 Hello, I'm Chancellor Ronnie Green. Thank you for joining me for today's Nebraska lecture. This distinguished lecture series features some of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's most notable scholars, researchers, artists, and thinkers. At Nebraska, we believe in the power of every person. For about two decades, the Nebraska lectures have showcased some of Nebraska's finest scholars, people who embody the spirit of this institution and are committed to sharing their knowledge with the public. Our speakers are renowned experts in their fields. They are scholars who strive to collaborate, breaking down the barriers between disciplines. They are educators who are committed to mentoring and shaping the next generation. They are problem solvers who have spent their careers addressing some of society's most pressing challenges. I am so proud of their accomplishments and dedication to our university and the state of Nebraska. Thank you to the Office of Research and Economic Development, the University's Research Council, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and other partners for making this lecture series possible. I hope you enjoy today's Nebraska lecture. I'm pleased to introduce Joy Castro, who will be giving today's Nebraska lecture titled, Writing Memoir, Writing Crime, Creativity as Sociopolitical Intervention. She is UNL's Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies and Director of the Institute for Ethnic Studies. She is an award-winning author of a memoir entitled The Truth Book and two literary thrillers set in post-Katrina New Orleans called Heller High Water and Nearer Home. A live question-and-answer session will follow her lecture and viewers may submit questions for her at unlresearch at unl.edu. Her lecture will invite listeners to imagine writing memoir and crime fiction as ways of articulating their own political views to a general readership. She will explore both genres in terms of their literary history and potentially disruptive political impact and offer specific writing strategies for listeners. Joy's work has appeared in publications including plowshares, senses of cinema, brevity, fourth-genre, North American Review, Salon, Afro-Hispanic Review, Gulf Coast, and the New York Times Magazine. She is a winner of the Nebraska Book Award and an international Latino Book Award finalist for the Penn Center USA Literary Award. Joy was an alternate for the prestigious Berlin Prize, editor of the Anthology Family Trouble, and a former writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University. Her books have been adopted for courses at dozens of colleges and universities including Brown, Grinnell, Purdue, UC Davis, Rutgers, and Vanderbilt. Closer to home, Joy has received the UNL Anishchacon Sorensen Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2011 and the UNL College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Award in 2013. This year, she was the recipient of the Hazel Arma Climate Distinguished Teaching Fellow Award, which honors exemplary teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and Latinx studies. Before joining the faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Joy received a bachelor's degree from Trinity University and master's and doctorate degrees from Texas A&M University. We're grateful that she's a Hustler, and I'm really looking forward to being enlightened by her lecture this afternoon. Without further ado, I present to you Joy Castor. Thank you so much, Ronnie, and many kind thanks to my friend and colleague, Roland Wegscher, who nominated me for this opportunity to talk with you today. Thank you to Mike, Craig, Kurt, Dave, Lisa, Heidi, Ashley, and Sean, the whole team behind the scenes that's making this possible. And thank you to my team, my son Gray, my brother Tony, my girl Amara, and my partner in crime, Marco Abel. I'd like to dedicate this talk to the Pawnee, Ponca, Otto, Missouri, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Kaw peoples, as well as the relocated Ho-Chunk, Iowa, and Sac and Fox peoples upon whose homelands now reside the campuses and programs of the University of Nebraska, a land grant institution, and to recognize the legacies of violence, displacement, and survival that bring us together here today. And here we are, here we are, still in the midst of the most chaotic and divisive election most of us have ever experienced. Here we are, after having done all we could in pragmatic, concrete ways, large and small, according to our means, to place in power the individuals whose visions we most trust to shape the future of the land in which we live. We've done all we could to vote, to help our neighbors vote, to inform, and to support the candidates who fight for the views in which we believe. Some of us have seen our efforts fail, some of us have seen our work succeed, many of us aren't sure yet, and some of us, even if our candidates won, or will win, aren't satisfied. We dream of an even brighter, better, safer, kinder, more beautiful, more generous, more just world than anything we saw on offer. And we, who are not politicians, who are not wealthy, we want in the years between now and the next election to do whatever we can to bring that vision into being. And not just for these next few fragile, vulnerable years, but for the long-term future. And that's why I'm here to talk with you today. Almost 200 years ago, in 1821, the great romantic poet Percy Shelley made a very strange assertion in his slender book, A Defense of Poetry. Poets, he wrote, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. That's odd. Tell that to the legislators making passing bills down in the statehouse. Shelley, though, was wise. He knew that if a vision were made real enough, vivid enough upon the page, it could capture other people's imaginations. If it was strong