 National Book Award, I'll say one of our favorites, sorry guys. One of our favorites, National Book Award finalists and local East Calus author Howard Norman. Today is the publication birthday for his last work of fiction, The Ghost Claws. It's a spooky tale told from the point of view of a ghost residing in an 1845 farmhouse in rural Vermont. And I wonder wherever did Howard get the idea for this book. The Ghost Claws is a testament of love to marriage, to home, to community. Howard's precise and provocative language draws the reader into the vitality of everyday life and the importance of connection. Whether we make those connections through poetry or through interactions at the Atomic Co-op, which many of us here do, The Ghost Claws presents us with a tantalizing cast of characters including one very engaging ghost. Who I said is the narrator. I liked this ghost immediately when he told us on page six, to me, the library is the most comfortable room in the house. It's where all the good books are. I have to agree and I can say the same for Bear Pond books, which is also mentioned in the book, thank you Howard. I'd also like to thank Orca Media, they're filming this event tonight. And I'd like to let you know that tonight's event is our kickoff for our sizzling summer of events here at Bear Pond books. On July 16th, we host National Book Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Rebecca Mackay for a talk on her novel The Great Believers. We also will be hosting local author with their debut novels on July 23rd. We host Susan Ritz. Hi, Susan. And on July 30th, we will host Makaya Bay Galt. Both of these authors have new literary thrillers out this month. I encourage you to sign up for our newsletter that's being passed around. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to learn more about these events. Tonight, Howard will read from the Ghost Clause, answer a few questions, and then sign books while we feast on cake and wine. Sounds like a perfect night, right? Howard Norman is a three-time winner of National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a winner of the Land and Award for Fiction. His novels, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist, were both nominated for National Book Awards. He is also author of the novels The Museum Guard, The Haunting of Elle, What is Left the Daughter, Next Life Might Be Kinder, and My Darling Detective, most of which are here available tonight. He divides his time between East Dallas, Vermont and Washington, D.C. Please help me welcome Howard Norman. I found this quote, the thinking of Tom Apshire, I found this quote from Heraclitus. It says, a gathering of friends is a reprieve from the rest of the world. So thanks for being here tonight. I wanted to write a novel that was, am I supposed to? Could you use that? I wanted to write a novel told in Ghost First Person and set in our farmhouse, which the novel is. The demographics of this story is basically Jane's Library and Out to Adamette. The novel's narrator is a guy named Simon Ineskort. He's a writer who is keeping a diary describing the lives, social, erotic, and academic, and everything else, of a new marriage that's taking place in his former farmhouse, the marriage of Zachary and Muriel. Simon's own widow Lorca is a painter who figures importantly right up to the last page. At the center of the plot, or several plots, is a missing child case, which is largely solved by Erica Heilman. Yeah, a private investigator who lives next door to Muriel and Zachary himself, a private investigator. So I wish to thank Erica Heilman for solving a case that my other characters could not solve. I don't know if she's here, but... She's running away. She's on her way. While she's not here, I'll tell you really quickly. When I gave her this manuscript, she said, Well, Howard, you write in this book that the Erica Heilman character has a kind of filthy mouth. But you didn't give me any words that would indicate that, so you need to add... I won't even say them. And so I did. Many email attachments from all over the country have arrived containing so-called ghost clauses. I think there's about 100 up to now. While these vary in content, basically the legal document known as a ghost clause states that if the new owners of a house experience a presence or revenant that they don't think they can live with, the previous owner is obligated to buy back the house. There's a time limit, usually. These are really popular in the 1800s and early 1900s. Anyway, for someone like me who lives so much in the spectral world, this is all very interesting to me. So I'm going to read the shortest chapter. It's called The Ghost Clause. The ghost first person narrator, Simon, is telling us about his widow who's on the verge of selling her farmhouse. I tried to find a word for several years that described a sense of a momentum we might try to construct in our lives that could possibly continue on after. The only word I could come up with was ongoingness. Today, within the ongoingness, a memory arrived