversational moments. Sitting in the plastic chair between the bed and the window, he reads aloud an article describing the Cavs when the previous night over the Celtics. His father raises one eyebrow and nods. He reads the next article about their latest draft pick and then the commentator's column complaining about the coach. And by the time he is done, he is generally interested, not to mention relieved at the transport into the familiar closed universe. When it comes time for him to leave, his father gives his hand a squeeze and reaches his other hand up to clasp his forearm. I'll be back tomorrow. The man says, I'm not going anywhere. The next day, his father is worse. The IV antibiotics are not enough. His lungs are filling with fluid. His mother comes to the hospital along with his father's younger sister, whose two children also come and go. Standing vigil, shuttling between the house and the hospital, going to the store to buy the small items his mother requests for his father's last comforts, an anxiety begins to grow in the man that he will never get to see his father on his own again. But he will slip away too soon while everyone is there. The thought quickly obsesses him. He cannot let this happen. When his aunt suggests she and his mother get dinner outside the hospital, the man sees his chance and importons his mother to go. The nurses switch shifts and soon his father's gruel of a dinner is served. Now that everyone is gone, the anxiety has been replaced by concentration on the act. He removes his father's mask and helps him take small bites of the chicken and brown sauce. Wiping the leavings from his whiskers, he places the mask back over his mouth and nose. Leaning in close, speaking directly into his father's ear, the man says, I wanna tell you something. Can you hear me? His father nods. I'm a ball buster, he says. I break up union contracts. I've been doing it for years. I'm good at it. I've invented new ways to do it. It's how I bought my house. It's what we raised Gabriel with. I wanted you to know before you die, close as he is to his father's head, he can see the ropey vein running down his temple to stand with blood and start to pulse. Despite his ashen pallor, red blooms on his wrinkled cheek, he tries to mutter a response, but it ends as another cough into his mask. Watching this, the man feels giddy as a boy in a store, stealing for the first time all his senses heightened, lightheaded at the point of fading, his victory against the world invisible and immense. He leaves the hospital that evening in a state of great calm. Around dawn, his father's heart gives out. When the phone rings at the house, his mother takes the call. From under the door of the bedroom, he slept in as a child. He can hear her crying. The service is held at their church in Toledo. His father is buried two blocks from the old house, just up the road from the shuttered tire plant. When Gabriel graduates from college, he volunteers for a congressional campaign and then gets a paid position in a gubernatorial race. After a few years, he has worked his way up to being a field director for a primary candidate in New Hampshire. The man speaks to him two or three times a week about how the race is progressing, about polls and get out the vote infrastructure and what it's like to work seven days a week. The man organizes a fundraiser for the candidate at his law firm and his son comes down to speak at the event. When he goes up to New Hampshire on the last weekend of the race to volunteer, he's happy to let his son hand him instructions and tell him what to do. And when the candidate loses, the man spends hours on the phone counseling his son, comforting him, talking through what he should do next, encouraging his desire to keep going in such an uncertain field. He's able to watch with pride as over time his son gains a reputation for being a skilled organizer and political staffer, eventually going to work for a senator in Washington. Though he and his longtime girlfriend do not marry, she becomes a member of the family and the four of them take vacations together at least once every other year. The man is a partner now at his law firm. He still works on cases but spends more of his time assuaging the worries of clients and cultivating new ones than drafting the details of merger agreements. When he visits his mother and they go to place flowers on his father's grave, he barely recalls his last moment in the hospital with him. So far in the past it already seems. When his mother dies, she is buried in the plot that has been awaiting her beside her husband. The house and most of its contents are promptly sold. The man and his wife are enthusiastic runners and have been since they were first married. They belong to their local club, attend races up and down the East coast and do at least five kilometers each morning before breakfast. They have brought Gabriel up to run as well and though he's stuck with it, he's not as fanatical about it as they are. Nonetheless, he and his girlfriend agree to take a vacation in Hawaii where his parents plan to run a half marathon. They arrange to spend a week together beforehand on one of the smaller islands. It drizzles during the day for much of the week and the running is treacherous. On the first pleasant day, the man asks Gabriel to run with him and the two of them head up a muddy track behind their rented house onto a winding road that extends to the far side of the island. Soon they have their windbreakers tied around their wastes and are enjoying the uninterrupted view of the ocean. They come to a turnoff for a path that leads steeply up the hill, skipping to a higher section of the road. Breathing