 Thank you for joining us at Mechanics Institute for this post-Valentine's Day program. We're gathering today to talk about the yin and yang of relationships, loss and love. The writer's lunch is a casual and virtual brown bag lunch activity on the third Friday of each month. Look forward to craft discussion and formal presentations on all forms of writing and excellent conversation. My name is Nico Chen and I am the program manager here at Mechanics Institute. For those of you who are new to Mechanics Institute, welcome! Mechanics Institute was founded in 1854 and is one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural events, cultural centers in the hearts of the city. Mechanics Institute features a full-service general interest library, an internationally renowned chess club, ongoing author and literary programs, and the Cinema Lit film series. A recent article in the San Francisco Standard describes this as the coolest library in downtown San Francisco and a remote work sanctuary. Come see this for yourself by joining us for a free tour, which happens every Wednesday at noon. You are also welcome to join us on a special evening tour on Friday, March 8th, starting at 5pm, which incidentally lands on International Women's Day. Light refreshments will be available during the welcome reception and complimentary beverages will be shared. Please visit our website, www.milibrary.org, to learn more about our upcoming programs. We have a variety of great events coming up with many in March marking the celebration of Women's History Month. Today's theme for our Writers' Lunch is Writing About Love and Loss in Relationships. This discussion will include a Q&A with the audience, so please add your questions to the chat box and I will read them aloud during the latter half of today's Writers' Lunch. Please also mark your calendars for our next Writers' Lunch, which is happening on March 15th. The theme for the March 15th Gathering will be Crossing Languages and Writing with Christina Garcia, who's writing often crosses into Spanish, Grace Lowe Prasad, who's writing reconnects her to her native Taiwanese language, and Saskia Vogel, a Swedish to English translator. This event will also be obviously moderated by the wonderful Cheryl Jay-Bazay Boute. Say hi, Cheryl. Hi, Cheryl. Hello, everyone. I see Alan, Alan, you still have your Valentine's Day colors there, good for you. An award-winning author, Cheryl Jay-Bazay Boute, and Pushcar Price nominee is an Oakland multidisciplinary writer whose autobiographical and fictional short story collections, along with her lyrical and stunning poetry, are fully succeed in getting across deeper meanings about the politics of race and economics without breaking out of the narrative. An inaugural Oakland poet, Laureate Runner-Up, she is also a popular teacher, literary reader, presenter, storyteller, curator, and emcee host for literary and poetry events. Next we have the wonderful Lauren Alwyn. Say hello to the crowd, Lauren. She is a writer of fiction and nonfiction who lives and works in the San Francisco East Bay. Her stories and personal essays examine bicultural identity, cultural inheritance, and intergenerational relationships in which attachment and belonging play a central role. Her short story, An Amount of Discretion, which looks at family relationships through a lens of grief and loss, first appeared in the Southern Review and appeared in the O. Henry Price stories in 2018. Her fiction as well as literary and personal essays have appeared in a number of literary journals such as Ziziba and is forthcoming in the Alaska Quarterly Review. Next we have Leslie Cuck Campbell Leslie, Say hello to the crowd. And her debut short story collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs, won the 2020 Mary McCarthy Prize for short fiction. Her collection is a 2022 Women's National Book Association Great Group Read Selection, a finalist for American Book Fest 2022 Best Book Awards for short story and a 2022 Ford Indies winner in short fiction. Her award winning stories have appeared in numerous literary journals and she is the author of Journey into Motherhood, Writing Your Way to Self-Discovery and has published feature personal essays in San Francisco Chronicle magazine. Campbell is currently working on a second story collection called Free Radicals. She teaches at Wright Fruits Writing, a creative writing program she founded in San Francisco in 1991. Last but not least we have the wonderful Nona Casper's Nona, Say hello to the crowd. And BuzzFeed, listed Nona Casper's novel The Fifth Woman as a book queer women and everyone else should read. It was a lambda finalist. Her other books of fiction include Little Books of Days and Heavier Than Air, which was awarded the Grace Paley Prize in short fiction and listed as a New York Times book review editor's choice. Lovers' exquisite, quiet risk-taking writing find language for the trick of love and of daily existence itself. Lovers are here and then gone. We are all here and then gone. She is also the recipient of numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Best American, Notable Short Story and more. Her work is forthcoming in Prairie Shunar, Simeron and North American Review. She teaches creative writing in the MFA program at San Francisco State University and lives in the city where she wanders the neighborhood with her, with her dog Bora. Let's unmute and Cheryl please take it away with our discussion today for writer's lunch. Well thank you all for being