unbidden, as memories always do. I had been sitting in the library reading Wallace Stevens when I looked up and noticed that Muriel, she's the young wife in the house, had added something new to the library wall, the framed copy of the original deed which contained the ghost clause. I had long thought that, in one way or another, almost every day Lorca and I had spent in our house connected us to the past. The architecture itself, the columned chronicle of heights of children formerly in residence, written in pencil alongside the pantry door, the decays and repairs, the vague smell of lightning that never leaves the nearest maple and drifts in through the library screen window on the breeze, moss on the roof shingles, secret passageways of the mice, the morning, midday, and evening light striking each window differently. A century's layers of white paint may be more than a century's. The branch that, after decades, finally reaches a length where a squirrel can acrobat onto the roof, wallpaper that peels away to reveal other wallpaper, the discarded rectangles of gravestones that some previous owner used to shore up and balance the back porch. The hieroglyphic porcupine tooth marks on the stanchions under the mudroom how the bases of bed posts made barely detectable indentations in the planks through generations of love-making and when children hopped on beds like trampolines. Every nook and cranny archives time, built in 1845, sure yet who knows, maybe for the farmhouse these are still early days. I thought of the house as here before the Civil War, perhaps because I like to think of its first existing at a relatively peaceful time in Vermont. Lorke and I learned that for five years it served as a music school. There were no classrooms per se, but various instructors of piano, violin, viola, flute, even harpsichord and harp would be paid a small fee to teach students in the downstairs rooms. If the teachers arrived from long distances they stayed over the upstairs bedrooms. We read in a diary written by a neighbor from that period that a violin and a woodwind teacher had fallen in love in the farmhouse, each having traveled from upstate New York a long way back then for employment. I once attempted and fell short to write a novel based on their courtship. Once when Lorke had pneumonia and had spiked a fever of 104, she claimed that tossing and turning in sweaty sheets one night in our bed, she heard harpsichord music floating in the air. And then three months after I died I observed a widow in her privacy, which you don't often see except in certain classical paintings. I was standing out front of the farmhouse looking in through the library window and there was my wife Lorke sitting in the rocking chair reading Middlemarch. I cannot tell you how many times she went on George Eliot Jags. In one year she read not only three George Eliot novels, but a collection of essays too. At least once a year she read Middlemarch, but readily admitted that when picking up the novel to read again, she didn't always start on page one. She called that reading in Middlemarch. Then Lorke set the book down on a rocker sat at her desk and looked to be writing out a list of some sort. Later when I looked I saw she had jotted down notes, one, two, three, four, five, of things to be sure to tell the prospective buyers when she toured them through our house. It gave me a start, but then again I wasn't totally surprised. Well I wasn't, I wasn't that she had decided to sell. In the end she refused to work with Realtor. She just sent word out mainly through Vanessa at the co-op and it made me smile to remember what Lorke had said about her. Quote, if you want something known, tell the BBC or tell Vanessa. One evening I followed Lorke through the house as she rehearsed a tour. She auditioned tones of voice, separated out certain details from things we'd read and the historical society bulletins, but mostly chose anecdotes from her own experiences. Her voice broke during her descriptions of the enormous wood-burning stove and that the library was once the birthing room. Yet as it turned out, only one tour was necessary. Realtor's called making a house presentable for strangers as staging, but Lorke wasn't about to do that. And speaking of our house to friends or acquaintances, she often called it Hamish, a Yiddish word meaning something like cozy and lived in. That is clearly how she wanted to present our house. It was our cartoonist friend Ed, within a day or two of word getting out that Lorke intended to sell, who had suggested Muriel and Zachary. On the phone with Lorke, she had the speakerphone on while she continued to make a pasta sauce. He vouched for them. Quote, Muriel Struth and Zachary Anders, he said. Different last names for professional reasons. She's a professor in New Hampshire. He's an investigator. Has a new job with an agency in Montpelier, but they're definitely married. I've jotted down their names, Lorke said. I'd say they're a solid couple, Ed said. They carry themselves well. They've been renting here