 All right, we don't have too many more people coming on, so I think I'll start now. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the 22nd annual John Howard Burst Jr. Memorial Keynote Event entitled Two Places, the Inside Room and the Outside Room. I'm Betsy Peck-Learned, Dean of University Library Services at Roger Williams University. Thank you all so much for coming. Please note that this event is being recorded this evening. The John Howard Burst Jr. Memorial Program is presented this year in partnership with the Carson McCulloch Center at Columbus State University in Georgia, and includes this evening's keynote event, a virtual exhibition and a smaller physical exhibition mounted in the University Library, both prepared by library staff, and a book discussion at Bristol's Rogers Free Library. The annual program celebrates a great writer of literature and their body of work. This year's selection, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCulloch, was selected by the university's Burst Committee with representation from Roger Williams faculty and staff and a member of the Rogers Free Library staff. The committee is chaired by Professor Adam Braver, who serves a dual role at RWU as a professor of creative writing and the library program director. Professor Braver will introduce this evening's esteemed panelists in just a moment. We are hugely grateful to Robert Blaze, an alumnus of Roger Williams, who with his gift to the university in the year 2000, made these events possible. Mr. Blaze's endowment was in honor of his mentor and friend, Professor John Howard Burst Jr., a scholar of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman and a collector of first editions. The Blaze gift supports an exhibition, a library book fund for collecting works related to the exhibit, travel for several Burst student fellows to archives and libraries associated with the book and a keynote event. And now I'd like to invite Professor Braver to introduce our panelists. Adam. Thank you, Betsy. I also would like to thank Robert Blaze and his daughter, Jennifer Murphy, not only for their longstanding financial commitment to this program, but also to their ongoing passionate support and care for it. In times such as these that we are witnessing nightly on our televisions, it is more important than ever to remember the power that literature has held over humankind for centuries, one that not only offers a refuge, but perhaps most importantly, enters into the mystery of the human experience and human consciousness, bringing understanding and perspective in ways that scholarship and rhetoric cannot always address. I, for one, was so grateful to be reminded of this last Thursday when my class met to discuss Carson's story, a tree, a rock, a cloud, followed by watching Karen's moving and lovely film adaptation of it. That beautiful short story that not only, that shows us not only the need for love, but within our most troubling moments, the conscious dedication it takes to embrace the love that is all around us, starting in places such as, as the story tells us, a tree, a rock, a cloud. We're so grateful for the partnership we've had with the Carson-McCaller Center on this year's project. Humbled to work with my colleagues who oversaw the digital exhibition on Carson, as well as its highlighted version on display in our library for those of you in the Rhode Island area. So many thanks to Heidi Benedict, Christine Fagan, Chris Traskowski, and Liz Bataglia. And also thanks to Susan Tassant for her partnership in bringing the discussions into our local public library. And lastly, a special thanks to our two student burst fellows who traveled with me to Columbus, Georgia to research the archives and history and Carson's Columbus and who brought everything they learned and so much more back to our team here, Paloma, Belly Seat, and Sam Treiber. Now to this afternoon's program. Please welcome our moderator, Nick Norwood, Director of the Carson-McCaller Center. And I'm thrilled that joining Nick is legendary Hollywood actors, Karen Allen, the world's foremost Carson-McCaller scholar, Carlos Deuz, and National Book Award finalist, Jen Shaplin. Hey, Adam, thanks so much. And I want to just say a thank you to you, Adam, and the other people on the committee for choosing Carson-McCaller to be this year's focus of the Burris Memorial program. We are thrilled, of course, at the Carson-McCaller Center that you chose Carson. And it was great for you guys to come here. And I was, you know, I had a good time showing you all Carson's house and everything in Columbus. So that was wonderful. Thanks also to my friends on the panel today for joining us. It's good to see you all. And it's always a pleasure to get together with other lovers of Carson-McCaller to talk about Carson and her work. So thanks for being here today. And let's just jump right in. I want to start by asking each of you to say a word about how you first came to the work of Carson-McCaller. And Karen, I'd like to start with you if we could. So if you could just tell, you've told me the story, but for our audience, would you say a word about how you first came to the work of Carson-McCaller's? I read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I think when I was maybe 17 or 18 years old and I was so taken by her work and by the incredible depth of it and that I just developed this appetite to read everything she had ever written. And I just began to, yeah, I think I read Member of the Wedding next. And then I think I also, there were two films of her work that were out at the time, Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Member of the Wedding. I saw the films and then I started in on the short stories and the poems and just fell head over heels in love with her work. It had made a huge, huge, profound impression on me. Okay, Carlos, how about you? Thanks, Nick. Well, I first encountered Carson's work when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, when a friend gave me some photocopied pages, selections from various books, thinking that I might like her work. And I've never had an experience, had never had an experience before and haven't sense of identification with the writer and feeling like that this writer had really sort of tapped into my own experience and was representing the things that I had struggled with in my life up to that point. And Emily Dickinson said that she knows something is poetry when it feels like the top of her head has been taken off. And I really felt like that when I first read Carson's work. And it's sort of animated and sustained my personal life and certainly my academic career ever since. Yeah. And Jen, you have written about this in your book My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, but if you would say a word about how you first came to the work of Carson McCullers. Sure, well, I'm by no means an expert on Carson's work or her life. And I feel like I came to her work almost by accident by way of the archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. So also at the University of Texas, I came across while I was working as an intern there, a set of letters that Ann Marie Schwartzenbach had written to Carson. And I recognized in them immediately a queer relationship. I was in the process of coming out as a