here. Thank you Leslie. Thank you Lauren and thank you Nona. And thank you Mechanics Institute, especially Niko Chen. I'm going to launch right into it because you know we only have an hour and we want to make sure that we get as much discussion as possible. So let me start by asking this question, convening question. You know it's said that in writing when writers write there is something about writing about love and loss that enables us as writers and humans to find our strongest connections. The strains that go through these topics and that topic together are universal. I'll start with you Leslie. How do you feel that manifests in what you write when you write about love and loss? Well you're right that these strains, these connections are universal. For example motherhood as you heard I wrote a book on motherhood is one of a very important part of my identity and then my own parents. All of my key loves in my life are either the seed and germ of one of my stories or one that I'm planning to write. No one, they engender so much deep and profound vigor and emotional content and satisfaction too for me as a writer to kind of excavate those relationships through the stories that I write. Thank you. How about you Lauren? Thank you for that question Cheryl. You know I think as one challenge of writing especially when we begin a new project but of course it can happen at any stage is finding our way in, finding access to the emotion to the real heart of your subject and I think around this subject of love and loss it's particularly difficult because it is so you know those moments of connection and loss are so huge in our lives. So for me I think the way that I find my way in is through attachment and what within the milieu or the characters I'm writing about what I'm attached to. It might be the setting, it might be elements of the setting, it might be the back story of the character that I want to explore more as Leslie said excavate and through those particulars I think I do find my way in and hopefully to an emotion that even though I kind of know the territory I'm in which is loss and love I might discover something else about it that I didn't know. Exactly. I like that part about attachment, you have to be attached. How about you Nona? Yeah I like that attachment I was thinking of that word and I was thinking you know yesterday was yesterday yeah Valentine's Day and I said to my students happy big love day because I think that we channel so much of this we think love and we think romantic love and all this energy gets channeled in that direction and then I'm so glad Leslie brought up as well. There's these myriad forms of love and for me in my writing the characters, the people feel love the most when it's gone. Not the love isn't gone but the person is either dead or vanished or broken up or that there's something that I try to find language for that like I'm pulled forward with my imagination to maybe re-experience the person but also in fiction but also to just sort of understand that place. I mean the first love of my life was a black mutt out in rural Minnesota. It was my brother Joel who was born at the piece of his spine missing and I though that feeling that passion that I had at that young age we don't think of that as love in any conventional sense and there's something that will then pressurize the writing from that passion those passions that I've felt and attachments and I think maybe that's I'll just stop there I think that says it. Let me continue with you Nona and ask you this question how does a writer prepare themselves to write about love and loss? Well I think for me because when you have any kind of expansive emotion I think about the readings that I did the craft readings around Richard Hugo's triggering town and Ira Richards and he writes about the difference between sentimentality and sentiment so what I needed I had to you know I went to an MFA I got the skills to then write I needed the craft skills to then have that as part of my imagination to be able to find the language and the scenes and the stories for that so sentiment versus sentimentality is something Ira Richards talks about and other people and just about getting closer so there's some sort of pleasure also in crafting right Lauren and Leslie and Cheryl you know this all you writers know this and getting closer imagining beyond the familiar reduction of love but what the textures and moments were actually like so that I think that's what you mean by there's that barrier of not being able to see not being able to see clearly and find true language for something that's has passion in it or a big grief in it but to me it has to do with craft and getting closer and laboring into beyond the familiar social reductions that were fed all the time right even that right exactly exactly so the partnership between the craft and the imagination yes being able to get to get there what about you Lauren oh that was that was wonderful yeah thank you for articulating all that that that idea of getting closer is why I don't know a story might I one story the the Southern review story that was mentioned in my bio I mean I worked on that story for 18 years it took a long time to get closer to the heart of the loss in that story and there's a great loss in that story I think I began with an image and before I knew really anything and began that process that arduous process of getting closer I started with an image and I had an image of a woman alone in a house with a kind of exhalation