in Brookfield, but they want to find their own place. Ed, of course they come highly recommended, because it's dear old you telling me about. How are you, Lorke? Oh, big question, she said, full of little daily things that seem to add up to, I'm just okay, I suppose. The moment I heard your voice, I wanted to say, Simon and you were such dear friends. I miss him a lot, he said. We had our boys' nights out. Conversations as secret lives, Simon called it. I don't quite know, conversations as secret lives, Simon called it. I don't quite know how to say this, but are you sure you want to sell the house? It's too much for me, I understand. Too much on so many levels, in so many ways, Ed. But we all had some such great times here, didn't we? Yes, we did. When can you drive down for dinner? I don't feel I'd be very good company. You can't seriously think that would matter to us. In a week or so then. Do you know where you'll live? I'm going to move into the apartment above the Adamant Co-op. My studio's already there, as you know. There's three big rooms and I've got carpenters lined up. They just need a start date to add a good-sized bathroom. Quite luxurious, claw-foot tub and all of that. Your Atelier in Adamant, Vermont, Ed said. I'll be considered the expat from East Calus, she said. That's actually pretty funny, Ed said. I have to write that down. You ask how I was doing, not so good some days, less good others. Me and Curtis will drive up or meet you in town. Or you come here, okay? The drawing you made, Ed, and what you said at the memorial meant the world to me. I'm having the drawing framed. I'll have this young couple get in touch, he said. Look, why not ask them to come over this Sunday, give them directions to the house, will you? Bye-bye, see you soon. That Sunday morning at 11 o'clock, a Toyota pickup with Vermont plates pulled up across from the house. Muriel was at the wheel. She parked next to Lorca's 1985 Volvo wagon. My pickup was in the barn, which had over 200,000 miles on it and ran like a Swedish watch. I stood looking out the front living room window, open to its screen. It had been seasonably warm in early September, but this day under a clear blue sky had a slight chill in the air. You could hear rain in the trees from the previous night's storm. Muriel was wearing blue jeans, a yellow cotton sweater, black flats. She had a veritable cascade of hair, perhaps a shade lighter auburn than Lorca's. And it looked to me by the expression on her face as she took in the farmhouse that she was already convinced. But it's possible that I may have conflated her expression with my wife Lorca's when she herself had first seen the house. Memory intervenes, memory confuses, right? Zachary was about half an inch taller than Muriel. He held a notebook and pen. A man who wanted to check his observations later, I thought. He wore neatly pressed khaki trousers, a black t-shirt under a blue cotton work shirt, also neatly ironed. Looking at the farmhouse roof, he jotted something down. After formal introductions were made in the kitchen, Lorca offered coffee in homemade lemon squares, but only Muriel accepted. She carried her cup of coffee and ate a lemon square while on Lorca's tour. We can go out to the barn later if you want, Lorca said. It's a sight to see. Lorca commenced with somewhat hesitant tone, but fairly soon she changed to a conversational one. She told how the house was built in 1845 and how the eldest two of the Peck family's sons fought in the Civil War and had survived. She showed them a photograph of the Peck family reunion at a long table set out in front of the house. The pantry has such low counters, Lorca said, because Wilpeck's wife, Dorothy, was quite a short woman. They toured the dining room and the living room and Lorca pointed out the wide ceiling beams and then they walked into the library. You're a literary scholar or professor, isn't that right, Muriel? So far I'm just an adjunct professor, Muriel said. Well, I'm thinking you might like this library. Lorca talked about the family photographs and frames in the front hallway. Then her tour proceeded upstairs. As you can see, she said, the master bedroom has the sweeping view. It's a room with five doors, too. If you crane your neck a little, you can look out and just see the roof of my husband's cabin. He wrote some of his books up there. Some summers he practically lived up there, it seemed. After Lorca revealed all the storage spaces, everyone went downstairs and into the kitchen, where Lorca asked Muriel and Zachary to sit with her at the table. There she spoke about the artesian well, about the neighbors, about the acreage and property tax, about the oil furnace and wood stove. And she said, if you're not comfortable with the wood stoves, you might consider propane. Wood stoves are demanding, but they're so comfy in the middle of winter, you know. It's a wonderful house, Muriel said. Well, I should tell you something right away, Lorca said. I won't expect you to be comfortable with it, either. But if you go up to the