enough, clear enough, compelling enough, it could spark the imaginations of thousands, of hundreds of thousands, and it could persuade them to change. While the story that President Abraham Lincoln greeted novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe by saying, So, you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war. Turns out to be disappointingly apocryphal. It is true that her best-selling novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which she wrote to protest the fugitive slave law of 1850, deplored the injustices of slavery so passionately and depicted its horrors so vividly that it swayed millions of readers and was, according to historians, one of the factors that helped to incite the civil war. 300 years earlier, Thomas Moore's 1516 novel Utopia, a fictional depiction of a communal egalitarian society, had furnished Spanish colonizer Vasco de Quiroga with a pattern for the mission towns that affected tens of thousands of indigenous people in central Mexico. Obviously, to be clear, I'm not saying that colonial missions were a good thing. Far from it, there were violent exploitative machines of cultural erasure. What I am saying is that Thomas Moore's fictional work on the page, because it stirred the imaginations of others, ended up doing actual work in the world. In 19th century England, Charles Dickens vivid critiques of workhouses, boarding schools, and the plight of impoverished street children in his serialized novels led to multiple social reforms. And in the United States, Rebecca Harding Davis's short story, Life in the Iron Mills, published in the Atlantic awoke middle-class Americans to the suffering of emissorated immigrant mill workers. Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle so vividly depicted the unsanitary labor conditions of meatpacking plants that it inspired a public outcry and provoked new federal food safety laws. And writers from Frederick Douglass to James Baldwin to Toni Morrison to Claudia Rankin have reshaped political discourse in this country around race. These examples, and there are many more, are familiar to most of us who study the intersections of politics, literature, and history. My bold thesis for you today, then, is this. If you too wish to become a legislator of the world, the better world that you envision and that does not yet exist, a world yet to come. And if you don't mind being unacknowledged, well, then you can. But you say, well, I'm hardly Dickens or Toni Morrison, I'm no literary genius. Well, I want to talk with you about two kinds of literature, memoir and crime fiction that can make surprisingly effective sociopolitical interventions and are not that hard to write. I know because I've written them myself and I'm no literary genius either. I'm just a person who grew up loving to read, and then one day tried my hand at writing and discovered it was fun. So I practiced and got better. You can too. I think memoir and crime fiction can be so effective at intervening in politics and society because they slide beneath the radar of reader suspicion. Memoir seems merely personal, one individual's story, while crime fiction is often dismissed as mirror entertainment, something you read on a long flight and then forget. But both can pack a powerful ideological punch. Let me explain. I've long been intrigued by the relationship between four different levels of violence and how telling stories about two of them can help us think about the third and fourth. I'll define the levels very loosely this way. One is the micro political, the violence enacted within domestic space and intimate relationships. Another is a kind of mid level violence, the violence of street crime, which occurs among strangers or people who become enemies for social or economic reasons. A third is the macro political violence enacted by governments against other nation states or targeted groups of their own people. Memoir together with a subgenre of crime fiction called domestic suspense focuses primarily on level one, the home, the family and intimate relationships. While crime fiction traditionally focuses on level two, the street, and sometimes includes political corruption, the macro or level three, which is more complicated, more difficult for us to conceptualize and comprehend unless it's distilled into one on one conflicts between individuals. What's even harder for most humans to perceive, let alone remain focused on, is a fourth meta level of violence, which Rob Nixon has called the slow violence of things like climate change, pollution, deforestation and the long ecological aftermath of war, the depredations of various industries that ruin our natural world for profit, a ruination then that forms our global landscape on which all the other kinds of violence play out. But this slow violence because it happens gradually and on a scale that's often too vast to see, like the erosion erosion of Louisiana's wetlands or the melting of polar ice caps or the death of millions of songbirds does not grip most of us in a way that galvanizes us towards action. Now this doesn't make us bad or morally lazy people. It's just because our brains evolved to focus instead on immediate visceral threats, the predator attacking us, the threat of starvation if we don't find food now. Even if it's only our honor that's threatened, our ego, we're wired for small scale agonistic conflict where we feel at a gut level that we have agency where we can do things with our fists or our wits that can save ourselves or someone else. This is why memoir and crime fiction in which we can see one person being terribly cruel to another or amazingly brave and generous have such power to grip our attention their immediate visceral personal as writers we can use the power of these genres as ways into galvanizing readers to recognize and act upon larger problems. We