 First I'll read my writing prompt. We only have 50 words for these. This is what I came up with as a prompt for any writer to use for this particular image. This is the prompt, as it appeared. Stare at the image. Find a poem that refers to a bird. Steal a line, phrase, or image from the poem. Build a flash fiction from the photograph and bits of poetry. Create plot, characters, action dialogue in miniature. Make your readers feel something. And then credit the poet whose words ignited your story. OK, so that was my writing exercise, and then I had to do it. It's like, oh, all right, that was fun. So I decided that I would make it harder for myself because that's the story of my life. Make things harder for yourself. And I took the image and really thought about the moment of someone taking that photograph. And I made those my characters. And I imagined that the woman in the photograph was dying, and her daughter is trying to take a memorial photograph of her. And the bird is sort of the angel of death. That's what I came up with. But also, instead of just finding one poem and taking images from that, you will hear some of these in the story. I used six poems, a short story, and King Lear. Because why not? And those lines are woven completely into my piece, which really becomes then mostly a found story. The image was found and the lines were found. Uses a couple of different narratives. So I will begin with this. It is called Evening All Afternoon. It's divided into little teeny, teeny chapters. Evening All Afternoon, one. Wrong. Marta gloats, but does not smile. That bird is not called hope. Damn. Please smile, mama. The day chills. It's been evening, all afternoon. Still, the coat stifles. Marta sweats in her topping of bird, collar of bear, her sick headache, her constant pain. Try again, she says. Blythe spirit? Rosellyn twists something on her black camera. The trees behind her mother blanch. Smile, a happy pose to remember you by please. Wrong. It's as if the bird itself speaks. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Raptors don't do rapture. Rosellyn tries again. Raven? Nevermore? Claws dig into Marta's scalp sharper than a serpent's tooth. Never fear. You'll inherit the coat very soon. And this picture, I suppose, she says. And someday, the bird will come to you, too, too. Rectangle inside rectangle, edges neatly squared, but time tears away a corner, nicks and edge, inscribes, creases. Black and white do not reveal the color of her dim, dried eyes. Three. Almost done, mama. Still time for a smile. Budgie, tweedy bird, Jupiter, trill. Wrong, always and forever wrong, Rosellyn. The bird chimes in. Sickle in my claws and grave grit in my craw. Come along. Inside Marta's skull, a blood-red blossom blooms. Four. Mama's last words. Have my eyes been plucked out forever after a puzzle to them all those words? Because Rosellyn, even with her camera at the ready, missed the shot. Rosellyn failed to capture the moment when her mother's head shot forth seven stars and her eyes lightenings and her shoulders wings. When the bird and mama's spirit together lighter than air, soared up to heaven or near it, as kingfishers catch fire and dragonflies draw flame, that little pinch of miracle before her mother fell, missed. It was snowing, and it was going to snow. Here are some of the lines I took very, very well-known familiar poems, and I'd love to talk about some of this later when we have a Q&A. And so at the bottom it says, with thanks to the poets whose words I filched, Emily Dickinson, Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Percy Shelley to a Skylark, Edgar Allen Poe, the Raven, William Shakespeare, King Lear, Christina Rosetti in progress, Gerard Manley Hopkins as kingfishers catch fire, and Wall of Stevens, 13 ways of looking at a blackbird. They're all in there somewhere. And Becky Hagenston, whose story, Midnight Licorice Shadow, got me thinking about the mysteries of naming. That story begins with a couple trying to name a cat they have found, and things go downhill from there. So that was really a fun thing, and I think it's something that you guys might have fun doing too. If you're ever in need of a moment of inspiration, find a painting, find an image, find a poem, put them together, and it can work and come out really surprising. Nothing was planned about this. It just happened. So that's that one. That's a 13 word, a 300 words, and it is exactly 300 words. That was not easy. The other story comes from my corporeality collection, and I've never read any of this one aloud before. It's the longest story in the collection. I'm not going to read it all, don't worry. And I've never been sure it works. It's a long story. In manuscript, it was close to 50 pages. It unfolds slowly, and it's got a lot going on, so I've never been absolutely sure about this story. But my very dear friend and our former colleague, Nalini Jones, told me it's her favorite story in the collection. So I decided I would trust Nalini and read some of it. And actually, as I put these two stories together, what was really interesting to me, because I had never thought of these two stories in any way, connected, was that I realized that actually they use a lot of techniques. They use multiple narratives. They use different points of view. They use found lines. This one uses lines from actually some Puritan writers, the sermons, and other things. Who knows? We could have done Augustine. He's