 Good evening. Welcome to Bear Pond Books. We're here for a writer's forum and reading from Alchemy of the Word. Writers talk about writing. The second edition. I'm thrilled that so many wonderful writers and teachers could join us tonight from Goddard College. Although our program has been scaled down slightly, some people could not get here, but we have five wonderful authors tonight. It's a good chunk of the MFA in writing faculty here with us. We have Eleanor Giorgio, who is our program director. Cherie Smith. I'm going to try to go in order. Jan Klosson, Rana Raco-Rizzuto, and Dara Cloud. Thank you. They're representing all genres, fiction, nonfiction, playwriting, young adult and children's writing. So tonight, each author will read passages of essays contributed to this book, which is curated from keynote and graduation speeches from the MFA residencies at Goddard College. Some are marvels of word weaving as they go from African-American theater to making the word flesh to Donald Trump's toxic words. I'm talking right now of Deborah Brevort's call and response speech. You really do need to read it to see how these magical elements come together. It's an uplifting call to join the power of words to bring more beauty and enlightenment into the world through writing. Copies of alchemy of the word are available at the front counter, as well as some copies of our author's books tonight, such as we have Raco's new novel, Shadow Child. It's the hardcover on display. We have Jan Clausen's memoir, Apples and Oranges, My Journey Through Sexual Identity. It's just newly been released and reprinted. I'm sure that they will sign books tonight for you as well. A few housekeeping items. If you haven't already, please mute or turn off your cell phones. We do have a restroom. It's in the back of the store. If you go right by the back door, the front door is locked just to keep people from walking through the event. If you do need to exit, the back door is open. I'd like to let you know about upcoming Fair Pond Books events. Next Tuesday, we have a Jungian analyst and psychotherapist, Dr. Polly Young Eisendraff, for a book launch for her brand new book Love Between Equals, Relationship as a Spiritual Path. She'll be in conversation with Dr. Robert Kaeper, who's her partner. Then on Tuesday, January 29th, we'll host Vermont College of Fine Arts President Tom Green to launch his new thriller, The Perfect Liar. You can learn more about these and other events on our website, bearpondbooks.com, or on Facebook or at Twitter. We also have a newsletter sign up going around if you'd like to sign up for our newsletter. Since we have so many authors tonight, rather than read aloud all their bios of awards and publications, which span many, I will refer you to read about them in the back of the book. And now I'm going to hand this over to Eleanor Georgiou, who will emcee the evening. First of all, I would like to thank Samantha for inviting us. It was her idea for us to come, and it just coincided with those perhaps some of you don't know, but the Goddard College MFA in Creative Writing is a low residency program, which means that the faculty are only here twice a year. So it coincided with when we were all on campus, so we were thrilled to do it. So this is a rare moment that only happens twice a year. And I just want to say, seeing as I have a group of mostly strangers, but not everybody, that whenever we're in residency, our faculty readings are always open to the general public, and you're always invited to come to them. I just wanted you to know that. So what we do with a residency, every residency has a theme. And on the last day of a residency, the faculty get together and they think about, what is the most urgent thing that is bubbling up from the student body? What do we need to kind of focus on for the next residency, six months? So we choose that theme and then three faculty members, the faculty takes it in turns, but three faculty members are told to go home and just think about what that means to them. They don't consult. The only thing that they're given two rules, address the residency theme in one way and make sure it fits a 10 minutes time slot. That's it, right? And then we come back six months later and we kick off the residency with a keynote presentation and there are three keynote presentations. So I would say probably about 80% of this book is a collection of keynote presentations from residences in the past 10, well, this is one of them too. So I think it's the past five years maybe, maybe there's some going a little bit further back than that. Then the other 20% is commencement addresses. And the tradition in our program is that we don't invite an outside speaker to give a commencement address. The graduating class get together and they vote on which faculty member they would like to give the commencement address. So the other 20% are commencement addresses. So you have about 80% keynotes, 20% commencements. And then the entire book is a collection of essays that in one way or another talks about the writing life. So that's the structure of the book. So what we're going to do this evening is we're going to keep the readings actually short because we feel like we want to give you a flavor of what's in the book. And because we can't get through an entire essay, even if it was a longer reading, it would still be a flavor. You wouldn't get the whole arc. So we thought we'll give you a flavor of the kind of things that are written about with a couple of minutes each person. And then you can, you know, if you want to buy the book you can take home and read the whole arc of every essay. So then we would devote the majority of the time probably to taking any questions that you have about writing and the art and craft of writing. So does that sound okay with everybody? All right, let's do this thing. Let's do it. Okay, so the first person, you know what, I'm just going to keep names. Cherise, the first person I'm going to welcome up is faculty member Cherise Smith who teaches fiction, young adult fiction, graphic novel. You sometimes do memoir too, right? And sometimes you do scripts? Okay, so Cherise Smith. Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for coming out and braving whatever it is that's falling from the sky. I live in L.A. so I don't know what that is. It's hard and sunshine. It stars. I think it stars. So I'm going to dig into this with another tradition is we don't read our own pieces. We read other people's writing that speaks to us in some way. And so I'm going to be reading to you from the freak in all of us or the importance of creating a map by Rogelio Martinez, who is not here tonight because of the stars are falling from the sky. But he is a playwright. Fantastic playwright. And I chose this because it tickled me. Writers are freaks. We are. You are a freak. I'm a freak. He's a freak. We all are. Okay, maybe not completely, but they, meaning the general population, think we are. Why? One question that writers are always asked, how long did it take you to write the story? It's as if we're this special being that retreats into some room, a Noah John Rondo, the famous hermit of Appalachia, only to come out every so often to show off our writing. What should we do when confronted with such a question? Three choices. Tell the truth and reveal the long winding road that is the map of the work. Two, give some kind of glib response that's partially true. Three, lie. The truth will bore your audience quickly. Try talking about drafts and outlines and workshops and feedback and mapping the work, and you will lose your genius status very quickly. We don't want to do that. A glib response is like the one that John Guare, the Tony Award-winning playwright of the House of Blue Leaves, gave when he was asked how long it took him to write six degrees of separation. It took three weeks or 51 years, his age at the time he wrote the play. It's a nice response, but after you hear it several times it becomes too neat, maybe even shallow. It's as if John has been preparing 51 years to answer that question. It's as if he had the answer ready before he even wrote the play. There's no spontaneity. Now, without in mind we arrive at lying. Lying is always more interesting because it becomes a kind of story in and of itself. It's not the right thing to do. Lying never is. However, keep in mind that your audience reader is not doing the right thing by asking you how long it took to write the work. They should be complimenting you. They should be showering you with praise. Buying you steak dinners. My apologies to vegetarians. Their question makes lying almost necessary. Thank you, Cherie. And Cherie actually has a book for sale called, it's a YA novel, right, Pasadena? You've got a few of it. She has a few books up there for sale. Just letting you know at the end if you want to do that. And the next person I would like to welcome up to the podium is Jan Klossom. And Jan publishes in poetry, fiction, memoir and hybrid works. And she also teaches in all four of those genres. So welcome Jan. I too, I'm so grateful to you all for coming out. So I'm reading from a section of this book called Writing and Community. And it's a piece by my beloved colleague and program director, Ellen of Georgia. And it's called Why I Read because the poet Marilyn Hacker said, writing is a difficult form of reading. The process of my decolonization began with an attempt to deconstruct the person that I was told I was and continued in a search for how I wanted to be perceived. Instead of others, family, community, politicians, random hostile strangers, supplying me with a ready-made label, I wanted to create my own personhood, one that made sense to my experience of the world. I was born in 1961, the year after Cyprus gained its independence from Britain. But even though the place of my ancestors was no longer colonized, and even though I spent no more than two weeks on the island every few years, I had inherited the legacy of a country that had been colonized a couple of times by the Greeks, a couple of times by the Turks, and a couple of times by the British. In fact, if you trace the country's history, it has been colonized 11 times and has only known 14 years of complete independence. The Greek dialect that Greek Cypriot people speak is considered to be the lowest form of the language. If you couple this information with the fact that all mother tongues stagnate whenever a group of people immigrate to another country, you should imagine me standing on the lowest rung of a linguistic ladder. And then, just when I thought I couldn't get any lower, my English was not the Queen's English. It was the English of pearly royalty. My accent belonged to the House of Cockney, not the House of Windsor. In England, identifying class by accents is learned at birth. Therefore, I knew from an early age that all my ways of speaking were stigmatized. But in 1987, after the work of Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison had opened my mind, I began to read writers who were challenging the ideas of class and race that up until that time had formed my way of thinking. The following year, I left England and enrolled at the Hunter College of City University of New York, an institution that, unbeknownst to me at the time of enrollment, had Audre Lorde as a professor in the English department. As an undergraduate, one of the first books I studied at college was in Guggy Watyango's Decolonizing the Mind. Once again, here was another writer from another country and another continent talking about experiences that were almost identical to my own. Next came books like The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanau, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, This Bridge Called My Back by Gloria Manzaldua and Sharima Raga, A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid and Woman Native Other by Trin T. Minha. I kept reading, I kept studying, I kept working at Decolonizing my mind. Eventually, I graduated with a degree that focused heavily on the post-colonial experience. I also graduated with a community of friends who had read similar books and wrestled with similar ideas. Once again, through reading, I'd found community. Dan has