 Good evening everyone. I'm Johnna Gifford. I'm the Chief of Adult Library Services here at the Boston Public Library. Thank you so much for making your way on this rainy evening, kind of cold tonight. And you found us in Rab Hall and we're delighted to see you in person and also may I say thank you to the Arlington International Film Festival for seeking us out as a partner. We're delighted to support your event and and what better way to do this than to have a wonderful author and journalist with us this evening. I'm going to let April who's with us tonight. She's the Executive Director of the Arlington International Film Festival, April Rank. She's going to introduce our guests, but let me introduce April. April is the Executive Director of the Arlington International Film Festival that will be presenting its 12th edition this November at the Capitol Theatre in Arlington, Massachusetts. More than a film festival, it celebrates the arts and has a mission of fostering appreciation for different cultures by exploring the lives of people around the globe through independent film. With specific focus on programming that promotes social justice, human rights and environmental climate change issues, which is a common platform for us here at the Boston Public Library this year in particular, we have a programmatic theme this year of environmental justice. So we're super pleased to partner with you and to present this evening's conversation. Just a little housekeeping. If you're looking for a restroom, there are restrooms right at the back of this floor. We will have a book signing. Our friends from Trident Booksellers on Newbury Street have come over and there's a table. So Professor Walker will be able to sign your books later and if you need any assistance, I'll be here. There's a question-and-answer period after the interview. So April and I will be walking around with mics to take your questions. All right. No further ado. Let me introduce April Rank. Thank you so much. Thank you, John. So welcome to this evening's program and as John has said, we are an international film festival, but we have a history of celebrating the arts in its various forms and this evening being a celebration of creative writing that has the ability to transport us out of ourselves and allow us to see and understand others. Our thanks to the Boston Public Library for seeing the value in this event and their willingness to partner with special thanks to Kristen Mott, the program's librarian and Andrew Maxie, the adult program's support administrator. Our sponsors for this program are the Massachusetts Cultural Council, CNI Real Estate and Social Equity Access Fund. The moderator for this evening's conversation is Crystal Haines, an Arlington resident and an Emmy award-winning journalist and the Weekend Anchor for Boston 25 News. Crystal holds a BS in broadcast journalism from Emerson Northeastern's universities, college of arts, media and design, where she is a part-time lecturer. Our guest speaker, Gerald Walker, is originally from Chicago, now a resident of Massachusetts and as a professor of creative writing at Emerson College, I hope it's okay to call you a Bosonian. So Professor Walker is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and is published in magazines such as Creative Nonfiction, The Missouri Review, The Harvard Review, Mother Jones, The Iowa Review and The Oxford American and he has been widely anthologized including five times in the best American essays. Walker is the author of Street Shadows, A Memoir of Race, Rebellion and Redemption, recipient of the 2011 Penn New England LL Winship Award for nonfiction and named a best memoir of the year by Kirkus Reviews. The World in Flames, A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult and his latest book, How to Make a Slave in Other Essays. It was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in nonfiction and winner of the 2020 Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction. He has received fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the James A. Michener Foundation. Walker's doctorate is in interdisciplinary studies combining the fields of American literary, African American literature, African American history and creative writing and please now join me in welcoming to the stage Crystal Haynes and Professor Gerald Walker. By more of my heels, I would have taken the stairs. Oh, there you go. Hi everybody, good evening. Oh, right. So Dr. Walker. Gerald, okay. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you about this book because the topics, your experiences, I know this is your third book, but it was very exciting for me to read as well. So first I want to talk about this title. What made you, I mean it's very provocative, right? So what, how'd you come up with it and why, why this title? The title refers to a famous line from Frederick Douglass who after he was in a fight with his slave master or before he had a fight with him. When he was tired of his master beating him, he said to him, you have seen how a man was made a slave, you shall see how a slave was made a man. And that was the moment when he decided that he would no longer allow someone to treat him as if he were a subhuman. I used that title because it is in some way a metaphor