can to quote Rob Nixon theorize but lightly through seen object story and incident in ways that keep alive the sensual serendipities of language and quote a spoonful of sugar a spoonful of story or in the case of crime fiction a spoonful of murder helps the medicine go down. And today I'm going to give you my best advice about writing in these two genres. So let's talk about memoir. The genre of memoir which began over 1600 years ago with Augustine's Confessions is often disparaged for its supposedly narrow preoccupation with the self. It's narcissistic naval gazing. But it's actually always inherently political for it illuminates the impact upon the individual of various structures, governmental structures, economic structures, religious, educational, familial, racial, cultural institutions and hierarchies. Various strands of memoir moreover such as the slave narrative in the United States and the Latin American tradition of testimonial are explicitly and urgently political seeking to bear witness to violence even genocide and to resist the erasure of that violence within the official narrative. In reflecting upon the past in dissolving secrecy and shame in offering testimony about what we have survived and what it has made us come to realize memoirists reach past isolation and towards others. Communication leads to community writes Jill Christman and community sustains us. While the immediate concerns of memoirists may seem tightly focused on the personal and the intimate, the ultimate ramifications of our work expand well beyond the private sphere to which nation do we belong, which culture, which class, which family on which side of the border? How has that shaped our lives? As Beth Min Nguyen writes, to tell the stories of family and other intimate relationships is to break the divide between inside and outside. Memoir is a kind of record and to enter into this record keeping is to assert audaciously a point of view and quote by recording the impact of what people have done and said to us the micro effects of the material environmental and political circumstances of our lives. Memoir argues directly or implicitly for how social life should be configured. How romantic partners should treat each other. How parents should behave toward their children. How the broader culture should dignify or ignore the rights of its varied and vulnerable citizens that differently abled the abandoned, the abused, the elderly, the queer, the dark, the poor. At the University of Nebraska I teach memoir writing in a semester long course so I could now spend approximately 40 hours telling you all the wonderful ways to dive into writing it. But in the interest of time I want to share just three suggestions and a couple of prompts before moving to crime fiction. First, find your focus. As an aspiring memoirist you can find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of your material. It's a whole life after all. You know you must select a thread, an arc, a through line. But how? The solution comes in the form of the urgent unanswered question about the self. Identify the troubling nodes in your own life where you're genuinely mysterious to yourself, where the reasons matter and the stakes are high. Don't shy away from the hardest questions, the most painful or even shameful ones, the ones that haunt you that keep you up at night. Why does the scent of cedar make me want to cry? Or why did our mother leave us? Or why do I keep marrying essentially the same person? Write your way into such questions and leave aside all the lived experiences that don't answer them. Your question is the key, the hook that pulls you through the process of writing the text. If the meaning of an episode or image from your life is already clear to you, if the moral of the story is plain, if it's an anecdote you can easily tell over dinner, then don't write that material. It will be flat on the page and readers will feel that. And drafting your manuscript include only those scenes, images and insights that speak directly or indirectly to your question. If a particular episode doesn't help answer it, don't even draft it. In this way you can work very efficiently and your work will have unity, shapeliness, and a sense of something crucial at stake. The best memoir writes Vivian Gornick, convinces readers that the writer is on a genuine voyage of discovery. Readers crave narratives in which something is truly at stake, truly at risk. In great memoir it's the writer who risks, the writer who has something to lose and much to gain, including by the way the alleviation of PTSD symptoms if writing about trauma is properly done. When you're tracking the answer to a genuine mystery about yourself, one that baffles, and perhaps even hurts you, then your memoir becomes filled with suspense, a psychological thriller. But writing honestly about your own life is tough, cutting past the cliches, the safe ways of rendering things so as to make them socially acceptable, getting very very real on the page about what actually happened, what you actually did, and how it actually felt in your body. To write memoirs to take some serious risks. So I always to lay the groundwork for a semester's worth of writing together shared these six rules for getting to first thoughts from Natalie Goldberg, from her excellent book, Writing Down the Bones. Number one, keep your hand moving. Keep your hand moving. If you get stuck right, I'm stuck, I'm stuck, I'm stuck, I'm hungry, I'm bored. The theory is that your brain is more interesting than that and it will deliver you something more interesting to say if you stick with it. Number two, don't cross out or erase if you're a pencil person. That's letting your internal editor get control. If you write something you didn't mean to write, that's okay, leave it there, go with it. You can always edit later. Number