that was taking place in her and it wasn't one of relief it was one of loss I knew that very clearly so I had to reverse engineer the story so that I ended up there and it took a long time because especially around the topic of loss you're you're writing about absence and it's hard to write about something that is missing more than a few times my husband said to me said you know you're you need to how can you write about something that's not there you know because the character of this story had had lost so much and was kind of steeled steeled herself emotionally against the world and yet there was something she wanted and it was to continue a relationship with her deceased husband's stepson that was the only the closest thing she had to a child but getting closer to that was was difficult in part because of all the absences so how did I do that I did it through portraying the whole story takes place inside a house and I did it by portraying the setting of the house the objects inside it the belongings that she that meant a lot to her and that had kind of been the prompts in a way to her life they had been there all along so I did find a way to get closer through concrete objects and that was kind of a learning experience for me in writing that story was how objects can be on just the objective correlative be characters in the story to help move it forward you know to its to its end point thank you Leslie there's so much to talk about about love I never know where to begin my gosh and I was thinking you know 18 years for a story certainly it's taken me many years to get into a lot of my stories but one example is that this piece I wrote basically three days after my mother passed away called mother load and the first line is a daughter is unable to part with her mother's body and the story she actually is with her mother's body you know it starts out just being you know few hours but then a day and another day then like the Buddhist do it three days and then it goes on to months years and so on and she stays with her mother's body and tells just bones that I feel like you know one of the things that I teach is something called what I call the writing faith F A I T H which means that we always write what we need to write and my goal is always to just free myself up internally as much as possible and and so that encourages I think the imagination I want my I need my heart to be open I know it takes a lot and in fact one of the things I was thinking of when you were talking is how do I do it I cry like some of the things I'm writing I cry because and that's a good sign because then I know I've touched a nerve you know that I've wrenched my heart you know in a place that that feels important you know so so in addition to sometimes definitely stories I've written where there's a lot of distance I'm working on a story now dark to themselves it's related to in that case a romantic relationship that that ended and so on that was years ago but then that mother load you know I just you know my mother's body was actually in my home I was writing it you know and and and then and love is so complicated you know it there's a mother's relationship with her daughter is so complicated so how to get the the the morning the special kind of love that I had have and have for my mother and and all the complications of that relationship you know all in the same in this case a short piece and one other thing I wanted to say because I thought of it when no one was talking about sentiment and sentimentality is a young Lee when I studied with her once at the Napa Valley writers conference she she talked about reading Tolstoy's war and peace every year and how and how she learned that into to get at the the real terror of and and visceral horror of war that the talking about a dog wound on the battlefield you know some a small detail you know rather than confronting facing on people shooting I don't know people dying bombs blasting like focusing on like looking at slant as Emily Dickinson said you know going slant to the small detail that isn't in the center of things and always in general just to to pull back when things are overly dramatic to to what is that saying that the F or OID foie there's a saying about that that Amy Hempel used to use does anyone get no no do you know what I mean no okay anyway but it's a kind of coolness towards what's so hot in that moment and and how that your right one's writing self as we mature as writers then can handle it in in a way that feels very true and doesn't over dramatize right thank you let me pick a piggyback just for a second on the the crying part it took me 10 years to write a scene for a book that was so horrendously tragic I couldn't face it so I put it into a historical novel where it belonged because it happened some time ago and I have to tell you I relate to the crying I cried the whole way through writing that scene because it was so ugly but it was the best scene in the book and remained so in my mind and I think writers know when this stuff is good and when it's not we know but that being said the crying is there how about the humor do any of you inject humor into your stories of love and loss and how do you do that and where do you do that norna well um I think okay so this I don't know I don't I don't I don't I don't know about the word inject because I don't think it's conscious but in the consciousness of whatever the characters are there is some way that my own humor which tends to be a little tilted and I don't know