heavily, Gabriel stops, leans his hands down onto his thighs and shakes his head. I can't, he says, you go. Come on, the man says, it's just a few hundred yards. He's still jogging in place. He taps Gabriel in the back, come on. They start up the stony path rutted by the rains and crisscrossed with the exposed roots of trees, eyeing the ground carefully as they go, both of them huffing now. It's just as he looks up to see the opening in the vegetation where the path rejoins the road, that the man feels the contraction in his chest, as if an invisible hand that had rested open inside him all these years had suddenly clenched into a fist. He opens his mouth to call out, but no sound comes. Then he's tripping, his shoulder and thigh meeting the ground with terrifying speed, his head smashing against the embankment. The world vanishes from sight. He hears the bellow of his breath and water rushing down the creek. When his vision returns, he is staring upward where the blinding noonday sun is erasing the tops of the trees, forcing him to look away into the fern-covered bank opposite where bird song fills the shadows, giving shape to the damp, echoing air. The fist in his chest grips tighter, sucking more breath from his lungs. His son's face appears above him. He is speaking too fast for the man to understand him. Gabriel reaches his hand down and brushes the side of his father's head. And when he retracts it, the man can see blood smeared across his fingers in palm. His son takes off his t-shirt and uses it to wipe away the blood and dirt. He looks terribly, terribly young as he does this. And it occurs to the man that his son has never contemplated the world without him. He is saying that he needs to get an ambulance, that he is going to run back to the house and call one. The man knows that this is futile. They are on a small island. His life is out of their hands. He holds on to his son's wrist, keeping him kneeling there on the dirt path. Behind Gabriel, the lush branches of the trees rise and dip as if on the breath of a giant. Now is the moment, he thinks. Staring into Gabriel's face, he awaits his condemnation. He needs it to come soon. The hand in his chest is constricting the pumping of his heart. Yet Gabriel says nothing as he folds his windbreaker into a pillow and places it beneath his father's head. There is only care in his eyes. And then the moment is gone and the man is released, unpunished and unseen into the realm of the dead. Thank you. That is a bedtime story for Monday, March 22nd, 2021. So, I think Adam may reappear here momentarily. Yeah, Adam, we have, I would encourage everybody, feel free to use the Q and A section if you want to type in questions. Adam, there is somebody who has a hand raised, so I figure we can go to that if that's okay with you. Sure. And then the rest of you can, and this is Thea who I'm going to be unmuting you or whatever. Okay. Thea, go ahead. I think you need to unmute yourself. I don't have a question. I thought it was amazing what I heard, but I don't seem to have a question. Oh, okay. I'm sorry, your hand was raised, so. Oh. All right. But I- No worries. Amazing, amazing in such a short period of time to deal with life and death issues. Did, maybe I'll ask the writer if he had that in his mind before he was writing it or it happened while he was writing it? Well, I think, you know, there's a, I don't know if you call it a tradition, but I mean, there's a whole line in the tradition or short stories of the kind of the life story, the story that takes someone from birth to death in a kind of synoptic form. I mean, it tends to be more sort of 19th century or early 20th century, but it, and I've never written one like that before or since, but I think it somehow came to me. I was thinking a lot about politics, as you can tell, and some of these divides between, you know, people who basically are, you know, moving from one world to another and what it means about their politics and their careers. And it was just that voice. It was the first paragraph came, this idea of the man, you know, this unnamed person. And from there, I just thought, okay, this is the, it's gonna be brief and complete in the sense of from birth to death. Thank you. Oh, Adam, I think you yourself are silenced. Yep, there's a question in the Q and A here from Teal, Kim, which asks simply, where do you get the inspiration for your stories? Well, I think as most writers will tell you, there isn't a discreet moment. When you write, hopefully you're writing, you know, most days or much of the time. And so really it's sort of like being a cook in the sense that they're just, hopefully a lot of things in the kitchen kind of going. And on any given day, you're kind of fiddling with a few of them. And then something takes light. So it's rare that a full idea kind of hits me on the head and I go, that's the story. It's much more often the case that there's a sentence or a paragraph that interests me that's in some file somewhere and I fiddle with it. And then I would say what happens is that the rhythm of the language itself, you try to listen to what you've written. There's something in the rhythm of that language which suggests more of itself. So for instance, in the story I just read, the tone of that first paragraph implies that you're not gonna suddenly slow down and go five minutes at a time. It's suggesting a certain kind of pace. And so that begins to give you a notion of where you're headed. And I think it was Dr. O'Eill, Dr. O said you can write a novel by like driving in a snowstorm, you can only see 12 yards ahead of you. You can still navigate. So I started each day writing, reading what I've written the day before and