three, don't worry about spelling, punctuation, or grammar. Don't even worry about the lines or margins on the page. Number four, lose control. You can write while you tremble, you can write while you yell, you can actually take a break and go be sick and come back and keep writing. The writing will hold you up. Number five, don't think, don't get logical. There's time for that later during revisions. Number six, go for the jugular. If something comes up in your work that is naked or scary or weird, go there. That's where the energy is. Following these rules, you can set a time limit for yourself, maybe only 10 or 15 minutes a day and a little more on your days off. That's the third thing I'd suggest, setting a time limit. Doing so builds a kind of framework, a crucible, a psychic safeguard, a promise to yourself so that no matter how deep you dive or if you do start trembling or crying or whatever, you know that you'll get to quit in half an hour and go for a run or hug your wife or call your best friend or whatever brings you back to normal. And then of course if you find yourself really hitting a productive vein and you have the time and inclination, you can keep writing. There's no one right way to do it. It all depends on the circumstances of your life. But however much time you set aside these six rules for getting to first thoughts are pure gold for helping you cut past that editor in your brain that says, oh, you can't say that or you're not a real writer or whatever your particular internal critic likes to say to shut you up and shut you down. I'll end my discussion of memoir by offering you two assignments to get started. Assignment one, jot down the three most painful things anyone has ever said to you. Not done, said. When you have all three listed and most people can usually generate these really quickly because we remember those things. Choose one. Then write the scene and write it in a very specific way. Write everything about the scene, the setting, the characters involved, what was said as nearly as you can recall it, any flashbacks necessary for context, all the sensory images so that a total stranger when they get to that line that hit you like a bomb will feel it like you felt it. And nothing else. Don't include one extraneous thing and don't state how you felt. Make us feel it. Describe the bodily sensations you experienced. Give us the details that will make us understand deeply in our guts how that line hit you and why. Once you've done one, do the other two and know you cannot send me the therapist bill. Here's the second assignment. List the six political values that are most important to you. Pick the one that's most intense for you right now. Write the scene from your life or the series of scenes, maybe even beginning in childhood, that would illustrate to a complete stranger why you hold the view you hold. Include everything that would make that clear and leave out everything that doesn't contribute. Illustrate. Don't preach. Do not write about your emotions and nowhere, nowhere should you state what the political view is. That is, in the dictum of creative writing classes everywhere, show, don't tell. This respectful way of sharing your experience invites us as readers to draw our own conclusions, which makes us far more likely to shift our perspectives than if you tell us what to think. Once you've done one, do the other five. These nine pieces can stand alone as personal essays that can be published in a variety of venues or they can become the scaffolding of a book-length memoir. You're on your way. So let's shift gears to crime fiction, although we may not be shifting gears too entirely because those nine memoir scenes that you're going to write, well, if you feel like you don't want to expose yourself to the world quite that nakedly, they could become things that happen to your characters and you can have fun making the story even wilder. Crime fiction, like memoir, has often been denigrated, but in this case as mere entertainment, as genre fiction, a lesser category than literary fiction. Me, I love it, because crime fiction is the genre of justice, the genre that most explicitly investigates the workings of force, which French philosopher Simone V defines as that X factor that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing, end quote. I love the way crime fiction implicitly interrogates and can redefine constitutive concepts of violation, fairness, and retribution and I'd like to suggest that a crime novel is an expansive vessel and that anything you'd expect to see in a literary novel in terms of serious themes, formal innovation, and miraculous prose can also work within crime fiction as writers like Kate Atkinson have amply demonstrated. Crime fiction has always done political work in the world. Critics have seen classic detective fiction as politically conservative, not in a partisan but in a social way. That is, it depicts a world that is essentially good and moral, with crime as the temporary aberration that must be put right by solving it. At the end of the story, the detective triumphs and order is restored, but such narrative seldom question whether that order is good or whether justice is truly just for everyone. That's been changing for decades now as crime novelists have hitched interpersonal crime, crime at the level of the home or the street, to cultural critiques of systemic institutionalized violence. Attica Locke writes political thrillers that tackle the issue of racism in the South. Michael Navaz novels feature a gay Latino criminal defense lawyer who investigates homophobic violence. Steph Chaw's LA novels pay homage to classic hard-boiled crime writer Raymond Chandler, but her protagonist Juniper Song is a first-generation Korean American and the series offers a sharp intersectional feminist critique of issues affecting immigrants. Chris