somebody called it did they use the word rye or dry how strange I don't think of myself that way but um but because there's a a sort of natural way of seeing the world's absurdities and then the closer I you can look at something there's a way that the absurdities make reveal themselves um in the woman in the fifth woman um she's in this room and um that was that was that book was compelled by trying to find language for a really big deep sudden loss oh years and years before I could find the language for it um a girlfriend who I'd moved here with and um in the book it's it's death so there's the complete absence the entirety of death and yet not because because death the person comes even closer in a way in the memory and imagination for a while anyway so when I started finding the language for it I think there's just an absurdity in in the details of life that starts to come forward from my point of from my tilted way anyway so she in one way to find language was through metaphor and what some people might call the other dimension um that she's walking through her apartment she doesn't know if it's night or day and when everybody else is asleep she's awake and when everybody else and and then at the end she just sees she looks up and she's staring at the wall and she sees a stain on the on the wall of her fallen down broken down fallen apart apartment building in san francisco which is the place one of the places I lived um cheap cheap and um then there it looked like a jellyfish and there's something absurd about that within all of this you know time is different for her and the darkness and the slowness and then there's the jellyfish and you're left with this jellyfish and I would call that humor it's just yeah there's something absurd built in and that's a shape on the wall but that's looking closely and then something you know imposing itself on that but I don't I like jellyfish a lot that's all I know I think they're hilarious that's all I know is if I came from that it's because they are hilarious jellyfish that's great Lauren well Cheryl that's a tough one for me because I find humor I feel like I'm still learning that and um my the stories that um I've worked on the most and that have been published tend to have a more because they are about largely about loss they do tend to have a um a more you know somber side to them although I have to say um I do love um injecting strangeness in and and a bit of circumstantial dissonance I guess to sort of um to counter that you know because uh because that's how life is and um so I tend to I'll put my characters in situations that are maybe unexpected um as a way of countering that heaviness um um I don't have a jellyfish anything nearly as good as a jellyfish um but I did have a character after she had broken an object in her grandmother's china cabinet uh it was an award her father had gotten I had her out deciding out in the backyard to bury it um which isn't exactly humorous but it is um it was a bit absurd I guess and I'm comfortable shifting into a bit of absurdity to counter the loss um because as she's digging of course uh this takes place in the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles where I grew up and the dirt's really hard there so it's quite hard to dig and um I had some empathy for my character in you know being so set on doing this and it was a bit hard for her and I was just hoping that that unexpected dissonance in in the situation she's the character six years old um might bring a bit of just to counter you know a lightness in in to shade to offset the dark I think that's about the closest I think I could get to humor is that absurdity yeah it's it's it's you know in injecting something other than that the sadness of loss uh continually uh how about you Leslie yeah I mean I I think I'm so serious um that's why in the sobbing I'm writing my stories uh and but I I totally connect with like the strangeness the odd situation um even the one I mentioned earlier mother load I mean that's that that took me to a strange place this daughter stand with her mother for years um and at some point her mother's corpse uh specifically so I mean there was a moment when uh she she takes a a selfie with her mother's corpse and and notes that her mother isn't smiling uh you know that that's pretty black humor I would say dark humor um and so there is I'm because maybe and maybe because it was so recent you know since like I said she was her body was in my family home and I was there too uh it just went in these weird places but and another thing that I thought of is um just in the character who does things that are funny like even like in my story Thunder in Illinois which is in my collection the man with eight pairs of legs um and it starts out the the the first line is Mr. Evans who still loves Mrs. Evans has thought up a dozen ways to leave her so it sort of begins with a sort of tongue-in-cheek thing and then Mrs. Evans is the kind of person who at a gas station you know Mick wants it to be all exactly six zero zero zero you know for how many gallons she gets and if I know her she keeps going as though some of the gas ends up filling you know it's over the tank it's on her shoes you know and so uh and she's involved while her husband is dying and her husband who has cheated on her also she she's learned um she she's they're playing a game that's a cumulative game that they've been playing for uh for 35 years you know of a word game and she's winning you know they have that's over a