for the themes I address in the book. Mainly how at some point I had to decide that I could no longer be a slave to race in a way that was harmful to me, which is to say to constantly see race and everything that transpired to be so concerned about racism and oppression that it created a sense of paranoia in me. And so while Frederick Douglass reached a point where he threw off the treatment of his master, I had to throw off the cloak of racism as being a prevailing theme in my life. So this is your third book. Yes. Why did you particularly choose this format of it being a book of essays and also some of the themes? Well, I have always loved essays. My first book, A Memoir, was originally a collection of essays. Okay. No one wanted to buy a collection of essays from an author who was unknown. And so every time I sent the manuscript out or my agent did, they would write back and say we don't want a collection of essays, but if you write a memoir, we'll publish it. And so after many, many rejections and desperation started to set in, I decided that I would convert all of the essays to chapters and call the book A Memoir. So while it's so does a memoir, it is in fact a collection of essays. After that ordeal, I decided for my second book to go straight to memoir. So I wrote the memoir and for this book, as it turns out, I didn't sit down to write a collection of essays. These books, these essays were written over the course of 16 years. So the oldest essay was published in 2006, the most recent in 2020. So it appeared to me a couple of years ago. I think I might have enough essays to compile and have a book. And so that's what I did. Collected them, gave them to my publisher. She sent them out. They were rejected by everybody over and over again. And finally, after more than 20 rejections, someone took it and it's done quite well. So, you know, I have friend who's in publishing. She's like, oh essays, no one wants to read essays. But this book has really gotten a lot of acclaim, especially given, I think, the climate that we're in now, right? So a lot of these topics are in zeitgeist as you will. And you're dealing with things like bias in the medical profession, Michael Jackson and other things like that. I mean, did you select, as I imagine you've written a number of essays over that time period that you've been a writer, did you select them because you knew it might hit a certain note at this time when they were being published? No. Oh, okay. No, I just, I wrote what what he occupied me. If something happens or I witness something or there's something in the news that I can't stop thinking about, I write about it. For instance, my Michael Jackson essay was written because of one of my students. This was back, I don't know, right after Michael Jackson died, which was right after I joined Facebook. I was not on Facebook and my students thought that I was pretty uncool because of it. And so they insisted, these are my undergrads at my prior university, they insisted that I join Facebook and so I, they set up my account. The very first post I saw was from one of those 20-year-old undergrads right after Michael Jackson died saying, good riddance. He's just a freak. Who cares about Michael Jackson anyway? Which was a knife in my heart because I love Michael Jackson and it occurred to me that this 20-year-old only knew Michael Jackson when he was a freak. And he was a freak. I don't deny that he became a freak, it's a fact, but he wasn't always a freak. He wasn't born a freak and I knew Michael Jackson long before his glove and his animals and the kids and all of that stuff. I knew Michael Jackson when he was an icon for the black community. And so I decided to write an essay in response to her and I titled it before grief. Meaning before the grief that I felt at Michael's passing, but also before the grief of seeing Michael transform himself into something that was unrecognizable to people like me who saw him as an enormously important cultural figure. What do you think, and I imagine all of these essays resonate to a different part of you, what do you think? Which essay in this book really I guess sits with you most often? Probably the essay Breathe, which is about my son having seizures and being mistreated while we sought to see what was causing the seizures. I remember when I finished writing that essay, I read it to my wife as my habit. I'll finish a piece and I'll read it out loud to her. I read that piece to her and when she stopped crying she said do not ever read that essay to me again. And when I stopped crying I said, okay. Because it's a really it's a it's a heart-rendering piece. It was it was difficult to go through. It was more difficult in some ways to write about it. Because when you write about something you really sit with it and when you experience it, it happens over a certain period and then it's kind of over with. But when you write about something you dwell on it, you think about it, you revise it, and I spent over a year writing that piece. So for an incident that lasted seven hours in real time stayed with me for a year as I wrote and wrote and revised it. In talking about, I wrote down this quote from the book and it's anger is often a prelude to a joke as there is broad understanding that the triumph over