Abani's The Secret History of Las Vegas about a detective obsessed with a crime he couldn't solve explores the larger violence of nuclear testing in the Nevada desert and the devastating legacy of South African apartheid. Jordan Farmer's new crime novel The Poison Flood tackles both its protagonist's painful physical disability and toxic chemical spills in West Virginia. And David Heska Wombly widens winter counts, a fast-paced thriller about drug dealing is set on South Dakota's Rosebud Reservation and meditates on historic political wrongs as when its protagonist observing tourists in the Black Hills observes, quote, few of these people knew they were traveling on sacred ground, lands that had been promised by treaty to the Lakota people forever, but were stolen after gold was discovered, end quote. So crime writers are deploying levels one and two stories to address violence that occurs at levels three and four and so can you. So let me share a condensed version of my best advice which can be boiled down again to three main points. Number one, respect your readers. You cannot condescend. Number two, the corollary of that, know your subgenre. Number three, balance the demands of character and plot. First, respect your readers. The crime genre offers you the benefit of a vast established audience of fans who are always hungry for more, but that wide popular readership is not an audience to which you can afford to condescend. Though crime fiction has often been seen as formulaic and predictable, things are more complicated than that. In his book The Role of the Reader, Umberto Eco explains that successful genre fiction must one, achieve a dialectic between order and novelty, in other words between scheme and innovation, and two, this dialectic must be perceived by the reader who must not only grasp the contents of the message, but also the way in which the message transmits these contents. That is, avid readers of crime novels are sophisticated. They're conversant with the traditions of the genre with what's been done in the past, and they expect clever innovation. To that end, my second piece of advice is to know your subgenre. First, let's differentiate between two major categories, the mystery and the thriller. Mysteries begin with an inciting crime, the discovery of a dead body, whether in the drawing room or dumpster, or an anxious victim arrives at the detective's office and narrates a crime or feared crime. The master detective, Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple or Sam Spade, then investigates. In mysteries, the detective or investigator is rarely in danger. Here she is above it all brought in as an expert, better at reading clues than anyone else, and at the end of the story the detective reveals how the crime unfolded and who the culprit is. In mysteries the chronology then is in a fundamental way backward. The crime, the endpoint of the story, has already happened, and the detective's job is to ingeniously reconstruct it by piecing together the clues that no one else knows how to interpret and putting them in a logical order. In mysteries the focus is on detection. They're game-like, cerebral. The thriller form is quite different, although there may be a dead body in chapter one. In the thriller the chronology moves forward. A nefarious plot is still unfolding and must be stopped by the protagonist. There is no safe haven. The protagonist is always at risk. A clock is often ticking and the plot is fueled by suspense. Whereas in a mystery the point is to figure out who did it and this disclosure is saved until the end. In a thriller the villain's identity might be clear throughout the novel and in fact letting the reader in on who the villain is and what he or she is plotting can heighten the suspense. In a mystery the climax occurs when the crime is solved, whereas in a thriller the climax occurs when the protagonist defeats the villain, usually saving multiple lives in the process. Most importantly thrillers thrill. They're page-turners fueled more by adrenaline than the little gray cells. Now each of these forms the mystery in the thriller has multiple subgenres. The mystery form includes classic detective fiction from Edgar Allen Poe's Dupont stories of the 1840s to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes to the golden age writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sears, and the other queens of crime. The modern heirs of golden age detective fiction are called kozies. In these the violence takes place offstage and there's no vulgar language or explicit sexuality. In kozies like classic detective fiction the cast of possible culprits is typically quite limited a limitation that is sometimes raised to an element of form as in the country house mystery the village mystery or the locked room mystery. The possibilities for culprits widen when we get to the mean streets of hard-boiled crime with its deliciously bleak offshoot of noir and in these novels the protagonist is often at physical risk as you know if you've read Dashel Hammett, Raymond Chandler or James M. Cain. Another subgenre of the mystery is domestic suspense with its focus on the home the family and the violence of intimate power relationships and another is the police procedural with its focus on ballistics forensics databases and the conflicted interactions between various branches of law enforcement. Thrillers come in many varieties too legal thrillers medical thrillers spy thrillers psychological thrillers and so on I recently heard the term marriage thriller. So do your research find your niche read examples and decide how you want to navigate that dialectic between inherited scheme and original innovation. My third piece of practical advice is to balance the demands of character and plot put character first of course suspense after all as best-selling mystery