 Well good afternoon everyone. Welcome to Alden Library here at Ohio University and welcome to another edition of Authors at Alden. We're pleased this afternoon to welcome award-winning author and assistant professor of English here at Ohio University, Kevin Hayworth. Kevin, whose latest essay collection, Famous Drownings in Literary History, won him an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council and is a former executive editor of the Ohio University and Swallow Press. In addition to his nonfiction work, he's an accomplished fiction writer and creator of character. His novel, The Discontinuity of Small Things, was published in 2005 and he's quoted as saying, I'm very aware of the use of dialogue, shifting scenes, shifting the reader's attention, but my essay work is nonfiction. I'm not making anything up. Consequently, the title of the topic today is, I'm not just making this up. If I even create of writers, need the library. Joining Kevin in this conversation is Lorraine Walkna. Lorraine is Ohio University's library's instructor and coordinator of instruction and so please join me in welcoming Kevin and Lorraine. Thank you Scott. Thanks to all of you who are here, including my students who are here compulsorily, but I'm happy to see you anyway. I suggested to Lorraine, just so that, you know, I think it will help everybody understand the kind of work I'm doing. If I just read a couple of paragraphs out of the most recent books, so I don't know. Whenever I hear musicians interviewed, you know, I always think, didn't you like bring your guitar or something? Can't you just play some music? So I don't have a guitar, but I figure I'll let you hear some music of the writing and then I know Lorraine has some things that she wants to ask. So I'm gonna read just a couple of pages from an essay titled Plagues, which is set right here in Southeast Ohio. As I write this, I've just come from a Passover Seder for small children. At this age, religious education involves a lot of singing, loud percussion instruments, and plenty of room for hop-footed preschool dancing. Small children are demanding in the way as they receive spirituality. They sit still only briefly for narrative. Long explanations cause them to engage in a range of anti-authoritarian behavior, including, but not limited to, whining, spilling juice, hitting thy neighbor, or demanding to go home. So we kept the evening punchy and short, singing, clapping, a picture book about plagues and the wondrous escape from slavery across the sea. Then we all ate matzabal soup. My wife, a young and quite beautiful rabbi, knows a lot about the plagues. She knows, for example, that the ninth plague, Khoshech, was not just darkness for the Egyptians, but complete isolation and imprisonment. The darkness was so pregnant and heavy, she tells us on the way home, that it had force, even weight. Once it descended upon the Egyptian houses, no one could move. It blocked every sound. Everywhere was thick and absolutely black and so heavy that it held the Egyptians down in their chairs or pressed them against the walls. Each of them, alone in the dark, terrified with only their own thoughts for company. And the frogs, she says, they were everywhere. In the food, in the cabinets, in your underwear drawer, and all of them croaking all at once. Bat bullfrogs and tiny tree frogs and squat ugly bellowing toads, blasting every street and courtyard and bedroom with their terrible sounds. Have you heard a frog? She asks our son in the back seat. He has. He agrees that they are very loud. So you can imagine how painful this noise was, she says. My son loves this Midrash, the Jewish tradition of retelling and adding to stories. He loves their texture and their details, their inherent creativity. He wants to know more about how the Egyptians suffered. The burns from the hail, the itching from lice bites, the terrible rank smell of their dead cattle. How they could have endured all this nine times and not let us go. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. But here's what I want to know. Who is this man who wrote this book? Can you tell us a little bit of just who Kevin Hayworth is and how you started your writing career? What made you want to be a writer? Sure. And is that basic kind of trajectory? Sure. I grew up in New York. I went to college in New York. The year that I graduated college, I lived abroad for a year in Israel, which is very formative in my writing. I went to graduate school to be a fiction writer at Arizona State. I got my MFA there. And I imagine, you know, that I would be a fiction writer my whole life. When I was younger, I wasn't really comfortable writing about myself in a direct way. I had no interest in writing memoir. But then a couple of things happened. First of all, my son was born. And he interested me very much. And I found his ways kind of interesting to think about and talk about. And I wanted to kind of find some way to talk about that. And so I got just much more interested in nonfiction. But I was still not comfortable just writing about me or about us and our family. And so, you know, just sort of find a side way into our talk today. From the beginning, I always wanted to include information that was sort of outside our immediate narrative. It helped give shape to what I was thinking and help understand, you know, what our experience was like. And then, as my daughter was born a couple years later, then I had to write more because I had to write about her too or else it wouldn't be fair. So that's sort of where this book of essays came about. How long have you been here? I've been here for 11 years. I've had, I don't know, a whole CV's worth of jobs on this campus. I taught in the English department. As Scott mentioned, I, for three years I ran the OU Press now. I'm very lucky to be working with the Honors Tutorial College and University College. And I get to teach some really wonderful students, some of whom are here. So. Okay. All right, let me see where I want to head from here. Think Curie is anything else about? And you have a wife, two children. And you write every day? I do not write every day. I try to write at least a few times a week. It depends. I get really itchy when I don't write. I think I maybe get a little bit crabby too, although I'm probably not the person to testify to that. Part also just, you