this destructive emotion lay in finding its punchline. Talk to us a little bit about the concept of that. Well, when I was growing up on the South Side of Chicago my friends and I would often experience various hardships in certain ways. Sometimes police brutality. There were times when police would chase us and they would catch us and they would beat us. And a lot of different bad things happened. And if we allowed those incidents to stay harmful to us in some ways they would destroy us. And so there was always this impulse for us to try to see how can we make light of this. Is there something in this incident that we can find the humor in? And that's simply no different than what many writers have done. My mentor in fact James Allen McPherson spoke about the importance of finding the comic in the tragic. That life is nothing but a combination of the two. It's not always good. It's not always bad. It's not always sad. It's not always funny. There's a mixture of these things. And if you can find a way to incorporate that in your work, at least that's my goal, then it allows people to deal with the reality of life, which is sometimes kind of bleak, but also to help relief from it by expressing some joy or happiness on the other side of the pain. Because I think about this in the context of, you know, all of the racial uprising that happened over the last few years and I think about the motivation toward activism during these acts of racism that we see, you know, on this very public space. But I think I read that quote thinking not everyone has access to activism in their life. Not everyone has access to be able to you know, be protesting in the street to post it. But they need to deal and reckon with the oppression that they feel. And I thought about that when when reading that quote, much of your book in that, because not everyone's going to be out on the street, not everyone's going to run for office. So a lot of regular folks just have to deal with what's happening in their lives. You have to deal with it, but you also have to get a break from it. And that's kind of what I try to offer people in my work. In the climate we're in now, the last thing I want to do is to read something that echoes some of the difficulties that we're experiencing and only echoes them. But doesn't offer anything positive or hopeful to go along with it. So I want to give both. I don't want to be all jokes and humor. I'm not David Sideris, but I also don't want to be Tanahasi Coates, who works very hard to make sure we recognize that the world's a bleak, bleak place. It's a combination of the two. Do you think that balance is important, especially in this space? I think it is. I think it is. But not everybody does. I mean, some people want to weep and cry all the time. They should not read my work. Speaking of reading your work, I know we'd ask you to read a passage and I wonder if you would do that for us. I read a couple of paragraphs, the essay Dragon Slayers, which is about my professor James Allen McPherson, who was my mentor at Iowa and is largely responsible for everything that I've done regarding writing that's been successful. Dragon Slayers, I was at a Christmas party with a man who wanted me to hate him. I should hate all whites he felt for what they have done to me. I thought hard about what whites have done to me. I was 40, old enough to have accumulated a few unpleasant racial encounters, but nothing of any lasting significance came to mind. The man was astonished at this response. How about slavery? he asked. I explained as politely as I could that I had not been a slave. But to fill its effects, he snapped, racism, discrimination and prejudice will always be a problem for you in this country. White people, he insisted, are your oppressors. I glanced around the room just as one of my oppressors happened by. She was holding a tray of canapes. She offered me one. I asked the man if, as a form of reparations, I should take two. It was midway through my third year in academia. I had survived mountains of papers, apathetic students, cantankerous colleagues, boring meetings, sleep deprivation, and two stalkers. And now I was up against a man who had been mysteriously transported from 1962. He even looked apart with lavish sideburns and solid black-rimmed glasses. He wasn't an academic, but rather the spouse of one. In fact, he had, no job at all, a dual act of defiance he felt against the patriarchal and capitalistic society. He was a fun person to talk with, especially if, like me, you enjoyed driving white liberals up the wall. And the surest way to do that, if you were black, was to deny them the chance to pity you. Do you find when you're in literary spaces, what's someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates or others, that you find yourself in a defensive position at all, or you just sort of disengage from that? I don't spend any time on that at all. I mean, I respect him and his work. I simply have a different point of view, although I held his point of view for many, many years when I first started writing. That I felt that it was my responsibility to blame and to express anger and to express rage and in some ways to present a kind of hopeless forecast for what the country is and can be. And James McPherson, and I don't