cabin, you'll see this lovely little cemetery. It's got a stone wall built by our neighbor. Anyway, there's just one gravestone so far, my husband Simon's. But I'd like to be buried there, too. I went through all the legal petitions and paperwork with the town clerk and the state, and so now there lies my husband. And that's the thing. I intend to visit him as often as I like, as you might expect. Of course, if you'd like me to call ahead of time while I'd prefer not to, I would. So you see, no matter what... So you see, no matter what you might use the cabin for eventually, the little cemetery must stay as it is. I'll be fully responsible for its upkeep. Muriel waited a moment and then said, you would never need to call ahead. Isn't that right, Zachary? Mrs. Innescourt, of course, Zachary said. I noticed some interesting trees up there. My husband planted Japanese crab apples. The climate obviously suits them. I might have some more planted. Simon had an orchard in mind. Lorca made Muriel a second cup of coffee. It's really a wonderful house, Zachary said. Lorca looked out to the field and back. For a moment, I thought perhaps because of the word wonderful, that she might be having second thoughts. We had heard of that phenomenon. Someone suddenly changing their mind about selling, even as late as when the deed was about to be transferred, the bill of sale about to be signed, all parties present and accounted for. And so now I have expected Lorca to say, I'll be in touch or something along those lines. Lorca, it has to be so difficult, even thinking about leaving here, Muriel said. So much life obviously lived. So much life. You know, I'm pretty good at accessing a foretaste of regret, you might say, Lorca said. Knowing ahead of time, if I desperately regret something, I admit to some sleepless nights overselling the house over this decision. But it's right for me at this point in life. Silence for a few minutes. And here's something else Lorca said. Some time ago we discovered there was something called the ghost clause written into the original deed back in the day. It was the deed that Will Peck's widow signed over to the next owner, a man named Harold Teachup. He owned the inn at long last south of here in Chester. But he wanted to sell it and move here. The crux of the ghost clause is if the seller of the house is aware of a malevolent entity occupying the house, the seller has to inform the purchaser of it ahead of time. Because if it turns out this entity is a rabble rouser of some sort, or I suppose however malevolent might be interpreted, then the seller is obligated to repurchase the house. Say for instance, I knew there was a malevolent ghost or something, anything. I'd have to buy back the house from you. No questions asked. The validity of reporting such things is unassailable. And I mean in the court of law. And I guess that it's still holed up too. There's water there too. Inside the side. Inside the side. I'm sorry. Ridiculous. And I guess that's still holed up too. Zachary said, did you and your husband ever oh goodness no, Larka said. She was shaking her head slowly back and forth. Goodness, goodness no. No malevolent spirit. Did we ever experience ever? Well, Zachary asked, how about a malevolent one? Not that either, Larka said. Not on the premises. I mean, this is an old farmhouse. It's got creep creeks. A warp in some post or other or what not. It readily offers its complaints. That's for sure. But when my husband was alive, I did that too. They all fell into genuine laughter and Muriel actually spit out some coffee which made everyone laugh more. Tell me more about who you both are, Larka said. What would help? Muriel then mentioned her doctoral work at Tufts University and she was going to defend her dissertation in December. I'm confident it'll turn into something more full-time, she said. I've been encouraged to have that confidence by my department chair. She's turning her dissertation into a book, Zachary said. She's got a university press more than interested. That's impressive, Larka said. It's a little she had, but still she had spoken truthfully. And you, Zachary, Larka said. Well, I'm the new guy. Junior investigator at the Green Mountain Agency in Montpelier. Though I did have experience with an agency in Saratoga Springs, but Muriel and I want to live in Vermont even though it's a commute for her. You may not realize it, Larka said, but just next door is Erica Heilman, an investigator herself, an estimable one. Great reputation, Zachary said. I've talked with her a few times on the phone. I never knew where she lived though. Next house down. That'd make, I mean, Zachary said. If things should work out, Muriel said. Yes, said Larka, that would mean two investigators on the same road. By my lights, the Green Mountain Agency is fortunate to have Zachary, Muriel said. They must feel the same because they've assigned them a very urgent, very, devastating case. Oh yes, and what's that case if I may ask, Larka said, if you're allowed to talk about it? It's public