author Elizabeth George explains in her craft book is simply that state of wanting to know what's going to happen to the characters and how it's going to happen to them end quote. So make your people as real complicated and believable as you can so readers will really care. Yet plot does matter and in crime fiction so dependent upon cause and effect plot matters a great deal because all of those clues and events they need to add up correctly to the ending. Agatha Christie hatched her perfect plots in the bathtub and many of us have noticed that our best ideas come while we're running or washing dishes or doing something else that's solitary and boring. Once you have a number of ideas for your plot though it's helpful for the sake of efficiency to make a plan. Charles Finch a wonderful literary critic and author of 12 mystery novels confides I wrote 240 pages of my first book before I figured out who the murderer was and quote don't let that happen to you. Now before he begins to draft he writes an extremely boring short story about three pages long that lays out every detail of the crime itself no one else ever sees this story it's only for him he carefully refines its logic for weeks and only when he's completely satisfied does he begin to write the novel proper sifting in specific details from that story as he goes. My own approach has been different I write a paragraph outline that sketches out all the key scenes and events of the whole book in a very general straightforward boring way with one paragraph per chapter I test the outline's logic until it all holds up water tight before I begin to draft the novel this outline leaves room for discovery and adjustments as I go but it provides the security of knowing that I'll get there. Either of these strategies or both might save you a lot of time lastly on that very issue of time even if you have only a little time in which to write don't be discouraged shoot for just one page a day and don't judge it write it and set it aside at the end of a year you'll have 365 pages more than enough for a book and you can go back with a cool neutral eye and begin revising your manuscript into something that satisfies you create dangerously said Albert Camus the novelist and existential philosopher in a speech in 1957 the year he won the Nobel Prize create dangerously exhorted Haitian-American writer Edwidge Dante caught in her book of the same title in 2011 create dangerously over 2000 years ago Plato wrote the republic a series of dialogues about the ideal society that have since influenced countless generations of statesmen and college students if they did the reading in book two Socrates argues that certain dangerous stories must not be admitted into our state but must instead be buried in silence the kinds of examples he then gives fascinatingly enough are those of family violence amongst the gods Uranus raping his wife Gaia and imprisoning their children and then his son Cronus castrating his father in an act of successful revenge Zeus beating his wife Hera and then when their son Hephaestus defense her beating him as well revealing such stories Socrates warned threatens the orderly status quo the tidy hierarchical pyramid with the most powerful person at the top whether that's the father in a patriarchal family or a billionaire boss or the president of a nation Socrates understood the power of telling stories of violence particularly violence done by the powerful and he feared its effects upon the polis the state because they tell these stories tell precisely the kinds of micro political violence that memoir and crime fiction feature yet telling our stories can reshape the world and as hundreds of thousands die preventable deaths as a wall is being built across sacred native lands and fragile natural habitat as children are wrenched from their parents and kept in cages as migrant women in detention are sterilized against their will as black people are killed by police in the streets and in their homes as the seas rise and the forests burn our time is now so go ahead legislate the world thank you for watching stay with us Chancellor Ronnie Green will join us for q&a in about one minute and if you don't get a chance to ask your question you can email me or contact me on twitter later thank you well it's a pleasure to be here today and to have just been able to participate with you and listening and learning and hearing from joy i'm i'm always awestruck by writers i'm always awestruck by creative writers i enjoy is certainly one of the best so i really appreciate your your your topic today it's kind of timely as we're all sitting counting boats in georgia and counting boats in pennsylvania and other states around the country that long that are very long drawn out some would argue tough presidential election and everything that's led up to it it's very timely also the conversation that you just had so we have a chance to ask questions from viewers i'm going to start just with a general one because i'm really curious joy what are you working on right now oh thank you for asking um i have just finished a book called flight risk and with luck it'll be out this time next year it's a psychological thriller and it's about uh an artist and uh it's she is uh the daughter of a woman who has committed maternal philicide which is the taboo crime when a mother kills her own children and the surviving daughter has to deal with the legacy of that past but it's also in terms of the lecture it's also about big coal in appalachia and uh it's about the international history of economic and political violence towards Haiti for being a land where black people staged a successful revolution against enslavers so big issues and small focus we can anticipate it huh thank you look forward to it thank you when you're you're done with it so uh to our to our viewers some questions that came in during the lecture joy you talked about how both memoir and crime fiction can link micro political forms of balance is that something you do in your own work i think we've maybe just heard yes yeah for sure definitely um yes okay so in memoir in the truth book the book you mentioned in your intro um i'm talking about my own life uh growing up and running away at 14 but the book looks at how that experience was inflected by big issues like poverty uh race ethnicity parental suicide and patriarchal fundamentalist religion among other things i think so that's in memoir and then in the crime novels that you mentioned i have a protagonist who's a journalist uh journalists are my heroes uh in new Orleans after Katrina and she has her own demons to battle and so on but the books are about um political corruption in Louisiana by big oil and the erosion of Louisiana's wetlands and police brutality against african-americans so uh i picked up in your lecture and i it made me think and i was still listening to you but it made me think when you said think of the three worst things anyone's ever said to you and it'll come really easily it actually did yeah it was amazing that it did but when when writing memoir yes um how do you recommend not crossing over into a mode of self pity rather than relaying your story yeah uh do you ignore your first draft or do you work through it as it pops up so kind of a multi-piece question uh for you that's a great question yeah if i find that um i've drafted something that's drenched in self pity because sometimes that happens uh it stays in my journal i you know or i throw it away um something that gets published it is told in a very cool distanced way the sensory images the dialogue i try not to editorialize or i try to editorialize as little as possible and you know if you put it aside for a while and come back to it you can be pretty cold about it and you can sniff self pity pretty fast uh and just eradicate that so do you do you ignore your first draft no i don't ignore my first draft like the truth book i wrote the whole thing in three weeks uh and then i put it away for nine months while i was teaching during the two semesters i got it out and i just made some changes a few changes but no i definitely don't ignore my first draft but then you know i had been writing about that material for years uh in my journal and notebooks and stuff like that because it was very difficult to handle it you know aesthetically um it was it was just hard material to handle like a hot potato and finally the potato cools off and you can handle it like an artist with control uh do you do you write with the intention of providing emotional healing for for your readers uh and if so how do you purposefully incorporate that i do not i do not write with the intention of providing emotional healing for my readers i simply don't well that's an easy answer to that question yeah it's a second part to it yeah um you mentioned that writing memoir about trauma can alleviate PTSD in your in your lecture can you say more about that yes this is so magical and i would recommend since i'm not an expert in this i would recommend louise de salvo's fantastic book writing as a way of healing how telling our stories transforms our lives and she has synthesized all the neurological research on this all the narrative psychology and she lays out very simply this multi-step process um by which if you follow it you can alleviate symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and even eliminate them uh from your life through writing it's pretty interesting so check it out if you if you if you're curious so joy if someone wants to start writing in in either genre what are some other helpful resources that you might suggest yes uh so in memoir uh i like to always do my homework so i would suggest a scholarly overview of the genre uh banyogoda has a great one called memoir a history very smooth to read uh and then some of my favorite craft books in memoir include su william silverman's fearless confessions she does a great job with how to navigate um the past self the voice of innocence with the present reflective self the voice of experience of how to tack between those two in a way that's coherent and pleasant to your reader um i would also recommend vivian gornick the situation and the story and that's that's really about it a great craft book um for any genre this will be my bridge uh is matthew celeste's craft in the real world it's it's on its way out i think it's forthcoming in 2021 so it'll be here soon it's phenomenal uh and then for crime fiction i would suggest again an overview was done by um pd james talking about detective fiction that's really super and then um lee horsley has a book from oxford you oxford up called 20th century crime fiction that's a that's a scholarly anthology that looks in a bunch of different uh through a bunch of different angles and then for craft text i recommend elizabeth george's book right away uh w r i t away it's terrific craft book and she really lets you behind the scenes how she does it and how you can do it and then patricia high smith's plotting and writing suspense fiction is not to be missed well joy thank you for a wonderful lecture uh they end up a great way to cap off research week with one of our best writers one of our best english professors i'm just so you know i i you know i i i have a huge level of respect for you thank you i like your reminded i i i was i was reminded um in thinking about today's lecture i asked joy a few years ago she will remember this to be the closing speaker at my investiture when i was installed as chancellor and she spoke truth to power and i appreciated it so um so at any rate thank you for a wonderful lecture for a wonderful cap to research week let's all applaud and thank joy castor thank you ronnie thank you