many, many, many, many books out in the world. But I think there's only one that register, right? It's Memoir, Apples and Oranges? Yeah. Next, I'd like to welcome up Rana Reco-Rizuta. Oh, I'm sorry. Who teaches both fiction and non-fiction in the program? Thank you so much. As I try to find my place here, I chose a piece by a colleague of ours who works on another campus. We have a campus here and also in Port Townsend, Washington. So, I decided to read a section of Kenan Norris' title. Kenan Norris' address called Body and Soul, which comes in a section of this book called Points of View. When, in a winter month, a few years ago, I published two books just a couple of weeks apart, a kindly colleague, who is not a writer, asked me, How does it feel to finally be a writer? I answered that it felt good. But what I should have said was that it had been the preceding 15 years of the word that I'd written in that time, published or unpublished, extant or tossed in the trash, but not book publication, that may be a writer. It was in those years that my ambition and my eyes slowed. It was in those years that I had to watch the work of countless hours wither into two sentence emails from editors. I had to deal with the limits of my talent and my imagination. Writing is perhaps the most humbling discipline one can subject oneself to, for when we come to the blank page, we are all of us, no matter our accomplishments, novices again, seeking out our stories, perpetually pupils to those stories, and to whatever they will in the telling teach us. In amidst the wreckage of my best-laid plans, I had to look hard at what I got wrong and start to perceive the world inside and around me more patiently. I was not a great writer, but I had learned how to write sentences, lean, evocative sentences. I had learned that I had enough obsessions for a book or two and that a few dark faces lay coiled in a deep ice of my mind and they needed, no, demanded I free them to the page. I had learned that there is one book that a writer must write if they are ever to write anything else. In between graduations and rejections, the occasional publication, a lot happened. Mostly, I sat at the feet of my own experience. I saw, I felt, I mourned the deaths of those closest to me. My body and soul met in the deep crater of my despair at the point of wide-eyed, painful vision and sudden knowledge. I became a student of human loss and widely mattered. Being a writer is to be a student without end and is to be at play without end. The two are tied, study and play. Both commit us to risk and remediation. That is to learning, to always learning. Learning one's characters, inhabiting them, becoming as old as their history and as new as their every first revelation. Learning that world-building is not limited to science fiction but is rather the province of all story, all telling. Learning where we are ignorant and looking hard at our own blindnesses. Taking that raw total of this world where the end there are no teachers and no lessons as such where there is only decision and fate, life and mystery. I believe that we are all still young in our journey not because of the numbers on our birth certificates which fall here and there along the spectrum of centuries but because as writers, we are forever the bright-eyed, open-minded, open-hearted children of this world. Thanks so much, Reiko. And Reiko of all the people who have books here tonight, she has the newest one. When did it come out? May. So it's called Shadow Child. How old does that make it? I'm kind of a six-month-old. It's her baby shadow child. And it's right there in the cash register. So the next person I'd like to invite up is Dara Cloud and Dara teaches everything pretty much, everything. She teaches everything but her passion is dramatic writing. I wanted to read the work of a fellow playwright, a woman who was my student in Juneau, Alaska. That's where I met her and ended up at Goddard and then was instrumental in getting me to come teach here. So we go back a long way. Deborah Gort is her name. I never have a chance to see one of her plays. They're fabulous. And I feel terrible trumpeting this but maybe it'll whet your appetite to read more. And this is from literary activism which is the very first chapter of the book and Elena mentioned it in her introduction. Call and Response. August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone, the first in his 10-decade cycle of plays chronicling African-American life in the United States takes place in a Pittsburgh boarding house during the Great Migration when African-Americans let the slave plantations of the South and headed north to build new lives as free men and women. This transition out of oppression and into freedom from property to personhood required that every person undertake an act of creation of their individual selves and also of their community. The only tool that was powerful enough to achieve this monumental task was the word or as Wilson more eloquently put it the molding of one spirit into a song. From the moment the play starts the characters engage in this ritual act of bringing themselves into existence via speaking, singing, and making music. We listen to binom chanting over pigeons in the backyard or Jeremy playing guitar in cutting contests at the local tavern or Seth, the play's percussion section beating a piece of scrap metal until it turns into a usable pot or pan while the boarding house residents sit around the kitchen table and talk or should I say in-cant because they're not just shooting the breeze around that table, their words are incantations. Through speaking they are summoning themselves and their community into being. Fairly quickly something miraculous starts to happen the words that are spoken or sung by the different characters begin to physically manifest on stage. The change is not dramatic or theatrical in fact it's barely noticeable. I didn't see these things myself until I had read the play a few times but not too long after binom's glorious monologue about the shiny man a fellow by the name of Harold Loomis arrives. Harold is later revealed to be the shiny