knowledge, Zachary said. I'm leading a missing child case. I take it you mean Corrine Moore, Larka said. I've known Corrine since she was born. I'm sorry to even mention it, Zachary said. It's got to be hard on everyone in this community. For Joanna and Devon, more Awaking Nightmare, Larka said. I have a painting studio over the New York Times that I met co-op, not a half a mile from the Moore's house. So far I'm solely assigned, Zachary said. There's been a complaint about that because I'm new, but I worked on a missing child case, a little boy in New York State, right near Saratoga Springs in fact. What that turned out to be, a father took off with his son, acrimonious marriage situation, so Green Mountain saw that I had a specific kind of experience. My husband's a very ethical man, conscientious, Larka said. Definitely. We haven't talked finance, as Larka said, awkward but necessary, right? My parents left me enough for the express purpose of buying a house, Mural said. We'd let the bank work out the details then, Larka said. Well, Zach, we don't want to overstay our welcome, Mural said, and then turning to Larka, we'll give you our phone number in Brookfield. We'll wait to hear from you. No. No, Larka said. I have to go upstairs and lie down now. I'm suddenly quite tired. But, you too. The house is yours if you want it. And why not? My intuition is as good as the next person's. Mural and Zachary looked a little stunned. I think they wanted to show more emotion than they allowed themselves. Larka took the reins in that regard and embraced them both and said, I really must lie down, but please go look at the barn and maybe take a walk up the road, whatever you like. I have every confidence that the property and the views will shore up your decision. And then Larka went upstairs. I could tell that she didn't want to be seen or to see anyone. Mural and Zachary did not walk up the road. I'm sorry. Mural and Zachary did walk up the road and then they drove off. Larka woke. She went downstairs and prepared some tea. Carrying her cup, she began her own private tour for her own edification. With this, of course, is the kitchen. I remember the time Ed sat here and told us about what happened one night when he was captain of the volunteer fire department. And Curtis told about a wild incident she witnessed when she was a journalist in Greece. And on in every room, including our bedroom where she said, well, what went on here isn't part of the tour. In the kitchen at about six o'clock, Larka made a salad. The news was on from on public radio. She ate the salad standing up, looking out the kitchen window. And then she put out a bottle of vodka, a bottle of orange juice in the glass on a tray and carried it up to the master bedroom. But she decided to lie down in the guest room instead. The mix she mixed a drink and took a few sips and then a more substantial gulp and set the glass on the bedside table. Rearranging pillows against the headboard, she situated herself comfortably and began to page through a book of Cezanne landscapes. She finished her drink and concocted another, this one heavier on the vodka. I don't think I've ever felt so tired in my life, she said. It is a mystery why someone would speak out loud to themselves. Larka was asleep by eight o'clock. In the morning she woke at 5.45 just getting light out. A barred owl called from one of the maples out front. Larka could hear it all the way around the house, the varied acoustic collaborations of our hill, trees, road, field, barn, wind and breezes alike. She had slept in her clothes. She went into the bathroom of our bedroom, peed, washed her hands, splashed water on her face and patted it dry with a towel. She brushed her teeth and then went downstairs. She ground coffee and sifted into a number four paper cone, fitted into a glass beaker. She put on a kettle of water on the stove. She looked out the window and puttered around and when the water boiled, she poured it into the cone and waited for it to empty and then filled a mug with coffee and for the first time I had ever seen she did not add milk. In the heartland detail to me she stood looking out the window again. A moment or two went by. To me Larka seemed all alert composure. Simon, my darling, she said still looking out the window she held her mug in midair. Whenever you saw that I had something urgent to share you'd just say, just tell me. So I must tell you Simon we sold our house. Familiar stuff to a lot of you. Ron's going to pick his sister in law up at the train station. This is how smaller communities are. We know these things. We know these things. Anyway, you guys we're all familiar with each other but if there's any anybody wants to ask a question please do. Yeah. Well I don't think it's anything that's dramatic. It just means I mean I've written a bunch of them and I also wanted to end up writing a novel set here so sort of narratively homecoming and I've just my way of thinking narratively has changed and I'm writing a book about friendship and I'm writing a book about friendship