apologize for mentioning him so much because he's that important to me. But James McPherson made me realize that that outlook is simply not true to any of us. That nothing is all bad. Nothing is all bleak. Nothing is all despairing. And I had to reshape my thinking before I could have my work have the complexity that I hope it achieved by trying to strike more of a balance. But I do recognize the impulse for some writers to attempt to change society by pointing out the ways in which we're flawed and the things that we've done wrong. There's certainly a place for that. But I take a different approach. Do you find your work is received differently, say, pre George Floyd versus after George Floyd or pre Ferguson versus after? I, one of the things that National Book Award Committee, one of the things that they said about my work is that it provided a welcomed relief from all of what we were going through. That because it gave us an occasion to smile and laugh when I was reading I heard some of you chuckle. I appreciate that. But I provided some chuckles and I provided people the opportunity to say let's take a break from all of the stuff that's upsetting us. See if we can smile and enjoy life a little bit and then we'll get back to the nitty gritty business of trying to correct injustices in this country. Talk to me about your writing process a little bit. Well, it's a job for me. And when I hear people talk about writing and creating art as if it's a mysterious process where you sort of walk around in your robes and wait for the muse to strike, that's not the way it is. I mean, to me it's a job. And I treat it like that. And I learned that when I was in a writer's workshop with one of my professors, Frank Conroy, who talked about the importance of doing the work every day as if you're punching a clock. And he spoke of people who he knew who in the morning would get up and put on their suit and walk into the other room instead of the computer and write. And when they finished writing they would go and they would take off their suit. So I learned to write every day without fail. And so if you are looking for me at any point, if you want to find me at 6 a.m. you can look in my office, I'll be at my computer. I'm there from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. without fail seven days a week. It doesn't matter if it's someone's birthday or holiday or whatever is happening. When I travel I bring my computer and my family knows it took a long time to train them, especially my wife, who didn't see this pursuit as being something that you couldn't simply pause whenever she wanted you to. So it's my job and so I have my block of time and everybody recognizes that I have to go to work and I get the work done. Was it difficult to train yourself in that way or the discipline that it takes? It was difficult at first until my competitive genes kicked in. And I want to be the best writer to have ever written. And you can't do that if you don't put the hours in. And one of the things that I learned when I was at Iowa was that this is a competition, that not everybody is going to get the editor's attention. And I know that editors have stacks and stacks and stacks of magazines to read. They have stacks of manuscripts to read. They have all of that. Why yours over someone else's? There's no reason unless you have done the work and you've put in the time and you've spent every effort you possibly can to perfect your craft so that when you have to make that difficult decision to choose three manuscripts out of a stack of 300, yours is in that three. And that's my goal. I want to always be in that three. And I felt that when I was in my graduate program and I haven't stopped. And I suppose in some ways I'm confessing that I need therapy because I am still competitive in that way when the National Book Awards just announced their finalist today and I checked that list to see who's there. When the best American essays anthology comes out every year I check to see if my classmates are there. And I'm always checking to see where the competition is and where am I in relation to them. And maybe that speaks less of what people imagine being an artist is than it should. But I don't think you will find many people in the arts who have achieved a certain level of distinction who are not obsessed with doing the best that they can and being better than everybody else at that pursuit. And as you see yourself, you know, writing for many years to come, you know, in different places, hopefully you stay in Boston, but of course, you know, I'm sure your work will take many places. Do you see your writing changing or evolving into anything else? Yes. My next collection of essays is a little less about me, which is difficult for me. So I'm writing a collection of essays that are addressing more current events. I'm still prominent in the pieces. I address them all on a personal level. But I am writing about more current events. I just finished a piece recently about Dave Chappelle and the controversy surrounding his Netflix series. And I'm writing more about Trump. I'm writing about January 6th. I'm writing about these events. So that's a departure from what I've done in the past. When you watch the news, and this is probably a selfish question on my part, but