man. Jeremy's conversation about desperate women summons Maddie a desperate woman and the boarding house's Saturday night entertainment the Juba, a call-and-response song from Africa erupts into Wilson's famous bones rising out of the water scene which transforms the death of the middle passage into something living and breathing. From language we witness a complete resurrection flesh mysteriously appears on bones the word it is revealed is powerful stuff powerful enough to bring the dead back to life the entire play is built on this invisible structure of call and response the call is a spoken word the response is flesh the word made flesh it is tied to the Yorubin concept of Nomo which loosely translated means speaking makes it so Nomo is also a Dogon word from Mali that refers to the power of words to create reality and build community you will also find this idea in the book of Genesis so what does this have to do with Donald Trump? The impetus for this key note was his election to the White House and the need for the writing community to respond in some way I started with August Wilson because there was an important lesson for all of us in Joe Turner's Come and Gone about how to respond to the current situation and it is this there is a tool that is stronger than repression it is the word the power of language or as Wilson says the song inside you and it is a tool that all of us possess but Donald Trump has this tool too he also has words toxic words that lie and distort and we are beginning to see the horrible things those words are bringing into the world how do our words or what August Wilson calls the songs inside us have any power next to words like that I'm going to travel to three repressive regimes for some clues to the former Soviet Union to Czechoslovakia before the fall of the Iron Curtain and to South Africa during the era of apartheid in each of these places language was tightly controlled by the respective regimes in each place language was used to lie and distort and in each place the language of song lyrics plays and literature helped to liberate those countries from repression I will start with Russia since it's very much in the news these days from 1922 to 1991 Russia or the Soviet Union was a totalitarian regime ruled by a one party system where the communist government regulated every aspect of life like all totalitarian regimes language was tightly controlled the Soviet regime forced friends and neighbors to spy on each other and to report on what they were saying the regime outlawed typewriters they put speakers on telephone poles to broadcast government propaganda during the day the news wasn't all news at all it was fake propaganda alternate facts lies narratives of happy Soviet workers but the truth was very different life under the Soviet regime was hard the country was economically depressed everyone lived in fear vigilantes roamed the streets there was also an official culture that was imposed from above with approved writers and stories everything from the west was prohibited if you were caught with western books or music you would be punished in fact several years ago I interviewed a musician in Prague who had been convicted of treason and sentenced to hang from listening to jazz music as one Russian said we were living in a monster state and we needed an alternative and then someone smuggled a bootleg copy of a Beatles album into the USSR the album went viral taking the country by storm and turning tens of millions of young people to another religion suddenly there was a great big hole in the iron curtain the Beatles opened up another life said one Russian citizen they were fresh air Beatles songs were sexy someone else said they were fun when we listened to their music we were free said another we stopped being Soviet slaves the Beatles had succeeded overnight in destroying official Soviet culture the government responded by clamping down they sent thumbs into the streets to beat up and shave the heads of anyone who wore their hair like the Beatles if you were caught with a bootleg record it was destroyed and you went to jail, lost your job or were kicked out of the university it didn't work Russians loved Beatles songs more than ever the government then put out fake news stories about the Beatles they issued pictures of the Beatles wearing toilet seats around their necks they claimed that Beatles music infected people with psychoses that made them violent and showed pictures of screaming girls as proof of what could happen if you listen to their song the Beatles were considered more of a threat than nuclear missiles this is not hyperbole this was a statement made by one of the Soviet foreign ministers when Gorbachev came to power he said that the Beatles had shown Russians that there was another life and quickly came to an end thanks so much Dara sorry so I wasn't supposed to read tonight because there was supposed to be 8 of us but there are 5 so I'm going to read and I will be the last person to do that and then we'll open it up to a Q&A so let me see I'm going to read from a section that's called composing the wilderness and it's from the title of the piece is mapping the dark world and it is by a faculty member called Bhanu Kakwa Bhanu is a hybrid writer that means that when you look at her work you can't tell which genre she's writing in and she teaches also on the west coast in our Washington program I'd intended to write a brief talk about the post-colonial map the fact that it's not possible to say the word for map without repeating the one for war cartography I wanted to write as played out for 200 years or more in the sentence as written in English functions as an intensely smooth line consider the long distance surface travel required of the map artist to kill it and constantly enriched record that ensured the line in time would become a groove a groove then a prediction a fate then a colony a colony then a weird border superimposed upon a nomadic religious or agricultural flows already present I refer you to the contested borders of India Ireland and Iraq I refer you to the sentence the line that ends the poem as a possible