queer woman at the time. And I just wanted to know more about these two women who were they, what was this relationship? So at that point, I started reading Carson's fiction. I started reading the biographies that had been written about her. I ended up cataloging her clothes and personal effects, household items at the Ransom Center, and then stayed in her childhood home at the McCullers Center for writers and musicians in Columbus. And that's where Nick, you led me to Dr. Mary Mercer's archives, where I kind of found documents that really helped provide some insight into the questions that I originally had when I found those letters. Okay. I also asked you all to come today with something, a short passage from McCullers to read for us, something that means something to you. And so before we get too far into this conversation, I'd like to take some time to do that. So Karen, I think you had a piece that you wanted to read. You wanna read that now and say something about why this piece and what it means to you? Well, you know, again, I rather stumbled upon this poem, which is in Carlos's book. I don't know if it's, is this Carlos's book? Is this your book? Oh, maybe not. Which one is that? The Library of America? The Mortgage Heart. Oh, yeah. No, that's the one that Carson's sister, Rita, did. Okay. Well, I can't, I don't remember when or how I stumbled on this poem, but at some point I started reading the poems and this poem just grabbed me. I mean, it's interesting my relationship to her work in the sense that I don't know how easy it is to put into words what it is about some, all of her writing, but there are certain things. This is a poem called When We Are Lost. When we are lost, what image tells? Nothing resembles nothing, yet nothing is not blank. It is configured hell of noticed clocks on winter afternoons, malignant stars, demanding furniture, all unrelated and with air in between. The terror, is it a space of time or the joined trickery of both conceptions? To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins, all that is non-air, if this indeed is not deception, is agony immobilized, while time, the endless idiot, runs screaming around the world. It seems very of these times this way. Yeah, it does, yeah, it does. I was thinking as you were reading that, I don't know if you've ever heard the album of Carson McCulloch's reading her own works. She reads mostly from member of the wedding, but she reads that poem. He does? Yeah, so you should, I'll send it to you because it is very interesting, her reading of the poem, but yeah. Oh, would you, I'd love that. That's wonderful. Carlos, would you read something and tell us why you've chosen this piece? As you know, Nick, I had the privilege of editing Carson's complete works for the Library of America in two volumes. And when the first volume came out, which was her complete novels, it was only two months after the terrorist attack on September 11 in 2001. And the 92nd Street Y in New York held an event to launch the collection. And they had a number of writers like Hilton Owles and Francine Prose, I think, and I was asked to read a passage. And given what had just happened a couple of months before, I chose a passage that appears near the end of her last novel, Clock Without Hands. And it's strange that it seems, again, given what's going on in the world and in Ukraine, it seems appropriate again to read it tonight. So this is a passage near the very end of Clock Without Hands. When the protagonist of the novel, Jester Klain, he has taken his airplane up into the sky. Looking downward from an altitude of 2,000 feet, the earth assumes order. A town, even myelin, is symmetrical, exact as a small gray honeycomb, complete. The surrounding terrain seems designed by a law more just and mathematical than the laws of property and bigotry. A dark parallelogram of pine woods, square fields, rectangles of suede. On this cloudless day, the sky on all sides and above the plane is a blind monotone of blue, impenetrable to the air and the imagination. But down below, the earth is round. The earth is finite. From this height, you do not see man and the details of his humiliation. The earth from a great distance is perfect and whole. But this is an order foreign to the heart. And to love the earth, you must come closer. Gliding downward, low over the town and countryside, the whole breaks up into a multiplicity of impressions. The town is much the same in all its seasons, but the land changes. In early spring, the fields here are like patches of worn gray corduroy, each one alike. Now you could begin to tell the crops apart, the gray green of cotton, the dense and spidery tobacco land, the burning green of corn. As you circle inward, the town itself becomes crazy and complex. You see the secret corners of all the sad backyards, gray fences, factories, the flat main street. From the air, men are shrunken and they have an automatic look, like wound up dolls. They seem to move mechanically among haphazard miseries. You do not see their eyes. And finally, this is intolerable. The whole earth from a great distance means less than one look into a pair of human eyes, even the eyes of the enemy. Yeah, that's great. You know, you've convinced me, Carlos, it's interesting, isn't it, that McCullers has several set pieces. I mean, there's the famous lover beloved and there's the famous, the we of me. And you know, you've convinced me, that's yet another of the great set pieces in McCullers. And it really stands out. I mean, I think that book is underappreciated, but that passage really stands out in that book as one of her great set pieces of writing. Wonderful. And Jen, I think you wanted to read something from member of the wedding, is that right? Yeah, I'll go ahead and read it first and then kind of describe why I chose it, but I think we're all kind of thinking along similar lines with the choices of readings today. It's interesting. So this is from member of the wedding. Frankie stood looking up and down the four walls of the room. She thought of the world and it was fast and loose and turning faster and looser and bigger than ever it had been before. The pictures of the war spring out and clashed together in her mind. She saw bright flowered islands and a land by a northern sea with the gray waves on the shore, bombed eyes and the shuffle of soldiers feet, tanks and a plane, wing broken, burning and downward falling in a desert sky. The world was cracked by the loud battles and turning a thousand miles a minute. The names of places spun in Frankie's mind, China, Peachville, New Zealand, Paris, Cincinnati, Rome. She thought of the huge and turning world until her legs began to tremble and there was sweat on the palms of her hands, but still she did not know where she should go. Finally, she stopped looking around the four kitchen walls and said to Bernice, I feel just exactly like somebody has peeled all the skin off me. I wish I had some cold, good chocolate ice cream. And that passage just popped into my mind last week, the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, something about seeing the map at the top of the New York Times of the bombings just immediately brought to mind Frankie's sense of overwhelm that kind of follows almost immediately on hearing about World War II on the radio