kind of inch forward really. So there's less direct inspiration. I wish there were more. Thanks, Adam. So kind of a number of questions coming in. Jillian, who you know from yesterday asked you if you would accept the phrase gently morbid and carefully optimistic as an accurate way of describing your work. Gently morbid and cautiously optimistic? Is that the? Yes, yes. I think the only caval I would have with that would be morbid. Because I think morbid shade slightly in the sense of perhaps horror ghoulishness of some kind. Gently dark, I think I can go with dark. I think morbid suggests perhaps a fixation on death whereas I think death is just simply a companion in life. And so it's present not in the sense of a kind of fixation, but in the sense that we're all haunted by either people who are actually gone or just the people who aren't in the room at the time. So no, you don't accept that. Well, I accept a self-revised version of it. Yes. And sort of, well, Madeline from yesterday asked you if you have a favorite piece you've written, do you have one that you still connected? In an ideal world, the writer's favorite piece is the last thing they wrote. So if they feel some sense of forward motion and optimism, I was speaking of cautious optimism, but so, you know, I don't know, I've written some scenes in the last couple of weeks that I'm fond of, I think it's hard. I mean, in the short story collection, I suppose the last story in the book is one that I feel is very close to my heart for a variety of reasons, but yeah, there are different things about different pieces. It's not, I can't say I have a standout of my own work, plenty of standouts of other peoples, but... Well, and I'm gonna combine a couple of questions here that come from Kaylee and Megan. And one is about, you know, do you take inspiration and incorporate your own experiences into your short stories? And then the second part of the question is that your stories do have a wide range of different kinds of people, you know, and how you approach characters and again, about putting a little of yourself into each character if you do that and how you do that and are there characters that have written and surprised you by the time they were on the page? Sure, sure, and those are good questions. Well, I would say, you know, the students will recognize this because I used this quote yesterday, but Baldwin is someone who said, you know, James Baldwin, all art is more or less confess, all art is confession, more or less oblique, all artists if they are to survive must vomit the anguish up, the literal and the fanciful. So I think there's a way in which all writers are writing what I would describe as emotional autobiography, even if they're writing science fiction, they're writing out of what they care about and what's important to them. So in that sense, they are exposing their concerns. So for me, certainly some of the emotional landscape of the stories is, you know, my emotional landscape, I don't know how it could be other. I think the borrowings from life otherwise are more complicated. So, you know, you've got to give yourself permission to use the materials of your own life, but also permission to change and rearrange and, you know, reconfigure all those things. So I, you know, that same quote Baldwin ends by saying that it's being an artist's discipline, delicate, arduous self-exposure. So it's, yes, it's self-exposure, but the discipline is to shape it into something that other people can experience, right? I mean, in the end, it's a communicative act. So, but as far as particular characters and surprising, I mean, for sure, I mean, my first novel, my second book, A Union Atlantic, I can remember I had this idea that it was gonna be this bank hurry, it was gonna be this guy who was the head of this bank and did it. And I started writing the scene and his junior, his kind of younger associate comes in. And he just, in the dialogue that I started writing, that younger guy was just saying things in much more dynamic, kinetic language terms, that just, that's the way the language was. And I suddenly realized, well, that's my character. This old guy that I've been trying to, you know, keep propped up. I'm not as interested in. So, there are discoveries like that as you go along. And I guess that goes back to what I was saying, listening to what you're writing. You've gotta listen to the music of it to hear what it's telling you because that part's usually unconscious. So, as a follow-up, and this is, you know, in the Q&A, at what point do you know when you've hit that? And she asks, also, when do you get to point when you're not critical of your writing anymore? When you feel that it's solid or that you maybe have hit the, you know, the musicality or the right rhythm or the right groove? Yeah, yeah, sure. Well, there is truth in the old nostrum that work is never finished. It's only abandoned. I mean, I think that you get to a point where you know that you can't do anything more to improve something. I mean, that can take a long time. I mean, it can take months and months and months. I mean, I spent probably nine months writing one of the stories in the book. So, it can take a long time, but you do get to a point where you can't do anything more. And I think then, you know, is where an editor or readers come in as people who can take a different look at it and help you to see your blind spots. So then it becomes sort of a different part of a process where, you know, then that feedback comes in and you can say, okay, well, if they don't see anything more and you don't see anything more, I guess it's done. I mean, a simpler answer is that when it sounds good, I mean, when it