when you watch the news, I guess, what do you take from that that then you take into your writing space? It depends. I mean, if I see something on the news that I think is interesting, that I can work with, that I will incorporate it. I'll give an example. There's a television commercial about that has, I forgot what it's for, but Haley Berry is in it and she stresses Cleopatra. My wife knows, so it's okay that I say this, that I'm obsessed with Haley Berry. And so one of the pieces I wrote recently begins with me watching that commercial and asking my son, do you know who that is? And he said, I don't know who that is. And I said, that's Haley Berry. And I recreated that event into the start of an essay, which goes into my life in Chicago. It would have been different had I been born and raised where she is. And that would have taken me somewhere else. So the whole essay is based simply on that commercial that I saw on TV. Interesting. I won't ask you to critique our writing in television news because I know it's terrible. Well, I would love to open it up to the folks in the audience if you have questions for Gerald. Yes. We're going to run the mic to you. One second, please. When you write from six to eight and six to ten every morning, do you write in your handwriting or you are using a specific writing formatting program? No, I just use my computer. Yeah, but how do you revise and how many revisions? And why did you look? Why did you have to wait for 20 submissions and refusal instead of self-publishing and then success? Well, I'll be frank. Nobody wants to read a self-published book necessarily. Some people do. There is a certain level of credibility that comes with having a publisher out of New York. And so that's the starting point. And that's where my agent went. You start there and you work your way down. And for many of us, there is a level below which we won't go. And I hope I'm not being offensive to you, but self-publishing is that level for me. I'm not going to self-publish my work. I can find publishers for it. It sometimes takes a while. Any other questions? I was interested when you were talking about kind of like the impact your writing has in the cultural context right now and the responsibility that you take, you know, not preaching about how to fix racism but maybe giving some levity. And I was mostly wondering if you are considering that when you're writing or if you're simply writing or if you even see that as your responsibility as a writer to speak to a cultural moment or as your responsibility to write? I see my responsibility is to tell a good story. I don't have a responsibility in my view to weigh in on social issues. I write about race because race interests me, not because I feel I'm obligated to or I feel I have a responsibility to. When race stops interesting me, I will write about something else. But right now I find it fascinating and I think it's the perfect vehicle because we're all obsessed by it and we can't seem to get beyond it. It's the perfect vehicle to use to discuss any number of things. So I can use race as a tool to talk about matters that go beyond race but I don't write about race as an end of itself. It's a means to an end. And the end that I'm trying to seek or trying to reach is to talk about what we are all going through in some ways as human beings. The piece I mentioned about my son who was suffering from seizures and experienced racism in the medical profession is in fact about racism in the medical profession on the surface. Below that is about the pain of feeling helpless when someone you love is suffering. We've all experienced that. You may not have had a doctor say something racist to you or a nurse do something racist to you but you have all felt what it means to not be able to provide help for someone who needs it. And in that way my story is a story about all of us. And not just about the experience that my wife and I have with our son. Boy I'm really saying some good stuff. We should have a pact. I'm wasting all this wisdom. I'm not wasting it. I'm glad you're here. But 300 more people would be good. That's okay. I've said it before. I'll say it again. I'm a former student of yours. So I know you a little more than maybe other people here. But something I've admired in your writing and your teaching is an emotional balance which you spoke to a little bit earlier of nothing is fully happy or fully sad. And I was wondering how that plays into your writing process. Are you just like that as a person or do you come into an essay extremely angry expecting it to be angry the whole way through? And how basically how do you get to that balance and are you looking for it or does it just happen? Well I mean it's a combination of things. That's a really great question. When I wrote my first book there's a lot less humor in it than in the last book because I resisted it. I am by nature kind of a silly hopefully funny person. That's who I am. But when I first started writing I felt I did feel a responsibility to address racial issues and I did feel it was my responsibility to condemn certain behavior. It's difficult to do that when you have an impulse to make light of something. And so I really had to smother that part of me in order to write those essays. Those essays were