right here. It's also based on my street where I live, which is a street of tiny little cottages built for workers coming home from the war, World War II. They were built for guys who worked for the local plumbing thing, so they're little cottages. And in the summer of 2006, there was non-stop rain. I don't know if people remember, but it never stopped raining. Everybody's basements flooded, and the yards flooded, and we were surrounded basically by a lake. We're a little tiny crappy house street in a kind of fancy-ass village, which is very historic. You'll hear some of that. But also, behind my house lies, and this is in New York State. People don't tend to remember this. New York State had slaves, and there is what we always called the slave graveyard. There were many graves of people who have very small headstones, most of them. They have Dutch names because they were owned by Dutch owners. And they were neglected for years and falling apart. So the slave graveyard plays some part in this story, not so much in what I'm going to read. Reading from the beginning, the inscriptions from the gravestones are used in the story and lines from some of the Puritan writers. I'm trying to think if there's anything else you need to know. Basically, you'll hear at the point of view shifts between among four characters a man named Peter, his lifelong friend named Aaron, who was struck by lightning as a child and who now has a sort of paralysis on one side of his body and only sees through one eye. And Janice, who was once Peter's lover and her mother, Mrs. Van Allen, they all live on this street. So when I stop the first section, I'll make a little transition toward the end. So this is called Praise Be to an Afflicting God. Either the water was rising or the houses were sinking, probably both. The way luck usually ran on incubator lane in Van Likensville, New York, both. Rising underground lake and falling houses. Troubles here came in torrents. Triumphs only trickled. Praise be to an afflicting God. Peter Johnson had been perusing the Puritans again. Attorney at law, when he felt like it and heavy drinking book reader when he didn't, Peter picked books that were appropriate to the times, he always said. Imminent disaster called for Puritans. Hellfire essays, brimstone, sermons, and bedeviled prayers. It's over. Our little time on this little street in this little town. Live with it, bro. Peter pulled his flannel shirt sleeves down over his fingers. It was June, but only 52 degrees. It had been raining for a month and a half. Peter's boots were sunk to the ankles in the muddy lawn behind his house. Aranum sneakers were sunk only to the laces. Aran would, of course, go down at a slower rate since he was a whole lot lighter than Peter. Almost everyone was. Aran looked across his fence and said, God, shit. It's the developers. They cut down the orchards. Apple trees drink what, 50 gallons of water a day. The fuckers cut down hundreds of trees so they could put up 14 McMansions. What a deal. He leaned against the old maple tree that created a bulge in the fence. The tree, rooted there 100 and some years ago, felt oddly loose as if its roots were giving up their grip on the land. Below in the deep gully that lay beyond the yards, the rail tracks rusted. The tips of 15 granite gravestones shown silver in the rain. Peter shrugged. Drops of rain purled on his bald head, then danced off down the rolls of his neck, vanishing into folds of flesh. Praise be to afflicting developers then. Comes to the same thing. Our houses are disappearing into the primordial ooze. Theirs are putting in heated swimming pools. Jacuzes. Got to be evolution, right? We're dinosaurs. They're mammals. Our time has passed. Cyanara suckers. At least three-fifths of the time, Aran didn't know what the hell Peter was talking about. He suspected that at least two-fifths of the time, neither did Peter. Aran squinted his good eye and looked back at his house. It wasn't so much lower as just a bit off kilter. If you took a T-square and put it up against any one of the walls, he'd bet you'd see that something funny was going on in the foundation. He felt his heart contract. He lived in that little two-bedroom ranch house since he was 10 years old, 34 fucking years now. His mother had bought the place with the old man's life insurance money in 1972 when these little houses went for about 5,000 bucks. Himself, he had no insurance. Not medical, not life, not fire, not flood. And as far as he knew, neither did anyone else who lived on this street. They weren't insurance kind of people. They were the kind of people who lived in certain expectation of disaster but didn't prepare for it. Aran pulled his sweatshirt hood tighter over his head. I don't know, I think the rain's slowing down, he said. The sky's lighter. Peter looked at him, a kind of amused sadness in his face, right, and lightning never strikes twice. Does it, bro? Fuck you. Aran turned on his heel, his good heel, and tried to walk away fast. But his sneakers squelched and the whole effect was pretty pathetic. Still, he tried to keep his dignity always had. Never worked, but he always tried. It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that Psalm 119, David speaking, Peter laughed. Affliction I wanted and affliction I had, full measure. That's Mary Roaldson in 1676 after being captured by the Indians and having most of her family slaughtered. Her 6-year-old daughter, taken