sounds, when it's got some kind of ring to it that you're satisfied with, then you decide that it's done. But the funny thing about finishing and, you know, Adam knows this, I mean, it's, there's so many different finishings, right? Because you finish a draft and you finish an edit and then the book goes to a publisher and you get a, it's very, really clean, you know, that you just one day say done. I mean, it's not many stages. I remember Stuart O'Nan saying when he put the commas back in that he took out, you know, he was done. A couple of questions about Imagine Me Gone, which was read by the Rogers Free Library Reading Group. And again, I'll combine these from Cheryl and Susan. And one is specifically about the voices of John and Michael and how you found those voices. And Cheryl says, you know, there's such beautiful voices and how you found them. And Susan is also asking some, how you made some of the decisions about how to construct the book, particularly the multiple points of view, the challenges of revealing information from one character by one character at a time, given the multiplicity of the storytellers. Yeah, yeah. Good, good question. I, in terms of the voices, I mean, this is to go back to what I said a moment ago. Imagine Me Gone is certainly the most autobiographical thing I've ever written. So there the question came into really sharp focus of the degree to which I was borrowing from the experience of my own family and the degree to which I was giving myself permission to change, alter, shape, accentuate, turn into narrative. And really, I think most of it came down to just writing in each of those characters different minds without, in the first instance, worrying about what the questioner is saying about the sequence of information, because I had to establish independently who they were and each one had a different music to it. There was a different rhythm to the prose that was mainly how they differ as people on the page. And using some of those formal things that Adam referred to as introduction, different modalities of getting at a person's experience. So, I tend to be kind of a method actor as a writer. I'm trying to move myself into the emotional life of the person that I'm writing about. And so it's tough. I mean, to be in the mind of those characters in those times is difficult work, but the only thing harder than doing it is not doing it. So it's the task that I had sort of come to as a writer, it was to write that book. And the voices of John and Michael coming from just that delving into that becoming that. Yeah, I mean, I think that I needed the sort of formal device that I found with these letters from the cruise ship in the first instance. That then once that sort of I thought of using that, then I was like, well, what are the other forms that he might use? What other kind of the intake form or the student loan forgiveness form or whatever it is, what are the other ways of addressing an audience that I might have? So, and with the father, it's just the one long chapter with John. And there the decision was to circumscribe dramatically the amount of time. So it's just one sequence. And so that really wasn't really the delving, just the sort of living inside. I wrote that when I was on a fellowship in Berlin and I was staring across the Wannsee at the Wannsee villa where they planned the final solution. So it was a dark place in which to write a dark chapter. And was, did you write that, was that book and there's a question from Hannah that kind of gets to this although I think she's also talking about stories, but was that something, was it something structurally that you had settled on initially or did you find the structure through the process? Oh, very much found it. I mean, I actually began with the scene of the two brothers in the cabinet at the end. I wrote that, well, some of that, I wrote the first half of that first. And then the question was, is this a short story? In which case it's just the story of this time in this cabin or, but then the next thing that I came up with was them driving up to Maine when they were all, the family was, the kids were young. And so at that point I was like, well, here I have it kind of like the birth to death thing. I mean, I had the other side of it was suddenly this early piece. And so I thought, well, I guess this is a novel. And so the rest of it came from understanding that was the timeframe I was gonna be dealing with. And is that true with the stories too, Adam? Do you follow that same kind of process when you? You know, they varied. I mean, the first story in the book, and that's to my biographer, sort of like the story I read tonight, just that first paragraph was the first thing that came to me. I barely changed a word. Lots of things in the story changed, but that didn't. And it was a voice. It was an energy. It had a certain emotion to it. And so I was propelled to produce more of that language in essence. But other stories, I'm just trying to cast my mind back. Actually, I wrote some of those stories quite a while ago. You know, the story about the brother and sister in London, I think that was taking a piece of my experience and transposing it to another country and to people who were older. They're all problems. I think a writer is someone for whom the world is a problem. I mean, the world's a problem for a lot of people, but it's a certain kind of problem. And the writing is the answer to the problem. Of course, it doesn't actually become the answer, but it's the way of engaging with the problem. Yeah, I know Russell Banks always talks about your, the writer is not, the job is not to solve the mystery, but to enter the mystery. Yeah. Let me ask