fine. It wasn't until I decided to allow my full personality on the page to allow the humor to work its way into my work that I think my work improved. And so I don't go into my pieces thinking oh I'm going to write some funny stuff today. I simply try to tell a story and as my personality alerts me to the humor in a situation I respond to it. I incorporate it but I don't force it and I don't look for it. I simply do what my instinct as a writer and as my personality dictates on the page. I know a lot of writers read a lot. Who do you like to read? I like to read fiction and short stories more than essays to be perfectly honest. But I do, I do, there are a lot of essays too I admire. A great deal. One of my favorite right now is a writer named Hanif Adurakib who wrote an essay collection called A Little Devil in America which is absolutely fantastic. I've been reading Zadie Smith. Just started reading her latest essay collection called Intimations which is she's absolutely brilliant. Roxane Gay is one of my favorite writers. There's just some fantastic, fantastic essays right now. And Imani Perry who's a brilliant writer, she wrote a memoir called Breathe a couple of years ago who just today was named finalist for the National Book Award in an unfiction, although she is my competition, I am rooting for her because she's absolutely brilliant. Any other questions? Are you guys saving it for the book signing? I have a comment. It's a riff off of the personality piece. But what really impressed me about your writing was your humorous personality takes on events and it made it so much more palatable and I was able to kind of see into a situation that I otherwise would not have been able to because of you making it a little bit lighter, a little bit. I was able to penetrate into the situation a little more fully. So I really appreciated that. Thank you, thank you. Professor Walker, could I ask you, it's a weird question but do you feel that this particular moment that we're in culturally is different than let's say in your life growing up and you've been reading and you've gone to school and you've voted in elections? Is there something particular about right now that moves you as a writer? I have to say, and I'm not really an optimistic person but I felt a tremendous sense of optimism when Barack Obama was elected. As many people did, I'm not unique in that way. But I really thought that this country was headed to a place that was unimaginable to my parents and to my grandparents that we were finally going to address some social issues in a way that would be sustainable and positive. But lately, I'm kind of terrified. And I just think that we have regressed so much in so many ways that I would not be surprised at all if another civil war is in the making. I simply can almost sense it coming. That worries me and I will write about it. I'll find a way to write about it and that's probably why I'm writing more about Trump than I would have in the past because I do want to help sound the alarm something bad is happening and it needs to be addressed and we need to talk about it and we need to, the artists in some ways are responsible to capturing this moment in whatever medium they work in to draw attention to it. And even if you do it with some levity at some points but I do think people need to pay attention to what's going on because it's frightening. So were you talking about putting your personality before like your obligations when you're writing your book or what you felt were your obligations? I guess can you describe more about that? Like, I don't know. Like, did you ever get like a sense of insecurity when you sort of like, you push or like put personality? Yeah. That's a really great question and it explains why I began as a fiction writer instead of a non-fiction writer because of those insecurities. I didn't want to put myself on the page for all to see and so I wrote fiction so that I could disguise my life, my choices, my mistakes, all the things that I did that I didn't really want revealed and so insecurity is a huge part of any artist's work day but at some point you have to get beyond that and at some point you have to recognize that we all have insecurities. We've all made mistakes. We've all done things we're ashamed of and in being honest about that is the way you can redeem yourself. One of the things that my wife explained to me when I was writing fiction constantly and she knew that the stories were really stories about my life. I simply changed the city, I changed the name but they were true stories and she said, why are you hiding? Absolutely nothing to hide from. Look at who you are, look at who you've become. Your story is not a story of shame, your story is a story of triumph and I think it took me many, many years to recognize that about my work and about myself and the more I focus on that the less the insecurities work their way into what I do. So when you sit down every day in your office to write are you always able to write every day and do you sometimes start fresh with a new idea every day or until something, an idea is really taking mass and moving forward? I don't have writer's block if that's what you're asking but I do write poorly and that will have to be deleted and so I can get it on the page