with her, died on the 9th day of their captivity in her arms. Sail of Emonomy. He pulled his heavy, mud-clumped boots out of the ground and walked head down toward his own back porch. We'll switch in point of view to a new character. Janice Van Allen tucked the afghan around her mother's shoulders and looked out the window. She pulled a strand of her frizzing brown-grey hair behind her ear. Her mother gave a little jump in her wheelchair. We're going. She shouted, I feel it. Janet didn't even turn. Her mother had been doing this for days, saying that she felt the ground giving out beneath her wheels, shouting out that they were falling. No, we're not, Janice said. She held the neck curtain aside. It smelled musty. Everything did. The sheets on her bed, the clothes in her closet, her own body, she thought. Well, shit. Things not in use get mildewed, don't they? And her body hadn't been used in a while. Peter used to use it very nicely, too, before he got so heavy. Now it was one of his more bizarre gentlemanly notions that he shouldn't put his weight on anyone else's bones. Not even if her bones were aching to be held down, crushed even. Anything. Mrs. Van Allen laughed. You might think that, my girl, but I can feel it right through the wheels of this thing. She smacked a palm on the arm of a wheelchair. Metal conducts vibrations. I can feel things you can't. Janice turned like a groundhog. She smiled to take any potential sting out of her words. Prairie dog? Mole? You predict earthquakes, too, old lady? Her mother's lips pursed. I believe I might if one was coming. Then she tilted her head on her thin neck. The afghan was already slipping, and the crumpled skin on her throat showed white with blue rivers of veins running through it. Well, the hell with it. Do we have Maloney for lunch? No, Janice said. She turned back to hold the handles of the wheelchair. Oh, what? Her mother's head tilted back now, her eyes rolling up to find Janice's face. The eyes were deep brown still with the little gold and flecks that Janice had inherited. Janice leaned down and put her lips on her mother's forehead. Everyone who knew the Van Allen's thought that Janice had sacrificed her own life to care for her mother. What everyone didn't know was that her mother was the only person Janice had ever truly loved. Not the only person she'd ever wanted, but the only one loved. The seventh Van Allen child, Janice had waited impatiently for her brothers and sisters to leave home to have her mother and her bedroom all to herself. We have liver worse, she said. Mrs. Van Allen smiled. Well, that's all right, then. It wasn't really named Incubator Lane, of course. It had an official name that no one but the post office used. Incubator Lane was just a snotty label given to the street by the people who had lived after the war in the big four bedroom colonials that lined the real streets of Van Larkinsville. This little street with its five shotgun houses had been especially created in 1947 for the workers on the rail line that ran behind the village, right behind the lane, just below the sharp slope that backed the yards. The guys who'd come home from the war, put away their weapons, picked up track repair tools along with young wives. One of those young wives was Mrs. Van Allen, 19 years old and wonderfully fertile. She produced seven children. Look at his split. And indeed, the houses came to be called incubators because of their boxy shape. And it was implied the fact that the trashy people who lived in them bred like bunnies. In the early years, the 1950s, babies had bloomed like a cash crop filling the yards. In the 1960s, hippies moved in. Planted gardens and the rail line shut down. From that time forward, the tracks ran rusty and empty with wildflowers and weeds filling in for boxcars and tankers. But the houses remained. In 1972, Aaron and his mother moved in. Aaron dazzled in one eye and crippled on one side from the ball of electricity that had rolled down through the center of his father's milking barn on June 13, 1971. Aaron and his dad had both been walking along the row, clanking the stanchions shut around the cows. Next, when the lightning ball came rolling, turning the air blue, they'd both stopped to steer. It was like nothing they'd ever seen, like a spaceship, like some kind of magic trick, like hellfire. Then that ball of light took a fast left turn bouncing into the metal stanchions that held the whole herd. 50 Holsteins and six pretty little jerseys that they kept just for the cream. The cows went down like black and white dominoes. Aaron's father went down with them. Aaron felt only a gentle tingling up his side, a running of warm fingers against his skin at first. Then a screeching in his ears and a green out of his vision. He thought he smelled something burning, but then the rain came. And there was only the smell of sweet wet grass. So hey, they'd cut that very afternoon just before the unexpected, unpredicted, unusual line of storms rolled in. In the midst of all the grieving for his father, only Aaron from his Shriners hospital bed seemed to remember and feel the loss of the cows. Their soft, brown eyes long lashed, their flicking tails and expressive ears. He looked it up later in his world books. Cows are 50 times more sensitive to electricity than people are. And they'd been fastened in, enclosed in metal neck bars. They'd been sitting ducks. He told Peter about it. They were both 10 years