record of land expropriation of the kind of liminal historical space that appears whenever one territory is overwritten by another I might refer you to the reach of the line as it appears in emergent forms the contemporary value of a complex and abundant accumulation of images and details you know this book you know this line and I don't know how else to say it because I don't know how to write fluently or even possibly to tell the truth in an alternate language but I want to leave I want the English to leave in fact they did leave and without the option or desire to become an immigrant in reverse to take up writing epic poems and treat Punjabi of French I find myself trying to work out the problem of the page of the language and images I use to fill it in a way that also embeds or mimics a history of awards and their subsequent carnage boundary awards as the British describe them when they pulled out which is risky post-coiltal post-coiltal colonial behaviour at the best of times I ran this by a poet Tom Donovan in the comments section of Harriet the Poetry Foundation mag a couple of days before coming to the residency he replied your commentary reminds me of Benjamin's phrase that there is no cultural artifact which does not exist as a record of barbarism only here in terms of the sentence it is a grammar punctuation which records barbarities it is interesting that you locate the barbarity in the sentence the period definitely serves as a regulatory function and it is interesting how non-anglo-centric Englishes respond to this nomos trace the deformation of the sentence syntax in American lit and one will discover lines of flight anglo-phono-centrism was English always an enclosure a potential border for mercantile belligerence does the period itself enclose can a grammar be non-experiential commenting there is something here in Tom's extraordinary remarks about a radical remapping or diagramming of space as one way to get the strange words writing done the visual practice of holding the old map up to the light until it marks until it marks its marks evaporate or like nodes slip off onto the floor don't slip in that pool of blood that's it for the reading part of the evening so now we would like to open the floor to any questions that you have about anything that hearing the fragments of these essays has brought up for you or about anything that relates to the writing life and craft as it relates to writing so the floor is yours just raise your hand and I will identify you by your clothing anyone yes the soviet stuff how the Beatles were corrupting things and everything you heard the same thing here they were just terrible that must be true all the screaming girls that's great hold on one second dude can I just check I'm supposed to give the mic to people who are asking the question no I'll repeat the question I'll repeat the question the gentleman commented on the piece about the Beatles being a corrupting influence in Russia and said that they were called the same thing here it's interesting to note that in the United States the night that the Beatles played on the Ed Sullivan show crime dropped so how corrupting an influence was any other questions where are all the men where are all the men I'll be honest they were too scared to drive that's the truth so I'm not going to say what I'm thinking but you know what I'm thinking they're protecting the campus while we're here like have you written in can you repeat the question between writing for young adults and writing for other audiences so my my primary genre is young adult fiction and she's asking if I've written in other genres and if the experience is different and yes so I have like eight books most of them are young adult I have some that are for younger kids middle grade and I just had like an elementary school nonfiction come out about the Tuskegee Airmen and that was very difficult because you have to change your language to something that kids will understand the younger the kid, the harder the language so imagine trying to describe the ins and outs of World War II without being able to say Japanese Imperial anything so that became Japanese Army that became Japan and then that became Germany and its friends so there's a it's an expanding or a refining of language and now I am working on my first adult novel and that's been interesting because part of me is like I can be free to say and do whatever I want and my agent said could you make this simpler and more accessible it's too literary but I finally get to unleash the SAT words in it so it is different I do also write comic books and graphic novels and that is different just in terms of my reader is the artist first and foremost because they have to understand the story in order to draw it and then so it's a different sort of writing for them as well as giving enough dialogue to fill in the gaps basically without covering because in a comic book any time you write dialogue it covers the art so how do you say it in the fewest words which I think so maybe everything is like writing for little kids I would love to hear any of you talk about the balance between solitude and community in your writing life the question is we were asked to comment on the balance between solitude and community in our writing life I started out as a poet and I I struggled to be a poet and realized somewhere at the end of graduate school that I didn't like the Garrett I wrote at Hardee's which was the fast food chain in my town and at the end of the day it was just the same thing at the end of the day so for me I started writing plays because there was a natural translation of poetic language into theater for me and I knew that at the end of the day there was rehearsal and there were people and it would be more fun for me then many years went by and I ended up in a small town in upstate New York and I decided that I was back to the Garrett and that was you know it was kind of lonely and a little bit uninteresting so I started a writing group and this is a town of 24 173 people so I started a writing group and I didn't know who was out there writing but I just knew that I like being