but also adjusting to the reality of her brother's marriage. So basically the reality that the world around her is changing and it feels threatening and she's helpless to stop it. And I think McCuller's really captures that childlike confusion, integrating that new information into her life in that passage, but it also resonates with me as an adult kind of encountering this news in such a rapid technological landscape in 2022. And so the feelings she described are so vivid and they describe feelings that I've had that haven't really been able to articulate. Yeah, it's interesting how all of us are moving towards this sort of next question that I wanted to ask, which is Jen, if you recommended to someone right now, oh, you should read Carson McCullers. And they said, why should I read Carson McCullers right now? Why should I be reading someone who's been dead for 55 years and whose works were written 70 to 80 years ago? What would you say to them? I think, I mean, exactly what I just said about describing certain feelings that are so common but so difficult to articulate. I know that I still read and talk about McCuller's work because it had such a huge impact on my life. It helped me understand the complexities of identity, of desire, and my life unfolded just completely differently. If I'd read her work earlier in high school or college or if I'd never come across it at all. So there's something just about the empathy she displays for her characters on the page that I found when I first read her, so completely validating. And I know many other readers feel the same way. Yeah. Karen or Carlos, do you have thoughts on that? If you were recommending McCullers to someone and they asked why now, why read Carson McCullers right now, what would you say, do you think? You know, I'm approaching 40 years since I first discovered Carson and having spent so much time teaching her work and thinking about her work and writing about her work, I've really sort of distilled all of my thoughts on what she was trying to do in her work down to a single word. And it stored empathy that because her own experience growing up and the sensitivity that she seemed to be born with, she had the ability to sort of feel for other people and along with other people. And it seems that now I can't read her work without thinking, seeing almost every page, an effort on her part to teach people how to be empathetic toward other people. I also study Buddhism. And she becomes more Buddhist the more I read her as well that her project seems to have been to demonstrate not only why people are deserving of empathy but how one can even like she says, the passage I read ends with even in the eyes of the enemy, teaching people to be empathetic even toward the people that you would most likely not be able to be. So I think that's a reason to read her today if for no other reason. Okay, Karen, how interesting because I know you know a lot about Buddhism as well. And so what do you think? What would you say to someone? Why read Carson McCullers now? I think that it is and continues to be for me because I continue to read her. There's a constant elevation of all of these qualities that we struggle with as human beings. There's a way of looking at them in this sort of full spectrum that she creates in her writing where she's just dealing with a lot of the real human, the big and the small struggles that we all share as human beings. And I think that when I read her, I feel lifted up by it. I feel lifted up by someone who is seeing in the way that she saw and able to articulate it and share its empathy and it's also just understanding her kind of clarity in a sense of seeing, it amazes me when I read her writing that she had this perception of the world. No, it's true. I gave a house tour this past weekend to a book club who had just read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and we were marveling at, how does someone that young have that sort of understanding and perception about people and be able to imagine herself into the lives of people who are so different from her? It's astonishing, isn't it? Yeah, it is, it really is. I mean, the character's in a tree of rocket cloud that she's writing sort of through the eyes of this sort of ancient man who is sharing like all of his struggles to the young boy. It's extraordinary that she had the, and it's totally authentic. It doesn't feel forced in any way. It feels like she really was living and breathing through them. Well, now you all have been to Columbus, Georgia. In fact, you've all stayed in the Smith McCuller's house. And so, how much do we attribute, you think, to McCarles, to Carson's writing, the fact that she grew up in the South and maybe even a place like Columbus, Georgia. I mean, do you think, what impact do you think that had? Well, I certainly don't think she would be the same writer and certainly wouldn't have had the same concerns that she had had she grown up in someplace other than Columbus because I can't separate the things that she's concerned about in the world from what she saw when she was growing up. I mean, the Jim Crow South of that time is maybe the most important influence on her work and the fact that the poverty that she witnessed because of the laborers in the mills who worked there in Columbus, to the treatment of African-American people that she saw every day on the streets of Columbus and for example, the young women who sometimes work for her family, their mistreatment as well, not only the segregation that she saw right in front of her eyes every day and the treatment of difference with disdain across the board that she saw. Some people would find in the South a difficult place to live in today but the South that she grew up in was a completely different matter. I mean, it was a very difficult place for her to grow up especially as someone who felt herself queer to feel outside, to feel difference and to be sort of fed that message constantly and I think attribute it to the place that she was growing up in that it was imbued with this sort of indifference at best and hatred at worst and not just for her and her difference but for any other kind of difference, big racial difference being a class difference. So I can't separate the two. I mean, her consciousness seems to be intimately connected with that place. You can't separate them out and look at how few work she set outside of the South is a sign of that. I think her imagination was born and lived the rest of her life in Columbus, Georgia. Right, well, she has that statement where she says when do the flowers bloom and what flowers, right? In other words, if I were writing about any other place I wouldn't know what I was talking about but I do think it like you're pointing out that there's something more to it and I'm curious though, Jen, when you were here and you came to Columbus, Georgia, I mean, what was your feeling about that? You said, yeah, I can believe that Carson McCullers came out of this place or were you surprised that Carson McCullers came out of this place? I mean, how did you feel about it? Well, I imagine that Columbus today is quite a bit different from Columbus and McCullers' own time but thinking about this question I was really focused on the impact that her community had on her and her writing kind of once Carson