old then. And Peter had gone ahead and looked up ball lightning too in his encyclopedia Britannica. Ball lightning was, he'd reported, a rare phenomenon that no one really understood. It often preceded the actual storm. There was no way to prepare for it or to prevent it. It was, Peter had said, even then Peter said things like this. It was a pure act of God. God said, slam, bam, thank you ma'am. And then God said, according to Peter, AMF yo-yo. Of course, Aaron had to ask them what that meant. And Peter, giggling, had explained that it was a note that doctors, Peter's father was a doctor himself so he knew, left in the charts of particularly hopeless patients when they went home for the night, a note addressed to some hapless intern. Adios motherfucker, you're on your own. At the sound of the MF word, both boys had sucked in their cheeks, rolled their eyes and laughed like wild loons. Now in 2006, no one understood ball lightning or its after effects. A whole lot better. And Aaron had given up on understanding anything much. Anyway, only three of the houses on the street were still inhabited. The other two, numbers two and four, had blown away in the year 2000 in the only tornado ever to hit this part of New York State on the only street that had suffered a direct hit in the whole blooming state. Now there were only numbers three and five left on the left, just above the slope in the tracks and number six on the right side of the road. Old Mrs. Van Allen and her still pretty daughter, Janice, now middle aged herself and no longer quite so wild as she'd been in her youth, lived in six. Peter inhabited five. Peter had moved in in 1966 after losing his own four bedroom colonial to one of his former wives. Aaron, who'd never even had one wife, lived in three. And it looked like they would be the last ever to call incubator lane home. I'm gonna stop there and then skip right toward the very end of the story. Lots of things happened. Lots of things happened in between. It keeps raining is the main thing that keeps happening and the houses keep sinking. A man comes from the state and his entire job is to try to rescue the bodies from the slave cemetery. Has nothing to do about rescuing the people living in the houses or the houses, but he has been told to try to rescue the graves because it's a historic site. Aaron has finally had his chance to make love to Janice who's always kind of wanted to make love to him because she wanted to see what it was like because he's only paralyzed on one side. Anyway, that was fun. That was a fun scene, okay? Toward the, we're right now toward the end and the point of view is skipping very rapidly now amongst the characters. If you see it on the page, they get a few sentences each I think you should be able to tell as I read who's mind we're in but things are going very badly wrong on incubator lane. It stopped raining for one day. That was when Janice and Aaron got to have fun and now it's raining again, okay? Right after a bloody red sunset the rain started up again. At first only light spatters then curtains of water teeming down. Aaron didn't bother to check the cellar. Instead he slept soundly in his bed. He could still smell Janice's scent on his skin. Janice went to work as she always did covering the night shift at the Stuart shop up the road. The other girl laughed at her, said, Janice was so spacey and smiley that she must be stoned. They all thought that Janice lived a sad life but they also thought that Janice had interesting secrets. She always looked like she might. Janice shook her head at the girl and said, no, that wasn't it. That wasn't it at all. She went into the tiny bathroom at the back of the store and looked at her face in the mirror. Her eyes did not look stone, not really. Only softened somehow, gentle. Mrs. Van Allen wasn't sleepy so she sat up in bed, took her weight on her arms and slung her butt into her chair. Through the wheels, she felt it. A sudden wrench, a loosening of the grip of the land. The giving up, the giving out. She cried out, there was no one home to hear her. The jolt, woke Peter. He tried to get out of bed and it was then that he realized that the floor was tilted. He adjusted his weight and stood unevenly. It came to him that this was how Aaron must always feel off balance. The house shifted. Aaron, Peter made his way to this kitchen door holding to the walls and cursing. When he got in the door open, he bellowed, wake up, it's time. Into Aaron's dreams came a vague noise, just a whisper really, just the touch of a hand on his cheek trying to wake him, his mother's gentle hand. He preferred really not to wake, but something called him. He sat up, his bed was tiptoeing across the floor. Peter reached Aaron's door at exactly the same moment that Aaron did. They stared at each other, the driveway bucking beneath their bare feet. Peter suddenly started to laugh. Praise be, shouted, it's apocalypse now. Aaron looked across the street, seeing it through sheets of green rain. He shouted back at Peter, Mrs. Van Allen, we have to get her out. Peter too looked over. The front door of number six opened and the wheelchair rolled out. Mrs. Van Allen, her hair white and wild as a phantoms had made it as far as the porch. Aaron and Peter began to move toward her, but Aaron was so slow that Peter got to her much more quickly. He took her right out of her chair and lifted her in his arms. With a mighty grunt, he centered her against