and the painter Jake Berto who's an old friend and I find myself well-writed that I'm applying a lot of things that I learned or think I learned writing novels so maybe that's a kind of segue. And I just think it's a good decision for me personally I don't think it's one that has to do with despair or disenfranchisement from the form or what's going on in the world of publishing or anything like that. It's long thought through and it's not I wish you wouldn't have mentioned it because I mean there's enough elegiac elements in this book you know but I it's a it's sort of like you don't want to have to talk about a writing life it just leads you where it goes and I think it's a good time for this for me and I'm 70 and I thought well the emotional dimensions of things outside of made up stories are starting to become more insistent and I thought that that would be a good this would be a good time to do that but thank you that's a sweet question thank you. Did you find someone to jump out of the closet for that interview with Jane Lin? I think there's a lot of stairs which is over and we'll call down eerie sounds but no one volunteers after Colster gave up writing fiction he wrote Resurrection this is a point in which Barry's area edition elevates me to a place that I shouldn't be but thank you Barry yeah I would say maybe more like my difficult grandfather stopping writing fiction or something like that it's not on that level of regard Is this why you use people's real names this time? I always have it's just that they have lived in Nova Scotia in a novel that came out in 1994 the bird artist I had a guy the lighthouse keeper's name was Bothel August and I take things from gravestones usually names like that and I met this is a man I met in St. John's and I said can I use your name and he said how much does a person get for something like that and I said $10 Canadian and he's he signed it over to me and it's a napkin which I friend so but Jane asked me that question too and what I really feel about this is that my feeling is that everyone in this book we all know is comporting themselves in the ways they do with tremendous dignity and humor and struggles and everything out front and I remember that in Chekhov's letters he writes about how euphemism becomes ostentatious that if you keep trying to find substitutes it will make the thing even more featured and I just didn't want to do that here the only person I made up was kind of a amalgam of difficult general store owners but I've never had these experiences at the adamant co-op that this character in here does at all it's my hangout the adamant co-op and so I felt maybe my own criterion for judging the intimacy was maybe refined by using people's names and besides I mean why say the owner of the Sibyl way I mean we all know I mean you the book won't sell to anybody but people here anyway what difference does it make it might as well be people you know and you know how you meet people at a certain point in your life and you sort of wish they were all friends for even much longer than you know them so I think it's probably the emotional dimensions are probably something like inclusive in that way I think that's just was my loose-knit thinking about anybody I mean you know yeah letters they're all just made up but I have letters in a lot of my books in fact a whole I wrote an epistolary novel that is one letter and I think it's just a fealty for an epistolary form I still write a lot of letters and you know I like the form and if you tell a publisher you're going to write an epistolary novel a faint but I I try to put letters in almost everything and you know I'm of an age where you're looking back at whatever archive anyone has where there's suddenly hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of letters and it's really shocking to know email is not quite the same although I love it I love writing letters in email too so I think it's the actual texture of letters that I wanted in that book well thank you yeah it's a point of view you've got the first person thing but it's almost like a close third as well because you've got this observation of these people who don't know they're being observed is this a form anyone else has used as far as you know well sure I mean I'm not that original but what I tried to do with this I needed to have somebody who need to slowly come to the realization was wrong that it was like extending his writing life into the afterlife for his own reasons and then it takes his wife to tell him you think you're doing something on somebody else's behalf I think an altruistic motivation is always suspect and so I really wanted to make I always wanted to make that very clear in this book and that's not giving anything away because I think things happen on every page but yeah I wanted I guess it's strictly autobiographical if you will I mean oftentimes I'll just walk up past Jody and David's house and as I'm coming back and especially if it's around dusk and there's lights on in the house worry you can't help where your