know, part of the reason why I started writing short essays, once we had kids, even though I finished my novel after my son was born, it's hard to focus on long projects when you have very small children. And the essays were a way to kind of deal with that. I could write seven to 10 page essays, sometimes three or four page essays and actually get them finished, you know, in the time period that I had. Okay. So I have some curiosities for you. I was wondering who were some of the writers or any other kind of a figure who influenced your writing? Yeah, I mean, for this book of essays, I have a lot of really direct influences. There's a really wonderful writer named Brian Doyle, who lives in Portland. He's Catholic, and he writes a lot about parenting from a Catholic perspective. And I'm not Catholic, but I find the energy that he brings to his work really, really powerful. And he also writes incredibly beautiful sentences, which I'm 100% for. So he's an important influence. On the other hand, there's a writer named Elliot Weinberger, also a nonfiction writer. He has a way of just bringing in the strangest facts into his essays that I've always found his work really compelling. And the writer named Maggie Nelson, she was here for Lit Fest a few years ago. She wrote a book called Blueettes, which I think in some ways is the most direct influence for me because it's both very personal, but it's all sort of spirals out of her interest in the color blue, which could seem like a kind of superficial exploration, but in her hands is very interesting and very layered and very deep. And I read that book a lot when I was working on this book. I'm going to focus more on your book, but I wanted to ask you a couple other outside the box questions like some curious how you how you define creative nonfiction. And would you say it's a definition that's relative? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a wonderful definition in that there's a lot of things that are sort of come under the heading. I think the the most useful definition is one I can't there's some literary journal that has under their submission guidelines, they say for fiction, we look for this and we look for that. And under nonfiction or creative nonfiction, they say, we simply ask that it not be fiction, which I think is useful definition. But creative nonfiction, of course, is a little bit different, you know, than than, you know, mainstream journalism. Although I think, you know, there's more overlap now than there used to be probably in those things. But it's voice driven. It's, you know, driven by curiosity, perhaps rather than fact finding, I don't know if the journalists would agree that journalism is driven by fact finding, maybe it is maybe it isn't. But you know, I think creative nonfiction, it has a voice that isn't, you know, about things that are made up. How's that? Yeah, then I'm wondering how is nonfiction different than creative nonfiction, like what what is that thing we put on it to make it the creative part? Oh, and it's probably different for all writers. I think it's different. For me, it's the introduction of a narrative, right, a kind of narrative that I recognize from being a fiction writer where it has a shape, it has a story that it's telling, it's, you know, very personally driven. Even, you know, I think creative nonfiction, even if it's not memoir, it shows the author's interest in terms of, you know, where the eye lands, what, what are the things that people are investigating? What is it that they're interested in? It shares, that feels like it's very prominent to me, even in, you know, someone like Elliot Weinberger, who the eye never appears in his work, but it's clearly creative nonfiction. Because the things that he chooses to talk about, I think nobody else would choose that combination of things to talk about. And also, you know, as opposed to scholarly, you know, maybe scholarly kind of nonfiction, I don't necessarily feel like I have to create new ground. You know, I don't have to feel any pressure to say something that other people haven't said before. You know, my interest in it is justification enough for me. Okay. Okay. Oh, yeah. So when you are teaching creative nonfiction to students, I've never taken a creative nonfiction class. How do you teach that? Yeah, it's, I'm, you know, there's a couple of challenges. I mean, the basic, of course, it comes down, there are some commonalities of good writing, right, you know, avoid cliche, avoid cliche phrases, avoid cliche ideas. But for me, a lot of teaching, and this is true for fiction, writing too is, you know, what is the thing that you have to say that you feel very strongly about saying? You know, what is it that you're bringing to this discussion? One of my teachers used to say, you know, what's the news that you bring that maybe the next person doesn't bring? And I think that's, that's hard for students sometimes when they're first learning to write, because they think that the power in their writing comes from doing the kind of things that they've seen other people do successfully. And a lot of my emphasis is about, you know, locating what it is that they have to say that they feel that they are attracted to that they're interested in, that somehow they feel is unique to them, even if it isn't unique to the world, but, you know, they are very, they're very driven to say. Okay. And so the only rule you really have for them is that it can't be fiction. It can't be fiction. Yes, that's an important rule, I think. Although there are, you know, there are, you know, out there in our listening audience, perhaps there's some creative nonfiction writer who, you know, feels like they want to play with that boundary. I'm not so hung up about that, frankly. Okay. Oh, yeah. And so I have a couple of things. I don't know if I should start with this or end with this, but I wanted to know if you were going to give pips to nonfiction writers what you would do, but we can answer that now or later. Once you're beginning or end question. I can, I think, you know, I think it's important to be incredibly curious. I think that, you know, this is something that I was talking to my class, one of my classes about last Friday, you know, the notion of not knowing what you're trying to say before you're saying it, allowing the writing to take you in, in a direction