his chest, cradled her like a baby. He carried her up the slope of her yard away from the house, step by step. Rain sheeded off his broad back and he crooned to her the whole time. Sleep, sweet babe, you are at rest. No cloud of shadow shades thy breast. By the time Aaron reached them, the old lady was awash in rain, but safely propped against a tree. Peter's enormous t-shirt wrapped around her shoulders. The ground up here seemed stable. Below them, numbers three and five were quivering like baby birds, balanced on the edge of a nest. At Stuart's, something shot through Janice. Seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, she had these moments. This one pierced her chest, the sword point of fear. She took off through the door running. She slammed herself into her car. Its headlights lit only a tunnel in the teeming darkness, but it was wide enough to see her home. Peter was rubbing a hand across his bare chest. He massaged his left arm. His breathing was ragged. He looked at Aaron. He smiled. I'm gonna go see the graves, he said. Aaron grabbed his arm. No, shit, no, that's crazy. Peter put a massive hand on Aaron's head. With a doleful grace bid the world adieu. That's from Sylvester Stone. For once in my life, let me have grace, okay? He turned and lumbered away. As he disappeared into the rain, his voice came back. AMF Yo-Yo, bro. AMF Yo-Yo. Janice found her mother and Aaron sitting together at the top of what had been a small hill behind her house. Now it was the jagged edge of a cliff. The houses, all three of them, were simply gone. The street itself, gone. The mud was still sliding sinuous as snakes. Rocks still clamored and spun. The noise was incredible as if the very earth were screaming. The air smelled of dirt and rot and old, old bones. The rain poured down and lightning blew the sky. So now, according to the orders of William Patrick, Q&A time, I would love to answer any questions that could be about those pieces, could be about publishing in general, anything at all. So please, yes. Your first piece that you read, can you talk about the benefits as well as the limitations of having such a restrictive work-out? The benefit is you can get it done. The restrictive work-out, I like things where you are challenged to do something within a restrictive set of rules and then just to see what you can do with it. And of course, poets have been doing this for years and years and years. No one seems surprised that a sonnet, for example, with its 14 lines can do things that are memorable and last forever. Fiction writers, I think, have a little bit more of a challenge because we're used to having more space. I liked the limitation in this particular piece and I have occasionally written a few other flash fictions and I was gonna talk about that tomorrow, flash fiction. This one, because it was assigned, I've been a student all my life. I'm like, okay, you told me to do that, I'll do it. When's it due? I'll get it in the day before. It's true, it's awful. There's something that comes right back to you, like, okay, I'm gonna get an A. I have taken the best notes, et cetera. So as a challenge, I really enjoyed it and I found the image to be just incredibly evocative. And I was glad I hadn't read her statement beforehand because I just took it, I'm just gullible. I was like, oh, look, the lady posed with a bird on her head. That's nice. And then she said, no, I painted the bird and I'm like, dang, you know. But I was glad I had not read the art statement in advance. Did you read it after? Yeah, I read it after and I talked to her at the thing and I thought, oh no, she sees what I did with her photograph. She was lovely, she thought it was wonderful and I think all of us thought that we, they're different medium, you know. We will do something different and if you ask writers to look at an image and write something about it, I think you're kind of giving people imaginative license, I guess, to do what you like. Some people read the artist statements in advance and then really tried to respond to the artist statements. I didn't want, that would be, for me, that would be another limitation. That would be an extra one added on. So there's actually one more thing. They're gonna have, they're having a contest up through March. Anybody who goes to the library of any age can look at those prompts and write their own piece and then they're all sending them in and there's gonna be some kind of a contest and then a reading of the pieces that come in. So it'll be interesting to see if people really do it, you know, at all. And then what they come up with. So, yeah, kind of a public response project, which I thought was fun. You know, you have a very particular way of reading. It's very dramatic. Don't ever stutter, only maybe the second time. I've heard you, but have you taken acting? No. Do you read out loud? Do you practice? I do practice. I practice for time, too, but, okay, so the true story behind that is when I first got things published and then somebody actually asked me to read, I couldn't, I was paralyzed with fear. Totally unable to speak in front of people and do anything. And somebody said, you better learn to do that. That's like. And at the place where I teach, there's a course called Oral Interpretation of Literature and I said, okay, I'll teach that. I don't know, I can't get up and talk. But I thought if I taught it, it would help. So I've taught that for years and just