around writers so I'll find out who's writing and it turned out there were a dozen people who immediately showed up all ages one of them was a 90 year old World War II veteran and New York City detective whose language was completely I don't know what you know awful it's wonderful but it was awful he just let it out and it involved the Kennedy assassination a bunch of other things but it's been terrific it's been the best thing I've done is to have that once a week for about an hour and a half we all get together we share a little bit of our work and then I can go home and be alone the rest of the time yeah Hardee's doesn't really work for me solitude is super important because I have to hear the language in my head like music so I spend a lot of time by myself I spent the day today with a dear friend of mine named Hannah Tinty who was the visiting writer at Goddard College over the last couple of days and I came Hannah and I found each other the way that writers find community and she was saying she said three books come out they've been national best sellers her last one's called the 12 lives and when I introduced her to the community I went through all of the awards and prizes and accolades that she had gotten and when she got real with the students in the room today she was talking about how all writers kind of feel like a failure and how she spent 20 years writing and maybe three years being published and going out in the world and speaking of people and connecting with people for 27 years she was alone and how once your book comes out there's this let down that she said it's kind of probably post-partum she hasn't had children so she wasn't sure but she said after this last book came out and she was feeling this let down she realized that the reason that she writes is for community because everything that she's gotten in her life has been about communities come through writing and all of the fact that she was at Goddard you know everything that sustains her came from writing but not from the publishing part from talking to friends sharing work going to writing retreats going to classes just having this community of thinking about things and chewing over things and engaging with words you know I live in Brooklyn, New York I'm originally from the Pacific Northwest but I've been in New York City for a long, long time and I guess I really need solitude but it seems that I continually choose situations that put me in the mix a fair amount but I do I do retreat into my home and into the quiet of my room and try not to check email too often but Goddard is an incredibly important part of my writing community and my community in general just the creative and the learning community both with students and absolutely with my colleagues and I don't know what I do if I didn't have these twice a year opportunities to foregather and kind of recharge in that way It does help to have other people know what it feels like to be a writer and people who understand you because there's I think people that don't write either assume that it's easy or that you know you're an introvert and it's super intense and hard and you don't want to talk to them and so it's really helpful to have people who understand that you were both those things and more and so when I first started writing someone suggested because I write for kids and that was what I was going for to join the society of children's book writers and illustrators so that I would have a community and that was the first thing he said the first thing wasn't like take a writing class or start writing he said first you want to get a community and that was invaluable to me when I sold my first book I didn't know when I got the offer the society and go is this a good offer and they told me yeah it was pretty good for a first time so having that sort of professional connection was useful and then you know find the writers in your area and in your life and the people you like to read that's the weird thing with the internet these days is you can actually connect with writers that you admire and you know pretend you're friends with them because you follow them on Twitter most of the people here know that I write in a gas station so I leave my house which is in a little village in Vermont and southern Vermont is very pretty I just live with one person and our two cats and it's very quiet and I can easily stay over right but I drive 20 minutes to a gas station and there are a group of senior citizens that come to the gas station and buy their apple donuts and have coffee so it's just me surrounded by about 10 senior citizens drinking their coffee and eating their donuts so they don't know me I don't know them so we don't chat but I'm surrounded by people and I need that and I think that's because I started writing in New York City and I was in a dorm room and it was tiny so I was used to go out to write so I got used to doing that and I need it I need to be surrounded by people to do that and I also think that when I was a kid I had to do my homework while my parents were watching the TV so there was noise going on all the time so I'm just used to it and you know but even though you're surrounded by people you're isolated I don't even see the senior citizens that are surrounding me and people will pass and say are you okay? like that so I can block it out yes plum plum sweater I was just thinking when you talked about how even with an adult novel they're asking me to simplify the language and I'm wondering is that a always been like that or has there been a dumbing down of the readership and that's a follow up question the second question is I was reading in this paper that writers are being asked to sign contracts where they pledge to have a moral life and that if it could be a problem for people who write controversial things with the trolls now in the divisiveness in the country are writers hearing the footsteps of polarized public that may be attacking them and their publishers okay so there are two questions the first question refers to what Cherie was saying about finally getting to write the adult book and the publisher saying could you