you because, you know, because you had said just a moment ago that Imagine Me Gone was the most, I don't wanna say autobiographical, but the most based on your, how was separating that out from the writing process in terms of thinking, if it's autobiographical, it involves other people. I'm thinking, you know, Joan Diddy and saying she couldn't write about her parents till they died because she would not feel free to express. Sure. Well, you know, I was lucky in that I have a very loving and understanding family. You know, they knew I was working on the book when I was. I didn't disguise that. And I think it was a cathartic act for me. I mean, it was, you know, to enter into that experience, much of which does track, I mean, not all of it and not exactly. And certainly there's lots of stuff that's quite different that certainly never happened, but again, the emotional landscape of it. It was cathartic to be able to shape into a narrative these things that were intractable or difficult to come to terms with and then powerful to have that come into the world so that it was shared. So, I mean, it was a powerful thing to have, you know, people write to me and say, my child has suffered from anxiety most of their life and I never felt I understood it until I read Michael. Do you know what I mean? In other words, that it became something, as I said, it wasn't for me only. You know what I mean? That it did have some life in the world. That, you know, that's, you can, it's something, it's a very gratifying thing to have that happen as a writer. That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting to think about those relationships of what you put on the page and what's out there. And of course, we all know that people sometimes see themselves in work who aren't in the work, you know, at the same time. So, another craft question, which is if you, if is writing scenes, writing in scenes the way you tend to begin from novels or short stories or do you have other, you know, techniques or? Yeah, yeah. I would say that I do start in scene. I think, I mean, the most frequent start of any kind I have is a character staring out a window. The first story I ever wrote was a character staring out a window and I just was figuring out what she was seeing. So, yeah, I think where I start is in scene, but usually on the character's own, so which is to say they're alone. So it could be a scene of a character, but they're not yet with someone else. So I think because really writing about interiority is what I think of myself as doing mostly, like what is it like to be a mind in a body in the world? And so doing that requires, for me, finding out what someone's internal dialogue is, what the sound of the voice is in their own head is. And so I tend to begin writing about people on their own and find out what they're saying to themselves before they come into the world. I mean, yeah, I guess that's how I would answer. And how often is what you start with and what you finish with? I mean, is that open to your openings tend to be the same openings or do you? No, I mean, I, you know, there's so much that gets thrown away. I mean, it's enough to break your heart, but it's, you know, there's just, I mean, I think, I mean, that a few short stories aside, it's rare that the thing you begin with is even in the thing that you finish with for me. So certainly when it comes to a novel, so there's just scads and material that you let go of. And, but that's the process, right? I mean, it's just that you, it's an iterative process. I mean, you learn things by writing and then you've learned something at which point you can write more, but that part doesn't, you know, is no longer necessarily required. You know, I remember if I recall that in the sort of flow bear, Proust comparisons that Proust was always known as being someone who overwrote and had to pair back and flow bear underwrote and had to add, where do you find yourself in one of those camps with your artwork? Yeah, no, I would definitely be in the flow bear camp, although I'm far more fluent at Proust than I am with flow bear. Perhaps because I knew right towards the thing you could never be, I mean, I will never write, you know, an 800 page book, let alone a 3000 page book, but I was, during Imagine Me Gone, reading Proust. I read old Proust during the writing of Imagine Me Gone and Proust actually plays some role in that book, but I think it was largely as a form of permission to kind of, to go at what for me was greater length, but as a right dispositionally, there's still the short story writer in the news and always cutting, cutting, cutting, paring down. So are your scenes, because, you know, the description is so wonderful that you do and really so full and rich, but if you look at the page, you realize it's very, there's a lot of space in there. Do you originally write a lot more of those kinds of descriptions and then pair them down to just the right details or? No, it tends to be much more sort of accretion. It's like, you know, I write very slowly, but the sort of sentence by sentence, you know, I've slowly, as time has gone on, held myself to a lower standard of how many words I have to produce in a day. I think for a long time I had Graham Greene's rule of 500 words a day, but now I let myself off with fewer, but no, it's accretion. It's just building up. I've never been somebody who would tear through a draft and then comes back and cuts out. I certainly cut things. I mean, I write plenty of things that need to be cut, but I think I'm like sentence tuning is most of my day. So I think it's, yeah, I keep saying rhythm, but that's, I'm just trying to, I mean, when I'm writing any one sentence, I'm