was a writer and I know from reading Illumination and Night Glare, the autobiography, from reading the therapy transcripts with Mary Mercer that the reaction of her community to her writing did have a big impact on her physical and mental health. She talks about basically going unconscious for several days after someone from the KKK calls after the publication of Reflections in a Golden Eye which was later diagnosed as her first stroke and she was seen, especially when she kind of came back to Columbus, usually because her health was a struggle she would return frequently home. She was seen as such an outsider, kind of like a traitor to the community for things like wearing pants or smoking cigarettes or typing out a typewriter. But in addition to those kind of more almost mundane ways that she was sort of rejected or felt rejection from the community she was definitely just so extraordinarily brave to be writing about the realities of white supremacy and the complexity and violence of race relations at a time when eugenicist ideas were in the mainstream just as she was brave to write about queer relationships and desire when homosexuality was actively persecuted by the US government, police by US citizens. So given her identity, given her subject matter it's no wonder to me that she felt from an early age a need to get out of there but at the same time that she couldn't kind of detach herself that she couldn't stop writing about what she had experienced there and the way that place continued to act on her even when she was a wildly successful writer. Yeah, and Karen, by the way, Jen is talking about that very thing that you were asking Carlos to relate again when she wrote A Tree of Rock a Cloud. That was all happening at the same time. She published Reflections in a Golden Eye. The KKK called the house. I won't repeat what they said but it was racist and homophobic at the same time. And Carlos can say more about this but I believe that was when she had her first stroke. I mean, that seems to be when she had her first stroke and when she came out of it in that front bedroom she wrote A Tree of Rock a Cloud. I mean, that's just amazing. And I remember I didn't know all of that. I guess I'd forgotten it. And you asked when you were there where did she write that story? And so I did some research and I went, oh, right there in the front bedroom. So I don't know, what do you think? Because you said, we were just talking earlier when you made your film. You filmed it in Massachusetts. And I remember talking to you about, do you feel that this needs to be a Southern setting? And you said, no, I think it could take place anywhere. But do you think that's true about McCullis's writing in general or maybe just that story? I don't think it's true about her writing in general but I felt when I read the story. So I remember having gone back and read it and I've seen some other versions of the film that were made many years ago. And I think it was initially set in a little bit more of an urban feeling, more of a diner than the kind of place where I set it, which is more like a cafe. But because the story itself is so encapsulated, I mean, the world is completely, I chose in the film to spend a little bit of time outside with the boy on his journey to the cafe just so we got a feeling, not so much for the world around him, but for his world and the way in which he related to the world. I felt that, whereas her story doesn't start until he walks into the cafe. But no, I really didn't feel as though, I felt like in Tree Rock a Cloud, it's a very internal world. I mean, so, and I didn't feel like there were any direct references in the story to where it was taking place. And so I felt I had a little bit of freedom to shoot it here. And because we were, it's just the way that the whole thing kind of grew out of my desire to do it. And the actors I wanted to work with were here. And it felt like it was a very intimate way to tell the story. We didn't have to, I drove 20 minutes to the set every morning, but it had this very intimate close feeling. A lot of the actors stayed at my house so we had that kind of intimacy. But you think in general, it is important that Carson McCullers came from the South. I mean, the South had a big influence on her work. And you were here in Columbus. Were you surprised by Columbus or did it sort of meet your expectation of the place where Carson McCullers grew up? I came in a very particular time because that was during the 100 year celebration of Carson's life. And I think it was sort of an overwhelming experience for me to be there, to be in the house, to be there within the celebration and watching what everyone was doing in order to celebrate. And the evening of the celebration was extraordinary. And then you're, you know, I was fetid as were the, you know, the whole group of us by your wonderful friends, so many different artists. So my experience of Columbus, it felt like I was in a little bit of a bubble. And yet when I was in the house, I felt very, very moved by being in the house. And I spent a lot of time with the photographs and with her books and with her things and just sort of really taking it in. But I couldn't articulate any better than what Jen and Carla said in terms of the impact that world had on her development as a writer and as a person, extraordinary. Well, Carlos and Jen, you've already mentioned, you know, something about Carson's sexuality. And, you know, that article, one of the articles that you wrote right after the founding of the Center at Carlos, I think it was a piece for a local magazine here in Columbus. And you describe Carson in that piece as bisexual. I mean, if we come back to that, is that the term that you would use now? And what effect do you think that had on Carson's writing? Well, I don't think I would use that term anymore. And part of it is thanks to the influence of Jen and her very deep thinking about Carson's identity and how we relate our own identity to our perception of her identity. And I think those labels are sort of tricky and in some ways reductive. And that, you know, describing her perhaps at one point as bisexual was almost a sort of numbers game of looking at the people that she had been in love with for lack of a better term, that she had been in love with both men and women during her life. I think, you know, following maybe Jen's cue, today I would probably describe her because it's purposefully and wonderfully and richly ambiguous term I would call her queer because it defies categorization to some extent in the way that bisexual or homosexual or gay or other sort of more rigid terms would. And there's a wonderful piece that appeared about Carson in The New Yorker a few years ago by Sarah Schulman. And she tries to trace in particular Carson's sensitivity regarding race and traces it back to her own experience feeling a young queer person in Columbus, Georgia and that the necessary sensitivity that she had to her own status as an outsider or other or one who's hated by her community or whatever is seen as the sort of origin of her ability to think and feel the way she did at such a young age about people who because of their race had been hated and despised. It's a wonderful piece. I think it's called White Rider is what it's called. And so I think her sexuality is as important as important to her gender and sexual identity, let's say is as important in shaping her as a writer as Columbus is as a place in shaping her as a writer but I think you can't separate those to her place and her identity and her struggles with identity and her places struggle with her own identity. I don't think you can separate them out. And Jen, would you agree with that? Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, and I think kind of pivoting to think about the work a little bit. Her books all to me center around desire, longing and human relationships. Carlos in a conversation we had once he said her great subject was love and that still kind of resonates with me as a good reminder of why it's important to investigate and try to understand her sexuality, her identity and what love really meant to her. But some of her books deal explicitly with queer sexualities like reflections in a golden eye, clock without hands and some have like a much more ambiguous relationship to sexuality, but queerness has been ascribed to her fiction for decades by readers and critics sort of a queer sensibility. And so it was so interesting to me in the research and in the process of getting acquainted with the archives in Columbus to see that, to learn some of the backstory of those letters within Marie in the therapy transcripts to read the love letters between Carson and Mary that are in the archives at Columbus State, learning more about how she understood reeves sexuality, his queerness, his self-hatred. And then hearing Carson wrestle with label lesbian in those therapy transcripts and try to understand the nature of her own desires. All of this kind of validated for me what was evident in the fiction as a queer reader. None of it was really a surprise, but it was also something I didn't expect to be there in archival document form necessarily. But I just think it's so valuable to think about that. And I mean, that's kind of why I wrote a whole book about it, to think about her relationships with women and to think about her queer identity, especially when approaching her work. When I think about what it would mean to young readers or to anyone questioning their identity to know here is like a great American mid-century writer who was also queer. Like if you can hold those two things together and then approach her work, I think that's really valuable. And Karen, you and I have talked about this before, but that same writer that Carlos is just talking about, Sarah Shulman, she thinks, she said her, when we were in Rome at the conference that Carlos put on and she was asked, what's your favorite? McCulloch's piece. And she's somebody who's written a lot about Carson McCulloch's and she's written a whole novel that's based on Carson's life and a play and so forth. And she said, a tree of rocket cloud. And we had just watched your film the night before. And she says that the fact that the science, another one of those great set pieces comes around to people start at the wrong end of love, they start with the love of a woman. And Sarah believes that this is coming out of her queerness that she would say this, but I don't know, how do you feel about that? Well, I suppose in a way, I don't necessarily myself interpreted that way. I mean, I think he says that because he is a man talking about his own experience. I mean, I think in the story, there's a specificity to the fact that he describes it. He says, a woman. I think really the story to me is sort of breaks gender in a sense, it's really not about gender at all as it's about the humanness of us all and that we have been in a sense taught to think of love as something outside of ourselves that is to be acquired and held as opposed to something inside of ourselves that is to be offered and acknowledged and nurtured. And I guess I have always seen it in a much more philosophical sense that doesn't really, I don't see the story necessarily dealing with those issues myself, but it could certainly be interpreted that way. Could it have been that it was a woman who was saying that people start at the wrong end of love, they start with a love of a man or any other thing like that? Well, in the sense that we all get for better or for worse or for worse and worse, we do get trapped in these gender identities. And I think that that is something so extraordinary about Carson is I feel like in the same sense that she has this open heart and open perception and open ability to empathize and understand people outside of her background, her race, her age, her, she also has this extraordinary ability to kind of, I feel like sit in a kind of non-gender conforming place where she's open to the humanity of us all. It's like, I feel like, I look forward to a time and when so many of these things dissolve and we don't, we aren't so identified with ourselves as either male or female or old or young or I feel like we do live in a culture that holds onto this stuff for dear life as though it has something to do with who we are. And I think one of the things that excites me about her writing is that it sort of defies these things. They just, they almost dissolve and fall away when you enter her mind or her perception. It doesn't feel like she's holding onto, she's searching for who she is perhaps but not needing to identify with it and grasp onto it. Can I say something about that, Nick, as well? Yeah, you know, not only does, I think Carson show us a model in the Battle of the Sad Cafe of love for lack of a better word and that's the word she uses in the novel so often. How it sort of transcends gender with this sort of triangular relationship between Marvin Macy, Kazem Aiman and Ms. Amelia but also she provides us the cipher as well and maybe the most famous passage of all of her work, the lover and beloved passage. Now is the time for us to speak of love if that's how the passage begins. Where she tries to describe her philosophy of love. Yeah, and she basically says, and I had you point out the page number to me and thank you for doing that, I was just rereading it. And I mean, she basically says there, to me, my reading of it is love is unpredictable and ungovernable, anyone can fall in love with anyone else. And you almost imagine that if she were writing that today, she would go further with that. I mean, she basically allows readers to keep it in the realm of heterosexual love, right? But says basically any man can fall in love with any woman or any woman can fall in love with any man. But she also writes it in such a way as you can read between the lines and say, she's saying anyone can fall in love with anyone else, right? And that's unpredictable and ungovernable. All right, I wanna ask one more question and that is, what do you think is going to be the legacy of Carson McCullers? And Jen, why don't we start with you? What do you think will be the thing that is her biggest and most lasting influence? Well, I think that's a little bit of an impossible question. And it's hard for me to say, when I was thinking about the question of her influence, I immediately thought of the writers that came immediately to my mind who I know have been influenced by her work or who it appears to me have been. I mean, I can see so many Frankies marching through the pages of contemporary fiction from Donna Tard's