got into a point where I really began to love to read because like acting, it's a persona. It's something you can put on. But the class really helped me probably far more than the students and they're not reading their own work, they're reading literature or what they think is literature, okay. I banned the chicken soup for the soul books. I banned the Ideals Mother's Day poems for your grandma books. They were so heartbroken. They're like, but my grandmother loves these. I'm like, yeah, well, too bad. So that's, it was actually a real process of trying to make myself learn to be able to do it. Because I really could. Anyone can learn to be a better reader, that's for sure. And it does help. If you can read well, you know, then this is a commercial message that everyone should run out and buy the book because they want to read the rest of it. What was your inspiration for the characters and the story and the second story that you had read? The characters were completely and totally invented. Like I said, that came completely from a place and this incredibly rainy summer where I really thought my house was going. I mean, the houses are still there by the way. They are there. And the kind of low grade now, but certainly still around mockery and snobbery for people who live on my side of town. Because it is a very historic village and when I'm at some gathering or somewhere and people say, oh, where do you live in the village? And first of all, if you live in the village, you're sort of cool. But then they say, well, where in the village do you live? And I say, oh, I live over on, it's actually called Rother Mel Lane. And they're like, oh, and they turn and talk to somebody else. It's like, oh, okay, nice. And so it was the place. The characters are just, I don't know where those particular characters came from. I really don't. They just sort of appeared as part of the rain. And once I had the idea that this guy was reading the Puritans and kind of doing that, praise be to an afflicting God thing, then finding the lines was really very fun. And the lines from the gravestones, I had already collected because I tried to, some friends and I tried to do grave robings trying to preserve the gravestones, deteriorating. And those lines like sweet, sweet, sweet, babe, et cetera, those are from the gravestones themselves. So I found those really to be inspirational. And a lot of the story actually takes place with Peter going and trying to also save the graves. In fact, he would rather try to save the graves than his house. At that point, he's also pretty clearly not much interested in staying around anymore, too. So, you know, we don't know sometimes at all when people pop into your head. Other questions? I found the descriptions of the lightning ball. Really, you know, you brought us there. Did you do a lot of research or have you actually experienced anything like that? I have a friend who did. And I lived on a dairy farm for years. I know it seems unlikely, doesn't it? I did, I lived on a dairy farm for years as terrified of cows. Cows are really big. I've never seen a cow up close. They're really big. And, you know, I was like 19 and, you know, we were gonna live off the land, you know. It was that sort of thing. So I'm living on a dairy farm and a ball of lightning rolled right through the middle of the barn. And it was an old fashioned stanchion barn with the cows on two sides. And in this case, it rolled straight down the middle and didn't kill anybody. But a local neighbor farmer had his whole herd wiped out. They are, that part is true. They are 50 times more susceptible to electricity. That's why electric fences keep them in. I mean, you can touch an electric fence. I know this because my kids try it all the time. You can touch an electric fence and the other thing, well, Bill knows my kids, that my oldest son Tobias actually talked his brother into doing was to see if you could lick an electric fence. That was shortly after he himself, Tobias decided to see if a rusty nail sticking up out of a board at the barn, if it would penetrate his new boots, if he jumped on it. In the interest of science, I would like to say that it does indeed penetrate through to your foot. And then because you don't tell your mother, because you might get in trouble, you get blood poisoning and there's a long hospitalization involved. Children raised on farm have very good immune systems. Anyway, yes, the ball lightning I had heard reported to me by someone who came walking out of the barn, like shaking, and this is just like in science class with his hair standing out like this, going, I don't know what that was. What was that? And that was by report. And then I did do some research to see if it, when it occurs and what it can do, et cetera. Yeah. Sometimes there's things that have happened to you so long ago and all of a sudden one day, you think, oh, I can use that, you know? That's too good in a way not to use, that you knew someone who saw this enormous ball of light just roll through the barn and out the other side. Yeah. And I had been reading about the effects, the physical effects of lightning strikes which are varied and enormously weird. I mean, what it does to people, yeah. A lot of people get struck by lightning. Yeah, a lot of people do golfers. Which I never might have said that. I never might have said that. Praise be to an afflicting God. God. God. Other, other questions? Pause, you're saying