mind goes right and as much as I would like to my mind always goes to that is that if I better get I better get there I better get in there there's always just a little touch of urgency about it because you know there's a sense of abeyance I think and I think I wanted to create that atmosphere not so much spectral as melancholy that's what I really wanted to try to I quote this a lot one of my favorite Japanese writers Akutagawa has this line you know where he asks what good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy and so I think one used to put melancholy too is to create an atmosphere in a book and that's what I was trying to do the first draft of this book everything that took place took place at dusk and I wasn't even consciously aware of it until I read the first draft and I said oh my goodness no that's not going to work but you could see where the mood was trying to be set in a kind of with a certain certitude and I had to open that up these things happen over 8 or 10 or 15 drafts as writers here know painters know Laurie were you thinking at all about the bardo of the state because when I when I read Robertson Davey's novel where he you know the character stands over his murdered self and goes on he was a great man what I loved about your book was that it really has that beautiful elegiac tone and Robertson Davey's was full of melodrama and satire and lots of other stuff quite different temperamentally but did you ever think about the bardo state once in a while I wake up and think that I'm already in it but I it's just 70 years of it I hadn't thought of that per se in terms of the stricter paradigms or definitions because the bardo state makes you in in Buddhism which is something I would look forward to I think as harrowing as it might be and there are various versions of it and you know you could ask Susan Wolpe about this because she knows a lot about this but there's different kinds of bardos but I wasn't so much thinking about that Laurie what I was thinking about a lot was about how not to live at a certain age paying attention to the moment you're in but also being in a state of elegiac anticipation and when I went to see our friend Jake Berto when he was dying that's what I experienced I just wanted to pay attention to him and listen to his fugue state of philosophical agitation and his crazy stories and his love for painting and so forth but at the same time I felt I'm already sensing what this is going to be like and it wasn't comfortable at all and I didn't like myself for that but here then I created a whole book which somebody is really in that state of anticipating what things would be like I suspect it's intrinsic to a certain age that one gets I don't know but Berto per se not really I mean not in the way I think you mean it yeah, hey I've only read a chapter that's actually a friend I've only read a chapter of the book that a friend has read to me but I was wondering if the library itself is a character in this book God yes, oh yeah that see like I don't want to go on because everybody's got things to do but what happened was is that there was we have an alarm in the house for smoke alarm and stuff like that and what happened was a couple years ago it's reported by room into the central thing in Montpelier and the one in our house that said motion in library it kept going off fine and so these work these technicians would come out and say you know well everything can happen I put it in this book you know a spider can get electrocuted in there or the wind can set it off we can't find what's wrong and the third time this guy came out he was wonderful and he came out and he said well what is causing this I pointed to the very thick volume of the collected poems of Wallace Stevens and he said that book would have to fly around the room and gain speed and slam into the ground to set off the alarm and I thought you're right enough about that happening which it does so that was really the origin the other origin of this book is really not to do with family and love and marriage and loss and the desire to love somebody else and all these kinds of things it had to do with moths it's like all of us who live in houses you know that almost every night in the summer your house not willfully but inadvertently murders moths and so I spent a lot of time returning moths in the mornings and so I gave the little missing girl this this gift to return them so novels, my novels I should say start in little strange ways and then everything else that you've been thinking about is added to it so it was really about that alarm and these moths and and all of it takes place in the library you know 90% of this book or 80% of it takes place in the library and I suppose because literature contains time maybe there's an element of that but when Jane Lindholm came out to the house I put that book of Wallace Stevens right out front and she said I should have brought my scale she really didn't realize how many poems he'd written it was kind of funny anything else thank you very much for coming