little friends, Zizi Packers, short story Brownies, Joy Williams, The Quick and the Dead. I can see her influence on so many fiction writers that I really admire, like Elizabeth McCracken who's written about McCullers, Eileen Miles, C-Pam Zhang. There are so many different people who I think are kind of channeling her work into contemporary fiction, which is so exciting. But influence is a tricky thing to pin down. And I think it would be hard for me to say kind of what that influence will be going forward in any way. But at the same time, I just hope that her influence grows. Like I said at the beginning, I didn't read McCullers when I was in high school. I didn't read her when I was in college, even though I studied literature that whole time. And I think it would really do the world a lot of good if more people were reading her work. So I hope that is her, let me see. Karen, do you have thoughts on that? Well, I couldn't agree more with what Chen just said. I mean, I hope that more and more people, I mean, I've had such an extraordinary experience taking this film around when we were several years taking it to film festivals and stuff. And it's been extraordinary to realize that there's an awful lot of people out there who don't know her work. They know of her, they know her name, they know something about her, but they're, they've never sat down and read Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. And then the people who also have read her work who were equally as moved by her are changed. Like people who really feel like their life turned when they read Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. And so, I think from my perspective, she did something, and I'm not, I don't know the whole world of literature, but from my experience as a female writer, writing in the time in which she wrote, she shook, she shook up the world. She did something that will go on through the people that were influenced by her, but I think, I hope people just continue to come back to the source and read her. She has a small body of work, but it's a very powerful body of work. And no matter who she has influenced going forward, I think people will continue to go back to these books and these short stories and these poems and continue to discover her. Carlos? I hope I'm not something like a broken record, but this idea of empathy that I'm sort of stuck on at the moment in relation to her work, that a writer who sets out, and I'm not sure she did this consciously at all, I just think it was so important to her, not only to find people in her own life who could be empathetic toward her, but her desire to provide that to other people, it comes out in her work, so that everywhere I look now at her work, either from the most outlandish characters, and that's a word she uses in describing the objects of love or the people who were loved in her famous passage in the Balancet Cafe, she uses the word outlandishness. Even the most outlandish person can be the object, the inspiration for love. Her showing us these sort of wild models of people we should be empathetic toward, and she sort of comes at it from so many different angles, because that's one of the reasons the heart is a lonely hunter, I think is her great masterpiece is because she takes on all these different characters and shows in the end how they're all deserving and in need of love is one way to put it, but empathy is another way to put it. And I think the world certainly needs more of that every day. I don't see it needing any less of it, certainly than the time she was writing these books. And so this idea of empathy, and I had this idea for a book I might want to write about sort of the stylistics of empathy to look at her work, almost take her work apart and see how on earth she was able to manage this, to instill this idea to teach her readers empathy and people who respond really strongly to her work, I think that's what we're responding to is this identification with desire or need for empathy that she's providing us by showing us how to be empathetic toward other people. That's certainly what I've come to realize is what I respond so strongly. It's this identification with her modeling of empathy toward these disparate characters in her work. That's not a bad legacy to have if it is hers. Right, and I think that is sort of what Sarah Schulman says in that piece, right? Is that she's a model for us in that regard. And it's what Richard Wright said, in that famous review that he wrote. And he said, she's the first white Southern writer who has the same sort of empathy for her black characters as she does for her white characters. And so, and it is an amazing thing, isn't it? Well, I have the luxury of giving the house tour, which I know you've done as well, Carlos, here at the house in Columbus. And I have given the tour to people from all over the world. And that is something to me that speaks to her legacy, the fact that she connects with people all around the world. I have had people from Asia, from all over Europe, from all over North and South America. I've had people when I take them into the bedroom and I say, this is the room that, this was Carson McCulloch's room when she was a little girl and they start weeping. And they apologized to me, but they said it just means so much to me. To me, that says something about her legacy right there. So, Adam, would you like for us to answer some questions or would you like to open the floor to questions from our audience? Well, let's see if we have some questions from the people in the audience. You can either put questions in the chat or I suppose you could raise your hands and we can call on you that way too. Okay, yeah, I see that someone has put that in the chat box. Hi, Carlos, greetings from Minneapolis. Well, is there anyone who would like to ask a question? No one has mentioned her parents. That's from NN, that's from Nick Norwood. Some other Nick Norwood. Carlos, you know a good deal about Carson's parents. What would you say is the influence of her parents on her life and work? Well, you know, there's an imbalance, I think of the influence between her two parents because I think her mother was wildly influential on her, both in, you know, lots of positive ways in the nurturing that she provided, but also in the sort of legacy of her dependence on her mother actually has this her dark side as well. You know, she has a, one of her short stories is it called, instead of the hour after or, oh gosh. You don't mean a domestic dilemma, but not that one. No, it's the one where the young boy's mother has attempted suicide and he's come home and found her and now whenever he returns home, she survives the suicide attempt and now every time he returns home, he's afraid to go inside his house because he's afraid she might have done this again. And there's the narrator says of him during that story, we hate those we have to need so badly. And I think it's one of the crucial line for Carson in understanding her mother and this sort of complicated relationship when he had a chair with the mother because she was so dependent on her mother, but there are very few mothers in her work. So many of her characters don't have mothers in her work because I think her mother was so important to her that it was easier for her to avoid writing about