kind of simplify it a bit and the question is is this a recent thing have we dumbed things down or or has it always been this way and then the second question is about the morality clause which I will let you the rest of you I don't know anything about it so I'll let Cherie but I will hand this over to everybody but I want to say that I have a really good friend who is a Vermont author he's 75 and he has written many books and 25 30 years ago his editor said you have to write for sixth grade and that was 25 years ago so to answer the question about have we been dumbing things down I don't know that we have but statistics say the average reading level the average American adult is eighth grade and so it's what people have time for and that is sort of averaging out all sorts of levels of education but when you're reading for pleasure some people like to really wrestle with the big things and most people just want to enjoy themselves and I think a lot of people were carrying around books that they were never going to read just to be seen like I too own a copy of Infinite Jest so that's another New Yorker by the way so the yes I also subscribe to the New York Times and then I'll pass it on to you but I want to say for the morality clause things I have done some research on this specifically in children's literature there we had a Me Too movement crisis last year and a few big names in children's literature were accused of mistreatment of others in the industry and the morality clause became a real question and the morality clause for those of you who don't know it is your publishers way of saying please don't do anything controversial between now and the sale of this book and if you do they have the right to then take back the money and not publish the book and some books have been pulled as a result so it's frightening but we had a conversation amongst the children's authors that part of what we imagine as kid lit authors is that we are role models so live by your standards and you don't need to fear the clause that doesn't mean I wouldn't also say please remove this clause because my idea of morality might not be the same as yours but I think it's the political arena is more likely to have a problem like that than most writers see look at the innocent women up here who knew nothing about the morality clause it's such a beautiful yes I have a question so I've been writing for five years so I'm still a new student and I recently my writing includes fiction but it often includes things that I've experienced either partially changed or actually verbatim and I recently read in an essay on a biography of a writer that he said he discovered that you can't include in fiction you can't include things that really happen because it stands out and looks different than the fictional aspects of the story and so is that do you think that's true so I'm going to pass this on to Elena but do you want to repeat the question? so the gentleman here heard another writer say that you can't include things that really happened in a fictional piece because it stands out as being different honestly I don't really have much to say other than that's not true I think I write fiction and memoir and if you're looking at a separate book there's a whole different way that I find of building a book so I think of fiction as being a potter and you can throw a lot more clay on and you can make whatever shape you want and you can keep adding to get where you want to go and I think of memoir as being a sculptor and having this huge lump of life and then taking away and taking away and if you take away the wrong thing you're kind of screwed but hopefully you get this kind of shape and I think that one of the things that we have a hard time with when we're writing memoir is everything seems everything happened so it must have been important and we try to put in too much and I think it's possible that the same thing might happen if you're taking a thing that happened and putting it into fiction that it has its own it has its own logic it has its own completeness and if you give it that logic and that completeness and that reason for being and you put it into a book that is a different reason for being it might stick out if there's a way to weave it into the kind of the fictional world the movement and the flow of that fiction I don't think it would stand out at all we're at a bookstore we love books, we write books could you share a story like a book that came to you at the right time you talked about the decolonizing books finding you as you were trying to decolonize for instance and that's what sort of prompts that idea is there a book that came to you at the right time? so you've been asked to name a book that came to us at the right time I'll start with you O Pioneers by Willa Cather it I as a female writer I was in a very male world out in Hollywood and I was just beginning to get jobs out there and then I got a commission to write the stage adaptation of O Pioneers which was just coming into the public domain in 1990 it was the first of hers that I actually went into the public domain and so it came to be in the form of a job and it showed me the female hero's journey and that I had never known that that existed I'd studied Joseph Campbell you know it all seemed like okay I guess I'm part of this I tried to fit in, I shoehorned myself into it but this showed me something else in a way two books come to mind one of my favorite books in the world is The English Patient by Michael Andaji when I got out of college I majored in astrophysics and I decided I didn't want to be going to my PhD and so I started working at Knopf in the publicity department and I was working with all these very famous writers and the minute that I started working with people like Michael Andaji taking them on tour to do things like this I immediately knew I could never write because I was never smart enough thinking about writing when The English Patient came out I tried to read it and I thought oh this is really hard and I stopped and then I picked it up again and I tried to read it four times and I just couldn't ever read it and then