million points for each one uh so you know they're just so much in in life what can I say you know when you say about life it includes incredible love incredible sadness and um these moments unexpected moments that you could just you know slap your knees of hilarity or absurdity wonderful do you consider your readers when you write about love and loss uh I know when I wrote the scene that took me 10 years to write I just felt I wanted to write it and I really I got some pushback from some people who thought that didn't happen that couldn't have happened oh but indeed it did um do you consider those kinds of things when you were writing about love and loss Lauren? That's a great question um I have to say that I think for I'm kind of a sentence by sentence person uh I I I have the um habit of not being able to go to the next sentence until the one before it is pretty much the way I want it which is I've heard a lot is not the way to do it all the time but it's just how how it is so um oh gosh I got so stuck in my sentences tell me the question again do you consider the reader? All right so to be able to do that um I really do have to be inside the text um to be able to move sentence to sentence so um I'm afraid I don't because um certainly I wanna I want my sentences to be readable I want them to have a logic I want them to have as much integrity as each sentence can have um and in so in a way I'm writing for a reader because I want that sentence to be pleasurable to read but in crafting it I have to say I'm just inside that sentence I'm inside the syntax I'm inside the word choice I'm inside the rhythm of it I'm inside where words are short and where words are long I mean all those things that you you obsess about you know or at least I obsess about but I'm I'm I'm writing a sentence so um yeah so I think probably probably not thinking about readers at that point I hear you no no you readers who um no I okay I think that I'm I like how uh Lauren put it in that I'm I'm very much inside the what's happening with the sentence and um and then I'm and what's happening with it's kind of embodying the character um and then at the later drafts when things are coming together thinking of the fifth woman I and little book of days I don't remember about heavier than air I um I do these feelings start coming up of oh something this is too heavy this is too you know I get those voices so I think that's when the reader slips in it's when I start going oh this is too and but not in a bad way because then what I do is somehow that rolls around inside of me and I sort of see is there another piece that needs to be added is there a way that I can craft this so that maybe it's not allowing in enough room maybe there's it air or something um also I have real readers in a in a writers group I've been in for a long time one of them is here Barbara Tomash is an amazing poet and another poet named um and Pelletier and and Jesse Nism so uh one of them is also works in fiction um so I I have reader readers so I have people who will they tell me things too and I listen I listen so I have you know lots of us have that I there's nothing like it so you know Kathy Rose and I work together I don't know what Kathy's here I think she is Anne Gelsior and I so I have those readers who give me like feedback but I can get those voices and I think that that must be the consideration of but it's later way later and then I maybe will like a little book of days I added some dream days to break up the rhythm or you know based on both feedback and my own feeling that it was too the rhythm was too repetitive in the days because it's day after day after day these I don't know it could be called prose poems or little vignettes um so yeah so I think I think later I consider the readers who are my readers and give me feedback very seriously because they're such they're generous and they know me but and they care about my work a lot so I listen to them closely and I also do get those other voices which I can only that must be the the consciousness of okay now this if this is out in the world what what might be missing is there enough air for everybody to breathe I don't know that's the best I can say but advice how about you Leslie I mean I have had so many students over the years and know that when people are thinking about the readers early on in the process it just stops the creative juices from going so I'm with no I'm with no no and and I'm with Lauren on when I'm creating when I'm generating I'm not thinking of I can't think I don't maybe even have the intellectual capacity or emotional breath to think about a million people out there who might might or might not ever see my my sentences it's just this world I'm totally immersed and if I'm not you know it's it's not working so I'm a writer who works intensively you know for hours and hours on end into the night and then and then maybe take a break so that's how I work and and then also similar to no no I I mean I could I have in my acknowledgement so many people for my debut short story collection man with eight pairs of legs like people it wouldn't have happened if you know they and I went to a number of summer writing workshops for example bread loaf tin house nappa valley writers conference as I mentioned and more and those I am so thankful for those strangers you know like 11 strangers in each case around a table and things they say there's I there's I find there's no better that's a little different than the monono was talking about with this group