that's, you know, feels legitimate and powerful. I think is, is the number one kind of requirement for writing well consistently. I think, you know, you can have a good idea, maybe you have a good idea, maybe it works out, but in terms of, you know, now writing for this book, 10 essays, you know, I've written seven or eight essays since I think, you know, going into the, to the, to the task with an understanding that there's something out there that you don't know and you're writing to try and find out what it is that interests you and that you really have to say. I think that's sort of fundamental to, to writing well or thinking interestingly on a, on a consistent basis. I think that's really good because I think actually that's, I would say that to any student about anything that it's important to be incredibly curious, especially when you are in college, it's very helpful to be curious. Yeah. And I think, you know, just to, you know, think about like, here we are in the library, right? This, I think of the library as just, you know, an engine to satisfy my curiosity. That's why it's here. I mean, it might be here for other reasons for other people, but for me, it's just, you know, how I get to explore the things that I wonder about. I mean, there's five floors worth of curiosity plus digitally many floors, I suppose now. You know, and, and every time I come in here, I was just browsing in the current periodicals section, because that's the kind of thing I do when I'm nervous. And there's, you know, it's fascinating what's over there, like just reading the titles. There's a magazine over there. This is kind of weird, but it's Folio, the magazine for magazine management. I had to like, I had to look at it. It's so meta, like interesting, you know, and that's not even in my area, but to think that there are people in the world who devote a whole magazine to the subject of magazines, right? To me, I find very interesting. Yeah, that's kind of the fun thing about being a reference librarian is that the questions you all come to us with are like, I find things with you guys that just are fascinating. I can't even believe somebody cares about that. But, but they do, people care about everything. So here's what I want to do. I have a couple questions. I want to talk about this teeny tiny book. This is the print copy. And I, it's, this is really great. I highly recommend it. It's checked out to me right now, but I'll return it because I read it. And then there's also Kindle copies, but just in a, what's the word, housekeeping. Tell us about this book and the production of the book, because I opened it up and I saw that like, there's a provenance statement. Like, I'm not even really sure what that means. And then Kevin signed it and I have 83 of 100 copies. It was very cool. And then the way it was bound and can you just talk a little bit about how you put this out for publication? Yeah, well, all of this, I have number, lucky number 13 out of 100, by the way. Yeah, all of this is the, you know, it's, it's the brainchild of my editor, Jason Pettis, who is based in Chicago. He's a real, he comes from a very strong arts background and his press, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, he operates on this model, which I think is very interesting in the current age, which is, he wants to produce for each book that he publishes, both a very kind of, you know, hand imprinted print volume, which, of which, you know, he only makes 100 at a time and he actually handmade this, which is why there's a limited number of copies and he uses like a special thread and special paper and all this sort of thing. But then at the same time, of course, it's available to whoever might want it digitally. So there's a copy for Kindle on Amazon and there's a copy via PDF that you can get from the website and, and you know, whatever other, you know, varieties of that there are, you can read it on your iPad, that sort of thing. And so, you know, he described it as sort of the box CD and streaming MP3 model, right? We're like, of course, most people are probably going to interact with it electronically, because that's the easiest distribution. It's the least expensive. I think you can get it for $4.99 on Amazon, no plug, but give it a shot. But, you know, on the other hand, there are people like, let's say, you know, the library or members of my immediate family who will like really want the, you know, the print version. And for them, it's a little bit special, right? It's not the everyday thing. It's a numbered copy. You know, for me, it also since I really love visual art and visual artists, it feels almost like, you know, a screen print or a wood print or something like that. You know, there are only so many copies in the world. And if you have one, you know, that's great. And it feels a little bit different and special. I know I did. It's like, whoa, I even know what glue they used to glue this book. That's pretty intense. So I recommend this. I recommend it highly. So I'm giving you that. So this book, these stories. I have to keep picking up my notes. Sorry about that. Just want to make sure. Okay. So I read them all. And I think almost all of them. And I know you can do another reading from this book later. Are you going to do the literary drawings reading, do you think? I was not, but we can talk about it. Okay. Because, well, I'm curious how you got the title, of course. And from the title, I'm wondering how you arrived at the core narrative of this book, that trajectory. Yeah. So I think maybe it would be helpful. There's a note in the back, which I think will explain some of the notion that one of the things the book is titled Famous Drownings in Literary History, there's one essay with that title. That's the essay is about a series of drownings or near drownings, including my daughter's near drowning in a hotel pool, which is sort of the jumping off point. She's fine. The jumping off point for that. But I realized after a while that this, this was an idea that interested me, there's, there's several essays that touch on water. And then after I finished the book, I wrote a little note for the back, which maybe I'll just share with you guys really quick. I attended Hebrew school at congregation, Ezra Israel, a modern Orthodox synagogue in Ellenville, New York, headed by Rabbi Herman Eisner, an Auschwitz