but I can recognize during revisions that a lot of what I've done is no good and will have to be deleted so I produce but there are times when I will concentrate I stare at my computer and I'll think about the sentence I'm trying to write for several hours when I write for four hours a day it doesn't mean that I write and it results in a certain quantity I can write for four hours a day and produce one sentence but if it's a good sentence that was a damn good four hours and that's what I'm striving for I'm trying to do my best in that amount of time now there also becomes a point I've discovered when you can get too comfortable in seeking that one sentence in four hours and if you do that you'll write one book you're 90 years old and that's all you'll have so when I find that I've gotten into too much of a routine of going for the one brilliant sentence I will give myself a word count minimum per day sometimes it's 300 words, sometimes it's 500 words but I will have to get those words on the page even if I know they're not great but I will have to reach that quota before I leave my computer but I don't stay beyond the four hours either so I know when I'm there for three and a half hours I only have a hundred words that I've got to get moving and I'll write them the next day I'll come back and I might delete them all but I might not because there might be something word salvaging in that what I produced and that's the importance of forcing yourself to get the words on the page and that's also why it takes me months and months and months to write an essay many of these pieces are very very short I write short pieces they take a lot of time and I will spend sometimes years on a single essay and I will often stop writing a piece when I feel like I just don't know how to solve it and I see essays as puzzles there's no such thing as a failed essay there's simply an essay that you have not yet solved you have not yet figured out its solution and sometimes I have to take a break from it that happened with my essay Breathe about my son I put it away for six months and I worked on something else and I went back to it it was cold I revised it got as far as I could get I found a few more pieces to the puzzle but not all of them and I put it away and I worked on something else and that way I'm constantly working on pieces if you look at my computer right now you would see probably 15 incomplete or unsolved puzzles they're all there and I'm working on a new one now this one's done I'll go back I'll try something else and see if I have figured it out yet and if not I'll move on to the next thing but I'm constantly constantly going back to pieces that I have not yet solved because I'm determined to solve them at some point any last question? I'm really curious before you took your first writing class did you feel that you had a talent for writing or did you really want to write and want to learn how to write better or how did you come into that writer's position that you're in now I came to it by accident mainly because I was bad at everything else that I tried and when I started my community college I went to a community college I took courses in math and I failed them I took courses in science and I failed those I took courses in politics and I failed that and I failed them because I just lost interest in them and I didn't care it's just another F what does it matter? and then I took a creative writing course quite randomly as I had taken any other courses and my creative writing professor after I wrote my first short story he told me you have talent and you need to be at the Iowa Writers Workshop and it wasn't that I heard him tell me that I was a writer I heard him tell me that I was good at something if he had told me that I was good at making shoes I'd be up here right now with a handful of shoes trying to sell them to you but he told me I was good at something and so I wanted to stick with it because I had not found anything else to be good at and that was enough for me and when he told me that he would spend his off time working with me I accepted it and I worked with him he worked with me for a full year before he rented a car because he couldn't afford one and he drove me to Iowa City the campus and as we were driving back to Chicago and I mentioned that I would like to go to Iowa but I couldn't afford it he offered to pay my tuition and he did so that's how I came to be a writer because there was someone who believed that I was good at something and I wanted to prove him right Professor, when you write a book do you think who is going to read your book phrase-wise? No, I don't have an audience in mind I have prizes in mind and I want to win a Pulitzer Prize I want to win a National Book Award I want to win a MacArthur Prize and I want to win a Nobel Prize so if I have an audience that's what it is I'm simply trying to do my best to make my mark and you make your mark by getting the attention of people who pass out the goodies Alright everyone well, I keep on to say Dr. Walker Gerald, thank you so much for your time and you'll be signing some books outside of the auditorium here Thank you everyone Thank you very much and if you want to purchase a book Professor Walker will be signing the books as well Thank you again for coming Thank you