of fiction writers who who bonded but the absolute strangers different ages but there's no greater gift I feel for me as a writer than to have someone closely read my work you know before it's totally totally done and of course after it's done too but during the process of development uh there's I I just always listen to what they have to say no matter how devastating sometimes in one time at the nappa valley writers conference um and and I was working on the Tasmanians and they were someone said I can't have this this character I can't have the objects going for the grandmother and and also have any of the trees cutting down you know and I was just sobbing in the parking lot afterwards and called my best friend in LA it's like right people so you know but but I listened you know it takes time then digest some of that take that in and that that story did not need that character that they that they were like killing off it at all became a much stronger story and then each case that's become a stronger story so um so those people have been reading in the development process so there's all these stages right and then one other thing I want that I think of is when I'm writing them so close to about people that I know right so for example Mr and this is Evan since I mentioned it before it was very much inspired by my parents you know and I really wanted and my father had passed away my mother was alive and I wanted her to read it you know so you know and she said um it wasn't her she and there I am all she said it wasn't my favorite story of yours but that was a lot better than saying you better not write that you know yeah you can't write that I you know I'll remember to the day I die you know um or uh and one one other quick example is a doctor themselves and when I said I'm writing about a love relationship there's a lot of things based on a lot of our love letters that are actually in there so I've talked to her uh sisters her three sisters a couple of her people who she was with after me you know I just sort of wanted to just to see even a draft um and and then in terms of readers more like you were saying Sheila you know if I'm writing about Armenians which in one case or something like that I I or someone who's a double amputee which I am not um I do so much research I talk to so many people and I always have people who are within that group so Armenian friends and acquaintances read that story to make sure that that it felt true to them and you know and so then the delight is when they say that my grandmother thought it was written by an Armenian then I know I've I've done my that's how to avoid appropriation there you go that's the way to do it that's a whole other subject we can get into uh in another in another time thank you right right so uh Niko do we have any questions from the audience we sure do um so Casey actually has two questions so um I'll start with the short one and this is directly directly at nonam regarding the jellyfish did you decide to include the jellyfish for absurdity and humor or did it organically show up for you as you were writing it showed up it showed up in that room in that moment in that state in that place that the narrator was living in in that moment yeah in that crappy apartment with bars on the window falling off yeah thank you for your direct answer and here's a question from Casey for everyone how do you begin writing into love and loss do you see yourself as a choreographer or director of these major themes when writing or do you rewrite and then sift or is it more about collaging pieces basically is your process the same when you are writing to any topic or is there a new process born and juggling such a significant topic such as love and loss how about Lauren you start with that one how that's an amazing question um I have to say I think when it it happens that as I begin a story if I such as the example I gave with the image of the woman in in alone in the house that I began with I knew there was going to be lost there but yet in beginning the story um um of course there were many failed attempts at the start of the story but when I finally got to the correct beginning it was the same as in a story about any topic which is I accessed the voice that was telling the story whether it was first person or third person no matter there needed to be a voice there and I was able to access the voice and I was able to access the the point at the best point at which to enter into the story yeah I want to emphasize it didn't happen the first time yeah I was a few years in uh but um but when I when I found my way in it was because of uh finding the right voice and by voice I mean an emotional perspective uh so we've been talking about you know emotion in during writing about loss and yet I find with my hard heart it's best if I have a lot of emotional distance so that as Leslie pointed out I can um most effectively make choices about what needs what maybe what's gone too far maybe what's not far enough emotionally um there's so many choices to make but the voice is the guiding is the ship that's guiding you through through those choices at least it is for me so um there really is no alternate approach for material that's more intense emotionally um as long as I've got that voice and as long as I've got an idea and often it's just instinct about the type the way that that voice would tell the story then I find I've got I've got my anchor I've got my anchor and I can go forward what do you think Leslie well my my first