survivor. We children had little interaction with the quiet Rabbi Eisner, though the numbers on his forearm made him a figure of great mystery and respect. Outside my classroom hung a poster titled The Sea of Halacha, created by the famous Lithuanian born poet Aba Kovner. It depicts Jewish knowledge as an ever deepening series of water sources. From the tiny spring of the Tenayim to the Mishnah to the Jerusalem Talmud to the Babylonian Talmud and more with great cities of Jewish learning, Jerusalem, Warsaw, Baghdad, Barcelona, shown as ports along this marvelous ocean, trading ideas, pouring more and more knowledge into this vast and powerful sea which cannot and will not ever be full. As with any ocean, occasionally we may drown in it. This is the image that gives shape to this book. So it was only after I had written the book that I realized that this poster, which anybody who went to Hebrew school in the 70s and 80s, I know that's all of you, will recognize this poster. It's just ubiquitous. And I always found it really fascinating. I mean, it's obviously as a writer, it's sort of, I remember it being one of my earliest encounters with metaphor, you know, ideas as an ocean, right? And the ideas beating into them as a river and the notion that they interact and they mingle and they grow bigger and bigger. But it's also dangerous, right? And that's the sort of, you know, as I was thinking about, you know, the notion of drowning, which, you know, is just something that totally freaks me out. You know, I thought about how, you know, knowledge of course is this really inspirational, this blowing thing, but also has its own dangers and we can become lost in it. And so I think those two things coming together, you know, became the core metaphor for the book. And then, you know, when I happened upon the title, I have no idea how. I just, I guess, probably just sounded cool in my head. You know, I realized that that was the idea that I was playing with in different forms, this notion of drowning both in a literal and a metaphorical sense. And, you know, for me, the way that it connects to this core image of Jewish history and Jewish knowledge is very powerful for me. And you know, also, you know, as this little anecdote says it's also for me, it's a very fraught with, you know, my memory of growing up in a synagogue that was run by a Holocaust survivor and just how I understood, even when I was 10 or 11 or 12, that that was very meaningful and kind of terrifying and all the things that it brought along with it. I was actually thinking this morning, you know, that it's weird for me that my children are going to grow up in a world in which there aren't people with numbers on their arms, you know, that that's a time limited thing. And for me, as a child, it was a really, really powerful thing that I grew up with. And, you know, felt of course, you know, so permanent, these people were marked on their bodies. And that's what made it so fascinating for kids. This is of course in the era before everybody had tattoos. So, you know, they were, of course, very strange and very notable. And yet, you know, that era is largely over. And that's kind of strange for me to think about. Yeah, that's true. So with the, let me see here. So there's a couple of things with this book. I have a lot of curiosity. One is, so then you have other pieces in here. And some, I like to keep a piece about the coal mining incident in West Virginia. So you also tie your time in Athens in this book. So I wondered if you consciously tied together your, because you also spend summers in Israel. So are you also tying in your place experiences in this book as well? Yeah, I mean, there are definitely, I would say about half the essays are located very strongly in Southeast Ohio. And, you know, it's weird for me, frankly, you know, we spend, my wife and my children and I, we spend most of the year in Southeast Ohio, which is not, you know, a hotbed of the Jewish community. And then we go to Tel Aviv for the summer and, you know, then we're the majority and we're in a whole different kind of situation and we're part of a whole different narrative. And, you know, the the combination of those two things is very interesting to me. You know, it's a, it's an odd juxtaposition. And to think about that, you know, living in both worlds for me is very interesting. And also, you know, most writers want to feel, I think, a sense of belonging. And this is one of the ways, you know, over the 11 years, I didn't, you know, I didn't grow up in Ohio. You know, most of the people certainly, you know, many of the students that I encounter from Ohio, they have a very different relationship to Ohio than I do. But, you know, writing about it is a way of feeling like this is my place and this is my family's home. I have children who are born in Ohio. That is such a strange idea for a New Yorker. So, you know, the essays are a way of getting to know that and feel close to that. But, you know, I mean, when we're in Tel Aviv, and this is something that I was talking with folks about in preparation for this, you know, I'm still in contact with Ohio. You know, we, I go online and if there's a source that I need, I, you know, I go to the library website, plug for the library, but that's why we're here, you know, and I interact with all the sources and all the material that I would, is if I were here. And that's kind of an amazing thing to think about, too. So, I think this notion that, you know, I think, yes, I live part of the year in Ohio. Yes, I live part of the year in Tel Aviv. But when I'm there, I'm also here on a very daily basis, right, because I'm interacting with many of the same things. And frankly, you know, I spend part of my time on the computer here looking at images of Tel Aviv, too. So, you know, it really, like, these are different spaces, but I think, you know, many of us, we exist in multiple spaces partially because our lives are so digital and we have access to these sorts of things on a daily basis. So I'm both here and there at the same time, which is a useful idea for a writer, anyway. Yeah. Well, I like what you said about using the library databases. I think that is really a good idea. And what is interesting about what Kevin does is he uses them, like, for fun. And, you know, and I liked I wanted you to talk about how you interface with them, because