it or trying to capture her mother or mother characters in her work because she had such complicated feelings in some ways I'm making a leap here, but in some ways her relationship to her mother and it's complicated nature was similar to her relationship to Columbus, Georgia in that she took it with her everywhere she went. She couldn't escape it. She was greatly indebted to it, but very ambivalent about it. And I think it's the same way in relation to her mother. Her father is this sort of sad character in a way because he worked so much and was out of the house so much his children didn't really have much of a relationship with their father. And so he is just like Frankie Adams father in the member of the wedding. He's just this figure who sort of appears every evening you have a meal with but otherwise he doesn't have that much influence on his life. And I'm afraid I think that's what Carson's father's influence was on her. But bless him for coming up with the money to send her to New York because that really changed everything for her. It was that place she was able to get away to that changed everything for her. Well, and he also gave her a fictional father something to do. They were watch repairman and jewelry shop owners and member of the wedding and the heart is only hundred. I've always thought that was interesting because as you say, her mother was such a much bigger part of her life. We have someone from Georgia College and State University asking why do you think the Carson and Flannery O'Connor had such a distaste for each other? Which I have always, I mean, I have my thoughts about this but many of you may know that Flannery O'Connor wrote a review of Carson's last book and said it's the worst book I ever read which seems just nasty and also unfair. But yeah, they, well, and Carson thought that Flannery O'Connor had basically like Harper Lee and other Southern writers been ripping her off. So I don't know, any thoughts on that? I have one thought which is that recently the New Yorker published an article talking about Flannery O'Connor's letters and what comes through from that article and apparently from the letters which I have not read where that is that Flannery O'Connor had a lot of pretty racist ideas that she held throughout her life and that she voiced pretty openly and she used a lot of racist slurs in language in her letters. And so based on what we've talked about with Carson McCullers and her work and her stance on race relations and how openly she wrote about that I can't imagine it was easy for the two of them to find common ground. But the same thing kind of goes for that review of Clock Without Hands because that book is about interracial relationships and that book is about racialized violence and KKK violence. So you can see how it wouldn't necessarily resonate with a reader like Flannery O'Connor but that's just kind of some new archival things that have leaked out that I find interesting for thinking about their relationship. Karen, I remember you saying to me that when we were discussing who's the most famous rider in Georgia? You were surprised for me to say that I thought probably Flannery O'Connor was more famous than Carson McCullers and you said what? What made you say that? You know, it's interesting. I just don't know her work that well and I think the little bit of her work I have read, I was not that drawn to it. So, but I remember when we had a tree of rocket cloud and we were taking you around to film festivals, we, I was really shocked and I think we talked about this a little bit how there were some festivals in the eastern part of Georgia that turned down the film and I just thought why would they, why would they turn down this film? And I remember saying to one of the festivals this is your daughter, you know, this is your, you know, this is the Georgia rider and somebody said in a very snipy, snippy sort of way to me, Flannery O'Connor is our daughter, you know, is your daughter. And I thought, okay, but you mean it's an either-or you can't have, you can't have two daughters. But it was sort of like, if they were going to embrace Carson somehow or other it was, there was some sort of demarcation line there. Well, you know- You surprised me and I had no idea. I didn't know much about them. Yeah. Well, Flannery O'Connor, even though she was Roman Catholic she did embrace organized religion. I mean, her old work is based on it. And I don't know. I wonder if maybe that is why some Georgians would embrace Flannery O'Connor when they might not embrace Carson colors. You know, I don't know. What do you think about that, Carlos? Do you think maybe that's part of the- No, that's, I think it's even broader than simply organized religion. It's sort of establishment, you could say. Yeah. Flannery O'Connor was much more of a, despite how unorthodox in some ways she was and unorthodox some of her work was and it's sort of more Gothic aspects. She played the game and followed the rules in a way that Carson never would and never did and couldn't tolerate. So one was an out, one had stepped outside of the system and the other was sort of happy to remain within it and be a bit radical from within and the other simply didn't want to play the game. And so you can see why Carson would be the one that would be rejected and the other be somewhat embraced. Yeah. And Jen here, I think is a good question for you. Says that Carson's great subject was love. Does anyone have an opinion on who Carson's great love was? I think based on the research I did, I'd have to say Mary Mercer without a doubt. Or so then Ann-Marie Clorox-Schwarzenbach, you think? I think so, yeah. Because of what I read in the letters and in the therapy transcripts at Columbus and because of the in excess of 50 different little cards that accompany flowers that Carson sent to Mary, it's kind of inarguable, at least from my perspective. Carlos or Karen, do you guys have any thought on that? Yeah, I think I agree with Jen in that Carson's life, Carson's life somewhat tragically was a search for sort of parody in love or was a search for reciprocity in love. And maybe too much is made of the sort of tragic nature of that and the various people throughout her life that she was in love with who didn't return it. And I say, that's why I would say Ann-Marie Clorox-Schwarzenbach was not in the great love of her. She was certainly madly in love with Ann-Marie Clorox-Schwarzenbach, but it wasn't mutual, very mutual, let's say, and that was heartbreaking for her. But Dr. Mercer was a different story. There was this sort of mutuality of respect and love and affection between the two of them that maybe the only time Carson encountered that in her life and unfortunately it was just the last eight years of her life that that was the case, but bless her for finally having that toward the end of her life. And it made all the difference. I think she would have died in maybe 1958 or 1959 if she hadn't met Dr. Mercer. I think she gave her the gift of almost a decade of life. All right, Karen, I don't know if you have thoughts on that or if you would have a... Not really, I don't, you know, I having not read the letters and stuff, I don't really have a very strong sense of that private part of your life. Yeah, yeah. Well, are there any other final thoughts that you