basically just trying to write a sentence that has the right rhythmic relationship to the sentence that came before. And I know that you live in a musical household. Has that a big influence on your writing or? Yeah, it is. I mean, I live with a musician yet. I can't play this instrument behind me or the piano that I'm sitting in. But I do, there's a lot of music. In my life, my brother was a music journalist. So there's a lot of, I think that way of thinking, though I can't, you know, I'm an ignoramus when it comes to the technical parts of it, that way of thinking and also just access to affect. I mean, there's no music brings you to affect more quickly than any art. I have one more question here that's in the queue before I start continue taking over here. And it's actually about the design process of the book cover of Imagine Being Gone. And specifically the omission of certain letters in the title whether it was purposeful or random or I don't know what role you had in that as well. Sure, well, actually I had more role in that cover than I have in most of my books, but it came about because I said to the only thing I said to the designer before he got to work was that I pointed into a passage in the book that describes the album covers of Joy Division and New Order, which were two of my favorite bands. And they have a very distinctive kind of modernate classical and sort of classes in the modernism kind of combined look to them. And I just said, I don't know anything about graphic design, but just look at the covers of these albums when you are thinking about this. And so he did and much to my joy, he came back with something that looks like the cover of a Joy Division album. So, you know, I mean, I came the closest to being able to have a Joy Division album that I could. And but it was his brilliant idea to leave those letters out. And I had first thought nobody was gonna understand it, but I was told that was not true. It would be perfectly legible. And it was just a coincidence that those letters, and you know, happened to stand for New Order. In the original version that was really graphic designy, heavy on the back, the two letters appeared and they just spelled no. And the whole back of the book was just no and black. But the marketers thought that was a little too harsh. So we just had the missing letters on the front. Here I am. I had to let my cat out. Sorry. Well, in closing, I just wanted to say that I love that you use the word interiority because to me, that's what the stories were really all about. And I had this conversation with some of the library staff recently that many of us have had a really hard time reading during COVID or finding the right thing to read. Either it's just too many words or it's just too hard after five Zoom meetings in the day, for your eyes to focus. But these stories, they were so meaningful to me. And I think it was all about the interiority because I felt like you got into the depth of each person that you wrote about. And I just wondered how, is that from observation from your own life story? Is it from journaling? Is it from observing in a coffee house the people next to you and listening in? How do you get to that? Is it from other reading? All of the above? Yeah, well, certainly all of the above. I mean, I think, I started, I mean, in high school and college, I was in acting classes and I was in plays. And I was in plays and I had a director who was very influential, was a mentor. And he was always telling us and training us to think, okay, this is your character, you know these details. What is that character gonna do in this moment? What do they want physically? If you go and sit in that chair, why are you sitting in the chair? What does it mean to you to be doing that? What is the, you need to know your lines well enough that they're the thing you want to say by the time you get your cue. And so there was this emphasis on going inside another person's experience and trying to imagine your way all the way into it. And so I think I really just sort of took that into writing in trying to be very concrete about it, very specific and often it's in physical details that people, the physical details we notice reveal a great deal about us, right? So someone who's an optimist looks at something and sees one thing. Someone who's feeling down, looks at the same stimulus and see something very different. And so if you as a writer can capture what the physical world looks like to someone in a certain manner that I think readers get from that physical description the sense of what the interior is like without you having to say, I felt X, you felt Y, which is more authorial. It's more of the instruction from the author. So that's some of what I was doing, I think. Yeah, well, I love the medium of the short story. It's been so long since I've read short stories and I was, it was so refreshing to be able to just savor each story and it didn't tire me out. Just a bit. Well, thank you, Adam. This has been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate your coming and spending time with our students. I think that's the real value for them to actually work with a writer is something they won't forget and we appreciate everything you coming. Coming is a, we don't get the dinner. We usually take our speakers to dinner. Unfortunately, we don't get to do that, but thank you very much. Well, thank you again for having me and thank you everybody for coming. All right, we'll say good night then. Good night, good night, everybody. Thank you, Jackie. I'm sorry your audio didn't come off. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Adam Braver. Thank you, Adam Haislet. Good night, everybody.