I know sometimes students might be like, oh, research databases and you come at it in a little more of a spontaneous kind of serendipitous way. But you actually go into databases, it's not Google. Yeah. So I was curious, maybe talking a little bit more about that. And then do you have specific databases you like? And I know you do. And then would you be willing to even connect a database to a story? Sure. Okay. Well, so as Lorraine suggested, my idea of fun is plugging in the phrases cross dressing and children's literature into articles plus and seeing what turns up. And, you know, so the process of writing a lot of these essays is to take this, this whatever the idea the jumping off point is for the essay that's about my son's circumcision, you know, I did searches in that way. I start with articles plus because it's just so awesome. But I the reason why I am more interested in what the library provides versus Google is because I'm looking very specifically for odd but intelligent ideas, right? And Google, you get the odd, you don't always get the other part. But, you know, the the databases that connect to scholarly journals are just fascinating in terms of what will turn up. I actually made, I made a little bit of a list, which I wanted to share with you guys of some of the journals that I used in the course of writing this book. This is just a sample. The Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Tulsa Studies and Women's Literature, the Diaspora Journal of Transnational Ideas, the Germanic Review, Fashion Theory, 16th Century Journal, Environment and Planning. That one has a lot of things to say about water, by the way. And my favorite, the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Convention of the Association of Jewish Libraries. That's fascinating. That was in Denver in 2002 in case you missed it. So, you know, what's interesting to me, obviously, like it's the really weird ones that produce the interesting stuff, that the, for the essay, I wrote an essay about my son's circumcision, which took place just down the street on 21 Mill. And in writing about that, circumcision is a very, very strange thing to do to somebody. But, you know, it only makes sense for me in the context of the narrative, which it's a part of, which is many thousands of years. And so in writing that essay, I was interested in what other people had to say over time about that idea. And so in searching, you know, I think I just put circumcision into the scholarly journal database, you'll come up with some really interesting stuff. But one of the things I stumbled upon via the Journal of 16th Century Studies was Martin Luther commenting on instances of circumcision in the Bible and for, you know, a Jewish writer hearing what Martin Luther has to say about a Jewish ritual is already a really interesting idea. And it's that kind of like weird combination of stuff that, you know, I, you know, I'm not a Luther scholar. I have no idea even where his, you know, how people talk about his work. But, you know, he said the most fascinating stuff about this whole story of Dina and this mass circumcision followed by mass murder that occurs in Genesis. I suggest you read it. It's really gripping. And that I just totally would not have found otherwise. The Germanic Review, I found out about what Bertolt Brecht had to say about the figure of Ophelia from Hamlet. And of course, Ophelia is this incredibly famous literary drowning, right? All the English folks in the room know what I'm talking about. But to think about like what Bertolt Brecht, you know, mid-century communist has to say about Ophelia is, you know, it's incredibly fascinating. And it's that kind of, you know, it's outside my area of expertise, which is what makes it interesting for me and what makes it compelling and what gives it that kind of like, you know, that kind of fizz as an idea that adds to what I know. Right? That's the difference, I guess, to get back to your earlier question. Right? The stuff that comes in that's from slightly outside the things that I already know are to me what makes make the writing really special, right? They add to it in this way, which is very unpredictable, creates really strange narrative connections, things that are totally outside my normal range of thinking, but feel like they make the story bigger, right? And one of the things that I'm trying to achieve, and this is like, you know, maybe a little bit weird, but the essays are short and I want them to feel really big. And this is how you get there quickly, is by getting these things that are really far outside what you're comfortable talking about and finding a way to include them. And then, you know, some of the skill, whatever skill exists, is about finding a way to bring all those things into the same essay in a way that feels organic and not forced. Oh, OK. So you were telling me earlier about, oh, yeah. I wanted to know, OK, what surprised you when you were writing these essays? What surprised me? I don't know. I mean, it started to feel normal after a while, but I guess it surprised me how willing I was to exploit my family. Maybe I think to a certain extent, because that was something that, you know, I didn't know if I would be comfortable writing about them as much as I did. But then the more that I did it, the more normal it felt and the more sort of valuable it felt. And, you know, I write about some things which I think are potentially, you know, I don't know, not embarrassing. That's not the right word. But they're private in many ways. I mean, you know, they're certainly in regards to my children. I will be very interested. To know how they feel about it in 20 years. I hope they feel good about it. But, you know, I think also being willing to talk about things that are private but meaningful in a public sphere in a way that's compelling, I think is incredibly important. I think that there are a lot of people out there. There are parents that struggle with the same things that we struggle with, you know, especially parents that are at all trying to be alternative in their parenting as I think we are. I think sharing those things is important. So that got to feel kind of normal after a while, which is maybe a little bit surprising. I was also surprised, you know, I had, you know, I'd been writing for a long time. I'd gotten many, many rejection