all of a sudden I read it and it just completely opened up and I still could not tell you why I was never really able to read it in the beginning but I write these books that have multiple threads and multiple narrators and are possibly they're very focused on language and possibly a little bit to literary at times which is very much like what he writes so I still don't know why I couldn't read that the other book that comes to mind because I majored in astrophysics I'm a self-taught writer so I taught myself to write by studying books which is very much the whole Goddard model so when I decided I wanted to write a novel I didn't know anything I didn't know where the chapter breaks or what the end of a chapter looks like or what the rise and fall was or anything like that and I was just writing these chapters and generating material and I picked up a copy of Dorothy Allison's Bastion of Carolina and I just mapped it what happens in this chapter and what's rising, what's fine I just did the whole thing and through studying her book I was able to construct my first novel I think of A Woman is Talking to Death by Judy Gran, a long poem that when I was quite young and wondering who I could be as a woman writer and who women could be in the world as people conscious of the circumstances that have formed them this was work that spoke to me and also said that I could be the kind of writer I wanted to be, I could be in community with women and we could make up what we wanted to do on our own we didn't need to go to school to do it which I suppose I shouldn't be saying as a daughter and faculty member and the other book I would say is Leslie Marmon's Silcoe's Novel Ceremony which taught me which expressed something that I had felt growing up in the west even though I grew up in a very different part of the west from where it's located something about the way that the land has an identity that could speak to people if they would only listen A few things come to mind but the one at the forefront is there's a series of I guess middle grade novels The Dark is Rising Sequenced by Susan Cooper and I think it's the third or fourth book in the series is called The Grey King and I found it on the bookshelf of my elementary school when I was in sixth grade and it has a photo there's like the Welsh landscape with the big images of the face of a German shepherd and it's sort of in negative and it really compelled me and I read that book and devoured it it was a contemporary story Welsh mythology tied in and I realized that it was the middle of the series and it was significant because that was the year that my parents were getting divorced and so the books in that entire series were a bridge for me from that last year with my parents in the same house to moving to a small town and living with just my mom and my brother and I remember going back to the beginning discovering okay let's read all the books I went to a new school in this little town and everything was different and I finished that series and I remember weeping in the cafeteria at school because they were gone now they've been with me and they were my travel companions and they were gone flash forward an embarrassing number of years 35 years later I'm at home married, living in California with my husband and I get this flyer in the mail that Susan Cooper is going to be speaking at the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Conference in New York and I'm flipping through the mail and I see it and my husband's like what's in the mail and I looked up and burst into tears and he's like oh my god what's in the mail and I was like Susan Cooper is going to be and he was like well I guess you have to go and I was like what okay I guess I have to go and I went across the country and she gave this amazing keynote speech that was really moving really touched me as a writer and as a human and I stood in the really long line to get my damaged copy of my book signed by her and I walked up and she's like hello and I said oh my god parents were getting divorced and I thought it was cool with the divorce and everything and I was not and she was very gentle with me and it was like thank you and I looked away and called my husband and he was like I am a fool and that book was more the books that were listed from the thing that Jan wrote I didn't write you know when I read those but those were about decolonizing myself so those books relate to that but I had the exact same experience that Rico had with the English patient I had that with Tony Morrison's Beloved I tried to read this book and I was like I cannot read this book I just can't read this book and I tried definitely twice and then I think it was a third time I picked it up and I thought oh okay I think I can read it now and it wasn't to be pretentious I walked around the book with the book everywhere because I thought if I put it down I might not continue being able to understand it so I just kept reading it reading it and when I got to it and I thought well why didn't I know how to do that the first time so so I can only say that your body or your soul or your body and soul knows before you do you know and so that's why sometimes you can't read it because you're not ready yet but then your soul opens up to the book but I also had a very funny story to tell well maybe it's not funny to you but it's funny to me about the English patient I really liked the book for some reason I wanted to get inside Michael and Dutch's writing so I decided to hand write the English patient so every day I would hand write a couple of pages in my journal and then no I didn't get to the answer don't be too impressed I just said about 20 pages that was all and then I guess I forgot that I was doing that and it was no longer important to me and I was tidying my office up about three years ago and I found this journal and there were no signifiers there's just my hand writing and I opened it up and I stopped reading and I was like this is really quite good I forgot the writing I kept reading and I was like this is not my work is that a good place to win thank you so much we really really appreciate you