thought is that I I just write from my body yeah and um I don't know exactly how to explain it more than that um in in a lot of ways so there's this visceral thing and to answer the question is it different for love and loss no I don't think so every time I I carry story ideas around for years and years I'm not a prolific writer I don't I don't have thousands of stories dozens of stories or even dozens of stories the stories in my debut collection are the stories I cut my fiction teeth on they're the original ones that I wrote and I kept working on them and working on them and I was just thinking for each story there always there's this just devotion um and commitment devotion and love I think you know maybe there's love I never thought of it that way um of for whatever is happening it's like to me like going into a foreign country you know and looking at what are the restaurants or the foods like what does it smell like in the streets you know what oh look at this museum meeting somebody that you never knew before how where did they come from what does that do you know it's this whole uh scary incredibly thrilling and enjoyable pleasure to to go into these different um to these different worlds and the other thing I thought of is that when I think about because I was thinking before this this talk about all the stories in my uh in that collection and then and then um the stories I'm working on now and they're all about love and loss they're all about love and loss so they're in one way or another but different kinds of love as I've said between a daughter and a mother or son and their father between a husband you know having an intellectual mistress in the heroin addict who lives next door because they both love Heidegger and Paul Salon you know there's unconventional loves of all kinds that cross different kinds of borders um I tend not to go towards romantic love but love in its many permutations you know uh it seems like everything is about that and then there's always loss with love because like even with Mr. Evans and Mrs. Evans there's this long marriage and I was thinking about they loved each other at the end even with all the difficulties but how you know there's a loss in love because it's not like it was yesterday you know and then four months later it's not like it was in the beginning and 10 years in 10 years and 50 years later in this case it's long marriage you know it's still love but what love is that so I'm interested in exploring all these kinds of love in the way love evolves destroys and uh changes form wonderful any more questions from the audience Nico um we don't have any other questions but I do have a question that emerges for myself we've been talking about love all this time but we have yet to actually define that word so what's like your personal definition of that word love Leslie oh my gosh it's this it's magic it's a miracle uh it's um I think I you know because I've I've come to learn and have felt for a long time that I was said here on this planet to understand compassion and then I have to say what is compassion and it and it's very much about listening to someone else to really listen in about someone else you know regardless of what they feel about gun control or regardless of what they think anything you know um to be able to really take in another person completely let go of my own ego my own ideas um and to to keep working on that through my life um and in a grand way too people in another nation um in another country losing their children in a war uh and it's love to me is I think is really compassion I mean that's it that's what it really comes down to and then I can only hope that when the close people I love you know my own two sons um the the my closest closest friends and family my partner that um my goal is always to have my love be seated in that kind of compassion and you know it's not that easy to just listen to the person you live with you know need your career but it's an ongoing work it's a process thank you nona okay so the question is what is love what is your definition of love I don't I don't have a definition but the closest I can come is when I think about I just taught this Edward Said article on the theology of language from democratic humanism and and and the the warmth of great act of the warmth of true attention and seeing the true face yeah here here lauren that's beautiful nona um you know I have to say I come back to attachment um for me that um and in its varying degrees um it really defines for me which is a love is kind of undefinable um but I understand it best as an attachment that may be um emotional but it might also be physical as in attachment to place um certainly we're attached to things but you know saying I love my car is not exactly the same as I love this place in the desert where I feel the way I did when I was nine um you know there's but but yet these these different types of attachments I feel really do drive a deeper connection and for me um that that connection that can happen with a person or a place um suggests to me different types of love for sure yeah and I I think Leslie mentioned the word devotion that's um part of it certainly um but I really do come back to to that sense of and and what I mean by attachment is I and I think what happens when we do attach to a person or a place is we see uh a kind of ourselves in that other person we see we want to see parts of them in ourselves we want to you know maybe embody certain things about them there's kind of a an