letters. But man, people really dig these essays. So that was that was kind of surprising to how quickly they started to be published, how well that process went once I started really focusing on the book as a book, how much momentum it took. That was a little bit surprising too, because man, did I crack my head open over my novel, you know. I was working on that and working on that and working on that. And, you know, I'm really proud of the results, but it was a really hard process. And so I think writing this in some ways was easier and that's that's surprising. And maybe I just got better at it. Well, I want to ask you a couple more connections to library databases and new stories. But I also wanted to ask you about, oh, I want to know if you had a favorite piece of all of them or ones you particularly like a lot that were really, really fun to write or really fun to explore or challenging even for you to complete them. I would say, that's tough. I think probably the circumcision essay, I think is probably my favorite because I think when I wrote that one, that was the, in some ways, the key to me that there was a whole book to be written. It's also, this is going to sound kind of weird, but it's the most fun to read out loud because all the guys in the audience get really uncomfortable. And so like the times that I've read it out loud, it's really fun to watch people squirm as you're talking about the ins and outs of circumcision. So, you know, there's this great line from Kurt Vonnegut. He says, he has this idea I'm going to paraphrase, right, that when you're writing, if you're writing about popcorn, you know you're successful if the reader starts poking their teeth with their tongue to try to get the popcorn out. And so my version of that is the circumcision essay. I know I'm successful when men in the audience start wiggling in their chairs a little bit. So I think in some ways, maybe that's my favorite. But also famous drownings, I think is my other favorite. It's the main one that's about my daughter. Most of them, frankly, are about my son. And so it's good to have that one to kind of balance things out. Yeah, I read the circumcision one as I was having dinner. And I stopped eating dinner and then finished it. It's wonderful, though. I had no idea that you had to do it. Yeah, me, but before I did it, that was so exciting. I thought a doctor did it. Well, it can go that way. It didn't go that way in our case. So yeah. It would be a very to bring that to the end. And you can tell when you read it that he was there. I hated it. I can really, I was wiggling in my seat and I'm not even a guy. So if you let me ask you about that. And the literary drownings piece, it's so fascinating. I would buy this book just for that piece because the observations about literary drownings, like the, you have a sentence in there where somebody says, literary drownings are gender-based? Yeah, Professor Wake Forest, I found via the library database, I was searching for drowning and gender, maybe, or drowning in women since the essay was jumping off from my daughter. And there's a professor from Wake Forest who says drowning in literature is gendered. Yeah. Which is just such a great idea. And so that led to a whole theme within the essay itself about how women are depicted. Victorians, they love their drowned women. So there's something really about that that became very interesting. But it's exactly that kind of phrase that I'm searching for. And when I come upon something like that, which again, it's not something that I know. I'm not a women in gender studies scholar. This may be obvious to other readers, but for me this was a really new and exciting idea. And it's something that I found via the library. I was just looking at the PDF this morning. That was the one from the Tulsa Journal of Women's Literature. And I also liked in literary drownings. And I don't know if this is you or someone else, but how the, it's the water is the continent. Yeah. Let like Kevin say to see what's so cool. Yeah, so this is kind of an interesting research story. So most of this book, we're not most of it, but a good portion of it. I wrote while I had an artist residency at a place called the Headland Center for the Arts, which is just north of San Francisco. I was there for 10 weeks in 2010. And there were artists from all over the world there, including a couple from Switzerland. And I was telling them about my idea and they said, oh, you should read this German philosopher, Peter Slatterdijk, which again, you know, is this great reference. So I went, I went the next day, went on the computer hooked up to the library database, typed in Peter Slatterdijk, found all this stuff by him. This is the thing that was in environment and planning. And it's all about his philosophy of water. And it's again, for a writer, this is fantastic because he like totally inverts our notion of how the world works. Like we think the world is about us and land, but he says, you know, water is actually the true continent. The water is connected. We're just these little blobs of land within it. And, you know, so I wrote about that and you know, that really, you know, kind of that interesting reversal of thinking about the world is exactly the kind of thing which really interests me. And I didn't know before I started writing and you know, all that kind of common stuff that we've been talking about. So, you know, it was a reference that I got from a fellow artist which I then followed through with the research in the library and it led me to these great references that really helped shape that essay. So it's, you know, that little research story is kind of, that's the research story of the book in a really, you know, kind of basic way. And some of the databases you were telling us about, you had sent me some names and I was, I was, once I finished it, I realized how Berg fashion, probably the Berg fashion database because of the cross-dressing. Yeah. And you also used art store. Now, do you use art store for many things? Yeah, I mean, I'm very visual as a writer. You know, I think my writing's very visual. So if I'm writing about a place or thinking about a place, I often look at photographs or I look at paintings and you know, I mean, it's really, it's remarkable the things that you can have access to in terms of visual imagery as a writer. You