that you didn't feel like this fit into your collection. Can you talk a little bit about why you did that and then how it ultimately ended up still in the collection? How it ended up still in the collection. It was, again, it's quite long for a short story and as people who've had workshops with me know, I don't like stories where nothing happens. I like a lot of things to happen and it unfolds, you know, more slowly than many stories and I wanted to get some of that history in, of, you know, the time period, et cetera. So I was never sure that it worked as a short story. I liked it, I always liked it, I always liked the characters, I always liked the situation and when I, so I just did include it when I was sending the manuscript out and the editor liked it and it was quite different from the other stories in the collection, so I think that it didn't have a blind old dog in it, which was a little too common in some of the other stories as I was told. What is this with the blind dogs? Anyway, this one didn't have any. It only had a guy, it was half one. But I, so it was pacing, I think, that worried me the most about it. Was it too long, was it dragging rather than being enriched by the length? I like it better now, but mostly that was due to Nalini who liked it. And also what I've heard from some readers from the collection, some of the readers from the publishers and others, were that they thought it was, and I didn't even think about this once. It kind of goes back to your question, Charlie. They said there's just so many, there's just not too many stories being written about this class of people, the people who know the disaster's gonna happen, but can't possibly prepare for it, they just can't. They don't buy insurance, they don't have money, et cetera. And so I didn't even think about that myself, but apparently they thought that was a strong point in the story. I just thought of these as people. They're my neighbors. Others? We had a hand up over here. Oh, I'd just love to hear more about the one first story about the found poetry and kind of the process of that, and if you found the poems first, for example, before you wrote it, or if you already started the story and then looked at the poems. That's a good question. I have a lot of the poems here if anybody does want to look at them. I had some of the poems. You see a picture with somebody with a bird on her head, and so I immediately thought of Hope is the thing with feathers. I mean, that's just in the top of my head. And then as I wrote it, I thought, I bet there's other poems that I could use. And Poe was right there, the very common ones. And then I remembered all of Stevens, and then I remembered some of them. And so it was a process of having some of them just pop right out right away and other than actually looking for some. And then what I loved about this, and again, going back to a short length, is what poetry does. I mean, I couldn't write those lines. Some of them are just so beautiful and so compressed and so enigmatic. They don't explain themselves like a lot of prose does. It was, you know, and I loved being able to use that language. And so for me, that was absolutely the most fun. I would have tried to get another 17 in if I could have. I was just so in avert of, and what I did was I just went through almost like, almost closing my eyes and going down the poem and grabbing a line and then I had to use it. I tried to make it fairly random. What that does, I think, for a prose writer's imagination is, you know how your brain works? If you must find a way for these words to fit in your story, your brain will find a way for the words to fit in the story. And even if you have to tweak it a little bit. And Evening All Afternoon is one of the found lines. And I love that one so much. And I should thank my son Tobias, the same kid who stepped on the nail, who is now an adult and a writer. He's published his third novel, who really, really helped me with that story. It was him who said use that for the title instead of the stupid title I had. And suggested a few other lines, places to look for lines. Yeah. I know Charlie already asked about the characters, but what was the motivation behind Peter because he just seemed really interesting. What is it about? I guess, I mean, I have a friend, I know a guy who was my student a million years ago and then went on to be the mayor of Malaysia, this little town next to me. He was a lawyer who never practiced, who built houses and built roofs and then became the mayor and then went to law school and became a lawyer and did all these things. And was just that kind of, it didn't take the legal thing really seriously, was much more of a reader, had this little basement office in this awful building. And if you went in there, he'd be sitting there with his feet up on the desk and his work boots and just reading. He was like, this is a great job, just get to read. And when I would go in, that's all he'd wanna do was talk, I'd say, okay, come on, I'm supposed to be making a will or whatever I'm doing. And he said, no, no, I gotta tell you about this book of stories I just read or something. So there was, now that it comes to me, there was someone I had known who really, really is an interesting guy. So, yeah. Or did you have your hand up or you just, it's hot. It's really hot. So does everyone wanna get out of here so you can go someplace where you can breathe? Okay, thank you so much.