would like to share about Carson McCullers then before we go, Karen? Oh, Nick, I'm sorry, before I forget, there's one question in the Q&A too, don't you? All right, I'm sorry, I missed it. Where is that? It's in the Q&A, not in the chat. Oh, okay. Ah, the Q&A. Jen, you describe so movingly your experience of living in Carson's Columbus house and your absorbing autobiography of Carson McCullers. I have a whole new appreciation for the clothing we all wear. Could you speak to the way Carson's environment affected your reading of her fiction? Yeah, I think in terms of the clothing, which you mentioned, cataloging her clothes at the Ransom Center gave me, I felt like a totally new insight into aspects of her life that didn't come through in other parts of the archive in any of the published work. And those were insights about her illness and kind of how she carried herself, but also about her fashion and her style that were amazing. And if anyone in the audience has not Google and Mitch searched Carson McCullers, you absolutely should to see some of these outfits. And so that was hugely impactful on my thinking about her and my interest in her. But the house itself had, I mean, as I'm sure the other panelists could attest, it has a very strong feeling and a very strong feeling of history. And it's hard, it's hard not to kind of fall down the rabbit hole of imagining scenes from her books in the house. And I even caught myself doing that, imagining that kitchen scene in member of the wedding taking place in the kitchen in the house. But then of course, having to remind myself, well, things about the house have changed. And I don't know what of the house was even here at that time. And I don't know if she was imagining this kitchen when she wrote about it, but it's just so easy when you're in a space like that to start making those conflations. But yeah, and then just kind of the climate of Columbus, the humidity, the pollen, things like that. Just what someone mentioned about what flowers grow there and when did they grow? It was kind of being able to see that, being able to see the magnolia tree outside the window and just feel like I had a glimpse into where she spent her formative years. Any final thoughts then, Jen, that you would want to share? No, I don't think so. OK, well, I'll catch you off, Karen. What were you going to say? Oh, the only thing you know that that I think had jumped into my thinking was, you know, just another because we were talking themes and some of these sort of beautiful themes, just remembering a theme that runs throughout The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, which really has to do with connection, like when two people connect and that sort of feeling that she had that there are certain people who are meant to make a connection. And yeah, it wasn't related to gender or race or any sort of common necessarily anything that with commonality, it was just that it was almost like she writes about souls, you know, like souls that are meant to make a connection with each other. And it just seems to be such a strong theme that she has that I think, you know, she speaks for a lot of us who also feel these things, but we just have never been able to really quite articulate it as clearly and as beautifully as she does. No, I agree completely. And I feel that is her big thing, right? This need to connect, this drive to connect and it's what drove her, it seems to me. And it's the big thing that runs through that book and all of her work. Carlos, do you have final thoughts that you'd like to share? Well, picking up on something that Karen just said that these connections that Carson shows us happening and that she valued so much between people, by reading her work, you can have that same connection with her. And it's interesting that some people respond so strongly to her work, shows that sort of inaction, you know, across time via her pages. So, you know, we're hosted by a library tonight. We're here thanks to the generosity of someone who clearly cared a great deal about reading and encouraging people to read great literature. I would just like to end by saying if there's anyone who's watching us, who hasn't read Carson's work to please do so because you never know, you might have the same kind of sort of electric response that I had when I first read her or other people have had when they first read her. So if anything can come from our conversation today, I would like it to be people to be inspired to continue to read and share her work. Yes, and stay tuned for the collected letters of Carson McCullers, which Carlos Duzes is currently working on editing. When do we're gonna see that, Carlos? When do you think that'll be? I wish you hadn't asked me that, Nick. I think they will probably be out sometime in 2020. 2024. Okay, all right. And if you haven't already, read Jen Chaplin's book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, finalist for the National Book Award. And you can go to various places now. I think it's called Canva, isn't that right, Karen? And you can see... Canopy. Canopy, canopy, thank you. Yes, canopy. And see the beautiful film, A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud directed by Karen Allen. And also a screenplay adapted from the short story by Karen Allen. So, and it's wonderful. Okay, Adam, I think we've answered all the questions, haven't we? Yes, and I'm gonna pop in here, especially I'll turn my video on. Hello again, everyone. And I just thought that was fabulous. I really do. I feel like your souls are all connected in the same way that Karen mentioned that our author tonight was connected. And Nick, you did a fabulous job moderating and anytime you wanna moderate one of our literary sessions, please feel free to. And thank you all so much for coming. And thanks to our audience. We can't see, but we know you're out there. And I just wanna say thanks. And I hope that we'll be able to meet again sometime. And I have a long list of Carson McCullers things to read. She was one of my heroes just like Karen's in high school back in the early 70s. And I reread The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I was just blown away. It was, you know, 50 years, so long time, but she's just been an amazing writer. So thank you again and have a great night, everybody. Okay. Thank you. Bye-bye. Carlos, are you in room? I am. You are. What's the feeling over there? Is there you feeling awfully close to the madness? Well, it is. It feels like it's right next door, to be honest. And we have Ukrainian students here at the university and there's a very large Ukrainian community here in Italy, especially here in Rome. So yeah, I mean, people are coming together and people are doing fundraisers and doing all kinds of things. And luckily, Italy is very generous in accepting refugees into the country. So they've already agreed to host a huge number of, because there's so many family members here already, they're letting anyone who's here, who's Ukrainian to sponsor their entire families to come if they want. So we have a lot of people coming in at the moment. So yeah, so it does. It feels too close, to be honest. I'm gonna sign off, but it was great seeing you all. Okay. Great seeing you, Carlos. Great seeing you, Karen. Thank you again. Thank you, Nick. Okay. Bye.