know, I mean, I like to see places in person, but for me, seeing it in person and then following it up with photographs is a really good way for me to kind of spur my memory. So I would look at photos of Tel Aviv, I would look at, you know, paintings by Israeli artists, that sort of thing, that's, you know, that's the kind of follow up. Okay. I'm just gonna do a quick check on my time here. Okay. How are we doing? We're good on time. Okay. We're gonna open it up for audience questions and we have at least one question from the webcast as well. Okay, and I'm just gonna... Yeah, I wanna just, before we move on to the questions, I have to give a shout out. This library owns for me one of the most important books in the entire universe, which is the 12 volume 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, which is, when I saw it here in the library, I almost fell over dead because nobody has this. I don't know why you guys have it, but thank you very much. It's a fascinating book and I wrote, you know, it helped inform a lot of the, this book. I interacted with it online because it's in the public domain. I also looked at it in person. So I just wanna read very quickly the opening paragraph of my essay about it, just to give homage to this book, which is here in this library, all 12 volumes. You should read them all. A note on the Jewish Encyclopedia. Consider the century ahead. In 1895, Isidore Singer of Vienna of Paris, now of New York, began work on the Jewish Encyclopedia, a massive multi-volume undertaking that required soliciting, compiling and editing the contributions of 605 researchers and scholars and for which Singer also served as managing editor, fundraiser, liaison with the publisher and head of the Department of Modern Biography. This guy is my hero, by the way. Several times the giant project undertaken to document everything that was ever important at any moment of Jewish history nearly collapsed from lack of money. Patrons died or lost their fortunes. A tireless series of appeals raised enough funding to move the volumes forward at the remarkable rate of one every six months. When finally completed in 1906, the 12 volumes had grown to include nearly eight million words of text, 2,464 illustrations and use of the relatively new technique of photogravirs so that the volumes would exist at the cutting edge of realistic portraiture. The first entry is Ach, a town near Baden, Germany, where the Encyclopedia tells us no Jew was allowed to harbor more than five strangers in his house. The last entry is Zweifel, Hall, a prolific Swiss writer of scientific monographs and a practicing gynecologist. In Austria, Singer served as librarian for the French ambassador. In France, he edited a short-lived journal that pleaded against anti-Semitism at the height of the Dreyfus Affair. But only an America Singer wrote, could one find the material aid in practical scholarly cooperation necessary to carry out the scheme which he had planned. When he began the project, he didn't even speak English. I think I wanna add one more thing. I think it's interesting that you're reading about a 1906 Encyclopedia while we hear a pencil sharpener in the background. It's so, I don't know, not virtual. Very analog. Very analog. Very analog. And I wanna personally say why I think you are, why I think you're a great writer and why I would recommend this book is because one of my favorite pieces in the book is called What's There? Or essay found on a sandwich wrapper. And you found some words on a sandwich wrapper and you just wrote a piece from there which is part of a mass of pieces in a bigger section. But because as a librarian, I look at books and a lot of times people have bookmarks and they have all sorts of weird notes and I keep them in my drawer and I don't know anything with them. I am not a creative writer. So my hat's off to you for taking a little tiny piece of paper and just riffing on it and writing these beautiful essays. Thank you. And I wanna open this up to Q&A from the audience. Let's go ahead and take the question from the webcast right here real quick. The person wonders, Kevin, about your current project with the Michigan Quarterly Review, how that came about and the vision that you have for your essays, for the MQR. Yeah, so right now I am writing regularly for Michigan Quarterly Review which is a really wonderful journal from the University of Michigan. I write an essay a month for them and it's been a really great way while I'm doing a lot of teaching and other stuff to keep writing. And it's not, the essays are a little bit different than the book but they share sort of like, I get to write whatever I'm curious about which is incredibly exciting for me. My first essay was about the town of Rawabi which is a town that's being built in the West Bank that Danielle and I visited this summer. My most recent essay is about the death of Kofi Awanor, the Ghanaian writer who was killed in Nairobi in September and who visited this campus in 2007. So I've written, I wrote an essay about my daughter. I wrote another essay about how much I love oversized books. So this is, they're very much of the same kind of idea that is within this. I got the gig because I wrote a short story that was published in MQR a few years ago that apparently they really liked. So when they started to, like a lot of literary journals, they have a print journal, they have an online presence, they're really interested in beefing up their online presence. So they have seven or eight writers who contribute every month. And it's supposed to be a place for literary cultural discourse and it seems to be getting a nice following. So I'm really, I'm excited to be writing with them. For me, a once a month deadline is great, it's perfect. Anybody else with questions? Yes. Why I don't see, why not? You read it's being. The thing with writers around themselves. Oh, Sylvia? No. Virginia Wolf. No, I didn't, I wrote about Jack London though, who didn't drown himself, but he drank himself to death, which to me is like a version of that. Yeah, you know, one of the things, you know, with that essay, let me tell you, a lot of writers drown themselves, right? And so, you know, like, and a lot of literary figures too. So one of the challenges really is knowing where to stop. Right? And that's a really hard thing to figure out when you write in