interesting transmission that goes on you know when that when that happens and um certainly a very it's interesting territory for uh writing and literature for sure well let me ask this which which may be the last the last question we could get in here um and I'm going to uh take that word that you just used transmission Lauren and I'm going to ask you all um what have you learned about yourselves in writing about love and loss and how do you think it is going to influence or um enhance or feed your future writing projects Lauren um well I have to I'm thinking now the stories that have succeeded the things that haven't succeeded yet are just you know uh it's different but the ones that well what about the stories that you love the most that I've written or others have written that you've written I think they have um I think in externalizing a lot of the emotion that came up when I was writing them um that's certainly been a kind of cathartic experience because um in externalizing it you do feel a bit lighter around that subject for me I get a bit of distance and I think that's especially around around loss I think that can be really helpful because it teaches at least for me it's it's it it teaches me um how to keep going how to be more resilient um how to not unlike some of the characters I've written be destroyed by it um because it can destroy us it can it can um loss can reduce us you know in our capacities and and as a human you know with a limited amount of time we have here uh I think that resilience is is really important so I think definitely the stories have have made me more resilient emotionally um and maybe more willing to take risks you mentioned in stories going forward I think we're willing to take more risks emotionally in stories thank you how about you Leslie so what is the question how has it changed me to to approach these well how um has what have you learned about yourself in writing about love and loss and how do you think it's going to manifest or or enhance your your future projects well it's sort of it's related to my last question I I believe that that I uh it helps me in my world to be a more compassionate person uh to have spent so much time with all these other people I mean if you don't write then you you know you might have I don't know maybe you have a partner maybe don't maybe have a few friends uh it so it adds to the panoply of relationships that um I curate and experience and feel connected to in my life and so I I learned so much from that I think that foreign country is part of it because you know that's going into foreign foreign territory always informed um by myself uh I remember that my title story the man with eight pairs of legs um there's a lot of love um there's potential loss it's one of the few stories that ends up and seemingly kind of a happy note um but uh I remember when I did a workshop with Charles D'Ambrosio in Tin House when I just had graduated from my MFA program which I went to in my late 50s by the way um went back to school and um he I had a one-on-one with him and he looked at me straight in the eye and he said do you have the courage to write this story? Do you have the courage? And I'm like and then just like whoa it was so confronting right it was so confronting and he's such I mean he's a wonderful writer but he's a brilliant teacher uh and so I just thought my god he he's seen into my psyche and beyond my psyche and into the future uh like or something and and in fact that title story um I went to three different workshops over eight years I brought it to bread loaf I brought it to Juniper and I kept working on that story um all that time and I and I just always felt wow do I have the courage to write the stories that I really want to write do I and um I feel like I have because I've achieved that and and it's it's out there and and people it's rewarding to hear what people are experiencing but because we have to have an incredible amount of courage to write things that people are going to really respond to exactly that makes allows them to be vulnerable and let things end and learn about themselves and so yeah it's it's admitted the do I have courage to write the next stories in the right oh my god there's a story that called the dinner with the mortician um that I know I've had in my mind for quite a while but damn if I can I can I get to the desk to start writing that story I don't want it don't you'll get there anyway so there's a lot to learn yeah I'll just say two two words which is um allowed me and honest looking at at myself and others honestly and um honesty intimacy yeah on those two words I will say thank you very much ladies thank you thank you nico mechanics institute this was great of course and I want to suggest for all of our attendees today if you can turn on your video and just kind of pulse love at our special guests for today thank you so much um for sending the love into our writerly community for this beautiful conversation today um within our chat box I do also want to point you to the fact that we are holding a course at Mechanics Institute on this very topic on March 23rd with Joey Garcia who is also at the S of Writers Conference and we also have a slew of wonderful free events coming up that I'm also adding into our chat box and we'll honor everyone's time it is 1 p.m. let's pulse love again as we exit this space and we hope to see you again next month on March 15th for our next writer's lunch take care everyone thank you everybody thank you for coming thank you