the kind of process that I have, which, you know, after a while you have to figure out what you can fit in and just what's like, feels like it's just there for the sake of being information. And so, you know, I remember, you know, there were lots of kind of narratives around that essay in particular, because it's potentially such a big topic that I had to, you know, not pursue. And some of the challenges knowing what not to pursue, right, and where to like, kind of focus. And that's where the revision process for all of you students out there is very important, right? Knowing where, you know, where to reign yourself in is just important as, you know, following this path of discovery. We want to make sure that you all repeat the question. Yes. So for the online audience, because they're not hearing the question from out here. Yes, so. Say that again. Matt is asking, it seems like I started with like a nugget or a core narrative, and then how does it proceed from there and how is it different from fiction writing? It's really different from fiction writing in that, you know, fiction, let's all agree, generally has to have a plot, right? And so when I write fiction, I think I have more when I start, because I, you know, I don't have it all but I have like different points in the plot that I probably feel like I need to hit. Something like the circumcision essay, just because it comes to mind, I had sort of three points of beginning. One was my son's circumcision. The other was a college student here that had to undergo this sort of version of a ritual circumcision in order to convert to being Jewish. And then the other was a circumcision that I was present at in the south of Israel in 1993. So those were the three points. And then like, I knew I would hit all those three points in the course of the essay. And then I was filling everything around it. But I also, not to give away my secrets, but I tend to begin with the core narrative and then come back to the core narrative at the end, right? I think if you look at the essays, you'll see that happens a couple of times. Again, not to give away the magic, but it's not really magic, right? It's sort of, you know, you start at point A, and I say this to fiction writers too, you start at point A, you're not really trying to get to point B, you're trying to get to point A1, right? The version of that original point, which is now somehow different enough to justify the existence of the essay. Or the existence of the story. So that sort of, you know, it kind of spirals out from a couple of different, you know, we could think of them as plot points, right? Even though they're not plot in the same way as they are in fiction, but related, I think. We have another question from the web. How do your children feel about being in your book? And do you think that will change as they grow older? Right now, they really dig it, or at least my son does. He's a little more active about it. I think my daughter's a little shyer in general, so. But yeah, he really likes it. He's very honored. When I was working on the book, he wanted to know how it's going. I think my wife and I are both, we share a lot with our kids about our work because the kind of jobs we do, they're not nine to five. We're still working at home. We're talking about our stuff. They're often within earshot. So yeah, he likes it. He's very proud of it. I think he took this to school. I asked him maybe not to read stuff out loud to his classmates because it's not really all PG-8 or whatever, but yeah, I think they like it. I am going to choose to believe that as they get older, they will still appreciate it because it's like art, man. It's about them and it's not about them, right? It's about the essays exist hopefully outside of just their own existence, right? They have something to say that's beyond just family history. But that's part of the reason why I work the way that I do so that I feel like I'll have something to say which is beyond just writing about my own kids. Anybody else from the audience? Questions? Yeah, James. Right, so James is asking, what's the research process like in fiction compared to this and as he said, my first book, obviously look, I have a common theme. I like to do research, right? And it's not by accident that I keep doing this. This is what keeps me interested. Part of the reason why I wanted to write about in the novel 1930s and 1940s Copenhagen is because I didn't know anything about it. I mean, I knew a lot about very little bit of it and then a lot of the things that I thought I knew turned out not to be true in the course of doing that research and that was really interesting too. So, you know, but I think, I don't know. I mean, if we wanna speak really metaphorically, right there, I think there's research involved in figuring out what it is that you're really interested in as a writer. I think one of the ways that I figure that out is externally, right? But the place that I'm ultimately trying to get to is what really interests me because I know if somebody else did the same research, they wouldn't be interested in the same stuff. They wouldn't use the same images. They wouldn't, you know, they wouldn't gravitate to the same things. There was a poet who came here a few years ago. Her name was Robin Schiff and she writes also historical poems, right? Which is even weirder than my stuff. And, you know, she said, somebody asked her, I think it was actually Mark Halliday, said, you know, where are you in these poems that are about like, you know, 19th century America? And she said, whatever I choose to look at is about me, right? So don't kid yourself, Mark Halliday, right? You know, this is just as personal as the stuff that, you know, is about first person, right? So what she said is the writer's gaze is intensely personal. Whatever it is that you're choosing to look at is about you. And it's not about the next writer or the next writer. And when I heard that, I was incredibly liberated. I was like, actually, the thing that I'm doing that I think is really external is actually also very internal. And it's about figuring out what I have to say. I'm not just making this up. Why even creative writers need the library? Please help me thank Lorraine Wachtner and our guest, Kevin Hayworth, for this, Authors at Alden. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome.